The Gaming Den

talozin wrote:So here's a scenario for you.

The human wins. Because lesbians are awesome. And lesbians turning ostensibly straight princesses is even more awesome.

Bah, the best answer is that the peasant does the whole quest thing and the seduction checks are high enough that monogamy loses.

Princess + farm girl is the new ultimate. Why did I never think of this?

I've found that preparation makes even complicated rules-heavy systems go much faster.

A lot of the time if you know what you're walking into, and know the rules well enough, you can get in and get it down pretty damn fast. It's when you're looking things up, trying to decide RAI vs RAW etc, where things bog down.

Or unnecessarily long, inane focus on subjects that don't matter.

"I search the corner!"
"There... there's nothing there...."
"I search the closet!"
"...nothing...this princess is giving you strange looks."
"I tell the princess to wait a moment! There might be an ambush encounter!"
"... /facepalm ..."

Somebody define "baroque" for the purposes of this discussion.

Archmage wrote:Somebody define "baroque" for the purposes of this discussion.

Baroque: A form of social role play rules marked by dynamic opposition and energy, by the use of curved and plastic figures, and especially in its later phases by elaborate and sometimes grotesque ornamentation. (Gee I didn't know cheap WoTC minis would come to play here.) Or you could just say " characterized by grotesqueness, extravagance, or flamboyance" and be done with it.

I'm guessing "crunchy and extensive" is probably a good enough definition of baroque for the purposes of this thread.

FrankTrollman wrote:

hogarth wrote:

fectin wrote:
Is this strictly true, or true only when applied to PCs?

I think there are people who dislike "skipping to the end", whether it's the PCs or the NPCs doing the skipping.

For instance, I could write a Lord of the Rings roleplaying game where the entirety of the rules is "Flip a coin, Heads = Frodo wins, Tails = Frodo loses", but I think most people would find something unsatisfying about that.

That's the main issue. There has to be a series of choices, potentially tension-filled die rolls, and events for it to not be considered "too cheap". It doesn't matter how stacked against you the odds actually are, a single die roll for diplomacy pisses people off.

So while I don't actually understand or care about Lago's contrived examples here, his suggestion that you put a series of baroque but reasonably fast mechanics in to power the social minigame is solid.

-Username17

I get that. But it isn't specific to social encounters. The Lankhmar story where they ended up with invisible jewels could have been reduced to a single climb check by the same logic, and same with Zelazney's This Mortal Mountain. The other narrative-agnostic option though is essentially critical fumble charts for everyday tasks, and those suck.

That seems to say that the narrative importance of the action should dictate how baroque the check is, and that would pretty much have to be evaluated by the MC. For 3.5, I'm not sure why an extended roll wouldn't satisfy that.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: So any diplomacy system that's going to work needs to be baroque and needlessly complicated. Not because overcomplication is good, but because people just get plain crybaby when success is seen as too easy--especially when it's contrasted against someone who worked hard and still failed. Even when people accept this for almost every other minigame, even for ones that have larger ramifications like warfare or economic struggles.

I wouldn't say needlessly complicated. The added complication shouldn't just be more rolls 4E style, it needs to be something similar to combat where you feel like you have meaningful choices.

FrankTrollman wrote:People actually get their panties in a bunch when you have social save or dies. People get upset about combat save or dies too. If you roll dice "only once", a substantial number of people get offended. For social systems, this is even more true.

If you calculate that you have a 13% chance of getting something to happen socially and then you roll the dice and move the fuck on with your life, people will get angry. Angry in a way that they wouldn't be if you had to roll an 11+ on three different d20s, even though that's basically the same thing. From the standpoint of probability, there is no actually difference between a specific series of events and a single event - but from the standpoint of offending peoples' sensibilities, it's night and day.

This is a good point. I don't think, though, that it necessarily has to be a series of rolls that could potentially be collapsed into a single roll (merely addressing the 11+ on 3 d20s example, not your post as a whole). There's no reason that the multiple segments could involve some form of decision-making at each stage point where you'd otherwise be rolling.

Now of course this sequential decision making could be transformed from an extended-form game into a single n-dimensional matrix (where n is the number of players) and you could calculate the mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium for such and then roll it (thus giving you the exact 13% you were talking about in the first place), but...not only is that often an intractable calculation for computers to do, I'd go as far to argue that that's intractable for a human for any number of decision-making steps larger than two. Maybe three if you can think really fast.

For me anyway, the difference lies there. If it's a really simple transformation from 3 die rolls into 1 then I think having 3 die rolls is pretty stupid. But if that transformation is completely intractable for me to calculate, then having the sequential system is worthwhile because the decision making becomes a worthwhile game whose answer I don't really know ahead of time.