D&D General Social Pillar Mechanics: Where do you stand?

DEFCON 1 said:

But how is this not replacing the actual verbalization players are making? As I mentioned above, one can't have it both ways. If you want to make things fair to people who don't want to talk... then you can't have any rules wherein actually talking or making cogent argument has an effect on the success or failure of social combat (via bonuses, modifiers or whatever). It has to be entirely about just rolling dice. That's the only fair way to make the quiet players be on equal ground to the talkative ones.

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Uh...no?

There is a middle ground you have neglected. What I usually call "sell me on it." That is, the player must still think. They must argue as a player for what they want. If I have an issue, I will question or investigate. If I think there's something missing, I will point that out.

Roleplaying the characters is a great way to do that selling-me-on-it diegetically. But it isn't required. I certainly prefer such tactics, and might be more favorable to someone who presented things that way. But as long as the player is actually thinking of how something can happen and what they would describe the character doing, even if they don't know how to do it themselves, that's enough.

This respects the fact that a Bard might be a silver-tongued seducer when the player can barely string two words together to talk to a handsome stranger: the player is still required to have a plan, they just don't need to explicitly say each individual seductive phrase, because the player probably can't do that, but the character 100% can.

DEFCON 1 said:

Which means that yes, one would need to replace the standard part of the roleplaying question-- "What does your character do/say?" "My character does/says X..." with a series of "verbal attacks" and " verbal defenses" and "resolve hit points" and so forth-- first one to knock their opponent to 0 has made them lose the argument.

And that's fine, if that's what someone out there wants to design. But I seriously doubt it will ever be designed by anyone at WotC because it goes against what I think they think the entire premise of roleplaying is-- telling the DM what you want to do, and the DM telling you what happens.

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But this seemingly ignores the possibility that there can be something more engaging than merely "DM says," while still being driven by players having plans and DMs asking questions and adjudicating. That's precisely what the skill challenge format does: it removes a lot of the arbitrary, "it ends when it ends" nature of the near-freeform approach, thus enabling much higher tension and emotional investment as the cutoff point approaches.

"DM says" is too loosey-goosey. It is, necessarily, formless and vague, driven by invisible priors and beliefs inside the DM's head. You never know where the finish line is, so it's nearly impossible to capture that "oh no, we're so close, c'mon dice, don't fail me now!" feeling. The structure of SCs provides just enough objective standard for everyone to actually see where things stand, and thus to feel dread or excitement at what may lie ahead.

DEFCON 1 said:

Yes, but your narration has no effect on the mechanics. The dice rolls and only the dice rolls affect the numbers. How you describe those dice rolls "in story" does not change anything or give you bonuses or penalties to future dice rolls (not counting gaining Inspiration from the DM which you could then use at a later point, but that's not a Combat rule, that's the Inspiration mechanic and is not specifically a part of Combat.)

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...why on earth should the narration have no impact? That doesn't follow at all.

The narration affects the meaning, tone, and direction of the scene. Such things are vital. They are often part of what differentiates "no need to roll, that just works" from "hmmm, okay, but that will have a high DC" or whatever else. These things can still matter enormously. I really don't see how you've established that they're somehow totally irrelevant.

DEFCON 1 said:

That's how I always saw how Skill Challenges were meant to be played in 4E and I was fine with it as a system to use if a particular DM felt they wanted those rails of '# of success before 3 failures' to help them determine when a "scene" should end.

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They aren't rails...I have no idea why you would call it that when HP do exactly the same thing, so many successful rolls against the enemy before they get too many successful rolls against you.

DEFCON 1 said:

Me personally though? I never used them myself, because I just relied on my own intuition to know when "okay that's enough, you have won(/lost)". Because for me... if I was capable of doing the thing you mentioned in your first point (knowing when a player had such a great idea that it should simply work)... I was also capable of knowing when the party was convincing enough or successful enough in the totality of the scene regardless of the number of Skill checks I may or may not have asked for.

But it was a good rule system I thought to help get DMs to the point when they no longer felt they needed to use them anymore.

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Okay. How do your players know what your intuition says? How can they see that they're on the cusp of victory or defeat, in advance? How can they strategize when the bounds of victory are necessarily hidden from them inside your thinkmeats?

Because that's a key benefit of the SC approach. It pulls the metric of victory out of the DM's head and makes it visible to all. Just as, for instance, the number of foes still left on the battlefield vs the number of HP the party members have.

Well this is tagged "D&D General" so I wasn't constraining myself to a specific interpretation of D&D

DEFCON 1 said:

As a set of house rules? That's great! I don't have a problem with that. But I just don't think it would ever be incorporated into the game by WotC that how you described the attack would impact your dice roll to execute the attack. Because that would mess up the mechanical balance if you could impact the combat based on how well you described everything and the DM had to rule on how well you described it.

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To be clear, are you advocating that player narration can affect social encounter rolls and out comes for the characters? Are you also suggesting this doesn't mess up the mechanical balance of social encounters?

Though it is not how we generally play, I don't really see any difference in allowing player narration to affect (or not) social, exploration, or combat encounters. I think it is acceptable to allow a similar approach to all three phases.

Personally, I think is a bit unfair and unbalanced mechanically if one player's social skills allow their character to overshadowed characters you are mechanically better in social situations.

Umbran said:

And if that's what they really want, why not?

If folks don't want to engage, they aren't going to have much fun with it,

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Then why are those folks in the game in the first place?

Lanefan said:

Then why are those folks in the game in the first place?

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For the other pillars? For their own reasons?

Do they need to justify their activity to you?

I'm A Banana said:

Yeah, this needs some work in D&D.

IMO, the best example of this in D&D so far is inspiration for playing your flaw. Which is nice, but not super strong (there's a lot of ways to get advantage). There's also the group check, which means that I can blow up the social situation personally and not totally ruin the group's effort.

The more I think about it, though, the more I think that performance of your dump stat is actually kind of part of the fun of having a dump stat.

We play to find out what happens, and if I'm playing a jerk of a mercenary who sees everything through the lens of coin and has a CHA of 8, part of what I want is to perform that. To be a jerk. To offend the sensitive nobility, to spoil the peace talks, to spit on the shoes of the diplomats. My presence in a social situation should make it riskier, and that is the fun of playing this character.

It's similarly fun to play an INT of 8 as a bit of a doof, and a WIS of 8 as a bit of a scatterbrain.

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I'm right with you up to here.

I'm A Banana said:

So in D&D today, the best way to handle our jerk merc is maybe to...

(1) Give him inspiration for being a bit of a jerk, and
(2) Have a group check. Maybe give the jerk merc disadvantage (or even an auto-failure), but the rest of the party can make up for it.

There's definitely more we could do there...

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Or not. Inspiration, along with any other such meta-mechanics, are IMO awful. Characters get rewards for what characters do, fine (that's what xp are for); but rewarding players in the metagame just isn't the answer.

My take is to just let the jerk merc blunder around and make mistakes until-unless the party sort him out or find an in-character means of cooling his jets a bit; particularly if the jerk-merc's player can find ways of making the character fun and entertaining in the meantime.

DEFCON 1 said:

As a set of house rules? That's great! I don't have a problem with that. But I just don't think it would ever be incorporated into the game by WotC that how you described the attack would impact your dice roll to execute the attack. Because that would mess up the mechanical balance if you could impact the combat based on how well you described everything and the DM had to rule on how well you described it.

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That seems to be the core 5e thing of DM discretion to give advantage or disadvantage if it feels right/to taste.

PC: "I jump out and swing around on the chandelier gaining momentum for my swing!"

DM1: "Ok roll your attack."

DM1a: "Cool, take advantage on that attack!"

DM1b: "That sounds awkward and tough to time right to actually do, it is still possible though, take disadvantage on the attack."

Quickleaf said:

While I love the direction your thinking is going, it does raise a yellow flag for me. The “jerk mercenary” sounds a lot like an instigator player… I don’t think you want to reward that behavior consistently and repeatedly because it’s sooo easy for it to blow up a scene that another player is attempting to engage very differently.

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Hell, I'll reward that behavior all day long! I'd love a table where every player is an instigator.

Quickleaf said:

It’s easy to escalate. It’s harder to deescalate.

I think “jerk mercenary” is already a potentially disruptive behavior that the GM needs to massage, develop specific group management skills to make it productive, and is sooo easy for a player to get impatient - and transfer that impatience to “just roleplaying my character” - and lose sight of the group’s fun. I think enshrining a reward for that behavior is a slippery slope.

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"Do what the character would do" shall be the whole of the law.

Reynard said:

Again, I am advocating for a social combat system that is intended to be used in social situations analogous to combat encounters: things like trials, dealing with courtly intrigue, and convincing powerful factions or individuals to do what you want. There are a number of ways to design the specifics, but in general it means giving players "tactical" choices and including victory conditions -- just like combat.

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That's fine in theory. In practice, the first thing that'll happen is PCs trying this social combat against other PCs; or players getting upset when NPCs legitimately try it on the PCs, and so forth.

You can't say "Oh, this social combat system only comes into play in important situations". If it's in the game it's there to be used in ANY situations that calls for it, just like combat; and therein lies the problem.

I don't necessarily need a detailed "social combat" system, but having a few things to give guidelines is helpful.

I liked that the older version of 5e backgrounds had Features that could be used in play.

I also like having a handful of things to roll against so as to allow a potentially un-charismatic player to still participate in the game during social portions of the game.

I'm A Banana said:

Incorrect, and another strawman.

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Given that even the people at Critical Role have spoken about the "Critical Role effect", maybe using it as a referent doesn't serve your point as well as you think. This isn't so much about a strawman, as it is giving pushback on expectations the reference sets implicitly.

I'm A Banana said:

... doing away with character performance is a lot like doing away with dice rolls.

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Nobody (except perhaps yourself) is talking about "doing away" with anything. That is, at best, a slippery slope argument, or an inattentive reading of what others have said.

This is about enabling play. There are loads of folks out there who are not into performance, and giving them ways to more fully engage in the social pillar is not "doing away" with performance.

If anything, it is giving people a less anxiety-inducing approach to engaging in performance, because they know that they aren't doomed if they can't do funny voices!