Social Skills, starting to bug me.

[Mark CMG]

I have actually experienced this in my online 1e AD&D game. Twice recently I felt that some of the players weren't very accepting of the notion that they could fail in a social encounter, fail to achieve their desired goals, through GM adjudication of the impact of their words and actions. In each case there were several good reasons why the NPCs reacted as they did, not all of which were obvious to the PCs. In the second case I ended up explaining stuff - "She's a Thief! She has Hear Noise! She knows you're right outside!" - which would not have been obvious to the PC, and I wasn't very happy about that. OTOH the same players would have likely accepted me killing all their PCs in a combat encounter, because with combat there are rules.

Yup, this is a huge problem with the way in which many games are adjuducated, whereby the players feel that everything in the game is transparent so that if they cannot figure out what has happened then the result of what happened must be wrong.

This also speaks to the need for fewer dice rolls to be in the hands of the players, particularly in cases where the results of a failure give away as much information as the results of a success. There should be a chance for a king, for instance, to see the hapless attempt to charm him (for the die roll to be a one with no chance of success due to the dimplomacy) but for the king to decide he is going to go with the same result but for other reasons. Perhaps the king wishes the failed attempt to seem as if it worked so that his brother the duke will go after the diplomat and his party. But if the player is the die roller and rolls the one, much of the motivation of that situation is laid bare. Of course, there are countless near miss and slight success scenarios that can speak to this same problem but I describe an extreme for the sake of emphasis.

The sense of success or failure in situations like a diplomacy check (or Charisma check or the like) should be in what the player wishes to assume from the resultant roleplaying, not from being able to look at how well the player rolled the die and comparing that to the roleplaying that takes place. The player might also have a sense from how much time the PC has invested in becoming a diplomatic character but situationally looking to the die roll feels like avoiding the actual roleplaying from my own point of view.

 

[BryonD]

This also speaks to the need for fewer dice rolls to be in the hands of the players, particularly in cases where the results of a failure give away as much information as the results of a success.

Good point

 

[Elf Witch]

Note, I didn't say never.

It's always possible that somebody who is painfully shy and avoids drawing attention to themselves is going to try playing a bard.

It's just not probable.

I'm pretty certain that Painfully Shy Guy (PSG) is not thinking "hey, I can be a bard, there's new rules for social situations so I don't actually have to be a loud and social and have everybody looking at me!"

People tend to play concepts they enjoy or are like themselves (at least as a default). The bard is the opposite of PSG. It's going to take some serious gumption for him to want to try a bard. Especially if the rest of the player do HAM IT UP. That sets the bar of expectation that the Bard is a social creature, something he dreads.

There are people who are enabled by these rules. Danny's friend for instance. But that's incidental.

The primary beneficiary of the social rules is regular gamers getting a standardized resolution to social encounters. It's not about the PSG's.

I agree that the rolls are there to standardize social encounters.

But I am saying that they also allow more options of character types for players.

I am not just talking about shy people. My one friend who loves playing bards and swashbucklers is not shy he just is not good at thinking on his feet and he is not glib. There is no way in real life he could ever be a smooth talking type of guy. But those are his favorite type characters he loves the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Musketeers, Zorro, in modern fiction he is a huge fan of con men like Neil on White Collar or some of the characters on Leverage.

RPGs give him the chance to play these type of characters and the ability to made rolls with the role playings makes him successful at it.

I am shy in real life less now then when I was younger but around strangers I am often tongue tied. My disability makes this a little worse. In High School the thought of talking up in class or talking to a boy made me nauseous and triggered panic attacks. Yet I always fantasized about being the charismatic type. Being able to play these type of characters in games makes the games more fun for me.

I play games to escape to be someone I am not in real life I would not want to play me in a game because that would be boring.

I had a player in my game tell me she wanted to play a bard but was worried that she wouldn't be able to pull off the social stuff because she is shy and she stutters a little more when she was under pressure. I told her not to worry about it that she could just tell me what she was doing and then roll and I would base it on her roll. She has realy improved at the table her confidence as grown and she often choose to role play out encounters.

Just like things like strategy and tactics often improve over time as you play role playing out social encounters and succeeding at them often give more shy players the ability to feel more comfortable which gives them the skills to improve.

 

[Loonook]

I think that the Social Skills are useful in a lot of ways. They help to really give you an edge that is tolerable. Yes, some of the great moments in various literature and the visual arts are when the unexpected occurs... But it is nice to have a baseline. Diplomacy doesn't necessarily make someone bend head-over-heels for your every whim... But it helps. You know how to soften the blows, word things in just the right way, weasel in there... And get things to happen. Any kind of deception skills help because they enable you to lie and then detect said lie... It's nice.

I take it almost in the way Speech skills are handled in a video-game sort of way. You get bonuses for how you verbally massage the person, ingratiate yourself to them, etc. and perhaps some will be able to speak eloquently... But this guy just rubs me the wrong way. Which is to be expected as the normal interactions are going to be with a three-day-stinky bloodmired man in spiky plate mail with a sword that catches flame telling you things like yes, we are totally trustworthy and no, I have no eyes towards your daughter .

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[Hussar]

Yup, this is a huge problem with the way in which many games are adjuducated, whereby the players feel that everything in the game is transparent so that if they cannot figure out what has happened then the result of what happened must be wrong.

This also speaks to the need for fewer dice rolls to be in the hands of the players, particularly in cases where the results of a failure give away as much information as the results of a success. There should be a chance for a king, for instance, to see the hapless attempt to charm him (for the die roll to be a one with no chance of success due to the dimplomacy) but for the king to decide he is going to go with the same result but for other reasons. Perhaps the king wishes the failed attempt to seem as if it worked so that his brother the duke will go after the diplomat and his party. But if the player is the die roller and rolls the one, much of the motivation of that situation is laid bare. Of course, there are countless near miss and slight success scenarios that can speak to this same problem but I describe an extreme for the sake of emphasis.

The sense of success or failure in situations like a diplomacy check (or Charisma check or the like) should be in what the player wishes to assume from the resultant roleplaying, not from being able to look at how well the player rolled the die and comparing that to the roleplaying that takes place. The player might also have a sense from how much time the PC has invested in becoming a diplomatic character but situationally looking to the die roll feels like avoiding the actual roleplaying from my own point of view.

The presumption here though is that a player (as opposed to the DM/GM) cannot act in anything other than first person. That if the player has any knowledge that his character shouldn't have, the player will automatically abuse that knowledge or it will ruin his fun.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that to be honest. I think that players can be perfectly capable of being objective if given the opportunity. The player knows that his attempt failed, (or at least he thinks that it has), but the reactions of the NPC don't match that. For me, I'd be even more interested in the game because now I want to know what's going on. I know that I failed, so, why is he playing along?

If the dice are out of my hands, I can only act from a very limited viewpoint- whatever information the DM passes along.

 

[Mark CMG]

The presumption here though is that a player (as opposed to the DM/GM) cannot act in anything other than first person. That if the player has any knowledge that his character shouldn't have, the player will automatically abuse that knowledge or it will ruin his fun.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that to be honest. I think that players can be perfectly capable of being objective if given the opportunity. The player knows that his attempt failed, (or at least he thinks that it has), but the reactions of the NPC don't match that. For me, I'd be even more interested in the game because now I want to know what's going on. I know that I failed, so, why is he playing along?

No, that's not the presumption. It's merely a fact that if the player has certain information then playing the character as if the character doesn't have that information doesn't allow for the player, as the character, to truly discover it. Then the only way of the character seeming to make the discovery is by the player pretending that the character discovered it rather than discovering it while playing the character. And that breaks the immersion of the game on a fundamental level. It's not about trusting the players to be objective, it's about giving the players a level of cover while they play their characters with a sense of actual wonder. Folks often ask where the sense of wonder has gone and this is one of the places where it has been stripped.

If the dice are out of my hands, I can only act from a very limited viewpoint- whatever information the DM passes along.

Yes, and that which the player, through the character, manages to uncover. That's the point. It removes metagame knowledge as much as can be done. Of course one cannot remove the knowledge the player brings to the table but adding to it by letting the player see the scaffolding is unnecessary and worth avoiding whenver possible.

 

[Hussar]

No, that's not the presumption. It's merely a fact that if the player has certain information then playing the character as if the character doesn't have that information doesn't allow for the player, as the character, to truly discover it. Then the only way of the character seeming to make the discovery is by the player pretending that the character discovered it rather than discovering it while playing the character. And that breaks the immersion of the game on a fundamental level. It's not about trusting the players to be objective, it's about giving the players a level of cover while they play their characters with a sense of actual wonder. Folks often ask where the sense of wonder has gone and this is one of the places where it has been stripped.





Yes, and that which the player, through the character, manages to uncover. That's the point. It removes metagame knowledge as much as can be done. Of course one cannot remove the knowledge the player brings to the table but adding to it by letting the player see the scaffolding is unnecessary and worth avoiding whenver possible.

See, I think there's a very, very fine line between sense of wonder and sense of frustration.

Imagine a situation where there are no rolls (or the rolls are kept secret from the player, makes no difference in this situation). Player makes his pitch to the DM to convince the NPC of whatever. Now, without any input from actual rolls, he's entirely dependent on the DM's portrayal of the reaction. DM decides that the pitch fails - either he rolled badly, or simply used a judgement call.

Now, the player is stuck. He doesn't really know why he failed, only that he did. And, actually, he might not even know that he did fail if the DM has the NPC play along anyway. He has no real way forward except to kind of blindly feel his way along. Did the guard rebuff his offer of a bribe because the guard is unbribable or did he just not offer enough money or did his performance lack something that the DM was looking for?

From the player's perspective, it's very hard to tell. And, it can be (not necessarily will be) but can be frustrating. Add to that the idea that sometimes DM's will just stonewall players because they didn't like the performance and it can drag the game down very quickly.

For players that insist on always maintaining immersion, where immersion is the most important goal all the time, sure, that's fine. They don't want to know why they failed. They WANT to grope around.

For the rest of us though, those of us who would much, much rather just get on with the game, groping around is about as much fun as watching paint dry.

It's totally a style issue. I get that. There's nothing wrong with wanting total immersion all the time. I don't. I've played that way and I just find it too frustrating repeatedly banging my head on the wall. To me, it smacks too much of pixelbitching. I realize that my style is not everyone's style though. For those who want that level of immersion, then hiding the rolls would likely be a good idea. For me, it would not be fun, on either side of the screen. Like I said earlier, as a DM, it makes me too visible with too much time talking to me the DM rather than interacting with what's going on in the game. As a player, it's too frustrating and any gains in immersion I might get would be lost very quickly.

 

[Mark CMG]

See, I think there's a very, very fine line between sense of wonder and sense of frustration.

Imagine a situation where there are no rolls (. . .)

Naw, using an extreme to prove your point doesn't actually prove your point since a roleplaying game has aspects of both roleplaying and gaming. However, what you are suggesting is removing some of the roleplaying aspects in favor of the player gaining knowledge directly from the way in which the dice fall. You feel that a GM is, by design, simply not up to the task of conveying the information the player will need in any situation and that the player should have the metaknowledge of the dice results to guide the in-game decisions of the character. Odd, though, that you want to trust players to act as if they don't have knowledge that they clearly will have while not tursting a GM to simply do the job of a GM and convey information that he clearly wants the players to have for the game to move forward. If a player doesn't feel he has enough information, he (through his character) investigates further and finds out more. As to knowing or not knowing why or even IF someone has failed at a task, it's the purview of the GM to make sure the player knows as much as the character should know, and not any more than that if possible which is the whole point you are actually arguing against.


But let's explore this "style issue" claim and the "get on with the game" attitude you sometimes put forth in conjunction with it. Try to help me wrap my head around your frustration with one of the traditional aspects of roleplaying games and your desire to jettison it, as well as helping me understand what constitutes roleplaying in your eyes and what roleplaying you wish to include to replace what you wish to eject. Because, honestly, I'm seeing a number of folks speaking in similar terms over the years but they tend to conflate their terms. They also tend to want to replace roleplaying aspects with other game aspects (like rolling dice), which is all well and good for the sake of gaming (though not for roleplay gaming) and having fun, but at some point when you've removed much, most, or all of the roleplaying, isn't it just a good idea to not call it a roleplaying game anymore? Don't get me wrong, I have fun with many styles of gameplay, I just tend to use rules that focus prmarily on the style of gameplay I am interested in exploring at that time. So, tell me more about this frustration you feel with having a GM be your conduit to an RPG setting versus getting on with it and preferring that the dice be what gives you your information on how to make your next move in the game you're calling a roleplaying game.

 

[darkwing]

I am not the most eloquent speaker in the world but I still hate social skills. I may not be able to slay a group of orcs in real life using a longsword but I can form complete sentences. Dice are a good way to abstract the former but not the later.

 

[Hussar]

Naw, using an extreme to prove your point doesn't actually prove your point since a roleplaying game has aspects of both roleplaying and gaming. However, what you are suggesting is removing some of the roleplaying aspects in favor of the player gaining knowledge directly from the way in which the dice fall. You feel that a GM is, by design, simply not up to the task of conveying the information the player will need in any situation and that the player should have the metaknowledge of the dice results to guide the in-game decisions of the character. Odd, though, that you want to trust players to act as if they don't have knowledge that they clearly will have while not tursting a GM to simply do the job of a GM and convey information that he clearly wants the players to have for the game to move forward. If a player doesn't feel he has enough information, he (through his character) investigates further and finds out more. As to knowing or not knowing why or even IF someone has failed at a task, it's the purview of the GM to make sure the player knows as much as the character should know, and not any more than that if possible which is the whole point you are actually arguing against.

You missed a word there. And it makes a difference. I feel that sometimes a DM is not up to the task of conveying the information the player will need in any situation. Not every time. Of course not. But, it does happen often enough that it becomes problematic. At least for me. Either I haven't explained what's going on well enough, or the DM hasn't. I've seen far too many table arguments from both sides of the DM's screen to think that this is entirely me.

See, you are saying it's up to the GM to make sure the players knows as much as the character should know. Ok. Fine. But, who determines that level? The GM of course. What if he's wrong? What if the GM thinks that the player has all the pieces when he really doesn't? We've seen more than a few Agony Aunt type columns either on message boards or in Dragon to think that this is an isolated corner case that rarely comes up. DMing advice after Dming advice says to give more information to the players and err on the side of too much rather than not enough.

But let's explore this "style issue" claim and the "get on with the game" attitude you sometimes put forth in conjunction with it. Try to help me wrap my head around your frustration with one of the traditional aspects of roleplaying games and your desire to jettison it, as well as helping me understand what constitutes roleplaying in your eyes and what roleplaying you wish to include to replace what you wish to eject. Because, honestly, I'm seeing a number of folks speaking in similar terms over the years but they tend to conflate their terms. They also tend to want to replace roleplaying aspects with other game aspects (like rolling dice), which is all well and good for the sake of gaming (though not for roleplay gaming) and having fun, but at some point when you've removed much, most, or all of the roleplaying, isn't it just a good idea to not call it a roleplaying game anymore? Don't get me wrong, I have fun with many styles of gameplay, I just tend to use rules that focus prmarily on the style of gameplay I am interested in exploring at that time. So, tell me more about this frustration you feel with having a GM be your conduit to an RPG setting versus getting on with it and preferring that the dice be what gives you your information on how to make your next move in the game you're calling a roleplaying game.

I would point out that this is a traditional aspect of the game for you. And that's great. It's not for me. I don't like pixel bitching. Trying to read the DM's mind is an exercise in futility and bogs down the game.

Although, I have to admit, the one true wayism here is rather a breath of fresh air. If I don't play the way you play, I'm not even role playing anymore. Nice. If I want a stronger mechanical framework for social interaction, I'm no longer roleplaying. Even better. I'm sure people playing things like Dogs in the Vineyard or various other games with strong social mechanics are perfectly happy not playing roleplaying games if the criteria for being a roleplaying game is freeforming social interactions.

Look, I get that you don't want mechanical frameworks for social interactions. I understand, I really do. I've certainly played that way more than a few times. However, what I'm looking for here is the recognition that this is simply one way of playing. Not the only way. Just one way. There are other ways to do it.

Loads of games have mechanical frameworks for social resolution. D20's is ... a bit meh to be honest. Too binary and far too easy to abuse. Spirit of the Century, Dogs in the Vineyard, Sufficiently Advanced, all systems I've used in the past few years, all have strong social mechanics that work rather well and that I find actually promote a great deal of roleplay.

At least for me. For others? Maybe not so much. But, then again, what do I know? I'm not even a roleplayer anymore apparently. Wow, can't play D&D because I play the wrong edition. Can't DM because I need training wheels. Now I can't even roleplay. This has been a good week for people to be more inclusive of other playstyles.