FATE Core - what happened to Diaspora social combat?

[Umbran]

R
"I convinced you to commit suicide."
"No you didn't! I convinced you to commit suicide."

I'm quite aware that some systems make combat in non-physical spheres so mechanically parallel to regular physical combat that the same sorts of consequences are available. What I am saying is that this sort of conflict bears no relation to any of the social interactions we commonly experience, to the point that they would seem supernatural or magical or alien.

Well, yes, if you are doing it wrong. "I convinced you to commit suicide," is a *horrible* narration of getting Taken Out in a FATE social conflict.

Let us remember - being Taken Out in FATE is being reduced to a defenseless state, so that your opponent can do what they want to you, including rendering your character permanently unplayable. One possible form of unplayable is death, but it is not the only form. But let's take death as the example.

For a social conflict, it shouldn't be, "convinced you to commit suicide". It might be more like, "I have so thoroughly ravaged your reputation such that everywhere you go you are met with scorn, derision, and bullying, so that you eventually succumb to depression and commit suicide." But even then, you'd want to avoid narrating it as stipulating the character's actions. So, "so damaged your reputation that there is no succor anywhere, and everyone views you as a target. In short order you are worn down to the point where you get a dagger in the back in a dark alley, and die," is more appropriate.

But, the more real case is probably, "I have so damaged your reputation that your landlord throws you out. Your employer now thinks you are a child molester and fires you. The bank won't loan you money. Your friends slam door in your face and won't even let you crash on the couch. The cops think you are scum, and find every excuse to drag you in to try to pin crimes upon you. You can no longer survive in the society of this town, and have to move away. Please make a new character."

None of these are supernatural, or even particularly surprising. My first example happens to teenagers bullied on social media with alarming regularity.

Social conflict that normally bears the stakes of death is not something anyone normally experiences and certainly nothing that just spontaneously happens because someone chooses to socially attack someone. It's a disassociated mechanic.

Not at all. It isn't like someone walks up to you, call you names, and you drop dead. Just as a physical attack must happen in a fight scene, the social attack must happen in a social arena, a place where social ties and bonds can be damaged. If done properly, it is no more dissociated than physical combat is, as the resulting narrative makes perfect sense in context.

In most social interaction we experience the risk is basically only "how various statements are perceived".

Apples to apples, please. Most physical interactions we experience don't run the risk of death either. Thus, we don't use the *combat* system for them. You probably don't use combat to adjudicate a game of ultimate Frisbee, or an arm-wrestling match. You use the combat system not for "interaction" but for deep and serious conflicts where broken bones, lacerations, and death are intended results.

Social interaction is not social *conflict*. Social conflict is where someone is using social positioning to bring real harm upon another.

 

[Celebrim]

Well, yes, if you are doing it wrong. "I convinced you to commit suicide," is a *horrible* narration of getting Taken Out in a FATE social conflict.

LOL. No doubt. I intended it as a joke.

But, at some level I think all narration of getting "Taken Out" in FATE social conflict is disastrously bad narration. Nor have you exactly convinced me otherwise.

For a social conflict, it shouldn't be, "convinced you to commit suicide". It might be more like, "I have so thoroughly ravaged your reputation such that everywhere you go you are met with scorn, derision, and bullying, so that you eventually succumb to depression and commit suicide."

Yeah, that's so much different conceptually than my joke.

But even then, you'd want to avoid narrating it as stipulating the character's actions.

That is indeed a rub.

So, "so damaged your reputation that there is no succor anywhere, and everyone views you as a target. In short order you are worn down to the point where you get a dagger in the back in a dark alley, and die," is more appropriate.

Err.. doesn't that also stipulate the character's actions? Why are we in this dark alley in the first place? Did I choose to go there? Why did I fail to notice the attacker, and why after so many combats did I die to this dagger in the back anyway? It doesn't sound like I actually was socially destroyed here. It sounds like I was physically destroyed by a physical challenge I wasn't allowed to win despite my massive physical stats. Why didn't we run any of that stuff?

But, the more real case is probably, "I have so damaged your reputation that your landlord throws you out. Your employer now thinks you are a child molester and fires you. The bank won't loan you money. Your friends slam door in your face and won't even let you crash on the couch. The cops think you are scum, and find every excuse to drag you in to try to pin crimes upon you. You can no longer survive in the society of this town, and have to move away. Please make a new character."

Which again, is stipulating the characters actions and railroading them through situations that might not believably happen and which in any event I might have the resources to survive by other means. Fundamentally, your narration above always involves the character losing repeatedly in the physical sphere. The lose of social standing results in physical attacks.

My first example happens to teenagers bullied on social media with alarming regularity.

Sure, but it doesn't happen to every character bullied on social media. As one example, ironically, it's often more devastating and traumatic to the very persons who had significant social resources and lost them. (In game, we might have the equivalent of a player choosing to retire a character with very large investments in character building resources in the social sphere, whose character is permanently maimed in the social sphere and loses those invested points. We might reasonably assume such a character feels like 'they've lost everything.')

Again, we have very distinct differences between the social and the physical. The physical act of having a bullet pass through your skull has a consequence that doesn't depend (much) on the character assuming you aren't a mutant or werewolf with magical regeneration abilities. No one feels its unreasonable they are being stipulated to by the laws of physics. But how a character will react to bullying, to his best friend slamming the door on his face, to the cops trying to frame him for something, or whatever else you want to invent is something we reasonably expect to vary greatly from character to character. No law demands a particular outcome.

Social interaction is not social *conflict*.

You say this to a guy who is autistic. Almost all social interaction is pretty frightening to me. And I have plenty of experience with social "combat" if you mean attempts to socially destroy a person, and I've experienced bullying in everything from being the object of mean girl public shaming to being group stomped and kicked. I think I have a pretty darn good idea what words can do, both in the harm they can do and the limits of that harm. My imagination is not limited here when I say the outcomes required by social combat would seem alien or magical. I'm assuming everyone has experienced bad social situations. I'll return to this in just a bit, but the big problem here is not that there might not exist some social combat narration that makes the outcome seem non-magical, but that we are required to supply it.

Unless you have a level nine intellect in real life, figuring out the 12 words that destroy a person isn't easy.

Social conflict can reasonably destroy social resources, though I'd argue that the relationships would need to be attacked from the other end making the whole process much more complex. I'd even buy that the loss of social resources can have consequences in other spheres, or that for a particular character loss of reputation and loss of relationships might appropriately produce certain actions. But only for particular characters and only in particular cases.

But even so, you are completely missing my main point. Even if we assume that there exists some possible narration which for a particular character explains the results of social combat in a believable manner that doesn't stipulate character action, it's still very radically different from a typical combat engine. I typical combat engine generates the narration that produces the believable result of character loss, and the more granular the engine the better it does that. The gun was fired. The bullet struck. The blood hemorrhaged. Brain death and cardiac arrest ensued. We can imagine all that concretely, even if the original engine was on the abstract side (say D&D or even FATE). For the social combat, the problem is we actually get no insight into the narration we need. The insult was hurled. The reputation was ruined. He was rendered a pariah. He became completely helpless. That's a tissue of a story, but it doesn't tell us what actually happened. He called him a jerk and it ruptured his spleen doesn't quite cut it. What was that so devastating insult? Why was it so believed? How did it undermine the reputation? You can imagine specific characters and specific cases where an Achilles heel is exposed and they are destroyed - Nixon's missing 18 minutes for example removes him from the Washington campaign. But doing that in a general case is so hard as to be impossible. A physical combat engine supplies us with more concrete details for our narration that we would not have had otherwise. A social combat engine leaves us without the concrete details we would have if we just narrated the social combat. If we start with the concrete insult, if we actually play out the scene, and so forth, we end up with a sturdier more believable narrative than if we propose social combat, declare some maneuvers, roll the dice, and then try to figure out what it means. Perhaps our constructed narrative will have the same sort of outcome of ruination, but at least we will know how it happened. Social combat requires us to generate as elaborate of stories as the backstory to the Count of Monte Christo specific to the particular character on the fly based on a few die rolls. It's just not reasonable to expect to generate that from the few clues provided by the fortunes in an abstract combat system.

Even if I concede, "If done properly, it is no more dissociated than physical combat is, as the resulting narrative makes perfect sense in context.", the engine gives us no insight on how to "do it properly" in the same way a physical combat engine might generate imaginable blows, parries, misses, and wounds. The reason is because the mechanics are disassociated and unlike physical combat can't be more associated by being made more granular.

 

[Umbran]

But, at some level I think all narration of getting "Taken Out" in FATE social conflict is disastrously bad narration. Nor have you exactly convinced me otherwise.

Disastrously bad, or just disastrous?

In any given version of D&D, when you lose all your hit points, there's a further mechanic that tells you the character's ultimate fate. These mechanic are actually pretty dissociated, in that they deal with the game-rule concepts of hit points, ability scores, and saving throws, rather than anything in the game world. But, really, the player has no further choices to make in these mechanics anyway, and the basic determiner of whether a mechanic is dis- or a- is upon what the player decisions are made, so the question is largely moot.

In FATE, if you get Taken Out, you lose all narrative control of your character. Like in D&D death, no further choices on your part, so again whether the mechanics is dis- or a- is largely moot. But, the end result is not determined by an impersonal mechanic, but by a *person*.

Lots of people just don't like that loss of control. They see being at the mercy of a die mechanic as more palatable than being in the hands of a person. A *person* having power over your personal avatar (and thus, in a way, you) is not attractive to many.

In addition, we can view D&D death mechanics as a simulation. Narration of death in D&D is typically, "You lie there for a while, and then pass away," because that's the what the mechanics have happen. As a narrative, it is uninteresting, even trivial. FATE death is not a mechanical simulation - the mechanic takes you to the point of loss of narrative control, loss of agency, and no farther. Mechanics do not actually cover death in FATE, be it in physical combat or social conflict.

Err.. doesn't that also stipulate the character's actions? Why are we in this dark alley in the first place? Did I choose to go there?

See, there we are. Not comfortable with someone else determining things.

We could word it differently, if you like, and leave it vague, and say that wherever the character goes is irrelevant. They've been left in a state where they are no longer able to impact events in a meaningful way, and end up friendless, alone, with a dagger in the back. Or, just so stunned by the realization of how much they've just lost in the conflict that they are quietly shuffled away and silenced forever by a bodyguard.

This is not a case of negating player choice - the player *had* no further choice, any more than the player whose character reached zero hit points had further choice. Agency was lost *before* death, not as a result of death.

Sure, but it doesn't happen to every character bullied on social media.

Nope. But, in a FATE conflict, it is *not* true that all conflicts end with someone Taken Out. FATE conflict has what, in the live-action world, we'd call a "free escape" - one side or the other can choose to Concede, which does *not* put them at the mercy of their opponent. For named characters (PC or NPC) Conceding is far more common than getting Taken Out. And, even when you are Taken Out, actual Death is less common than having something else happen.

You say this to a guy who is autistic.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Social conflict can reasonably destroy social resources, though I'd argue that the relationships would need to be attacked from the other end making the whole process much more complex.

It isn't a simulation of the real world. If it is a simulation of anything, it is of pulp or action-adventure narrative.

But even so, you are completely missing my main point. Even if we assume that there exists some possible narration which for a particular character explains the results of social combat in a believable manner that doesn't stipulate character action, it's still very radically different from a typical combat engine.

It is exactly the same as FATE's combat engine. As noted, FATE's combat engine doesn't actual handle death, either.

FATE is not "typical". Nor does it try to be typical, or claim to be typical. If that's not for you, that's okay.

Even if I concede, "If done properly, it is no more dissociated than physical combat is, as the resulting narrative makes perfect sense in context.", the engine gives us no insight on how to "do it properly" in the same way a physical combat engine might generate imaginable blows, parries, misses, and wounds.

That's correct - the *engine* doesn't tell you. The rest of the rulebook makes an attempt to do so in bits separate from the actual game engine.

Maybe not for you, but for many players this solves a problem - in D&D, played as written, death can often be anticlimactic. FATE allows the GM, without breaking any rules, to make sure that death only happens when it would be dramatically appropriate. The purpose is mostly to allow the GM to do something *other* than kill the character who was Taken Out.

This isn't good for all possible players. As one example, some folks want life or death to be a measure of success at game-rule-play and manipulation. FATE will probably be phenomenally unsatisfying for these players.

The reason is because the mechanics are disassociated and unlike physical combat can't be more associated by being made more granular.

I remind you - as far as I am concerned, the major determiner for dis- or as- sociated mechanic is upon what criteria the player makes decisions. If they make decisions based on in-game reality, it is associated, if they make a choice based on metagame elements, it is dissociated. We are talking about what happens when the player *has no decisions*.

This is, again as noted, like D&D death, which actually happens after the character has no choices (but is determined by game-rule, dissociated stuff, too). It is a portion of the game that chugs along without player input.

 

[CanadienneBacon]

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