Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay

[pemerton]

Let's say that you are out with a friend and you bump into that friend's boss, who is a massive egotistical jerk. You know that your friend has been gunning for a promotion because his wife is pregnant and they could really use the money. So your friend starts kissing up to the guy.

You can:
A) Stay out of the conversation and politely wait for your friend to finish.
B) Join the conversation and try to help your friend.
C) Tell the boss exactly what you think of him.

You might be bored if you pick A.

You might feel dirty if you choose B.

And, yeah, there might be hell to pay if you pick C. At the very least your friend is less likely to get that promotion and will probably be angry with you as a result.

That's how it goes. What else would you expect?

In a real life situation where your friend whose driving gets pulled over, how often do his three passenger friends start piping in on the conversation. Generally only when he starts failing his persuasion checks. And even then, it's generally only one person. "Officer, what he's trying to say is that he has insurance, but he left the card at home." This same format often goes for speaking to bosses at a meeting (mostly because people just want to get out of the meeting ), and a group speaking to people they don't know. Ever see a group of 18 year-olds try to speak to a group of girls, 90% of the time they have a front man doing a lot of the talking.

So I don't think it's fair to declare an RPG dialogue to be any different.

Iin real life, if I'm attacked by orcs they win. And I've never inherited a magic heirloom either.

Why is my model for FRPG dialogue me? That's not my model for anything else in a RPG.

Why isn't it King Richard meeting and swapping gifts with Saladin's brother (to point to some real-world example of charismatic individuals). Or why isn't it Robert Downey Jr or Julian Moore or even Jack Black in a film? Just like my models for combat are Jet Li, the knights in Excalibur, and Wolverine.

In the example from Curse of Strahd, this is not a meeting between a boss and a downtrodden underling, or between a police officer and a hapless driver. The PCs are personalities in their own right, protagonists in a fantasy adventure, with prowess in arms or magic or both. The Mad Tyrant is among peers.

The barbarian can still speak, but he should allow the person who used his resources to use diplomacy to shine. The barbarian used his character resources to run fast, or take damage, or deal damage, etc. The diplomat doesn't always try to block his way every time he wants to run fast, or be on the front line, or deliver the killing blow.

Why can the barbarian not speak and contribute to the endeavour, if that's what that player wants to do?

Conversely, if the player of the diplomat doesn't want the barbarian to kill a particular NPC, isn't it his/her prerogative to have his/her PC do something about that?

I am talking about the OP's response. Not some simple conversation with a barkeep or random encounter. The OP's roleplay encounter was obviously important to the story.

Meeting a tyrant is not a random encounter.

These are also players talking to one another. Not a scripted or close to scripted encounter with a pivotal NPC, who is run by the DM.

Why is ths social encounter scripted? Is that how combats are meant to be run too?

 

[Fenris-77]

I think there are two different things on the table here. On the one hand we have dialogue, which, frankly, isn't and shouldn't be something that need mechanics to reproduce, either for PC-PC or PC-NPC situations. The thing that's really at issue is dialogue with intent, where there there is a particular desired outcome of the action in question, and that outcome is in some doubt. This is a sticky topic to use examples from books for, because in those cases the author generally knows what the outcome is and it isn't in doubt. This is made more difficult because two rational people can have very different views of what was actually going on in a given interaction. We only see the dialogue, not the actions declaration, which is what really indexes intent.

The example of Gimli and Legolas talking to Eomer is a great example. I have a very different reading of that exchange than some of the ones that have appeared upstream. The whole of LotR is very rooted in Saxon and Norse myth and culture, and the responses of both Legolas and Gimli in that exchange are 'heroic' in that they show Eomer something about the mettle of the two, a measure of their character as it were. Eomer is a warrior, and when he sees that both Legolas and Gimli are also warriors, that they adhere to something like the same code of conduct and speech acts, which in this case specifically does not brook insult, he sees them as worthy - hence the gift of horses. To model that in-game there would probably need to be a preexisiting understanding of the warrior ethos in question, and definitely a declaration of actions something like - I am a warrior born and brook no insult, I will show this man that he must treat me with respect. Without that culture of warrior boasts the exchange reads very differently. Modelling social interaction in LotR generally is hard for most TTRPGs because their base assumptions about the meaning of actions, and what matters in a given exchange, can be very different than model(s) Tolkien was working with.

 

[prabe]

I think there are two different things on the table here. On the one hand we have dialogue, which, frankly, isn't and shouldn't be something that need mechanics to reproduce, either for PC-PC or PC-NPC situations. The thing that's really at issue is dialogue with intent, where there there is a particular desired outcome of the action in question, and that outcome is in some doubt. This is a sticky topic to use examples from books for, because in those cases the author generally knows what the outcome is and it isn't in doubt. This is made more difficult because two rational people can have very different views of what was actually going on in a given interaction. We only see the dialogue, not the actions declaration, which is what really indexes intent.

That's true. As I said, there's no TRPG system that leads to PCs bantering as though they're in Eddings. I do think that even getting to intents, though, the fact that all the characters in, e.g., a novel are emerging from one mind, whereas around a TRPG table they're emerging from several, will make a difference as to how dialogues go. If everyone around the table is on the same page, I don't think the system is really likely to matter all that much (except where the mechanics force differences).

I do not think that the models of social interaction in TRPGs map well to the models that novelists/playwrights use; I don't think either particularly maps well to reality (though both aim for verisimilitude).

 

[Fanaelialae]

Iin real life, if I'm attacked by orcs they win. And I've never inherited a magic heirloom either.

Why is my model for FRPG dialogue me? That's not my model for anything else in a RPG.

Why isn't it King Richard meeting and swapping gifts with Saladin's brother (to point to some real-world example of charismatic individuals). Or why isn't it Robert Downey Jr or Julian Moore or even Jack Black in a film? Just like my models for combat are Jet Li, the knights in Excalibur, and Wolverine.

In the example from Curse of Strahd, this is not a meeting between a boss and a downtrodden underling, or between a police officer and a hapless driver. The PCs are personalities in their own right, protagonists in a fantasy adventure, with prowess in arms or magic or both. The Mad Tyrant is among peers.

Why can the barbarian not speak and contribute to the endeavour, if that's what that player wants to do?

Conversely, if the player of the diplomat doesn't want the barbarian to kill a particular NPC, isn't it his/her prerogative to have his/her PC do something about that?



Why is ths social encounter scripted? Is that how combats are meant to be run too?

There's nothing wrong with running it that way. Maybe the mad tyrant does see the PCs as equals, and is willing to give them considerably more leeway than he otherwise would.

There's nothing wrong with ruling that way, although the fact that the module says he runs them out of town if they anger him does suggest otherwise for the default way of handling it. The DM is always free to alter the module as they see fit.

Additionally, you can absolutely have NPCs who respond poorly to praise and positively to insults. Maybe there's a surly pirate captain who hates sycophants but likes those who speak their mind.

It's simply that the egotistical baron isn't likely to be that kind of guy.

In a game a few months ago, one of the players tried to pick a fight with an NPC. She made a bet with him that ultimately resulted in her spitting a mouthful of beer in his face (intentionally). There was a bit of back and forth but he was unwilling to fight her as she has something of a reputation. Instead, he retaliated by putting nails through the tires of our truck. They went back and forth like this a few times until finally they called a truce and now they actually get along quite well.

 

[Imaculata]

And yet Conan and Belit become not only friends but lovers.

Or if one doesn't want the pulp tropes, I'll go back to LotR: between them Gimli and Legolas insult and threaten Eomer, and yet he lends them horses and they all go on to be friends and comrades-in-arms.

They do, but they are also entirely different characters from the Baron and this PC. I'm not saying that such a hostile act can't have a positive outcome in "a" campaign. But given the personality of the Baron specifically, that does not seem like a logical outcome. When you make an attempt on the life of a paranoid evil lord, he puts you in irons or has you executed.... probably both. That seems like the most logical outcome to me.

I think the more important point is, that this does not automatically mean the end of the player character. There are many ways to continue the story from this point.

 

[billd91]

The starting point is for the GM to think about the situation similarly to how s/he might think about a combat. For instance, why does the mad tyrant not address the barbarian or thief or whomever directly (as Eomer does to Gimili).

The next step is to think more carefully about how to adjudicate the resulting action declarations. In particular, if we take it as given that Gimli's player (ie the player of the relatively low-CHA dwarf) is more likely to fail a check than is Aragorn's player (whose paladin has at least 17 CHA!), how do we resolve this? In LotR Eomer still lends Gimli a horse, but there is an outstanding dispute between them about whether Galadriel is the most beautiful woman in Middle Earth.

Of course there are many many other ways to think about making sense of a failure in social interaction. I just point to that one because it's fairly fresh in my mind and it is the sort of thing that I don't hear much about in accounts of D&D play.

Well, if we're going to go with the Two Towers example, let's go all the way. Do you think things would likely have gone as well after Gimli insults Eomer and Legolas readies to shoot if either one had followed through and attacked Eomer? Or do you think Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Eomer, and several desperately needed riders would have all ended up dead? This is the difference between a character following up an insult with defusing the situation as Aragorn does and trying to take the burgomaster hostage as in the OP.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think there are two different things on the table here. On the one hand we have dialogue, which, frankly, isn't and shouldn't be something that need mechanics to reproduce, either for PC-PC or PC-NPC situations. The thing that's really at issue is dialogue with intent, where there there is a particular desired outcome of the action in question, and that outcome is in some doubt. This is a sticky topic to use examples from books for, because in those cases the author generally knows what the outcome is and it isn't in doubt. This is made more difficult because two rational people can have very different views of what was actually going on in a given interaction. We only see the dialogue, not the actions declaration, which is what really indexes intent.

The example of Gimli and Legolas talking to Eomer is a great example. I have a very different reading of that exchange than some of the ones that have appeared upstream. The whole of LotR is very rooted in Saxon and Norse myth and culture, and the responses of both Legolas and Gimli in that exchange are 'heroic' in that they show Eomer something about the mettle of the two, a measure of their character as it were. Eomer is a warrior, and when he sees that both Legolas and Gimli are also warriors, that they adhere to something like the same code of conduct and speech acts, which in this case specifically does not brook insult, he sees them as worthy - hence the gift of horses. To model that in-game there would probably need to be a preexisiting understanding of the warrior ethos in question, and definitely a declaration of actions something like - I am a warrior born and brook no insult, I will show this man that he must treat me with respect. Without that culture of warrior boasts the exchange reads very differently. Modelling social interaction in LotR generally is hard for most TTRPGs because their base assumptions about the meaning of actions, and what matters in a given exchange, can be very different than model(s) Tolkien was working with.

this actually gives me hope that D&D can simulate the types of interactions you would find in its sources if inspiration. Why? Because you’ve just stated the reason is simply that DMs don’t run a world conforming to the same warrior boasting notions that LOTR is based upon. that’s an easy fix if that’s all there is to it.

I think there’s more to it though. It’s not just about having an insult help in interactions with all or even some NPCs. It really has to do with the predetermined nature of such an insult I think. That’s why this notion of NPC as puzzle comes up so much - it’s such a key point to understand the criticism.

I don’t want social interactions where you can convince NPCs of anything. But I think a broader range of possibilities in social interaction are possible without opening those floodgates. In short, be willing to let the dice decide a bit more often in social situations.

I think more often than not a players conception of the social situation and the game and genre as a whole is perfectly valid and The dm too often dismisses that out of hand, especially in social situations.

 

[FrogReaver]

Well, if we're going to go with the Two Towers example, let's go all the way. Do you think things would likely have gone as well after Gimli insults Eomer and Legolas readies to shoot if either one had followed through and attacked Eomer? Or do you think Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Eomer, and several desperately needed riders would have all ended up dead? This is the difference between a character following up an insult with defusing the situation as Aragorn does and trying to take the burgomaster hostage as in the OP.

I don’t think anyone has an issue with the actions post attempted hostage taking. So not really sure what you are getting at.

 

[Numidius]

Just to point out that the family of the baron is also described in detail, the spiritually broken wife laughs hysterically at anything he says; their son is a self made magic user who wants to craft a way to teleport himself far away from the town, for good.
So a lot of stuff going on.

 

[FrogReaver]

They do, but they are also entirely different characters from the Baron and this PC. I'm not saying that such a hostile act can't have a positive outcome in "a" campaign. But given the personality of the Baron specifically, that does not seem like a logical outcome. When you make an attempt on the life of a paranoid evil lord, he puts you in irons or has you executed.... probably both. That seems like the most logical outcome to me.

I think the more important point is, that this does not automatically mean the end of the player character. There are many ways to continue the story from this point.

I think you’ve missed ALOT of the conversation. The issue isn’t around what he did after attempting to take him hostage. I’d say that bringing that up as part of your point actually undermines the rest of it because your talking about something the rest of us aren’t.

to make it clear: the issue with that scene was the calling of guards at a single insult by a single pc in an otherwise progressing social encounter.

that reaction done in that manner was the only unjustified action in the whole series of events.