A Question Of Agency?

[pemerton]

I would like to say, I'm a 'by the book' GM. When I go buy a game I run it exactly as written. I rarely make house rules (I will add homebrew material if its called for). I have found that many people ignore a lot of the details of a specific game, so I may play quite differently from what everyone else THINKS the game is. When I've talked to game designers I usually find that what I'm doing is closer to what they imagined, but not always...

"House rules", as used among RPGers, covers a wide territory.

In our 4e game, we agreed (under my leadership as GM) that the +1 to damage from Weapon Focus (? is that the right feat name) didn't apply when the weapon was used as an Implement for casting spells. This seemed like an obvious consequence of correlating the rules to the fiction. I think a year or two later the errata caught up with us and agreed. In between there were pages of debate about that feat and "weaplements" which was (in my view) ridiculous given that we're talking about RPG rules and not the tax code.

In our 4e game, the player of the Wizard/Invoker took the Sage of Ages epic destiny. That destiny has a range of abilities that - as written - work only with Arcane powers. We've always ignored that, allowing the abilities to work with all of the PC's abilities, both Arcane and Divine. There was not the least reason not to.

Those are "house rules" - one a precisification, the other an alternation - that don't make any difference to the "system" of how the game is played, but simply brought the rules for the fictional elements, in a game that is heavy on mechanically-specified elements of PC build, into conformity with what we wanted that fiction to be.

Deciding to ignore skill challenges, and treat skill checks in 4e just the same as one does in (say) RuneQuest, would be a completely different sort of house rule. It would be a fundamental change in the resolution process. The closest that we came to something like that was in the context of XP for quests - I would tend to treat quests as implicit in what the players were having their PCs do, rather than require them to be spelled out. In our particular case, that didn't seem to undermine any sense of focus or purposeful orientation in our play.

 

[pemerton]

I think these kind of "rules" for a creative endeavor are guidelines. They are good to help one learn craft, but eventually they are there to be questioned. The trick with breaking these rules is to justify it by doing something creative.

But with a game, it's different. Yes, RPGing is a creative endeavor, but it is also a game. It is both things.

I would add: it's a collective creative endeavour. As per what I quoted from Vincent Baker upthread, a big part of what the rules do is establish which participant gets to create what, when and how.

Breaking those sorts of rules might be just as outrageous in the context of an artistic collective as among a group of RPGers!

 

[chaochou]

Indeed, that system exists: it's called "Mother, May I?"

A system which, definitionally, is completely lacking in player agency. Who knew?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Not necessarily. Merely that a system is not needed for them. But I certainly have found some systems to interfere with them. Exalted's social combat system certainly was such.

But you do have a system. "In Bob we trust," is absolutely a system.

 

[pemerton]

On romance in RPGs:

Rolemaster has a Seduction skill, and a table to resolve those checks on which will give a modest degree of finality of resolution; and when we played it we also had an Amiability skill (analogous to Prince Valiant's Fellowship skill, though at the time we didn't know Prince Valiant). Romance featured in our games from time-to-time, and these skills were relevant. Other skills for resolving interpersonal interaction, like Lie Detection (RM's equivalent to Insight/Sense Motive) would also come into play. There is no fully robust system for integrating these into a conflict resolution framework, though.

Burning Wheel has a Seduction skill, and unlike RM does have a fully robust conflict resolution framework. But I've not seen that particular sort of social interaction in play. Ditto for The Dying Earth.

Our Prince Valiant game has quite a bit of romance and seduction. All the PCs have become married during the course of play. Relevant skills have included Fellowship (to resolve rivalry between suitors as to who would yield to the other) and Glamourie (to try seduce someone who isn't inititally inclined to be seduced, with Presence used to oppose the check). We've also had the Incite Lust special effect used, once by me as GM on a PC (so that he has an ongoing infatuation with a NPC who is not his wife) and once by a player on a NPC (so that his wife would not just marry him for political ends, but would actually be in love with him and hence continue to govern her lands as he would wish her to in his absence).

Our Classic Traveller game has more romance than I would have anticipated going in, though not a lot. Some of it is largely in the background. Where it's in the foreground we've used the Liaison skill, with the reaction table as the resolution framework.

Our Wuthering Heights one-shot featured romantic and failed seduction. The resolution framework practically guarantees broken hearts and consequences ranging between wistful longing and violent retribution. (We got both.)

I've never done romance using Moldvay Basic or Gygax's AD&D. There is CHA as a stat but no real process for resolving interpersonal interaction - the Reaction Table would have to be adapted to that end, which isn't a huge stretch but is a slightly bigger stretch than Traveller (which is clearer up front about the range of uses of its reaction table). There are questions that would come up on in D&D that don't arise in Traveller, like whether Dispel Charm makes someone fall out of love, whether seduction attempts are to be resolved on the reaction table or via a saving throw (and from memory the Houri class in White Dwarf didn't use either of those but rather it's own subsystem), etc. This is another case where the plethora of subsystems and lack of anything like unification or integration in classic D&D would get in the way.

To the extent that romance is resolved just by everyone at the table talking, I don't see that that would be very satisfying - consensus fiction can be fine in some RPG contexts but doesn't tend to make for drama.

 

[Aldarc]

Sure. So was the penicillin.

I don't think this is an equivalent comparison. Penicillin wasn't an unintended by-product of negative space. Penicillin was the result of scientists actively trying to isolate a historically well-recognized antibacterial agent in strands of fungal mold.

That's a perfectly valid way to handle those too, and sometimes I have. However mentally modelling complex physical situations without external framework is far harder than doing so with a simple conversation.

I don't think it's necessarily harder. It's just we haven't adopted a system where that's the norm. So thinking out of that norm has a hasty habit of proving challenging to those deeply entrenched in it.

Based on the experience of myself and others who jumped from older systems that had few or no formalized mechanics for social interactions to newer-at-the-time systems (e.g. 3e D&D) that did, and seeing how the amount of roleplay dropped away and how an attitude of "skip all the talking, just roll the damn dice" started to take hold among some players, then yes it's a very easy connection to make.

This perhaps unfairly maligns social skills when part of the larger issue was the 3e skill system as a whole. Worth noting, is that large parts of the Indie Story scene were likewise responses to what they were seeing in the 3e skill system, namely mechanics first. This is one reason why the whole notion of "fiction first" is an important principle in indie games. So the idea that social mechanics = "no roleplay" or "skip all the talking" shows a lack of awareness of the larger body of conversation in the hobby. For game engines like PbtA, Fate, Cortex, FitD, etc., "fiction first" also means that the roleplaying has to come before the roll. This is largely because the roll happens when there are consequences at stake as a result of the fictional framing by the associated characters.

I'm not so sure about that. Benefit of the doubt says the social stuff got less attention because the designers realized it didn't need much, and that in-character talk at the table would suffice. Meanwhile combat, which couldn't be acted out live at the table but was seen as a key part of the game, had to be modelled somehow and designing that model took some effort.

That sounds less like "benefit of the doubt" and more like "confirmation bias" to me, but it's inconsequential.

Er...if roleplaying is defined as playing a role - i.e. acting - which is what you're in theory doing at such times as you can match live-at-the-table action to in-game action (almost exclusively limited to social interactions in TTRPGs; some LARPs take it considerably further), then what other understanding can there be?

You may be missing the actual thrust of discussion here: i.e., the dependency of fictional resolution and/or new fictional states on convincing/entertaining Bob the GM. Or let's put it another way. It doesn't necessarily matter how well in-character you roleplay or act when social resolution ultimately boils down to convincing Bob. In fact, all the roleplaying and acting, in this case, is nothing more than high quality lipstick on the "Mother-May-I" Pig, because Bob holds all the cards for social scene resolution. But let's not pretend that the system is anything more mechanically meaningful than "In Bob We Trust."

 

[Bedrockgames]

To the extent that romance is resolved just by everyone at the table talking, I don't see that that would be very satisfying - consensus fiction can be fine in some RPG contexts but doesn't tend to make for drama.

If you like having social mechanics for resolving romance, that is fine. I certainly understand why some people prefer that. But I promise you, we get plenty of drama, challenge and entertainment when we don't use them for things like Romance. Look, I totally understand the other side of this debate. I also understand I am in something of a minority on this opinion. In most of the groups I was in, the majority of other players didn't mind when games had social mechanics (and we played tons of games that had them, including rolemaster----Vampire also had them, as did many other games). But for me, they just interfere with how I like social interaction in the game to work (particularly around mysteries and similar types of adventures). I also find there is a tendency for them to start to function like buttons for many players (I've seen this in groups where people go from having a conversation with a guard at the gates to saying something like "I use command to have him let us in"). Plenty of people will role-play that after the fact, informed by the role. But I don't enjoy roleplaying to watch people perform what the dice just determined. I want the players words to have impact. With Romance this is even more the case. And to be clear here, I am not talking about 'acting'. I actually don't like acting out in a thespian style of play. I just like my words to matter when I speak in character. I have players in my games who are great actors, but I am not one of them. I just like when my characters have conversations and they feel real.

That said, I get people like social skills, and I get not every player at the table is going to be as into these kinds of exchanges. I also get that the ship has largely sailed on this matter (once D&D introduced social skills in 3E as part of the core game, I think that pretty much clinched it for the majority of players----because D&D kind of sets the mainstream experience). So I even include skills for Command, Deception, Empathy and Persuade. That is for more than I would like, but even at my own table, people like having them. What I was able to do was come up with an approach to them that didn't interfere with my style of running social encounters (which is to roll things like command, deception and persuade only when the GM is unclear on how an NPC might react; and to have Empathy rolls simply produce the cues the character sees----i.e. things like visual signs someone is anxious for instance).

One thing I will say, is for those who have never played an RPG that lacks rules for social interaction and things like clue finding, try it a few times and see if the experience is any different. Personally I find it is more immersive for me without those things. It can be useful to discover if the lack of such rules adds or detracts from your experience of play. I would just note that the trick to running a game without them is to encourage interaction with the setting elements.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't think it's necessarily harder. It's just we haven't adopted a system where that's the norm. So thinking out of that norm has a hasty habit of proving challenging to those deeply entrenched in it.

I don't know about this. If a player says I throw a ball over the wall, and it is a high wall, it is very hard for me to gauge whether a character that strong can do so off the top of my head. On the other hand, if a player character accuses an NPC of having an affair with his wife, I can pretty quickly figure out in my head how that is likely to go down with that particular NPC. Maybe I am just less math and physics oriented. On the other hand, I have a lot of experience with combat sports, and I would find it incredibly difficult to handle combat the way I handle social interaction. Certainly if I could it would be great because who wouldn't want to have a game where the player can say exactly what they do and you respond in real time telling them what happens and how the NPC reacts. I think there, contention is more likely to arise (I know how my NPC will react when the player asks him to them his gold, and the players understand that I know that, but do I know if he can block the PC's right cross this specific time? I find that more complicated and think it is useful to have combat mechanics). That said I don't need particularly robust combat mechanics. The lighter the better in my opinion (I don't like combat to take more than 5-10 minutes if possible----2 minutes would be better frankly)

 

[pemerton]

if you meet someone (say, your new boss) for the first time and don't know what makes that person tick there's always a chance you're going to rub that person the wrong way for no reason you can figure.

Both in the game and in reality, the puzzle-solving bit lies in getting to know the person.

In the game context, I prefer to use the mechanical resolution framework to find out if the PC gets what the player wants for him/her; and then establish the appropriate narration.

One reason for this is @hawkeyefan's from upthread: it avoids the frustration of RPGing-as-puzzle-solving.

Another is that I find it more entertaining and enjoyable: rather than deciding in advance what the outcome will be of such-and-such an approach to a NPC will be, we find out in play. It produces a wide range of unexpected consequences.

An example: in our Classic Traveller game the PC von Jerrel seduced the NPC Imperial Navy Commander Lady Askol, ranking officer of the naval base on the world of Novus. This took place during the course of a week of wining-and-dining which another PC (Vincenzo von Hallucida) was financing, so as to allow the PCs more time before an alien starship they were exploring, which had mysteriously appeared in orbit about Novus, was interdicted by the Navy. The actual reduction was resolved via a roll on the Reaction Table, with +1 for von Jerrel's Liaison-1. The player rolled double 6 - in the system a roll of 12 is unmodified and produce a genuinely and/or strongly friendly result. As the player narrated it, when von Jerrel and Lady Askol kissed it was the most perfect kiss the latter had experienced, and she swooned in his arms.

Thus she willingly joined him when he invited her to accompany him onto the alien vessel. And then was onboard when it jumped out of the system to another world, where the PCs were trying to locate the remnants of the ancient alien civilisation that had built it. During that exploration, von Jerrel was accused by another NPC - Toru von Taxiwan - of using psionics, which is a serious matter in the Imperium. When Lady Askol asked him whether the accusation was true (which it was), lamenting that if it was true then she would have to send him back to his homeworld of Ashar (this last itself being the result of a roll on the reaction-to-use-of-psionics table, modified by +1 for his Liasion-1 and +2 as a GM-stipulated modifier to reflect her affection for him) he denied it. The previous reaction roll stood (ie the natural 12 signifiying genuine and/or strong friendship), and so Lady Askol believed his denial. The upshot is that Lady Askol has declared a provisional "first contact" order in respect of the alien site, thus asserting Imperial authority to displace that of von Taxiwan, and placing von Jerrel in command as Imperial Overseer while she returns to her naval base on Novus to take further steps.

This romance has involved two checks so far: the initial seduction attempt, and the reaction-to-the-use-of-psionics check. But the mechanical outcomes have had ongoing effects. The strongly successful seduction result has underpinned Lady Askol accompanying von Jerrel onto the alien vessel, tolerating being unexpectedly taken to another world in it, and then believing his lie and acting on it. And the result of the psionic reaction roll framed the player's choice to have his PC lie to her, which means we now have a situation where von Jerrel's romance with Lady Askol rests on a fundamental deception.

These events have played out over four sessions. They haven't been the totality of those sessions by any means, although the problem with the psionics was very prominent in the final hour or so of our most recent session. When I read Vincent Baker talking about playing to find out what happens, or read Paul Czege saying that he likes to frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player and to keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this, I think that what I've described in this post is an example of just that. I don't think it's as dramatic (either literarily or emotionally) as the sort of play they are aiming for - my group is solidly low-to-middle-brow melodrama at best - but in the process and the logic of play I think it is exactly what they're talking about.

I think the game would be much more boring for both me and the players if I had a description or a script for Lady Askol that dictated, in advance of the actual play and the actual action declarations, what she is like and how she will respond to things. Whatever that had been, I can't envisage how it would have ended up with von Jerrel stringing her along with a lie that had him appointed Imperial Overseer of a potential first contact site!


EDIT:

Benefit of the doubt says the social stuff got less attention because the designers realized it didn't need much, and that in-character talk at the table would suffice.

That's not an accurate description of either Moldvay Basic or AD&D. Both feature a reaction roll table, to be modified by CHA. In the example of play in Moldvay Basic we see the table in use, with the referee applying a contextual modification (but not a stipulated outcome) to reflect the impact of the player's action declarations.

What is presented there is not wildly different from how my group does it in Traveller, except we have the benefit of a coherent set of subsystems rather than the hard-to-integrate mish-mash that is Classic D&D. (As I posted upthread it's fine for first impressions but it's not clear how to extend it into something like romance.)

 

[prabe]

Based on the experience of myself and others who jumped from older systems that had few or no formalized mechanics for social interactions to newer-at-the-time systems (e.g. 3e D&D) that did, and seeing how the amount of roleplay dropped away and how an attitude of "skip all the talking, just roll the damn dice" started to take hold among some players, then yes it's a very easy connection to make.

So, I'm not going to argue that your experience is somehow false, but I've found there are at least two advantages to having social skills available for PCs. The first is that if there's a situation where between at the table and in the fiction it's clear that the knowledge-states are wildly different (which I know you hate ... but it's eminently plausible, for example, for the DM to know the PC is lying when the NPC should have no idea) it serves as a way to resolve things relatively fairly. The second is that it lets players without much in the way of social skills play a character who has them, and it doesn't bork the party. A probable third is that if one is playing a character who knows much about the world, that character will have heard of cultures the player hasn't (because this player at least doesn't read world books for setting I'm a player in) and should be capable of not committing some sort of lethal faux pas--and rolling seems at least as fair as DM Fiat.