D&D General "I roll Persuasion."

[hawkeyefan]

wasn't Exalted brought up as a bad example not a good one...

It was brought up as an example of how social mechanics work poorly, and I think @Campbell ’s point is that it’s an example of poorly designed social mechanics, not an example that proves social mechanics cannot work.

If my character can be persuaded against my desires..."because that is realistic"...then shouldn't my character also flee screaming from just about every single monster encountered? Or perhaps just freeze up and soil his trousers? And then suffer horrible PTSD afterwards? Because that's what we humans would undoubtedly do in those situations?

Or maybe, just maybe, the point of D&D is not to realistically model human psychology, but to have fun killing monsters and taking their stuff.

So, yeah, social combat subsystem. Great idea. But it should be based on what would be fun, not what's realistic.

Or how about this: at least as realistic as the physical combat system.

Yeah, it’s all a matter of implementation toward the goals of play.

In a game like D&D, where the characters are routinely faced with violence and horror, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have mechanics for fear or trauma and the like, not unless you want to shift the tone significantly. But for other games, those kinds of things may make sense.

Overall, I think 5E works fairly well on the PC to NPC vector. This can also be expanded pretty easily along the lines of Skill Challenge, which I think add the kind of dynamic scene called for in the OP.

I would say that I wish there was a little more at risk for the PCs in the social/emotional/mental area, but such rules would be potentially difficult to implement without significant changes to the core rules.

 

[FrozenNorth]

That's not accurate. I will not steal anything. Just won't. No amount of talking, tricking or manipulating can get me to do it. There are things that will fail across the board.

I don’t think that you can categorically state that you cannot be tricked into stealing anything. The nature of being tricked into something is that what you think you are doing is not what you are actually doing.

Like, your friend asks you to help his cousin move. He even offers to pay you for pizza afterwards. You do so, but it turns out that it wasn’t the cousin’s house. You were just tricked into stealing.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I don’t think that you can categorically state that you cannot be tricked into stealing anything. The nature of being tricked into something is that what you think you are doing is not what you are actually doing.

Like, your friend asks you to help his cousin move. He even offers to pay you for pizza afterwards. You do so, but it turns out that it wasn’t the cousin’s house. You were just tricked into stealing.

yeah somehow the idea of con men and grifters seems to be an alien concept to some on here. Even going so far as not believing that someone could be a good enough salesman could get an average person to buy something they do not want or need...


I wonder if this extends to calming down someone angery... can they not imagine being so angry and someone calming them (without magic yes calm emotions the spell would work)

 

[Chaosmancer]

Whilst I generally like PC and NPC rules working symmetrically, this is an area in which I prefer to make an exception. The inner mental life of NPCs is not nearly as important and inviolable as that of the PCs nor is the GM immersing in the same way than the players.

So I’m perfectly fine with the PCs influencing the NPCs via their social skills, but I really don’t want the same to happen in the reverse. We can still test NPC’s bluff vs the PC’s insight but the success for the NPC doesn’t result the PC automatically believing the NPC but merely the PC being unable to detect any signs of lying.

Again, this is about a system that the player's initiate. Are we really saying that the only way that could possibly be allowed is if the player's face zero consequences for failure?

 

[Chaosmancer]

I posted upthread of the social system I use. It was a modification of the PF2 Victory Point system, which is itself a modification of 4e skill challenges.

People apparently prefer to argue endlessly about other matters.

I did like your idea, I'd mentioned using skill challenges as a basis, but replacing the X successes before Y failures with a modified hit point concept, since that allows it to be drawn out longer and feel more like witty repartee

That was like... the 8th post of the entire thread

 

[Chaosmancer]

If my character can be persuaded against my desires..."because that is realistic"...then shouldn't my character also flee screaming from just about every single monster encountered? Or perhaps just freeze up and soil his trousers? And then suffer horrible PTSD afterwards? Because that's what we humans would undoubtedly do in those situations?

Or maybe, just maybe, the point of D&D is not to realistically model human psychology, but to have fun killing monsters and taking their stuff.

So, yeah, social combat subsystem. Great idea. But it should be based on what would be fun, not what's realistic.

Or how about this: at least as realistic as the physical combat system.

The Roman soldiers did not flee screaming when they faced down Elephants, the closest thing humanity has ever come to encountering monsters out of nowhere when they expected men. People living in a DnD world? They wouldn't treat monsters any differently than we treat large predators and serial killers. And the PCs aren't common folk, they are trained killers.

And yeah, we are talking about something at least as realistic as the physical combat system. The hang-up seems to be no one wants to suffer the consequences of defeat, which have been completely abstracted, because they keep picturing mind-controlling pig farmers taking away their autonomy,

 

[tetrasodium]

yeah somehow the idea of con men and grifters seems to be an alien concept to some on here. Even going so far as not believing that someone could be a good enough salesman could get an average person to buy something they do not want or need...


I wonder if this extends to calming down someone angery... can they not imagine being so angry and someone calming them (without magic yes calm emotions the spell would work)

That buy something they don't want IME is more
*Bob wants his pc to have an item that sells for say 100 hypothetical gold but wants it for 50 or 70 if not zero.
* Bob wants haggle with the npc and gets shut down or told he can do 90 no better
*Bob decides to continue holding the session hostage angling for a deeper discount and either continues until the npc will do 50 or till Bob is forced to just throw up his hands declaring that he no longer wants the thing the npc doesn't want to discount further.
*the group goes to another city or whatever & Bob tries to repeat the process wasting the table time of everyone till the gm is blackmailed into giving it to Bob for 50gp or each time the gm looks bad to the players not familiar with the history of this particular "haggler" when it just gets shut down immediately

 

[Chaosmancer]

I'm not ignoring anything. "Setting stakes" really isn't what D&D is about when it comes to social interactions. My group and I are not going to stop roleplaying, pull everyone at the table out of the game to discuss what stakes we should have regarding a conversation that's about to happen, and then converse. We're just going to go into the conversation.

If a system like this gets added to D&D, it should be an optional rule in the DM's Toolbox, not the default. As for the bolded above, I've never said or implied that it was the "whole idea." In fact, I've said the opposite and that if it's a possibility, it's not a system I want to ever take part in. I need to have veto power in order to make sure that my PC doesn't believe or act in a way that I don't think he would. It doesn't matter if it only happens once in ever hundred social combats, if it can happen I don't want to take part in that system.

I find quoting myself to be kind of gauche, but... seriously, it was post #14 of the entire thread, and it seems no one read it.

So, I actually encountered a social combat system in recent years, and kind of fell in love with the idea. Now, I don't think it would work in DnD as written, because my friend was designing his game from the ground up to include these concepts. DnD doesn't work like this, and so it would need to be a sub-system at best.

Now, before we get into arguing the exact mechanics, I think it is more important to talk about two things.

1) The goal of the system

2) When to execute it.


And the biggest thing I think gets missed or messed up when people make social combat systems is that they try and make the system and assume that point #2 is "Always". But, this is the biggest difference between combat combat and social combat. If you have a party of level 15 adventurers walking down a wooded path, and you have three completely normal goblins jump out of cover and attack the party... well, most of us wouldn't have those goblins even exist, and those who do wouldn't bother to have the party roll for initiative. Those goblins are defeated and the party loses no significant resources in the process. We do not want unimportant combats.

But we do want unimportant social interactions. If those PCs then get to a fort and the guard refuses them entry and demands to know who they are... we don't want to skip this. Even if there is no question the PCs are going to get in, this is part of the glue that holds the game together. And, frankly, this guard isn't going to be worth pulling out the social combat system for, the standard rolling is perfectly fine for this scenario.

So, when do we want to use this system after we make it?

The best use of my friend's system came when I was running one of his Demo's for a con. The game is set in mythical Japan and so concepts such as losing face from being visibly upset were things he wanted to emphasize. The players had been tasked with determining the origin of a Void creature which had been terrorizing the city, but while they had some evidence that a particular government official was involved, it wasn't enough to bring to the Daimyo. And they were running out of time.

So, they decided to confront the noble to try and get him to confess. They rolled a social skill check, as we had been doing the entire night because we were using the simplified rules for the demo... and they failed. But they were frustrated with this failure. They KNEW it was him, but obviously you can't just keep rerolling the dice til you succeed. And this is when I brought up the system. I'd let them take their first attempt as a failed first strike, and we'd go into a social combat. If they lost, then they lost, they would be shamed for accusing the noble, and they wouldn't achieve their goals. But if they succeeded.... then they basically would have argued their way into a success via the different methods available to them.

And this is when I think a social combat system shines. This is the "dramatic scene" moment where the argument happens and we zoom in on the clash of wills. And, actually, DnD has a system that we can use to model this with some very simple changes.

Are we talking about turning every single social interaction in the game into this system? No, I specifically point out that isn't what anyone wants.

So would it be an optional sub-system? Yes, that's the only way it could ever work in DnD.

So do we need to pull aside and discuss stakes before every social challenge? Nope. Not even a little. Before the big dramatic showdown in the Court (royal or legal, you decide)? Yes. If we want to make use of this system then, because social combat isn't the norm like regular combat, we need to stop and lay out the stakes

Could we have actually been making progress in refining the idea if we didn't have to continuously correct people's assumptions about the content we are talking about? Probably. But we don't live in the that world.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

That buy something they don't want IME is more
*Bob wants his pc to have an item that sells for say 100 hypothetical gold but wants it for 50 or 70 if not zero.
* Bob wants haggle with the npc and gets shut down or told he can do 90 no better
*Bob decides to continue holding the session hostage angling for a deeper discount and either continues until the npc will do 50 or till Bob is forced to just throw up his hands declaring that he no longer wants the thing the npc doesn't want to discount further.
*the group goes to another city or whatever & Bob tries to repeat the process wasting the table time of everyone till the gm is blackmailed into giving it to Bob for 50gp or each time the gm looks bad to the players not familiar with the history of this particular "haggler" when it just gets shut down immediately

yeah... I don't expect that behavior with my group so I guess I am lucky

 

[Bill Zebub]

It was brought up as an example of how social mechanics work poorly, and I think @Campbell ’s point is that it’s an example of poorly designed social mechanics, not an example that proves social mechanics cannot work.


Yeah, it’s all a matter of implementation toward the goals of play.

In a game like D&D, where the characters are routinely faced with violence and horror, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have mechanics for fear or trauma and the like, not unless you want to shift the tone significantly. But for other games, those kinds of things may make sense.

Overall, I think 5E works fairly well on the PC to NPC vector. This can also be expanded pretty easily along the lines of Skill Challenge, which I think add the kind of dynamic scene called for in the OP.

I would say that I wish there was a little more at risk for the PCs in the social/emotional/mental area, but such rules would be potentially difficult to implement without significant changes to the core rules.

I think many of my reactions/opinions in this thread are because it's in the D&D forum, and although it's tagged 'general' I'm thinking in terms of 5e.

I can certainly imagine an RPG in which the weakness of the human mind plays a central role. CoC, for example. It's not so much about persuadability and influence, but it is more focused on the mind and less on killing monsters and taking their stuff.

But in D&D? That just causes a lot of dissonance for me. I hope D&D never goes that direction. Not because it's my favorite game but because when I play it I want a certain kind of game.