D&D General Social Pillar Mechanics: Where do you stand?

[Swarmkeeper]

I have a player who prefaces nearly every one of her social encounters with "This is the part of the game I am not good at." I think she just has trouble coming up with the right thing to say on the fly and probably feels a little self-conscious despite playing with a table of friends who include her husband (I sometimes wonder if playing with total strangers might ironically make it easier for her). As such, while I appreciate her few attempts at first-person role play and try to get out of the way when she unconsciously slips into that mode of play, I totally accept that the vast of majority of the time she will more likely say something like, "I try to convince the merchant to give me the information by explaining that if we succeed at defeating the bandits, he will have an easier time importing goods to sell."

During our last session that involved a very long combat that also involved attempts at negotiations to cease hostilities or at least figure out what the enemies were even doing there, she struggled knowing how to best phrase her character (a druid) calling out to the enemy druid in Druidic Cant in attempts to learn something about what was going on. Part of the issue was figuring out how to ask something without revealing too much about her own group and their goals. . . I suggested she poll the group out of character for what to say and how to word it.

Would I like for her to do more 1st person RP and be quicker on her feet with it? Sure.
Is it fair of me to expect it from her? No, I don't think it is.
Is it okay for me to encourage it and give positive reinforcement when she does? I think so.
But would it be fair of me to penalize her for her "3rd person" stance when she doesn't? Absolutely not.

Very much this.

At our table, it doesn't matter if the player wants to express what their PC is doing in a scene first person or third person. I have several players that actually do both depending on what it is they want to get across (and I do this myself when I play - often switching to 3rd person to "hurry up" what my character is doing/saying so as to get the spotlight back on another character). What really matters is that I, as DM, have enough info to glean what the PC is trying to accomplish (goal) and how they are going about it (approach) so that I can adjudicate appropriately. This applies not only to social interaction but to the other pillars of play as well. The dice only come out when there is uncertainty and a meaningful consequence for failure. In such a way, I don't need the dice to "even the playing field" for those who are outgoing improv artists and those who are not. I adjudicate based on what makes sense in the scene, not on how well expressed it is. And, if something is unclear - and this could apply to someone who is being overly dramatic and wordy in their first person roleplay as much as it could for someone who is terse in their third person description - I'll ask a clarifying question before making a ruling.

Then again, this feeling is influenced by a memory of my being a jerky DM to a new (to us) player who joined our group like 25 years ago who was not into doing first person RP and ended up ghosting the game and that I regret to this day and am mortified whenever I recall it (and wish I still had that person's contact info, so I could apologize).

Sorry to hear. I would think most DMs have certain rulings they wish they could take back or change over the years. I know I have several.

 

[Corinnguard]

The irony here is, that's still true. Dragonborn officially don't have tails. Larian just recognized that the instant dragonborn came on the scene, people were giving them tails.

I'm personally on the fence. Tails are actually a lot of headache in many ways. But they can also be cool. Depends on how it's drawn, I suppose.

I am one of those people. If you are going to have a setting with anthropomorphic races in it, a tail is aesthetic must.

 

[mamba]

I don't think we are any more well prepared to get inside the head of an alien creature in an alien time on an alien world than we are to have it out with boffer weapons.

agreed, there are certainly limits to that

Mechanics in the social pillar

allow us to not even properly get into the mind of other humans, something we usually can do. Instead they turn negotiations into this weird mini game with no correlation to anything

allow us to define terms and goals and approaches in a way that makes the stakes clear.

I can make the stakes clear in many ways, I do not even see the mini games helping with it all that much, they just provide arbitrary means to influence the outcome

 

[mamba]

That sort of thing is only possible when you start adding in some degree of mechanics. That doesn't mean we should flip things to the reverse state, where absolutely every race under the sun has to have a full observer team and official timekeepers and (etc.), but rather that we should try to find ways to make use of both techniques in the places they're most useful.

If you have a system that helps you there fine, the heavier ones mentioned here all feel like pure mini games with no relation to a negotiation however.

I’d say a skill challenge where people say what their argument is, is about as mechanical as I see making sense

 

[Reynard]

agreed, there are certainly limits to that


allow us to not even properly get into the mind of other humans, something we usually can do. Instead they turn negotiations into this weird mini game with no correlation to anything


I can make the stakes clear in many ways, I do not even see the mini games helping with it all that much, they just provide arbitrary means to influence the outcome

Combat is a mini game. Exploration is a mini game. Character creation and advancement is a mini game. Intractions are, and always have been, a mini game. That you prefer the "game" part of the social interactions to be more obscured than other parts of play is a fine preference, but it is merely a preference and does not say anything about the value of having a subsystem that makes courtly maneuvering (for example) as interesting as combat.

 

[mamba]

That you prefer the "game" part of the social interactions to be more obscured than other parts of play is a fine preference, but it is merely a preference and does not say anything about the value of having a subsystem that makes courtly maneuvering (for example) as interesting as combat.

agreed, never meant to imply that it is more than a preference. That is equally true for those preferring the opposite too.

I would not even mind a bit more mechanical support, I just have not seen one that does not feel ‘alien’ to me, like it is there for the sake of having some structure, not because it is a good approximation of a negotiation

 

[FrozenNorth]

These Pathfinder 2E Influence rules are a good example. I think they improve things by giving the GM a solid foundation on how to adjudicate what the PCs do, with DCs and concrete targets and outcomes. This reduces the mental load on the GM and makes it more fair for the players.

While I like the idea of the PF2 influence rules, and even took some cues from them the rules I use (which are overall more inspired by the 4th edition skill challenge rules), ultimately they have the same problem that most PF2 rules have, they feel overly engineered and require quite a bit of GM mental load to run (and in this case, preparing a social encounter requires a lot of prep work).

The 4e skill challenge rules by comparison.

Skill Challenges by blaek

Skill Challenges by blaek - Created with GM Binder.

www.gmbinder.com

 

[FrozenNorth]

You keep going back to the landlord example, and I have to repeat, your landlord example is really, really, really stupid. Note I'm not calling you stupid, just this example you've fabricated. No one is using this to talk to landlords. Its for hashing out more serious or intrigue-based social encounters. You don't use this for every NPC. If you use it for landlords, its because that landlord has big importance to the overall scenario the players are going through.

The landlord is the example given in the PF2 Gamemastery guide. You may feel the example is stupid, but that’s not on @M_Natas .

 

[Shardstone]

The landlord is the example given in the PF2 Gamemastery guide. You may feel the example is stupid, but that’s not on @M_Natas .

The isn't so much the example, its how the example is being portrayed. What matters about the landlord is their context in the specific game.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I think it is relevant at least from the perspective of talking about who mechanics can help bridge that alien interaction. Players don't have to figure out what "sexy talk" for lizardfolk would be when their elf tries to seduce the frilled guard, or whatever. We have skills and modifiers for that stuff.

To quote Seinfeld:
“You just ‘yadda, yadda-ed’ over the best part!”
“No, I mentioned the bisque.”