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

[Lanefan]

Not to my knowledge. Are you aware of any such errata or where it would appear?

I remember things like polymorph being updated all the time in different official versions but not the social skill mechanics.

This is from the 3.5 srd so they already had development time from 3.0.

Edit, I just checked my PDF of the 3.5 PH which has the same diplomacy and intimidate differences in phrasing and says it is from the 2012 printing, so any such errata if it was put out anywhere is not included as of 2012.

Huh. We started playing 3e in 2001 and the DM already had it that those things only worked on NPCs; given as he tends to follow rules pretty close I assumed he'd found somehting official to back him up.

Had I only known...

 

[Hex08]

The GM should set up a social challenge not by mechanics but by determining two basic things about each relevant NPC:

- overall personality traits (e.g. the Queen is friendly and charming, the Duke is a boor, the Prince is an arrogant fop, etc.)
- their underlying motivations as regards the topic at hand (e.g. the Queen is open to persuasion, the Duke has to be bribed and even then can't be relied on, the Prince is already thinking along the same lines as the PCs and might speak in support once he realizes what they're proposing, etc.)

And then with those things in mind, just let it play out as a conversation.

If all things were equal that would be fine but all things rarely are equal. I have run games with players who are smarter and more persuasive than me (and my hence, my NPCs) and have had players who care more about combat and don't care about or are not good at the conversation roleplaying parts of the game. If my game if didn't rely on both conversation and game mechanics for social situations then it wouldn't be uncommon for things to become unbalanced and certain players to always dominate conversations.

It's not hard to imagine a situation where a player makes a character who is far more charismatic than the player. If I were that player and I never got to roll during a social situation I might get frustrated. Why did I spend feats and raise social skills or stats if I am just relying on a conversation with my DM? I would feel like I wasted part of my character creation when I just could have built a monster-stomping machine.

 

[M_Natas]

I do think skill challenge rules could have though. Because, as I said, it creates tension and removes the loosey-goosey ambiguity.

Let me put it this way: you said yourself that the players had no idea how many successes they needed nor how close they might be to failure. If that's true, why would the players not simply keep throwing solutions at the problem until they inevitably succeed? There's no actual tension or concern visible to them, because all they have are a fey lord they know they can ply, and some vague descriptions from you. They've no idea if the third roll or the tenth roll or the hundredth roll will be the one that ends it. I'm absolutely certain they had fun doing this; this is not at all saying that they didn't. Instead, I'm saying that having both the adjudication and the metaphorical "finish line" invisible to them cuts down pretty heavily the tension and danger of the situation

I mean, I'm pretty sure they could tell by my descriptions that they were succeeding and on the right track. I really prefer to draw the finish line trough ingame means.
I also wouldn't tell the players how much HP a Monster has, but would make it clear with the description if it is barley scratched, wounded or hanging on a thread.
I prefer to not use playervisble meta currency whenever possible. Like I hat hate the Bastion points in the D&D24 Beta Test with a passion, because they are stupid.
Also not exactly knowing if you are succeeding until it is done is also tension raising. Nor knowing is a powerful tool (that's why in good horror films you don't see the monster for a long time because the moment you really see it the tension is usullay gone).

You can be as descriptive as you like, but I doubt your descriptions would put the fear of God in your players the same way "you have 1 hit point left, your allies are too far away, and only one enemy is still standing" does. That's the power of having visible finish lines and failure points. It's objective, inarguable, and inexorable, since every skill check must be either a success or a fail, pushing the overall situation to a climax.

But I prefer the visible failure points to be rooted inside the game world.
Like ... there is the city council with 9 members. In order to get the Law passed you want, you need to convince at least 5 council members. So know we have an ingame justification.

In this case, I would structure the SC like this:

Spoiler: Feylord's Secret

Learn the Feylord's Secret
The Feylord is hiding something from his wife, our ally, that is harming the war against the corruption. We have to find out what it is.

Obviously useful skills include Insight, Deception, Persuasion, Stealth, and Streetwise. History, Nature, Medicine/Healing, and Intimidate all seem plausible, but unlikely to have repeatable use without a solid plan of action (e.g. using Medicine to tailor the dose of a drug to act as a "truth serum" for someone as powerful as a lord of the fey.) However, the fey can be real weird, so any skill may work if the players have a clever trick.

The Feylord does not want the party (or anyone) to know of his secret shame. Hence, failures will make him suspicious and disinclined to share at all; after two fails, the party may only get half the secret even if they ultimately succeed. If, however, they succeed with no fails at all, the Feylord will come clean to his new wife, begging her forgiveness, possibly repairing their marriage.

Possible complications (note, not an exhaustive list):
A drugged lord is an erratic and dangerous lord. How will he respond to court events unfolding while he's intoxicated?
The party may not be the only ones listening in. One failed roll may not catch the lord's attention, but may (if appropriate) reveal that someone is listening in, trying to get dirt on him so they can usurp his position.
Some of the things ordinary humans think of as just socialization may have other meanings to the fey. Given his (current) wife is helping, will the Feylord think she wants to set him up with a concubine or lover?
If the players get desperate, they might turn to other forces for aid. What kinds of beings would know the secrets of fey lords? What kind of price would they expect for their help?

The write up is fine and If I would write it up to publish I would probably look similar to your write up, including possible venues the PCs could take, failure and win conditions ectera. But again, all DM facing.

Note, for example, you don't have to use an initiative order. You can instead use (effectively) "popcorn" initiative, except the players don't know that they're doing that. Just ask for an idea, and then whoever goes first picks who follows after them, possibly after some OOC discussion.

I usually get the ball rolling by after Inset the scene I ask the (for the scene) most important player what he wants to do (else I one by random or the one with the least time to shine) and then let the players naturally go from there. But I would never call it initiative, because it is a naturally flowing back and forth.

Also, although it's "traditional" to be "N successes before 3 failures," you can alter the number of failures too if it makes sense. (Hard to call it a tradition from only one edition, but eh, we do that with Fighters and Barbarians being idiots from 3e, so whatever.) For example, with a really extensive skill challenge covering a lot of ground (say, more than 6 successes), it might be wise to do "7 successes before 4 failures," but make actually hitting 4 failures especially bad, while 3 is still bad in the "pyrrhic victory" kind of way.


...skill challenge rules are also light and flexible. That's the whole point. You should be able to come up with an interesting skill challenge in minutes. Just like how you would if the party got into a fight you weren't prepared for and had to draft up opponents quickly.

I mean, Skill challenges are basically just an extension of RAW play. It is quite natural that for complex situations you use more than one skill check.

---

Now, to turn things around: You've basically been arguing "I didn't need them in the game I run, therefore no one would benefit from adding them." That line of argument does not hold; just because your gameplay style doesn't have such situations very often doesn't mean they're generally useless. Instead, as I have said more than once, it means these things are tools, and not every tool needs to be useful to every user. A person might go years without needing a specific tool IRL (say, a socket wrench), and many cases might exist where you can get equivalent results with or without it (e.g. bolts that also have a screwdriver head), but that doesn't mean socket wrenches are generally useless.

I didn't say no one would benefit from adding a different mode of play. I'm saying that I haven't seen one yet that I think would be an improvement over the current one. That's why I started to bring concrete table examples, because with those it is easier to show how something looks in actual play and also helps to eliminate misunderstandings on how things will work in actual play. And after the first example somebody basically said, that's not complex enough for "social combat"-rules so I tried to think of a more complex example and couldn't find one in my current game (because that is still low level and despite being quite roguish they are not on the radar of Law Enforcment yet and also quite far from other big social interactions).

As I said before, these things are "sometimes foods." They've got a place, they aren't for everyone, and that's okay. They don't need to be, any more than Druids need to be for everyone or Dragonborn need to be for everyone.

You've said you think situations that would call for this are rare.

I said I couldn't find many in my current game, that's why I went to my campaign before.

I disagree. Consider the following:

• Legal proceedings, court cases, etc.
• Complex negotiations (e.g. a trade treaty)
• Persuading a powerful figure to give military or financial aid
• Trying to break a cult (or other org) by revealing how the rank and file members have been lied to
• Sleuthing while attending a social function (e.g. a masquerade ball)
• An academic debate
• Impressing someone with a stage performance of some kind
• Working through intermediaries and proxies to request a face-to-face meeting
• Leveraging the corruption of a political establishment against itself
• Fomenting a revolution, starting a mutiny, or rallying a town to defend itself
• Convincing an enemy force to switch sides and support your cause instead

All of these are at least partially social events that would make sense to be more than just one single action (groups and organizations are rarely so easily persuaded), but which would be far less exciting if run just as "keep rolling until the DM decides you've failed or succeeded." They are not weird or obscure events, but rather perfectly reasonable things that could happen to almost any adventuring party exposed to relevant social groups (cults, high society, rulers, villages, ship crews, law enforcement, etc., etc.) Places where both failure and success can be exciting, where degrees between those two extremes are plausible, where the situation can (and really should) change dynamically as the players take action and engage with it.

Yeah, and I would usually run them based on the ingame-fiction.
Like a court case, the rules are informed by the rules of the court - who is allowed to speak when, for how long and how often. So here we have fixed numbers based on the ingame fiction.

So I would usually present all those examples with as concrete ingame goals as possible.

Just as there are various rules that many groups never make use of and couldn't care less about, I imagine you would be one of the people who looks at these examples and thinks "nah, I don't need any rules for that, I can just decide when the players succeed (or don't)." But it simply does not follow that that means nobody gets value from it, nor that nothing whatsoever is gained from using some degree of more formalized structure.

I already said (probably already 20 pages ago) I would be fine with a DM facing book a la Tashas Cauldron of Social mixture that gives like 20 or 30 examples/subsystems for those specific examples you mentioned to help DMs run those things.
As long as they don't have player facing Meta currencies, I will be fine with that .

Hence why others have pushed so hard on the "well why have all these rules for combat then? They get in the way of the conversation." There are systems out there that work like that, where nothing, not even combat, has complex rules. But most of us see how there is value added by the extra rules of combat. Nothing prevents there being some cases—not every case, not all the time—where a bit more structure to how social challenges play out can be very, very useful and beneficial.

I intend to reply to others as well, but I'm in dire need of sustenance, so I will do that after.

 

[Voadam]

If all things were equal that would be fine but all things rarely are equal. I have run games with players who are smarter and more persuasive than me (and my hence, my NPCs) and have had players who care more about combat and don't care about or are not good at the conversation roleplaying parts of the game. If my game if didn't rely on both conversation and game mechanics for social situations then it wouldn't be uncommon for things to become unbalanced and certain players to always dominate conversations.

It's not hard to imagine a situation where a player makes a character who is far more charismatic than the player. If I were that player and I never got to roll during a social situation I might get frustrated. Why did I spend feats and raise social skills or stats if I am just relying on a conversation with my DM? I would feel like I wasted part of my character creation when I just could have built a monster-stomping machine.

Bards, paladins, sorcerers, and warlocks in 5e all benefit directly in combat from high charisma, most from maxxing it out as their primary stat. They will all be monster-stomping machines just like all 5e PC classes are. Whether a character throws their skill selection into persuasion versus arcana is not usually a big deal.

 

[Reynard]

Agreed only until and unless those rules force the GM to have NPCs act or behave in a way they otherwise would not, or allow a die roll to overrule what has just been roleplayed.

How could that even be? The GM built the NPC and the encounter? What are you imagining happening?

I mean, it doesn't matter. This thread is just a conversation and I don't want it to seem like I am trying to convince you of anything. Your idea that NPCs are "GM PCs" is baffling to me, but even so it is no skin off my nose. I just don't think we have much common ground.

 

[M_Natas]

Doesn't the GM get to have the same control and agency in playing her NPCs as the players do in playing their characters?

Because that's what a lot of this is starting to sound like: ways and means of giving the players the ability to force the GM to have NPCs react in ways and-or do things that the PCs want them to, while those same abilities are not given to the NPCs to use in return on the PCs.

Okay ... maybe this is worth another thread, but I would say no, DMs don't have that same agency over their NPCs that players have over their characters.
NPCs are not DM-Player-Characters. They are mechanical constructs that have a role in the game. They are only their for the benefits of the PC. They are like ... a challenge or a help to the PCs or just set dressing to make the world feel reel.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This might be another sticking point for both sides of the discussion. You mention 'DM Fiat' here, and a number of other posters have also talked about it... how removing 'DM Fiat' is better for the game in their opinion. As though the Dungeon Master not making choices for what the NPCs end up doing and instead relying on the results of dice is better than the alternative. I certainly can understand that desire. It removes (or at least lessens) the possibility of a "bad DM" making bad choices or unfair choices. Removing 'DM Fiat' turns the game much more into a game, and thus players who do not trust the skills or attitude of their DM can still play and expect relatively "fair" results.

Do not force a false dichotomy here. The world is not comprised solely of "absolutely wonderful DMs" and "just dirt worst DMs." There's a spectrum, and it turns out that an awful lot of DMs are just...mediocre. Not great, without somehow lacking moral fiber: well-meaning but inept or bumbling; brilliant writers, but terrible designers; absolute beasts at combat design, but incapable of keeping lore consistent from one session to the next; awesome planners, but terrible improvisers; friendly and approachable, but far too fickle (again, not a moral failing, just too easily led by whim or presentation); etc., etc. There is no end to the possible ways someone can be a mixed-bag DM or a just-kinda-okay DM or a great-except-for-one-Persian-flaw or whatever else.

We neither need nor want rules to "save" us from bad-faith DMing; in all likelihood, no such rules exist. But it is useful to have rules which steer all of the above DMs—imperfect, erring, human—away from preventable mistakes and errors. And guess what? Rules are really good for that exact thing. They don't help keep any man, honest or dishonest, stuck to honesty; they help keep imperfect men away from easy mistakes, or, in the best cases, help guide those men to even greater success.

So don't make this a false dichotomy, where we must choose between no rules at all so as to not hobble anyone, or draconian and likely useless rules with the false premise of making good men out of bad. Recognize that this comes from a desire to make effective DMs out of imperfect ones—something that, when undertaken with moderation and care, is good for everyone.

My response to that would be that I genuinely feel really bad for any players out there who play with DMs for whom their instincts and attitudes are not trustworthy enough to garner a good game. That must suck as a player that the "fiat" their DM employs is not worthwhile.

What if it isn't a matter of trust, but a matter of recognizing human flaws? Of knowing that humans all too easily fall to bias and error, particularly when it comes to difficult things like statistics, or perverse incentives, or accidental degenerate solutions?

I would say though that in a normal case scenario... your prototypical DM should, could, and would make logical, sound, reasonable decisions in reaction to what the players do, such that elaborate mechanical systems wouldn't be necessary to "protect" the players.

Forget about protection then. You should most certainly know by now that lots of people absolutely don't make "logical, sound, reasonable decisions," not out of moral failings, but because people are not logic engines. We do foolish things for strange reasons. We fail to properly communicate all the damn time. We allow emotion, or bias, or false beliefs, or any of a million other things to cloud our reasoning and preclude doing the things that would be most beneficial for us or others or both.

I know for me... the DMs I play with are all good DMs for whom if they make a reactive decision in response to what I say... that I trust their reaction to be reasonable for whatever the NPC is that the DM is playing. And if they make that reaction with or without a die roll... that's perfectly acceptable to me.

Would you then say you have never ever had a merely flawed DM? A merely mediocre one? One that could have incredible skill in one aspect of DMing but be, charitably, not the best in other areas?

Because if you've never had a DM with even a single flaw, then yes, I would absolutely call you insanely lucky.

But in my estimation the more hopeful response would be to just teach DMs how to make better calls and thus become more trustworthy than take away their agency and replacing it with mechanical systems.

And what of systems which do not do that, but instead enhance their agency?

Have you established that every rule necessarily destroys DM agency? Is it not possible that some, being useful tools rather than albatrosses around the neck, actually help the DM do more than they could achieve on their own?

Because that road will eventually lead to CRPGs, where you don't need a human DM anymore because every response is generated mechanically. (And yes, I know the "slippery slope" argument is almost always extremely weak and fully admit that it is weak here too... but I use it merely as illustration for what removing DM agency and replacing it strictly with mechanics starts to feel like, if not actually become.)

Yeah, sorry, this is a textbook slippery slope argument and is exactly as weak as you say. It may be harsh, but your illustration of the feeling would have been far better served with something not so...well. Flawed. Emotional. Driven by things other than being "logical, sound, [and] reasonable." Which seems like a good way of showing how a person can be pushed toward things they themselves recognize as non-logical.

Rules—good ones, well-made, showing restraint in where and how they are made and used—help us to fight back against human imperfections such as these. They'll never make such imperfections go away. Nothing will. But the fact you cannot make a problem 100% go away is not a reason to choose to do nothing about it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This assumes, to continue the analogy, that the players/PCs know how long the "race" even is.

Yes...that's the point.

And thus, giving them "visible finish lines" amounts to providing the players with information the characters wouldn't know; which in my books is a big DM no-no.

Why not? They know all sorts of things their characters don't. Y'know, like the rules of the game. Which the above would be a completely optional such rule.

Like...for real, why does everyone argue like this is somehow going to be enforced by WotC-trained book ninjas, assassinating anyone who doesn't shoehorn this into At Least One Out Of Every N Sessions or some nonsense???

Just as "gritty realism" rules exist but are nowhere near frequently used, what on earth is wrong with having skill challenge rules that some folks pointedly ignore and others gleefully employ?

That said, ideally the DM is roleplaying the NPC well enough to give a good idea (whether accurate or not!) as to how well or not-well the PCs are doing in their attempts to persuade, as the conversation goes along.

I prefer to design for practical cases, not ideal ones. Unless you're saying it's acceptable to start discussing "white room" theory now? Because that would be a massive relief to me if I could absolutely banish any use of the "white room" argument from game design discussion.

Only a few of these have come up in games I've run or played in:

....and? Why is it relevant that you've only had a few? Seriously. I don't understand why "these are example generic situations that

COULD​

apply to any given party" means that now every single one absolutely must apply to every single campaign ever, no matter what.

So you're suggesting that this all be optional, and clearly flagged as such? OK, that's far more acceptable.

I've been going on the assumption these social rules were intended to be baked into the core game.

Why can't it be both things?

Seriously. Why can't there be skill challenges as a core rule...and then...get this...folks who don't like them can ignore them.

I thought that was kind of fundamental to 5e's design philosophy? Like how every thread ever where someone asks about a rule thing, they have to be told "well, ask your DM, none of us can actually say anything about rules at all." (Only to then, at least half the time, be told "I am the DM, I'm trying to work out what I should do" and getting the hilariously useless reply of "you're the DM, you figure it out," as though them asking online wasn't a key part of them trying to figure it out.)

 

[Voadam]

How could that even be? The GM built the NPC and the encounter? What are you imagining happening?

That seems easy to imagine. A player roleplays out trying to be persuasive and to improve an attitude and tells completely inappropriate jokes that are actually infuriatingly insulting but rolls well to change the attitude to friendlier, say even despite having disadvantage on a hard target.

The DM then after the roll is supposed to change their roleplay to act as if the PC was cool in some way and not offensive and actually improve the NPCs attitude in response to the jokes and roleplay out that improved attitude.

One way to avoid this is to say that when the PC roleplayed their insults, they blew it, the insults meant no chance of success so no roll on their 20 Charisma expertise persuasion instead of a straight roll or disadvantage or a difficult DC. If you allow a roll though and their character expertise to shine, you can get this kind of incongruity of mechanical result and what feels right and try to use that as a guide on future roleplaying.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I mean, I'm pretty sure they could tell by my descriptions that they were succeeding and on the right track

But "on the right track" applies just as much to "I am 10% of the way there" as "I am 90% of the way there."

I really prefer to draw the finish line trough ingame means.

Okay. Then this isn't for you--which I literally already said. Do you use "gritty realism" rules, for example? If you do, then congrats, you already know what it's like to use and appreciate a rule that most people don't. If you don't, then just imagine how fans of gritty realism would feel if you had told them, "Well, because this isn't how I run things, it shouldn't be part of D&D."

I also wouldn't tell the players how much HP a Monster has, but would make it clear with the description if it is barley scratched, wounded or hanging on a thread.
I prefer to not use playervisble meta currency

It's not a meta currency. It's literally just a count. You count up successes. That's something in the world: the number of times they have succeeded vs failed.

Also not exactly knowing if you are succeeding until it is done is also tension raising. Nor knowing is a powerful tool (that's why in good horror films you don't see the monster for a long time because the moment you really see it the tension is usullay gone).

Again: consider it like a race; no, better yet, consider it like you're trying to beat a world record. You are running, but you're competing against other people in the past, so you're by yourself. You know that you're on the right track (almost literally!) because there are markers.

Now, imagine you have no idea how long the race is. It could be only five minutes' light jog (so about 500 m). Or it could be five hours cross-country running. Or it could be three days. Or three weeks. You have no idea. You'll know if you get turned around and if you get back on track. But you have no idea whether you've crossed the finish line until you actually do.

There is no tension in this. You know you're making progress, but you've no idea if the second chunk will end things for good, or if you'll still be working on it five chunks later. Your horror movie example is a disanalogy because there, you know there isn't a finish line. Things that don't have a finish line, a place where success has been achieved or failure has befallen the party, should never be used with this setup, for exactly the same reason that things that don't involve the use of physical conflict shouldn't involve the combat rules.

But I prefer the visible failure points to be rooted inside the game world.

They are. They happen when the players fail 3 times (or perhaps more; 3 is a good starting point, after all. Once may be a fluke, twice may be coincidence, but three times is a pattern, after all.)

The write up is fine and If I would write it up to publish I would probably look similar to your write up, including possible venues the PCs could take, failure and win conditions ectera. But again, all DM facing.

The only part that wouldn't be DM-facing in a skill challenge is the number of failures (almost always 3) that result in full failure, and the number of successes required to fully succeed (I'd assume this one would be roughly 4-6 successes? Depends on exactly how difficult you feel it should be, context matters a hell of a lot there.) Everything else is pure DM content.

I usually get the ball rolling by after Inset the scene I ask the (for the scene) most important player what he wants to do (else I one by random or the one with the least time to shine) and then let the players naturally go from there. But I would never call it initiative, because it is a naturally flowing back and forth.

The problem is, this extremely frequently (at least in D&D) results in the 1-3 most highly skilled characters doing everything, and the 1-2 quiet players doing nothing at all. Using some form of initiative ensures that it is a true team effort, not merely the star player(s) taking over.

I mean, Skill challenges are basically just an extension of RAW play. It is quite natural that for complex situations you use more than one skill check.

Try to tell anyone else that! They were despised, outright vilified, in the past. That's why they don't exist in 5e. They had 4e cooties. To include them would have told the 5e partisans that there was something of value in 4e's rules, which would have been intolerable to them. (Keeping in mind that I am, and have long been, of the opinion that the vast majority of what elements of 5e "came from" 4e really aren't anything like 4e rules at all, not even partially, they just wear the flayed skin of 4e rules. Further, this was a highly intentional effort from the 5e design team, despite Mearls' protestations to the contrary.)

I already said (probably already 20 pages ago) I would be fine with a DM facing book a la Tashas Cauldron of Social mixture that gives like 20 or 30 examples/subsystems for those specific examples you mentioned to help DMs run those things.
As long as they don't have player facing Meta currencies, I will be fine with that .

Does "you must succeed this many times before you fail 3 times" count as some kind of "meta currency"? Because I'm not seeing what that could possibly be. It's...literally "you have to do things in the world that succeed, and do enough of them before you screw too much of it up."