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

[Reynard]

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.

Just because you have a system in place doesn't mean you stop using the fundamental rule that if the outcome is certain, you don't need to roll. If the PCs saved the life of the King's heir, you wouldn't expect they would have to roll either.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Just like the combat rules are applicable every time a PC pulls out a weapon and tries to use it, or someone tries to use one on them, yes. Ditto if a PC draws against another PC; the combat rules apply.

Rules are rules; they either exist or they don't; and if they exist they cover all situations to which they apply. Social interaction rules, if they are to exist, have to apply to all social interaction situations (even includng arguments or discussions between PCs!) if they are to apply to any; and bang goes player agency over their characters. And this is why they're a dumb idea.

You don't get to say "Oh, these rules didn't apply last time but they do this time and may or may not next time", because that's the highway to Calvinball.

That smells like a logical error.

You are asserting that if social rules exist they have to apply to all characters, and the rules applying to all characters is bad so the rule must not exist.

This can be trivially proven false by counter example.

We can obviously construct a rule that does not apply to all characters. "Whenever two dwarves have a conservation they must roll a wisdom save DC 15 or start fighting." QED.

 

[M_Natas]

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."

Of course that can be shown by description.
The ORC is barley scratched. He has big gashing wound on his side. He is barley able to stand .
The feylord is sober and watches you with mistrust. He is a little tipsy. A smile crosses the lord's face as you dance together over the floor. You can feel his body relax under your arms while ...

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.

It becomes a metacurrency when it is arbitrarily decided with no relation to the Ingame World how many successes are needed.
Again: You need to convince 5 out of 9 Councilmen is fine by me.
But: You need 3 successes before 3 failures to convince the King to lend you an army is meta. Also it doesn't take take into account all the stuff the PCs can get up to.
Like ... for example I prefer a dynamic system, like a morale or loyalty system for retainers. Just as an example: they start with Morale 0. Every thing positive a PC does can raise the morale by one or more (depending on the action the PC takes). Every thing bad can lower it by one or more (again, depending on the action). You can also have actions in this system that make it impossible to change the loyalty further (like killing the child of a retainer).
So If I would use such a system to influence a single NPC, I wouldn't use 5 successes or 3 failures or something but more a morale or attitude like system.
Of course I wouldn't tell the players the current attitude score of the NPC.

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.

Have you ever run a (half)marathon? I did several times. While on the race track you don't look at the markers, you don't look at your watch, you run until you see the finish line. Counting the meters or kilometers on a marathon race would just make it super slow, like watching a microwave clock makes it feel like this 1 minute it takes the food to be finished like an eternity.

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.

I thinknI see were our Philosophical Difference now stems from.
I don't use finish lines. I don't like set meta goals. Not a certain amount of steps needed to finish this. Dynamic systems with win and loose conditions that can be achieved in a 100 different kind of ways. Like real life, like war, like running a business, like a soccer game were on brilliant action could change the whole outcome or could have catastrophic consequences. Which is why it doesn't really make sense for me to habe "3 successes before 3 failures" as a good condition. And which where it also doesn't make sense to tell the players that, because the finish line is not fixed, it is dynamic, based on the player actions.

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 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 always break the paragraphs to early ... is there a way to undo that?

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.

For me that is the DMs job, to make sure every player has the time to shine.
For social situations I would fine any kind of Initiative to restraining. It would ki the natural flow of any conversation, which for me is a big part of roleplaying.

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.)


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."

Again, as long as it has inworld reasons it is fine.
Convince 5 out of 9 councilmen. Stop the enemies before they finish 3 rituals. Find 10 supporters in the house of common to be eligible to get voted on. Convince 6 put of 10 jury members of your innocence.

But for the Playe4s to.know the correct amount of "successes ", the characters need to know that amount, too.
Like ... an election, you need more voters than your opposition, but exactly how may are enough? You only know after the count.

But especially with a single NPC, any fixed number of successes/failures is arbitrary- it is meta.
Like, why do I need to convince the King three times? Why can't I just kidnap his infant son and blackmail him to do my bidding? Why can I insult him two times but only the third time will he throw me in the dungeon?

Yes, as a DM you need to have some kind of measure (your 3/3 successes/failures, I my dynamic point system), but telling the players the mechanics is like ... killing the suspension of disbelief. Is like seeing the microphone bouncing into the screen in a movie or the seeing the camera operator reflected in a window.
It is the difference of
"You hit the Orc with your sword, cutting a deep wound onto his right arm. You can see the fear in his eyes" to
"You hit the ORC, reducing him to 12 HP, his morale score is lowered to 1."

One js a fantastic adventure, the other is some guys sitting around the table playing with math.

Yes, you need some kind of visible mechanics to facilitate the game, but the less you can get away with the better it is.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It is the difference of
"You hit the Orc with your sword, cutting a deep wound onto his right arm. You can see the fear in his eyes" to
"You hit the ORC, reducing him to 12 HP, his morale score is lowered to 1."

One js a fantastic adventure, the other is some guys sitting around the table playing with math.

Yes, you need some kind of visible mechanics to facilitate the game, but the less you can get away with the better it is.

Again, I fundamentally disagree. Sometimes, when used judiciously, visible mechanics make things better.

And there's a perfect way to prove it.

Do your players feel awesome when they roll a crit? Do they feel terrible when that crit then rolls minimum damage?* Or absolutely STOKED if they roll max damage?

You could hide all of that from them. You could roll all of their attack and damage rolls behind the screen and just tell them what they see. But, if I were a betting man, I would bet good money you'd never, ever do that. Because the purely mechanical perspective of "HELL yes, I got a CRIT!" is objectively worth more than any immersion/verisimilitude/etc. benefit gained from not thinking about making rolls.

This is exactly the same thing. A very, very small concession to the fact that yes this is a game, it thus has win and loss conditions, which provides substantial dividends in better player experiences.

(*I still don't understand why 5e abandoned the much, MUCH simpler way of doing critical hits from 4e. In 4e, when you crit, you maximize all damage dice. This is technically not as good as rolling twice as many dice, because on average you'll get a teensy bit more, but it has several practical benefits: 4e-style crits obviate the need for rolling, rather than exacerbating it; they're extremely easy to process mentally; and, best of all, you never get a horribly disappointing minimum-damage roll.)

 

[Lanefan]

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.

I disagree completely with this premise.

Characters in the setting are in theory all the same. They don't walk around with little "PC" or "NPC" stickers on them, and were you and I in fact walking down an imaginary street in the setting and interacting with the setting's inhabitants we shouldn't be able to tell the PCs and NPCs apart.

Yes the only time an NPC becomes relevant is when it interacts with one or more PCs, but to say they're merely "mechanical constructs" is to me the same as saying a film director shouldn't bother wasting time with anyone playing a bit part in the film because only the star actors matter....and that's wrong. Even if you only have one line in a movie or a play, for that brief moment you're every bit as important as the stars and thus your moment should be directed and played to the same standard as those of the stars.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes...that's the point.

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.

If the rules of the game are good enough, they reflect the physics of the setting; in which case the characters would, to a point, know the rules just like we know the rules of physics in the real world.

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?


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.

What's impractical about a DM roleplaying an NPC well?

....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.

All I was trying to point out is that other than court trials (of which I've seen at least a few dozen over the years) those sort of situations have IME been either very rare or nonexistent; certainly nowhere near frequent enough to be worth designing a whole new rules subsystem for. And I say this as a happy designer of new subsystems, when they're justified.

And sure, other tables might hit those sort of big-implication social situations more often.

That said, they rarely if ever come up in published modules I'm familiar with (though I'll quickly admit there's many modules out there I've never read) and IME the published modules usually give at least a vague idea of how play is expected to go in general. Now I'll also admit that might be a chicken-and-egg thing; the design isn't there because it never comes up, and it never comes up because the design isn't there.

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.

Two reasons:
1. Many tables won't be able to choose to ignore them; for example, if they were core they'd have to be used in all organized play.
2. The rise of player entitlement has made it far easier these days for a DM to add optional things in than to strip core things out.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

This actually brings up somethng else worth mentioning: with most checks and combats, the "finish line" is fairly obvious: you know when you've succeeded or failed (or, in combat, won or lost). There's a hard and final resolution point and everyone involved knows what it is and when it occurs.

With some social situations that hard and final resolution point might well a) never arrive; and-or b) arrive and pass without the knowledge of one or more participants.

Let's say your party is talking to a Duke, seeking the loan of 40 of his militia to bolster your expedition into the mountains; and let's say the DM has somehow determined ahead of time that the Duke is a very friendly chap, polite to a fault and happy to talk all day with people who interest him (which the PCs very likely will, with their tales of derring-do in the field); but will passive-aggressively do anything he can to avoid having to make a decision.

An example of a) above: you talk to the Duke all day; everything is friendly and smooth but in the end all you really agree to do is keep talking, and even that agreement is never formally stated. And later when things finally get to the point, all you can get from the Duke is a non-committed "maybe" to your request, i.e. neither a hard nor final resolution.

An example of b) above: you talk to the Duke all morning, everything is friendly and smooth but no useful conclusions are reached; then he retires to his dining room for lunch as expected but does not reappear in the afternoon and nobody will say (or even knows) why. The discussion is left hanging and apparently never resolves; what the PCs don't know is that instead of having lunch the Duke bugged out and went hunting, hoping the PCs would go away on their own thus absolving him from any decision-making.

Of course, some social situations do have a hard-coded and clear-to-see finish line, the most obvious of which is a court trial: sooner or later a verdict comes down, and on that the trial is over. But other than these uncommon situations, is there any real need to force finality of resolution on to something that in fact might never resolve or where success or failure might never be known?

 

[Lanefan]

That smells like a logical error.

You are asserting that if social rules exist they have to apply to all characters, and the rules applying to all characters is bad so the rule must not exist.

Correct.

This can be trivially proven false by counter example.

We can obviously construct a rule that does not apply to all characters. "Whenever two dwarves have a conservation they must roll a wisdom save DC 15 or start fighting." QED.

The rule is stated as a cultural element that only applies to Dwarves; but as such it applies to all Dwarves, whether PC or NPC.

The social rule ideas I've seen proposed would appear to be intended to apply to all sentient species equally.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Correct.

The rule is stated as a cultural element that only applies to Dwarves; but as such it applies to all Dwarves, whether PC or NPC.

The social rule ideas I've seen proposed would appear to be intended to apply to all sentient species equally.

That would also be possible.

"This rule applies to all player characters"

Or this one

"This rule only applies to non player characters"

Done.

 

[DEFCON 1]

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.


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?


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.


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.


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?


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.

You make a lot of good points, and yes, my post was a reaction to many of the posts that gave me the impression that a lot of issues people had was just because of "bad DMs" and not just DMs having flaws to try to sand the edges off of. Obviously there is middle ground here as there is with everything. But when it comes to posts here on the boards by almost all of us, they more often than not give a more extreme impression than probably what any of us really feel, as that is the best way to make sure our points get across. Oftentimes when folks post more middle-of-the-road opinions their actual point gets lost because the examples do not highlight the point.

So yeah... my post leaned into the "bad DMs" thing because while it is the further end of the spectrum... the actual intention behind it still applies. Because even if a DM isn't "bad" per se, there still is (in your words) "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." But I for one don't think that's still at all necessary to try and amiliorate that with just more rules to cover for them. If even if DMs are just merely mediocre... I'd rather see them just keep working to get better, rather than mask their inadequacies by throwing more rules at the problem.

You say that it's not about trust... but what else would you call it if you as a player are not willing to let your DMs fumble about and learn by doing and instead want them to instantly "get better" by putting in a mechanical system? I suppose if it's not trust, then my next thought would be "impatience". People have limited time to play and they aren't willing to deal with a mediocre DM who has flaws and biases, so they want game rules to cover for them. That way they can get the experience they want right away.

Again... that's fine if that's the case. Everyone wants what they want for whatever their reasons... and usually there is someone or something there and available to take care of their needs. So if some folks want more rules of any sort and less "DM fiat"-- which is basically another way of saying "less 'Rulings, Not Rules'"-- they can probably find something out there that works for them. I just don't personally see WotC leaning in that direction with 5E, because "Rulings, Not Rules" has been one of the signposts of the edition and thus anything that removes the DM from any decision-making process seems to be very carefully adjudicated. If it's creating a new rule or just letting the DM make a choice... the latter seems more often to be the one that the game goes with.