NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency

[Bill Zebub]

A dogwhistle, if you will, for a certain OSR-favored playstyle that is nearly impossible to enjoy for many who are mentally disabled, or are socially impaired.

I wish @Bawylie were still around to comment. Two things I know about them:
1. They DM for people with mental disabilities
2. They are strongly in @iserith's camp, which is to say, on the side of letting players choose their own action declarations, no justification required

So I bet they could shed some light on whether those folks can enjoy this playstyle. (Any claims on my part would be conjecture.)

 

[Bill Zebub]

Yeap. I like social mechanics because it reminds everyone specifically that they are playing a character that is interacting with another character being played by a person. I know the social mechanics are not necessary for this, but for many its a great aid in reminding them of it. Instead of just saying to the GM what you want from the characters and/or scene, you are forced to engage from the character to character mindset point of view. That is what im looking for, and often without social mechanics, players drop any pretense of character to character interaction. YMMV.

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this, and would love some kind of illustrative example of what you mean.

If I map that to the example I used above, traps, my experience has been that with mechanics players tend to say, "I roll to detect to traps" or "I roll to disarm it". But without mechanics they try to engage and narrate what they are doing.

Can you describe how the opposite happens, although with social mechanics, in ways that you've seen?

EDIT: The thing with traps is that in order to make it happen, I have to also be more descriptive and thoughtful. I can't just sprinkle traps around randomly; I have to plan ahead and use traps that have their presence telegraphed and can engaged with by people who aren't mechanical engineers. So the same would be true of social interaction: one would have to plan ahead, and make sure you know the NPCs goals and desires and weaknesses, and how they telegraph those things.

 

[Aldarc]

I wish @Bawylie were still around to comment. Two things I know about them:
1. They DM for people with mental disabilities
2. They are strongly in @iserith's camp, which is to say, on the side of letting players choose their own action declarations, no justification required

So I bet they could shed some light on whether those folks can enjoy this playstyle. (Any claims on my part would be conjecture.)

My partner has autism. They hate free form RPing social scenes and greatly prefer being able to roll instead of saying what they describe as the "magic words" that unlocks whatever the GM is playing at in social interactions. The latter greatly stresses them out and reduces the entire fun of playing roleplaying games for them.

 

[Celebrim]

And we reduce that complex interaction (in most cases) to a single roll, or perhaps a contested pair of rolls.

This is such a hugely complex topic and broadening it out into search check adjudication - how we handle abstract interaction with the game universe - may make the confusion less or worse.

But at the same time, I can't really imagine what a complex system of rules for social interaction would look like.

I can, but that's not really the problem. The problem is that unlike complex physical combat rules they don't leave a transcript of play. We could resolve combat down to high attack meets a particular parry disengagement beat thrust sort of thing and produce a transcript of a fencing match. We can't do that to produce a transcript of conversation without rules as complex as a large language model that would require centuries of hand calculation to produce the words.

And unless we were equally careful in handling things, they wouldn't produce logical results congruent with expectations about how conversations resolve.

Replacing something we are capable of doing...talking...with abstraction makes the game less rich, not more.

Yes, exactly. That's the real problem. We can produce a transcript of conversation by having a conversation without relying on some massively complex set of rules that would bog down play. That isn't to say that we necessarily resolve a social scene without recourse to some sort of fortune test, but we don't produce the social scene through a fortune test in the way that we produce a combat through combat rules.

Searching is handled differently. Searching is a clue or information finding mechanism, similar to a knowledge check. But a character who knows something doesn't need to make a check to know it. Once something is known from play, it's known. You don't need to make a search check to look behind a painting. You just have to interact with the painting. A search check might imply looking behind the painting, depending on the parameters a searcher gives me. For example, a player will often make a "visual search only" check. That might learn that the painting has been moved, but wouldn't learn what is behind it.

 

[Aldarc]

And we reduce that complex interaction (in most cases) to a single roll, or perhaps a contested pair of rolls.

How un-fun would RPG combat be if it were resolved in a single roll? I'm not sure I'd even play RPGs at that point.

But at the same time, I can't really imagine what a complex system of rules for social interaction would look like. As you said, we are using dice rolls to represent sword swings, but that's partly because we aren't actually swinging swords at the same time. Replacing something we are capable of doing...talking...with abstraction makes the game less rich, not more.

And even if we keep the talking, but what matters is the dice rolls, then the talking feels...pointless.

It just occurred to me that I treat social interaction not like combat, but like traps: I have two kinds of traps: those that are hard to find but easy to avoid, and those that are easy to find but hard to avoid. In the former case I telegraph the presence and it's up to the players to read the clues, and in the latter case I leave the solution to their imaginations. In both cases I consider it a success if no dice are ever rolled.

What I find boring (and honestly, in my opinion, "boardgame-ish") is:
"I roll to search for traps...17"
"You find a poison needle trap"
"I roll to disarm...23"
"You disarm it."

I don't want that to happen in social interaction, either.

All the world is more complex than the rules of a TTRPG, which are an abstraction meant to help facilitate a fun experience at the table. I'm not sure why we are privileging the complexity of social interactions to the exclusion of all else that is equally complex in the real world. I would add that because social interaction is so complex, therein is potentially a good reason for it to be simplified, easy, and abstracted at the table for the sake of gameplay. I have given one example already with my partner, who also prefers mechanical social interactions as means of facilitating and making easier what is otherwise a stressful part of their lives.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Searching is handled differently. Searching is a clue or information finding mechanism, similar to a knowledge check. But a character who knows something doesn't need to make a check to know it. Once something is known from play, it's known. You don't need to make a search check to look behind a painting. You just have to interact with the painting. A search check might imply looking behind the painting, depending on the parameters a searcher gives me. For example, a player will often make a "visual search only" check. That might learn that the painting has been moved, but wouldn't learn what is behind it.

I would say that searching is different on one dimension (your point about transcripts) but similar on another: just like we can search behind the painting, or come up with a strategy for bypassing the pressure plates on the floor, we can also threaten to expose the old man's affair. We don't need to reduce either of those things to a description-less abstraction of a die roll. Whereas we can't really describe a way to swing a sword that hits without requiring a roll. Or, if we do, it's pure narrative flavor with no logical impact on its success rate. It's not like we can say, "I feint to the left and lower my shield as if going for that side, but than make an upper cut on my right" and the DM will know that it will be an effective way to get past the defenses they were imagining for their NPC.

(Caveat emptor: I know a lot about sword-making but nothing about sword fighting, so please don't derail with a critique of my imagined tactics!)

 

[Bill Zebub]

All the world is more complex than the rules of a TTRPG, which are an abstraction meant to help facilitate a fun experience at the table. I'm not sure why we are privileging the complexity of social interactions to the exclusion of all else that is equally complex in the real world. I would add that because social interaction is so complex, therein is potentially a good reason for it to be simplified, easy, and abstracted at the table for the sake of gameplay.

Well, I've been describing why I don't reduce trap and secret door finding to die rolls, and I don't reduce the avoidance of traps (or even the opening of those secret doors) to die rolls.

Heck, I don't even really do it for opening locks. I don't ask for rolls to see if they can open the locks, I only ask for rolls if there's some circumstance like they don't want to leave evidence they've opened it, or they have to do it under time pressure.

I have given one example already with my partner, who also prefers mechanical social interactions as means of facilitating and making easier what is otherwise a stressful part of their lives.

And I have genuine empathy for that. But I'm not sure that means that mode of play should be the default.

 

[Aldarc]

Well, I've been describing why I don't reduce trap and secret door finding to die rolls, and I don't reduce the avoidance of traps (or even the opening of those secret doors) to die rolls.

Heck, I don't even really do it for opening locks. I don't ask for rolls to see if they can open the locks, I only ask for rolls if there's some circumstance like they don't want to leave evidence they've opened it, or they have to do it under time pressure.

Though you may find your traps analogy helpful, I don't. If anything, IMHO, it risks potentially sidetracking a more direct discussion of social interaction rules in TTRPGs.

And I have genuine empathy for that. But I'm not sure that means that mode of play should be the default.

It's easier to remove/ignore rules for social interactions than it is to put them in, which is something that we saw people do in 3e-5e D&D all the time. If yours was the default, it would likely exclude my partner from playing.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It's easier to remove/ignore rules for social interactions than it is to put them in, which is something that we saw people do in 3e-5e D&D all the time. If yours was the default, it would likely exclude my partner from playing.

What system do you play with your partner that has those mechanics? It's hard (for me) to not always frame these discussions within 5e...which I don't even play anymore!...and in that system there are not explicit rules for social interaction. There is just a play loop, and a couple of quotes here and there that seem to apply.

 

[Bill Zebub]

And I'm not sure how easy it is to "remove" rules once they exist. As I've noted, once there seems to be a "button to press" on a character sheet, players seem to want to press that button to solve problems, rather than engage creatively with the scene.

"In my experience" (tm)

EDIT: And not saying, "so your partner should lose." Just saying that there seems to be an unavoidable trade-off.