All Characters Should be Good at Talking to NPCs

[Grendel_Khan]

My personal feeling is that niche protection in RPGs is highly overrated. Most characters should have strengths and weaknesses, but I find it better to have much more well rounded characters who are good at multiple things instead of one specific thing they demand the spotlight in.

Agreed, and also having niche overlaps can be exciting--two stealthy types breaking in somewhere is arguably more interesting than yet another solo excursion, and a pair of social dynamos can set up some fun good-cop-bad-cop or social shell game interactions. Plus those overlaps can help steer the entire campaign in novel directions. If a party has lots of social skills/talents/etc. then maybe the whole game veers more into investigation and intrigue than something combat-heavy. Niche protection seems more important when the campaign is more scripted and rigid, like when the GM is running only published stuff, and resists reworking that material on the fly or tossing it out completely.

In other words, I think niche protection is only a thing when the GM is...not that great.

 

[MGibster]

It's not all that obvious to me. What makes the physical dimension worthy of simulation/representation, but not the psychological/neurological? I get that's how traditional games have generally treated things, but that does not mean it's ever made much sense. Especially if you have any measure of experience with athletics and know how much neurological and psychological factors play affect athletic performance.

I think it's because social interactions are far more complicated than combat. In most games, it doesn't matter how good I am at shooting, swinging a sword, or swimming it only matters what's on my character sheet. With social skills, how effective the player is at communicating can often make a significant difference. As a DM, I've committed the cardinal sin by letting how good the player is at communicating help or hinder what they were trying to accomplish in the game. These days I try to do my best to remember to say, "What are you trying to accomplish?" in a nice and friendly way.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

When I say characters should be good at talking to NPCs I don't mean they should all be equal. By all means, the player who invests heavily into their character's social skills should have a more persuasive character than the player who invests heavily elsewhere. But they should all be able to move the plot along.

I know this isn't what you were suggesting, but I like the idea of having every PC be pretty good at interacting with NPCs, unless there's something about their build that makes them specifically very good or very bad at it. But the baseline would be high, in other words.

What that actually means really depends on the system, though. In 5e, for example, having your social skills be reflected entirely by CHA seems rough, since suddenly the people who need a high CHA for other optimizations just happen to be great at interacting, and everyone else can go to hell. And relying too much on one or two social skills, in a game that makes skill acquisition pretty tough, isn't great either. But plenty of other systems have more related options, like disadvantages or qualities that could signal that someone is particularly bad at interacting with certain people, or traits that signal the opposite.

So while I really like what you're proposing, I think the way it actually plays out will vary in a big way, depending on the rules that are available.

 

[MGibster]

I know this isn't what you were suggesting, but I like the idea of having every PC be pretty good at interacting with NPCs, unless there's something about their build that makes them specifically very good or very bad at it. But the baseline would be high, in other words.

That's not a bad idea. If I'm playing Cyberpunk Red, if my character is a nomad I can probably fit in with the nomad gangs like the Aldecaldos and Snake Nation a lot better than the corporate character.

What that actually means really depends on the system, though. In 5e, for example, having your social skills be reflected entirely by CHA seems rough, since suddenly the people who need a high CHA for other optimizations just happen to be great at interacting, and everyone else can go to hell.

D&D 5E has a problem with Charisma being such a good stat. It's good for spell casting/combat and it's good for interacting with other people.

 

[billd91]

It's certainly possible but I don't think that's the root cause as I've seen them behave the same way when other people are DMing. And it isn't all my players at all times. One player had a very memorable character who was terrible an interacting with people but he was overconfident and believed he could do anything. That character was a lot of fun. In recent years I've tried to limit the number of dice rolling in my games to those situations where the results might be interesting. If a character is going to be able to batter down a door eventually I don't make them roll I just say they batter it down after a few rounds. But at times I have caught myself thinking, "Why did I make the player roll?" in situations where the result didn't really matter.

I think some of it may come from bad habits developed in other games they've played. Did a GM require them to roll for everything and they've brought that style over to the game in question?

Or is it possible they're just trying to be efficient and roll it ahead of the GM asking for it?
I had that happen a lot in online play by post games. In a situation like that, it feels like you're being efficient by including a roll so that you don't have to go through the overhead of having the GM see the post, read the post, respond to the post asking for a roll, for you to see the response, respond with a roll, wait for the GM to see the post, and then adjudicate it. But it still ends up being annoying as your players end up attaching a diplomacy/persuasion roll every time they open their yaps to an NPC. I had to press players of a play by post game I was running to stop doing that.

With either case, I do recommend stepping back from needing any rolls for interaction until it's necessary and some point of question comes up.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think it's because social interactions are far more complicated than combat. In most games, it doesn't matter how good I am at shooting, swinging a sword, or swimming it only matters what's on my character sheet. With social skills, how effective the player is at communicating can often make a significant difference. As a DM, I've committed the cardinal sin by letting how good the player is at communicating help or hinder what they were trying to accomplish in the game. These days I try to do my best to remember to say, "What are you trying to accomplish?" in a nice and friendly way.

I don't think social interactions are more complicated than combat. This looks like an ingrained assumption due to being very familiar and comfortable with the abstractions inherent is combat engines (5e in particular). However, even if you're going to assume this, then why would a game have less support for a more complicated interaction than it does for a less complicated one? This argument leans towards just saying that social interactions are too hard to even try to model, so the best methods are ones that have no structure or teeth. This, of course, is ignoring that there is still a game mechanic that is defining social interactions, and it has teeth -- the GM decides. You've ported any responsibility for modeling social interactions to having one person imagine what's possible and preferable.

I think this is a large impediment to a number of these conversations -- there's a set of assumptions attached to play due to long experience and received wisdom of D&D. These manifest often in statements like the above -- that the multiple levels of a combat, even between just two people without magic, is somehow less complicated than a negotiation or haggling interaction. I can't say which may or may not be more complicated, because both are hideously so, but I think that they're pretty close -- especially for RPG purposes.

As I said in a different thread (I think), the mechanics of game really need to be evaluated in the light of what you're actually asking them to do. And this posing of the question is where I think that things go off the rails in games that don't really lock it down clearly. In 5e, for instance, how you make a check is straightforward, but what question a check answers is not at all. The scope of questions posed to the 5e mechanics from all the different GMs is very broad and often not even thought about. The question posed is very complex, because it not only deals with what action is being attempted, but also what the consequences or rewards are. These are, quite often, skipped until after the check, because 5e defaults back to GM decides and the GM is really using the check not as a resolution mechanic but a decision aid. This is why you'll often see things like giving a better resolution on a very high roll (or 20) and a very bad outcome on a very low roll (or a 1).

There's nothing wrong with this, but if this is your approach, it's very hard to accept/see/grasp what actual constraints this puts on play -- and it does constrain play. It creates an opaque, black-box decision process that players have to try to understand experimentally -- what action will the GM allow here. This can be quite a fun experience, mind, but the constraints of play are still there as players may refrain from preferred action declarations because they know/worry that the GM is or will be adverse to such things.

The clearer constraints by a more defined system appear like they provide a smaller play space to those that are unfamiliar with such constraints because they obviously reduce how their used to playing. However, it's a case of close one door open another, because while the clearer constraints often directly restricts familiar play, it also allows players to engage in ways they cannot or usually do not in other approaches. It's not that the mechanics actually create more constraints on play, but rather just different constraints, while also removing constraints on different approaches. For example, when I play Blades in the Dark, my approach to how I play my character is very different from when I play 5e, and this is directly due to how the game mechanics allow me to engage. I face both different constraints on play and different freedoms, but I'd not say that one has more of either than the other. They're just different.

 

[Puddles]

Speaking for 5e, I always loved the idea of threatening someone could be an Intimidation (Strength) check. I think if you came up with a list of social skill checks that each keyed off a different ability score apart from Charisma, it could be a great way to make sure every class has a role in the social side. Something like:

Intimidation (Strength)
Explanation (Intelligence)
Give Council (Wisdom)

Dexterity and Constitution are hard though... any ideas?

 

[Campbell]

I think removing the roll does not really help matters that much. Shouldn't GMs be mindful of character skills and ability scores even when no dice are rolled? I mean those are things that should correspond to fictional positioning the GM should be mindful of.

 

[billd91]

I think removing the roll does not really help matters that much. Shouldn't GMs be mindful of character skills and ability scores even when no dice are rolled? I mean those are things that should correspond to fictional positioning the GM should be mindful of.

It's not a question of removing the roll entirely, as I see it, just not requiring so many rolls that aren't really consequential.

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

You may have read the title and muttered under your breath with indignation, "What about niche protection? What if I want to role play a gruff abrasive type with the personality of a turnip? Who the #%#% are you to tell me what characters should or shouldn't be good at in my games?" First, do you kiss your mother with that potty mouth? Second, before you compose a righteous evisceration of my position, please allow me to explain myself.

In any given story, the protagonist must is usually able to communicate at least at the minimum level necessary in order to provide exposition, characterization, or to move the plot along. And while it's okay to have an RPG light on dialogue -really, what can be a more clear message than an axe to the head- typically someone in the party has to talk to an NPC to get the quest, to talk to others in order to progress, and sometimes players have their character speak with an NPC just for the fun of it.

But you made some good points in the first paragraph. We don't expect every character to be good at swinging a sword or shooting a bow, why should we expect all of them to be good at talking to NPCs? While I do like niche protection as it allows each PC some time to shine, I have found that taking it to the extreme often limits a player's ability to participate in the game. Very often I run into situations where characters who have not invested much into social skills are hesitant to participate in dialogues with NPCs. This can result in a session heavy on socializing and light on combat where many PCs don't really do much of anything.

When I say characters should be good at talking to NPCs I don't mean they should all be equal. By all means, the player who invests heavily into their character's social skills should have a more persuasive character than the player who invests heavily elsewhere. But they should all be able to move the plot along. So what are some ways you encourage players to fully participate in the game even if they're not social butterflies?

I'll take ya one further: every single RPG character should be able to contribute meaningfully to every aspect of the game. In the terms of D&D and the "three pillars," that means that every character should be able to provide something when talking with NPCs, when exploring in the dungeon or the wilderness, and within a combat encounter.

A broader perspective: all RPG characters should be able to participate in all scenes. The alternative creates bad gameplay and usually results in players "checking out" during certain gameplay elements because they feel useless or as though they will hinder the party.