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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 6209450" data-attributes="member: 12037">To a degree, this is something that caused some disillusionment with D&D post-2000 for me in the past few years, and what has me interested in the indie scene. I don't want to ruffle anyone's feathers, but I used to be of the mind of constraining the GM to give the players more power. That, to me, seems to be a philosophy that showed up around the time that D&D 3e came out. Reign in the powers of the DM. Limit the GM's power to alleviate some of the problems of bad DMing. It wasn't exactly present in the rules, perhaps, so much as an idea. I remember a lot of talk in the early ENWorld days of this, so I'll peg it around that time frame, though it could have started earlier and I just wasn't exposed to it. But, I don't think influence over the game is a zero sum game anymore. A GM can have full control, and should be encouraged and learn their craft. A good GM with an open system should be the end goal, after all. The same should apply to players in my mind. Don't constrain them. Don't hand hold them. Let them learn the craft of roleplaying through experience, and trust that they'll figure it out. Trust the other players to help open up the socially awkward and the non-tactically minded. There's no set standard that they need to hit. There's no this high to ride. If you're muddling through, then you muddle through, and hopefully after years and years you get into a stride. That's the way I see it at least, and I agree with most of what you're saying here.FATE actually has a social combat system that I really like. But, then, compared to something like D&D 3e/4e, FATE has fairly light gameplay. You're either attacking (dealing stress/consequences) or creating an advantage (creating a helpful aspect). And, in FATE when you're entering social combat, you're looking to create social repercussions. So you don't use social combat for something like convincing the king that you're right. You use social combat to create doubt in others about the king's decision to stay out of the Plague Wars, for example. So, your attack may be stating a fact about how the war is going poorly that the audience didn't know and seeing if the king can respond without losing face. Creating an aspect might bringing up something that might compromise his judgement, then making an attack by saying how that compromised judgement might hurt the kingdom. Of course, beware of petty kings who might throw you in the dungeon. But, if he takes a consequence from the social combat, maybe a young duke will decide to follow you.All of that can happen freeform of course. But, in my opinion, the dice add a certain expectancy that I like as both a player and a GM. As GM I like not knowing where the story will go. I'm very much the kind of GM who loves to see the game unfold in front of me and thrives on unexpected twists. I guess I'm being somewhat selfish here in a way with social combat. It lets me see how things will play out, much as the players get to have that sense of the unknown, I get that as well. Will the king's aides in the above example be swayed against him? Will people start to whisper about the war behind the king's back? I don't know. The dice will let me know. And, I enjoy that. I love to roll the dice and see what happens instead of using my own judgement sometimes, because that moment where the players want to do something crazy and dice hit the table is why I play the game.That isn't to say I want social combat in all my games or in everything I play. I love Dungeon World, as an example, and social combat would be terrible for that game. Absolutely horrid. It's all about context, expectations, and style.At his heart, "combat" is just a contest between parties with a winner and a loser. It doesn't have to be high fidelity. Generally, people are going to expect whittling away at some kind of resource until someone beats the other. In D&D 4e a social conflict would just be a skill challenge where that resource is failures. In FATE this is inflicting consequences on the enemy until they concede. Like I said above, social combat isn't about what the characters say - that comes through the roleplaying - but instead about the fallout of the conversation. It's about determining who gets what they want and who has to make compromises. Most social interactions, thus, wouldn't be social combat.But what I really want to talk about is abstraction. Abstract mechanics don't mean you have to abstract the fiction itself. Quite the opposite sometimes. The more granular the rules system, the easier it is to let the rules do the heavy lifting for describing the fiction. When you've abstracted away the mechanics from the actions, you are forced to start describing the actions themselves, because the rules don't describe them anymore. The rules aren't a shorthand for what's going on.For example, take D&D 4e, because I think I've picked on 3e enough for today. Say my rogue has the 1st level Encounter Power Impact Shot that lets him shoot someone with his crossbow and push them back. The power itself is descriptive in what happens, so its not that important to the game itself for me to have to describe what's going on in the fiction. The power itself conveys a lot of information within it. I shoot a crossbow. I deal damage. The target moves backward, away from me. It's all right there on the power. If I use it and the guy is on the edge of a cliff, he goes off the side (if he fails a saving throw!). "AEEEEEeeeee" splat <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Then go look at Dungeon World. You're a rogue. You've got a crossbow. If you want to do the same thing, you have to describe why it happens. What did you do to knock him off the cliff. You might say "I lower my crossbow from his chest to his leg. I want to hit him so that he stumbles backward off the cliff." Or you might say "I'm going to shoot my crossbow so that I startle him, sending him confused off the cliff." Or maybe "I'm shooting him straight in the chest. The force should make him stumble backward just enough to push him off the edge and down." And, then the actual task resolution comes into play, which is going to be one of several abstract moves that the GM can decide between, depending on the circumstances. In this case the GM says the rogue si Defying Danger (getting rid of a dangerous opponent) and he rolls +DEX. "AEEEEEeeeee" splat <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />[Note: Not saying one way is better or worse. They're just different, and they emphasize different things. You're perfectly within your rights to not like how Dungeon World handles this situation. I'm using it to describe abstraction of mechanics and fiction. That's all.]So, you can probably see where I'm going with this. If you abstract away the task resolution for social combat, you end up with something similar. You have to describe the fiction in order to figure out what the task is you're trying to resolve. In this case, the fiction is the dialogue. Without roleplaying the scene out, you have no basis for what you're going to roll or how you're going to resolve anything or what's even happening in game. There is no there there. It doesn't exist. And so, you roleplay the dialogue to create the task to resolve, full circle.So back to Celebrim, I think we have some insight into our differences.I'm the opposite. I don't like crunchy rules text. I like Dungeon World, where the fiction is described by the participants as if it is being played out in a movie or in a book. It goes something like this:Player: Ragnar charges the orc leader lifting his heavy axe blade and slams it into the enemy's shield, yelling out a warcry! I want to break through his shield and cracking some bones.GM: What's important to you here? Destroying the shield or dealing damage?Player: Definitely damage. If I end up having to choose between the two, he's going to feel the pain.GM: Okay, in that case, roll Hack & Slash.Player: rolls 11! I deal 7 damage with my smash! Ragnar smiles coldly into the enemy's eyes.GM: The blow is devastating and the orc's shield is shattered under Ragnar's might! It's just then that you notice four goblins sneaking up behind you. They obviously don't care about honorable one on one combat. What do you do?The distinction being here that you can obviously and most assuredly play like this in D&D. It's just that in Dungeon World its the rules of the game to play fiction-first and task-resolution second. To me, that's what makes for cinematic combat and high action, which are two things that I want in my high fantasy experience. In effect, high fidelity is the opposite of what I want out of a system. I just want a system that resolves things quickly with a lot of leeway for the players and DM to interpret and improvise off of situations as they develop in game.So, when I say social combat, I'm not talking about creating feats that mimic various debate tactics and such. Because I don't want that in my physical combat either. I just want a way to create exciting, randomly resolving, conflicts.So, perhaps that explains a bit why we see physical and social task resolution (and the differences between them) differently.</blockquote>

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