Distinct Game Modes: Combat vs Social vs Exploration etc...

[Fenris-77]

For my part, I don't play with the goal of creating great dialogue (though if it occurs, I have no objection to it). But I do want this:
Gripping and exciting scenes, including social scenes, are something I do want in my RPGing.

Gripping scenes are something I think that partial success mechanics scaffold really well. Watch any TV show and you'll see how much suspense and drama accrues from failure and partial failure especially. Binary mechanics struggle to do the same thing without a lot of unscripted additions by the GM.

 

[aramis erak]

Yeah, the suggestion that the damage/hit point systems is just an afterthought - that beating a Pit Fiend in combat is just a modest mechanical variant on climbing a cliff - is pretty odd.

I'm kind of fond of the social hit points models of BW/BE/MG, 2d20 STA/Dune, and TOR. Three different approaches to it, all of which worked well enough for me and mine.

 

[pemerton]

Gripping scenes are something I think that partial success mechanics scaffold really well. Watch any TV show and you'll see how much suspense and drama accrues from failure and partial failure especially. Binary mechanics struggle to do the same thing without a lot of unscripted additions by the GM.

You probably won't be shocked that I'm going to put in a good word for Burning Wheel here: generally it uses binary success/failure on the roll; but by distinguishing intent and task, and emphasising that failure means failure of intent, it allows for similar sorts of consequences as does a partial success approach.

 

[aramis erak]

You probably won't be shocked that I'm going to put in a good word for Burning Wheel here: generally it uses binary success/failure on the roll; but by distinguishing intent and task, and emphasising that failure means failure of intent, it allows for similar sorts of consequences as does a partial success approach.

it's fair to say that, especially in BE and MG, success of action but failure of intent is the suggested default mode for Luke's games. This is still boolean, but with the option of painful complications/devil's bargains for complicated succeess of intent, it feels a lot more robust than it actually is, mechanically, in terms of outcome space.

The extended conflict mechanisms, however, do give robust, negotiated, spectrum-of-outcome.

 

[pemerton]

The extended conflict mechanisms, however, do give robust, negotiated, spectrum-of-outcome.

Absolutely! This is true in Torchbearer also.

it's fair to say that, especially in BE and MG, success of action but failure of intent is the suggested default mode for Luke's games. This is still boolean, but with the option of painful complications/devil's bargains for complicated succeess of intent, it feels a lot more robust than it actually is, mechanically, in terms of outcome space.

I'd say that it not only feels robust, but is robust.

 

[zakael19]

I think any time you have a robust scaffold for exploding an overarching intent/conflict/goal into a multi-part set of checks you have the space for a similar feeling as inherent "partial success" mechanics. You can judge the twist in the situation from each success or failure under the larger umbrella, and look at how close you got to failure before success or vice versa for how to frame the outcome.

4e Skill Challenges / Draw Steel! Montages and Negotiations have felt like that consistently for me, hitting the social and exploration pillars pretty well.

 

[Staffan]

I'm kind of fond of the social hit points models of BW/BE/MG, 2d20 STA/Dune, and TOR. Three different approaches to it, all of which worked well enough for me and mine.

I've run Infinity 2d20, which treats social interaction much the same as combat (just like combat has Physical Damage, which is Soaked by Armor and applied to Vigour, and if you hit hard enough or wear them down you inflict Harm which has actual effects, PsyWar has Mental Damage which is Soaked by Morale and applied to Resolve, and a good enough attack or wearing someone down inflicts Metanoia which literally means "change of mind"), and I found it profoundly unsatisfying. To me, it felt like someone at the top level decided "We're going to have a three-fold battlefield with both physical combat, social combat, and hacking" and then someone else had to squeeze the rules to get that result.

Part of the problem is that while combat is usually, on some level, a contest between more-or-less equals where both sides have similar goals, or at least goals in the same domain (survive, get out, disable their foes, etc.), social interaction is usually more lopsided. One side (usually the NPC) has something, and the other (usually the PCs) want it. So trading "attacks" generally isn't a good model for this.

While I haven't had the opportunity to try it myself yet, Draw Steel's negotiation model seems to fit better. NPCs start with a certain amount of Patience (how long they're willing to put up with you) and Interest (how much they're willing to help you), as well as certain Motivations and Pitfalls (usually about 2 each, chosen from a common list of 12). Motivations are things the NPC cares about, and appealing to a Motivation will make the argument more effective, while Pitfalls are things the NPC actively dislikes or disdains and trying to appeal to that in an argument will make it automatically fail and lower the NPC's Interest. So a negotiation (and preparing for one) usually involves finding out what things make the NPC tick and then presenting arguments tailored to what you have learned. Usually, making an argument (successful or not) will lower the NPC's Patience – they have things to do, and can't be here talking to you all day, and if they hit 0 you're done. Hopefully the argument will also increase their Interest, which is measured on 0 to 5 where 0 to 2 are "No" with potential "and" or "but", and 3 to 5 are "Yes" with potential "but" or "and". I've seen it described as not so much being about changing the target's mind but about making the target realizing their interests and yours align.

 

[Celebrim]

While I haven't had the opportunity to try it myself yet, Draw Steel's negotiation model seems to fit better. NPCs start with a certain amount of Patience (how long they're willing to put up with you) and Interest (how much they're willing to help you), as well as certain Motivations and Pitfalls (usually about 2 each, chosen from a common list of 12). Motivations are things the NPC cares about, and appealing to a Motivation will make the argument more effective, while Pitfalls are things the NPC actively dislikes or disdains and trying to appeal to that in an argument will make it automatically fail and lower the NPC's Interest. So a negotiation (and preparing for one) usually involves finding out what things make the NPC tick and then presenting arguments tailored to what you have learned. Usually, making an argument (successful or not) will lower the NPC's Patience – they have things to do, and can't be here talking to you all day, and if they hit 0 you're done. Hopefully the argument will also increase their Interest, which is measured on 0 to 5 where 0 to 2 are "No" with potential "and" or "but", and 3 to 5 are "Yes" with potential "but" or "and". I've seen it described as not so much being about changing the target's mind but about making the target realizing their interests and yours align.

The draw steel negotiation model is a formalization of how I've often conduct a negotiation over the years going back till at least the early 1990s. I like that model of encounter design and it's nice even from my perspective to see that encounter design laid out in a formal manner because it does help clarify what I'm doing when I decide after X attempts that the NPC can't be convinced any more.

The problem I have with it is precisely the problem you outlined with the 2D20 social rules, which is that while one particular encounter design for a social challenge might be well suited and congruent in that situation and a good way to run it, that's true only to the extent that a social challenge fits that design. For example, another common social challenge is you and someone else are having a debate, and you are both trying to convince a third party. And here, this might play out more like a combat, where taunts and insults might well sway the third party. Sure, the third party might have preferences related to their character as to what sort of arguments appeal or don't appeal to them, in as much as some third parties might fight find an ad hominem attack vulgar and reflect poorly on the speaker, while others might actually be looking for who can deliver the wittiest insult and embarrass their opponent the most as a fair deciding factor in which person to side with.

The point is that you have to tailor the social mechanics of your game to the situation involved just as you would tailor the combat resolution to the weapons and terrain. Singular "this is the one true way to run a social encounter" invariably force interactions into a model that is unrelated to how it actually would work in real life.

And the danger though I always find is the more you codify this as a system, the more you risk the problems you can get in codified abstract combat where the actual process of play at the table is something like, "I attack with my sword. 19 is a hit and that's 7 damage." That doesn't produce a transcript of play that allows for concrete visualization of the action. You need elements of the narration to reify the mechanics and ideally you want the narration to feed into resolution process and not the other way around.

So many of the attempts at social combat I've seen turn the exciting dialogue that you can produce at the table into, "I bring up the chancellor's missing daughter. That's a 19 hit and successful increase in interest, the Chancellor perks up and asks you to go on."

That's why I try not even to tell my players what is going on behind the scenes in my mind, because I want them interacting with the fiction and not the meta.

 

[Celebrim]

I find it interesting that some people play with a specific goal of things like creating great dialogue.

Yeah, I don't if I'm weird or not, but my goal is always something like, "If this was a television show, would people be entertained by it?" Or insert "novel" or "movie" or whatever media you think that your game is adaptable too.

One of the things that has always bugged me is that while I've occasionally seen great intraparty RP, very few tables are interested in that and rarely speak to each other in character. There is always an assumption, one that I don't want to overturn at tables where I can tell intraparty RP is not central to their aesthetics and even something that annoys some of the players, that you can communicate with party members OOC. In my ideal game, you just wouldn't. Anything you wanted to communicate would have to be done IC.

 

[zakael19]

AT least in Draw Steel! the Negotiation system is pretty clear on the how and where you should use it, it's very much not expected to come up every session. You need to be attempting to honestly negotiate with somebody who has reason to not simply give you what you want, and you're trying to see how your interests can actually coincide. Since there's a variety of skills you can use (along with the fact that the game is open about there being Motivations and Pitfalls NPC will have), the space is pretty big of the interesting fiction you bring to bear before a Skills Check can be made.

A pass might be something like: "I say that I hear he's had troubles with the upper city guards not allowing his Marines to escort their shipments, and despite how we appear we're actually quite seasoned" and I think I'm trying to like, Lie to him a little? Because we're actually new to this.

Or: "I step out of the shadows behind his chair and drop the rat-things head on his desk; 'behold, we have already taken care of a plague on your docks' and I think I'm Bragging a little here, like my tone of voice is really full of pride.