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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9852202" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is the received wisdom of modern gaming that I've been listening to now for like 25 years.  And all the attempts to actually act on those two statements have completely failed.  And just like how "hit points are bad" was the talk of the 1980s, and I eventually realized just how a wrong that statement was, I have no come to believe those two statements while just about everyone says them especially all the cool kids who really know about lots of systems and game design are equally as wrong as the whole idea that hit points are bad and what we need is more realism.There are two unsolvable problems.The first is that social actions are unlike combat actions in that the best we can manage to make a combat action evocative and real and impactful is to simulate it.  We could try LARP and foam swords and so forth, and there is a place for that, but you can't really LARP a fight with a 60' dragon in a crumbling ruin on breakdown that is sliding under your feet while someone casts a lightning bolt.   There is a level of fantasy that you just can't manage with foam swords.  LARP combat has to be limited to smaller more gritty scales, and it's not perfect solution anyway.  So we do tactical wargames as a minigame within the RPG.  But social actions are just conversation and dialogue and it's just a whole lot easier and more immersive to manage that and create that and have that be evocative and real and impactful by just having conversation and dialogue rather than trying to manage it as a complex tactical wargame.  Sure, we do have some of the same problems of LARPing that LARPing combat does, in that it's hard to always simulate heroic conversation especially if you aren't very much of a thespian, but even that problem is easier to deal with than LARPing swords because we can always dice for how well the invented conversation lands easier and with less disruption than we could for dicing how well the sword hits landed.  It's a lot easier to simulate the character leveling up at conversation while LARPing than simulating the same leveling up process with LARP combat.  So fundamentally, as just a result of the very different natures of conversation and combat, the solutions that work for one just don't work for the other in a game.  Rules heavy works better for combat.  Rules lite works better for social pillars.The other problem is that combat is almost unique in how much it rewards cooperation and teamwork.  Social pillars just can't be forced to have the same structure in the general case.  You can through good encounter design force players in a social encounter to have to work together, but in general especially with organic social encounters that weren't heavily designed, the best strategy in a social pillar is almost always to let the "face man" handle the encounter by himself.  It's hard to force a social engagement to where the help of the socially inept baffoon actually helps rather than hinders success.  And so social engagement can almost never be as regularly engrossing for the whole group as combat can be.</blockquote>

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