Does social standing have a place in your game?

[Bishop Odo]

I have used social standing in past as a GM, but I’m afraid I seen it abused in other games. Most young players see it as only a way to get “Stuff.” The concept, that there is level of reasonability involved with being Noble never enters their mind.

One player I knew, who was kind of a psycho, saw everything in terms of DM hooks and conspiracies to get the group to take some action. Why play the game right? I told you he’s psycho. He forced his “party” to turn down patents of nobility, usually by some rude act, and if a kid needed to be rescued, ok but then he would kill the child for fear if it would become a DM hook. Defiantly a chaotic personality.

No wonder, I have not played in years, lol

 

[Li Shenron]

Does social standing have a place in your game?

Yes, if the players are interested, but most of the times they are not.

Also social standing is not directly dependent on level: the strongest fighter in the world doesn't automatically become a high-standing officer, he could just as well end up working in a circus as an underpaid brutal attraction. And even the 20th level wizard could have no social standing, if all he can do is blasting cities with meteor swarm.

At the same time the ruling lord of the land can be a 1st level character, if he is an excellent leader and administrator of the country but has never fought a battle.

It rather depends on what you do to work towards the social role, not your sheer firepower. But of course, if you have the firepower that you can use it to your advantage!

When you make up a background for your character how much depth do you put into it?

When I am a player, usually the other DMs require a background, but if we start at low level they also require a low social standing. Personally I don't think it's really clever, but since it's a common staple I have no problems playing like that (and anyway it's easier). So typically as a PC I always have something like one handwritten page of background, but with near-zero social standing. For NPCs I don't officially write or publish a background... in my own notes the NPCs are usually very schematic-ked (few lines of most important info, some stats but not full stats) and of course contain mention of their social standing too.

Do you have rules set in place for backgrounds?

No. It's free, although there's the unwritten rule that it should be reasonable.

I sometimes remind the players to take a look at the backgroung rules in UA, but I don't think they are really usable as such! OTOH they can give suggestions of certain PC ideas that may not often come to mind to players.

Does your DM give you bonus skill points of feats to help flesh out a background?

Absolutely I don't... I used to reward good roleplay during the adventures (now I don't even do that anymore),
but I never rewarded "extra work" that is done during preparation. I believe that if you like doing the extra work, you are already rewarding yourself.

The other DMs I play with don't reward this either, but I suspect that if one player insisted enough they might give up...

Will your DM allow you to play a prince?

Tough question. The other DMs probably won't. I certainly would think about it... While I would be tempted to choose the easy route (i.e. ban the idea), I think it might be possible to make it work without significantly break the game with an advantage to such player.

I think the solution implies somehow to (1) limit the advantage so that it doesn't have a straight usefulness in most situations, and (2) make it so that the advantage affects the whole party and not just one character.

So for example the prince could have an army, but the army is not useful to follow the PCs around the world in search for dungeons and treasures. It would be useful to wage a war against the forces of evil, if the players want the game to go to an army-scale. However that would maybe cause the game to become something else than D&D, up to a point where maybe the PC are not fighting anymore and there's just armies fighting and PCs watching...

Maybe the prince is rich and can afford much more powerful magic equipment than the others? Because that could break the balance, if this is allowed then some other basic statements of the game will be changed. There won't be many people able to craft so powerful magic items for example. Furthermore, as a DM I would probably declare that, just as treasure has to be generally equally split, so would the extra money from the prince, otherwise the party of PCs is not really a party but a leader + his underlings. If this would be the net result, then as DM I would conclude to ban the idea, period.

 

[Aholibamah]

Does social standing have a place in your game?

Yes. My main setting is a republic but it has an aristocracy and ranks of officials and military standing and so on. I have two players right now, one is a minor official and another is a military officer.

When you make up a background for your character how much depth do you put into it?
A fair amount--my pcs have families and contacts for instance, one is married. Family is important when making further contacts.

Do you have rules set in place for backgrounds?
Yes. Basically you can choose to be any social class but there are bonuses and penalties that go along with them. For instance playing a patrician means that you have the responsibility of serving the state in some capacity pretty much most of your character's life. When making a patrician character there are about 30 families in the republic to choose from and you don't get to know what the family is like in advance of picking a name at random. You can however ask to have certain characteristics in a parent for instance. (I would change this if I made it a general system but my players trust me not to work them over for pure sadism) One of my pcs picked a family that is descended from one of the founders of the republic and therefore has a great reaction bonus for fellow countrymen but is also likely to get a bad reaction from enemies of the state.

Does your DM give you bonus skill points of feats to help flesh out a background?

Stuff like leadership, wealth, and so on, yes. It would be a given that my one player has some training at weapons, leadership and riding while the other has skills in negotiating, a craft and bluff since he is from a merchant family.

Will your DM allow you to play a prince?

I haven't played in a long time but I would only allow this if we were doing a big intrigue or war type campaign. As stated in the post above mine the difficulty here is in whether or not this prince is a titular one or actually has an army and resources. If this were the case there are certainly ways to have adventures but it has to be done carefully. Not many players really want the headaches of running a fictional country either, even if they are irresponsible about it. This is really in my opinion better suited to Warhammer than D&D but it could be done I guess. I'd be more inclined to let a pc run a noble who didn't have a huge amount of land or immediate power.

 

[DM-Rocco]

Thanks for the input guys. It was very helpful. Looks like most people use some sort of social standing and most will allow a royal bloodline with a few restrictions.

 

[Phlebas]

Does social standing have a place in your game?

Yes. The default is that you start as 'nobody' but advance in social standing depending on your actions (and location relative to those actions)

Do you have rules set in place for backgrounds?

I have a lot of options IMC, but i normally only flesh them out with the help of the PC when they develop the character

Does your DM give you bonus skill points of feats to help flesh out a background?

Quiet the reverse, In my game there are specific birthright feats you can take to be wealthy, famous or noble - if you pay the feat you get the benefit - no feat then its 'in name' only

Aristocrats get bonus feats from this list which is a reason to play the class for a few early levels - still play testing this but it doesn't seem to be too unbalanced in that one person thinks its fantastic, a couple of others think its underpowered so i think its about right....

Normally these are 1st level options only - but IMC one pc's background was from a wealthy family but started the game having fell out with her father - by 8th level the character wanted to make up and get some money but didn't want to spend a feat - ergo they made up but no money was forthcoming

Will your DM allow you to play a prince?

Oh, yeah - how many plot hooks can you develop from there! I would probably 'force' them to take some Aristocrat levels if they wanted full benefits - pay the price kind of thing- but if they were 'the lost prince of the destroyed kingdom' it would just be a flavour decision

 

[kigmatzomat]

Does social standing have a place in your game?

Yes. But generally it doesn't kick in until higher levels when the party has some contacts beyond the weaponsmith and the inn keep. One of the "treasures" I grant people in game ranks, titles, and special privileges. After saving a town from sentient weeds they were exempted from taxes in the Lord's lands. Later they were made officers in the military, which includes a small stipend, and gives them authority. With successive accomplishments they were granted lands, the right to build fortifications, and are currently the equivalent of colonels serving in the King's division.

The flip side to the coin is that if they use their titles and ranks, they will come to the attention of the local Lord. Maybe they'll just want to talk but maybe there's something to hide. Villains assume that if a hero knocks on their door that the hero has come to take them down, not ask directions to the next village.

When you make up a background for your character how much depth do you put into it?

Mine are generally a typed page or three. I generally don't recommend people go too detailed on their own characters until they have a chance to play them in the setting and get a good feel for their place in the world.

Do you have rules set in place for backgrounds?

I start the characters out at the same general level, which may mean the half-orc is regarded fondly locally while the paladin is considered something of a nuisance. I'll let anything go, within reason, but the net result is the party starts on an even keel.

Does your DM give you bonus skill points of feats to help flesh out a background?

I don't and neither does anyone I know. Either you can make your concept by the rules or you can be a junior apprentice who hasn't quite got there yet.

Will your DM allow you to play a prince?

Being the DM mostly, I'd say no. Mainly because my players wouldn't want to deal with what I would put them through. They have learned that any request for power I grant will wind up being a Faustian bargain. Go as the dragon disciple IMC.

None of my DMs would let me play a prince due to the risk of my actually playing a prince correctly. Fear a noble who has a plan.

 

[fusangite]

Thanks for the input guys. It was very helpful. Looks like most people use some sort of social standing and most will allow a royal bloodline with a few restrictions.

That's an interesting read of the data but then it sounds like this is what you were predisposed to conclude.

 

[exile]

In the group that I recently played with, social standing did indeed come into play, particularly if an individual player wrote it into his or her character's background.

My backgrounds are usually pretty detailed, at least in my mind. I don't often write up the background per se, but I do sometimes write a piece of short fiction that touches on some element of the background.

No, we did not have rules set in place, but it would often influence a given character's place in the story.

No, no bonus feats or skills. The benefits are less tangible, but still very real to the game. For example, a friend and I were playing twin elven sisters attending an academy for adventurers. While both of our characters were of noble birth, I was something of a black sheep who had gotten into a fair bit of trouble on first coming to the academy. Most of the characters were given ordinary dorm rooms, my sister was put up with a very nice apartment near the campus, I was relegated to a servant's status for a semester, having to sleep on the floor of another well to do character, see to her needs, and generally receive less treasure than I would otherwise be due.

Yes, the DM would have probably let someone play a prince, though the active part of the world was somewhat well developed, and the character might have only been the prince of a small, distant nation.

Chad

 

[HellHound]

Does social standing have a place in your game?

Yes. Streetdrek don't mingle well with the corporate elite, and never get invited to the cool parties.

When you make up a background for your character how much depth do you put into it?

Moderate. Here's a sample from one of my characters I rolled up for a PBEM game that never launched.
[sblock=rethe] "We've all seen that movie "Starship Troopers" when "our heroes" all lose their families when the bugs dropped a rock on their home town... Well, when they Euros dropped a rock on my parents' house in Colorado, all I felt was relief. Without their help, I would never make it to med. school - which is what I was relieved about"
"Also, without the funding of the Zaibatsu dad worked for, I coudln't go to the private school they kept me locked away at in Utah. I lied to the administrators and said my aunt would pick me up that evening, and Hitched to New Orleans."
"Life was rought out there on the streets of the French Quarter. Luckily for me an old con artist named Cody took me under his wing. He claimed to have been a fighter jock before the Orbital Cutters made most of his training obsolete; but I was always under the impression there were regs about eyesight in the USAF and Cody's pale gray eyes were always seen through his thick glasses... But that's waht you get when you ask a con artist about his past."
"We worked well together while it lasted, I acted as his eyes while he ran his cons. On the side I would keep him alerted to the comings and goings of the local Five-Oh."
"But no real story has a "happily ever after" and we went our seperate ways soon after I met Linda. I guess Cody realized he was going to need a new partner after she got her scratchers into me. It was a match made in hell, and I was in love with the devil, a twisted little girl. She was 16 when we met, two years my junior, and already hell on wheels."
"Once Again I was playing look-out for someone else's scams, only this time it wasn't con games. I kept an eye out for cops and CorpSec while my red-dreaded partner ran micro-runs on security systems and the older ATMs that weren't tamper-proofed yet. And then the euro started rolling in and we started living the life. WIth euro came better clothes, and with that and more euro we could go to the good clubs and do the good drugs and she would bring home the hot boys... annd I would leave them at our conapt and crash in the coffin hotel down the block."
"Two things followed that really changed my style..."
"She got hooked on the wire. Not real bad, but hooked. She had to tap in at least twice a day, but rarely for more than an hour or so. But this lead to her deciding to build her own wires, copying the designs of the two she had bought. And I started selling them - mostly to college kids at the clubs and to other up-towners wanting to four-oh-four in the zone. Some of Linda's pieces weren't too hot, and some were way to hot - she was still learning ya know. I watched one of my "clients"' hair smoulder as he twitched to death under her wire... but that's just a lesson for those uptowners - stay out of the zone, zombies!"
"The other event really changed things. One day she came home from a night at "the Temple Of Doom" meatrack and asked me to provide some "ballistic counselling" to one of the club kds she had brought home a few weeks before. Seems this drek had jacked her white lace and had started spreading the word around that she was the one manufacturing the bad wire in town."
"It took a lot to work up the nerve to do it, but once I had that little gonk of a club kid on the ground in front of me, aiming my first gun at hime and yelling that I was gonna execute the mother er, I had this erotic / adrenaline / dominant high that i started getting off on. I had the gonk describve in exact detail everything he had done with my input the time they had jammed. Once I had that out of him I shot both his ankles and yelled for him to tell it again. When he moaned and started puking up instead, I shot him another dozen times until the gun cycled on an empty chamber, spat on him and went back to my little devil."
"We left New Orleans for Dallas, Texas not a month later. Turns out the Bronze were hot on my ass when we skipped, but I only found that out a few years later. We were actually on the run from the rep Linda's wires had, off to find new markets now that she had "perfected" a new wire."
"In Dallas we prutty much had to start from scratch, and it looked to be a long road back to our old lifestyle. I dealt wire and Blue Glass to the proles out of a sequence of dives through the run-down parts of town, scratching out a living and supporting Linda's habits."
"Two months into our Dallas time, a chilly just-above-freezing janurary night, I met Carlucci. He was a scary son-of-a-bitch with cehemically-altered monotonous gray skin and matte silver implanted mirrorshades. Everybody in the scene new who he was - he moved armament that's legal in Texas all over the rest of the US and Canada, as well as a bunch of armament from small third world countries that wasn't even legal in Texas."
"He first contacted me tow ork part time as one of his facemen, wheras it turned out he really wanted me as an enforcer. Linda and I fought about it constantly once I took the job since she wanted me to devote my time to moving her wire instead of working Carlucci's smuggler contacts."
"Then, with the first bright days of spring, I came home after eliminating a delinquent client of Carlucci's in New Mexico to find the conapt stripped of everything valuable and all her gear. To this day I occasionally run into one of Linda's people - she's one of the hottest wire-builders in the East COast Underground now. I can still feel the textrure of her dreadlocks on my shoulder and chest and feel her breathing at my side when I wake in my coffin in the early morning after a rought night."
"With Carlucci, we continued to pretend I was a faceman and not just "local talent". I actually learned quite a bit about conducting gray business in his employ, between settlements of accounts and dealing with competition. Nice part about working as "talent" for an armament dealer is having a new toy for each hit - fire and forget like they say."
"But I started losing my taste for the Business Of Punishment, sometime around meeting Annie again. Annie had been one of my wire customers back in New Orleans. We met at a Hindu Flesh Mechanic's stall on the strip where I was checking out a pair of implant mirrorshades like carlucci's, she was looking for a cheap RAM expansion for her wetware drive. We had both dumped the wire and just started talking about New Orleans, Dallas and the old scene and stuff and hit it off. Two jobs later I gave Carlucci the bad news that I was pulling myself out of the loop and moving with Annie to Night City, where her job was taking her. Our parting was pretty damn amicable, as one could only hope for when dealing with someone who owns a large selection of autonomous assassination units."
"Annie and I settled into a small conapt in Night City. She worked nights as a SysOp while I made some new contacts and friends in our new environment. We'd go clubbing in the early evening at the best meatracks that her salary allowed."
"I still see Annie once a week, but don't expect that she notices. 'Bout a year and a half ago a netrunner whacker her with some nasty Black ICE while trying to crack her security perimiter. Her contract with Raven Mycrocyb indicates that they'll keep her on life support for another 7 years in case of such an eventuality..."
"So now I'm in business for myself. Buying and selling favours and tid-bits and generally getting by with the dreck of Night City. But I'm not killing folks this time out. I'm trying to exercise a bit of restraint like Annie tried to teach me."
"One year later I've only fired my guns a dozen times each - damn good for Night City, and haven't sent anyone to the body bank to my knowledge. I've brought together a lot of my old contacts or my old contact's contacts in Night City and things are looking up again."[/sblock]

Do you have rules set in place for backgrounds?

Yeah, Cyberpunk has a background lifepath generation system.

Does your DM give you bonus skill points of feats to help flesh out a background?

The lifepath system provides some skill bonuses, but for most cases it is the player's job to assign skill points appropriately for their background, not the GM's job to give them more skill points than the other players just to cover the odd-ball backgrounds they come up with.

Will your DM allow you to play a prince?

I'm the DM. Yeah. Even better, a corporate exec.

 

[DM-Rocco]

That's an interesting read of the data but then it sounds like this is what you were predisposed to conclude.

I'm not sure I follow you line of thinking. From what I can see, almost everyone uses a social structure of some type, even if there aren't clear cut rules for it. It also appears that a lot of the posters would allow a prince to be played, but with some type of restriction, such as a banished prince, or having to take Aristocrate levels or having a limited role in the government and armies.

So, what is it that you don't understand? I don't think I am reading into the data. Yes, I did want to hear most of what was written, but that doesn't mean I am reading into what was written.

Perhaps you could explain how I am reading the data wrong?