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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6703536" data-attributes="member: 4937">LOL.  No doubt.  I intended it as a joke.  But, at some level I think all narration of getting "Taken Out" in FATE social conflict is disastrously bad narration.  Nor have you exactly convinced me otherwise.Yeah, that's so much different conceptually than my joke.That is indeed a rub.  Err.. doesn't that also stipulate the character's actions?  Why are we in this dark alley in the first place?  Did I choose to go there?  Why did I fail to notice the attacker, and why after so many combats did I die to this dagger in the back anyway?  It doesn't sound like I actually was socially destroyed here.  It sounds like I was physically destroyed by a physical challenge I wasn't allowed to win despite my massive physical stats.  Why didn't we run any of that stuff?Which again, is stipulating the characters actions and railroading them through situations that might not believably happen and which in any event I might have the resources to survive by other means.  Fundamentally, your narration above always involves the character losing repeatedly in the physical sphere.  The lose of social standing results in physical attacks.Sure, but it doesn't happen to every character bullied on social media.  As one example, ironically, it's often more devastating and traumatic to the very persons who had significant social resources and lost them.  (In game, we might have the equivalent of a player choosing to retire a character with very large investments in character building resources in the social sphere, whose character is permanently maimed in the social sphere and loses those invested points.  We might reasonably assume such a character feels like 'they've lost everything.')  Again, we have very distinct differences between the social and the physical.  The physical act of having a bullet pass through your skull has a consequence that doesn't depend (much) on the character assuming you aren't a mutant or werewolf with magical regeneration abilities.  No one feels its unreasonable they are being stipulated to by the laws of physics.  But how a character will react to bullying, to his best friend slamming the door on his face, to the cops trying to frame him for something, or whatever else you want to invent is something we reasonably expect to vary greatly from character to character.  No law demands a particular outcome.You say this to a guy who is autistic.  Almost all social interaction is pretty frightening to me.  And I have plenty of experience with social "combat" if you mean attempts to socially destroy a person, and I've experienced bullying in everything from being the object of mean girl public shaming to being group stomped and kicked.  I think I have a pretty darn good idea what words can do, both in the harm they can do and the limits of that harm.   My imagination is not limited here when I say the outcomes required by social combat would seem alien or magical.  I'm assuming everyone has experienced bad social situations.  I'll return to this in just a bit, but the big problem here is not that there might not exist some social combat narration that makes the outcome seem non-magical, but that we are required to supply it.Unless you have a level nine intellect in real life, figuring out the 12 words that destroy a person isn't easy.Social conflict can reasonably destroy social resources, though I'd argue that the relationships would need to be attacked from the other end making the whole process much more complex.  I'd even buy that the loss of social resources can have consequences in other spheres, or that for a particular character loss of reputation and loss of relationships might appropriately produce certain actions.  But only for particular characters and only in particular cases.  But even so, you are completely missing my main point.  Even if we assume that there exists some possible narration which for a particular character explains the results of social combat in a believable manner that doesn't stipulate character action, it's still very radically different from a typical combat engine.  I typical combat engine generates the narration that produces the believable result of character loss, and the more granular the engine the better it does that.  The gun was fired.  The bullet struck.  The blood hemorrhaged.  Brain death and cardiac arrest ensued.  We can imagine all that concretely, even if the original engine was on the abstract side (say D&D or even FATE).  For the social combat, the problem is we actually get no insight into the narration we need.  The insult was hurled.  The reputation was ruined.  He was rendered a pariah.  He became completely helpless.  That's a tissue of a story, but it doesn't tell us what actually happened.  He called him a jerk and it ruptured his spleen doesn't quite cut it.  What was that so devastating insult?  Why was it so believed?  How did it undermine the reputation?  You can imagine specific characters and specific cases where an Achilles heel is exposed and they are destroyed - Nixon's missing 18 minutes for example removes him from the Washington campaign.  But doing that in a general case is so hard as to be impossible.  A physical combat engine supplies us with more concrete details for our narration that we would not have had otherwise.  A social combat engine leaves us without the concrete details we would have if we just narrated the social combat.  If we start with the concrete insult, if we actually play out the scene, and so forth, we end up with a sturdier more believable narrative than if we propose social combat, declare some maneuvers, roll the dice, and then try to figure out what it means.  Perhaps our constructed narrative will have the same sort of outcome of ruination, but at least we will know how it happened.  Social combat requires us to generate as elaborate of stories as the backstory to the Count of Monte Christo specific to the particular character on the fly based on a few die rolls.  It's just not reasonable to expect to generate that from the few clues provided by the fortunes in an abstract combat system.Even if I concede, "If done properly, it is no more dissociated than physical combat is, as the resulting narrative makes perfect sense in context.", the engine gives us no insight on how to "do it properly" in the same way a physical combat engine might generate imaginable blows, parries, misses, and wounds.  The reason is because the mechanics are disassociated and unlike physical combat can't be more associated by being made more granular.</blockquote>

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