Games with great social rules

[Fenris-77]

My primary work function is technical pre-sales, which means I talk to customers, work out what it is they need, and then work out how our company’s services can help. I’ve had a fair chunk of sales training over the years and there are structures that can be applied to these kinds of interactions*.

I think there is a movement towards these kind of subsystems in games, with The One Ring, Draw Steel and even GURPS Social Engineering putting a process on key interactions to make them more game-able in a satisfying way.

* at a very simple level: establish rapport, opening questions on the context, establish credibility, deeper questions, initial offer, revise offer, finalise the deal. There is more to it than that, of course.

Yup, this is certainly true, lots of people have things like sales skills that can provide a useful framework for extended social interactions.

That said, what if that conversation was mostly about hawking and the supplies of horses to the northern border, with the sales bits in between. Would you still feel comfy free-handing that whole conversation? I mean you might, but I think that for the most part the movement of the conversation from peak to peak is a separate concern from the details and finesse that get you there. I hope that makes as much sense in print as it does in my head,

 

[dbm]

There’s the process and there’s the colour. In terms of a significant social encounter a system could have a standard process that the players will move through, with meaningful choices to be made.

Some of the tricky things are that many RPGs don’t have the level of granularity to model nuances like you suggest - knowledge of specific things like hawking and horse trading in this instance. You could have a system which can cover that level of granularity (like GURPS) or a system which abstracts that into knowledge bundles like background skills in 13th Age do.

There could be a range of social skills which capture a character’s competence at different strategies (good-old deception, intimidation, persuasion and performance etc) or different parts of the process (insight etc). The challenge then becomes what skills should the players invest in for their characters and how much should that cost in terms of lost opportunity to pick up other skills instead. This is most obvious in pure points-buy systems where every point spent on etiquette is a point not spent on whacking people over the head with a blunt instrument. That can be a hard choice for players unless they have a good understanding with the GM what the game will cover. But it is still an issue in D&D 5.x where you get very few skill picks and having good stats is also really important and can be very tricky for characters who don’t have Charisma as a primary combat stat.

Beyond that, the fluff / description is ‘just’ providing colour in a way that the table finds mutually acceptable and appropriate. You don’t need to know real falconry facts as long as you can talk in sufficiently plausible way and the GM has the NPC react appropriately based on the result of your roll.

 

[Fenris-77]

I don't disagree, not even a little bit. What I was getting at is that the (usually simulationist) argument that simple roleplaying does the job is mostly arrant nonsense past very short social encounters. I'm also suggesting that exactly how to model longer interactions and their backs and forths is more complicated than people might think and that the answers are going to be very genre and expectation specific. I don't think it's a matter of 'one good mechanic'.

 

[dbm]

I think ‘one good mechanic’ is a start. Then it can be refined to a cluster of systems if the subject matter and typical focus warrants it.

Few systems have even one good system in my experience, and ‘good’ is subjective in my experience.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think ‘one good mechanic’ is a start. Then it can be refined to a cluster of systems if the subject matter and typical focus warrants it.

Few systems have even one good system in my experience, and ‘good’ is subjective in my experience.

I'm not so sure. I don't think there's one good mechanic when the needs of various games are so disparate. Are there better and worse mechanics? Of course there are. But that's what we're trying to parse.

 

[dbm]

One good set for a game, not one good set for all games.

 

[Barner Cobblewood]

I think social interactions are the field for many types of games (war is a continuation of diplomacy, but not all social interactions are wars), distinguished in part by the goals, purposes, aims, they attempt to produce through (rule- or custom-shaped) action. I'd like to hear more from people about what the rules in particular games are good for, e.g. what are great rules for making friends (not allies)?

I don't see how this can be separated from the "setting," but within a setting I can imagine there are better and worse.

Perhaps there is a more general problem in trying to set a mechanic for ground rather than proposed and purposeful activity. I don't know of any game that supports all kinds of social interaction (how could they? why should they?), so I think that successful games must instantiate a more specific relation between the game setting and desired outcomes than simply the designed "social rules."

 

[Celebrim]

The social equivalent, a conversation for example, can be really hard to do the same for. Drawing someone into a confession through conversation isn't easy to even describe in detail generally, never mind replicate at the table in media res. I'm sure there are GM-player pairs who could manage it, but I suspect it's very small subset of RPG hobbyists.

Wait... what?

I have yet to be in a group where that couldn't be played out in conversational form. Are you saying that in your experience the ability to roleplay out a conversation with an NPC leading to a confession or some other disclosure of information is exceedingly rare in the hobby?

For example, I don't know a goddamn thing about hawking, or a lot of other noble medieval pursuits (despite a degree in Medieval Studies, I'll add), nor about advanced interrogation techniques. I do have great communication skills but I still I don't think I could carry my end of that interaction at the table.

So in game you'd have a situation where the character, who might not know anything about hawking either, would have to try in character to make themselves minimally conversant about hawking, knowing for example what a Merlin was used for as opposed to a Gyr Falcon (if that's misspelled it's because I'm doing this without looking it up). This would serve the dual purpose of letting both sides get minimally prepared for this conversation both IC and OOC. Fun times.

 

[Fenris-77]

Wait... what?

I have yet to be in a group where that couldn't be played out in conversational form. Are you saying that in your experience the ability to roleplay out a conversation with an NPC leading to a confession or some other disclosure of information is exceedingly rare in the hobby?



So in game you'd have a situation where the character, who might not know anything about hawking either, would have to try in character to make themselves minimally conversant about hawking, knowing for example what a Merlin was used for as opposed to a Gyr Falcon (if that's misspelled it's because I'm doing this without looking it up). This would serve the dual purpose of letting both sides get minimally prepared for this conversation both IC and OOC. Fun times.

I think roleplaying the exact kind of conversation I mention is exceedingly difficult. I am completely aware that groups mange some kind of short-hand here, some of them very effective shorthand. I think the various moments of any given conversation are, of themselves, meaningless.

 

[Celebrim]

I think roleplaying the exact kind of conversation I mention is exceedingly difficult.

The reason I am shocked is because I don't. I once tried to roleplay a game based on Gerrold's "War against the Chtorr". Making the biology of that setting believable to an average nerd is not the same as making that conversation in character believable to my wife with her PhD in biochemistry. If you have some nerd at the table who is playing a character how has IC the same specialized knowledge as they have OOC (a lawyer perhaps playing a character with legal skill) then as GM holding your own in that conversation does require a good deal of OOC prep on your part, but I've rarely had IRL a problem making a conversation believable enough for the players I've had. For one thing, as GM I have full control over the setting and can make crap up to even the playing field, and as long as it feels to the player like a plausible thing with a similar richness of detail they are used to, it works. The goal here is verisimilitude. Plenty of fiction works at that level, even though an expert wouldn't necessarily buy it, the reader has buy in. And really, players are genuinely experts only in narrow areas. It's not that hard to do enough research that they at least enjoy that you've made the effort. If I have a player who is an IRL hostage negotiator, IRL doctor of biology, IRL expert in church Latin, or whatever, I will have a hard time keeping up in their narrow field, but I can fake and the tools for doing that are getting easier all the time.

I am completely aware that groups mange some kind of short-hand here, some of them very effective shorthand.

If by shorthand you mean, "sufficient accuracy for verisimilitude not actual accuracy" then I agree. If you mean that the conversations don't happen, then I don't agree.

I think the various moments of any given conversation are, of themselves, meaningless.

I think they certainly can be. In some systems, and explicitly in many Nar systems, they actually are as often fortune has already been decided and you are just playing out the results of fortune and your acting however engaging doesn't matter, or else it doesn't really matter what you say because the dice are going to decide for you anyway. But I don't personally consider that normal to traditional play or to most systems.

In this post (Games with great social rules) you described how in a particular system, particular elements of a conversation are used to steer how the ultimate fortune test is resolved. The framing formalized in the system you are describing is something I've been using in even 1e AD&D in a more informal and ad hoc manner (or in the form of predefined minigames written up in the scenario notes) since no later than about 1993 as a means of adjudicating things like bonuses or penalties to Reaction Checks depending on the suitability of the conversation to the NPC's personality and goals. The various moments then in the played out conversation are then extremely meaningful, with different approaches to the conversation leading to very different results. And things like "clocks" are frequently used in an informal way as well, with the conversation perhaps allowing for a natural number of "retries" depending on how the conversation plays out and whether anything truly new is being said, or whether the PCS have become badgering or irritating, repeating the same things or moving on from persuading to some other thing like intimidation or bribery, which tend to on failure result in further conversational options being terminated.

To me this is absolutely normal. Its the way I was taught by example to do it by an older GM in the mid 1980s, and the way I've always experienced at other tables, or when running my own games. I think it is also intuitively normal that they should work that way, as this is how child's games of make-believe work. You actually talk in character.

I'm not at all against formalizing clocks and positioning and difficulty if those things related to spoken things in the conversation. It's good advice and teaches GMs the fundamentals of running engaging social interactions. I've seen some really good advice come out lately on this that is I think much more functional than I find some older attempts that treat social interaction as being a parallel to combat. But I don't want to ever get to the point where the actual spoken words are meaningless.