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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8726344" data-attributes="member: 4937">So given that the goal is to produce a particular sort of transcript of play or if you will "movie of the game" there are at least two different ways to do that.  The first way we could do that is the way the vast majority of groups already do it.  They play out the scenes using a set of rules to arbitrate the propositions in the scenes with players declaring their actions and roleplaying them out, and DMs responding to that by arbitrating the actions and declaring the results.  If your goal though is to produce a particular transcript of play, this is a maddeningly frustrating way to go about things.  If your goal is to capture reliably certain common tropes of fiction and emulate genre it can be very difficult to do this using "playing it out" as a methodology.The alternative is to hash out the transcript in much the same way that a group of screenwriters tasked to write a script by committee would do it.  The group collectively decides through some process what the transcript is going to be, talking over what they want to achieve and what they think will be a good story and crafting it as they go with certain big story points already worked out as being really desirable.  Both methods can potentially produce the exact same transcript of play but the experience of the game will be very different if you are a participant in the two groups.  In the first group, the experience of play is like being a character in the book or the movie.  It is the book or the movie of you and your friends, and you are acting out in it real time learning the story as it happens with the dramatic excitement that that implies.  At the end of it, if everything works, it's like having a private movie that only you shared that you were yourself a participant in.But the other method of play produces an experience of play not that different from being the screenwriter that made the movie.  You still produced the story and you were still participant in it, and the experience of play can still be fun (especially since above all else, both methods are social) but it's not the same sort of experience.  You really don't need to play anything out.  You can just say it happened and it goes into the transcript the same way.  The big reveals can be something you collectively decided was the best for the situation ahead of time.  You get the creative energy of "Let's have Darth Vader be Luke's dad!" and everyone goes, "Oh that an awesome idea.  That's perfect.", but you don't get the same experience as sitting in the theater going, "No.  That's not true!  That's impossible!" right there along with Luke the way the "play it out" people do when everything goes right.  As a result, there are aesthetics of play that don't get fulfilled or don't get as much fulfilled by the story by committee group as the "play it out and see what happens" group.  Arguably, the "play it out" group have a hard time producing as reliable of a cinematic transcript as the committee group, and so maybe they get frustrated with that, but there is a tradeoff here.My argument is that almost everyone in the group of people attracted to the idea of Social Encounters with as rich of a rule set as combat come from the "play it out" school of gaming.  They want their games to produce narratives that are a lot less "meaningless combat" and more like the movies and novels that they love, but they aren't wanting to forgo the experience you get from "playing it out" because the fun of playing it out is the biggest part of the fun for them.   The people in the game by committee group don't need rules particular to social combat to make it as much a part of their game as any other part.  They are perfectly happy to just decide that some sort of conversation took place through whatever methods they use to come to collective agreement.  In a sense, they already have sufficient rules to make any part of transcript, since whatever part of the transcript it is, they can always just hash out what they think is best for the scene.  A bunch of rules for playing out social encounters would only make it more likely that it would all "go wrong" and produce something other than what they all agreed was the best result.   So keeping in mind what the people who want detailed and engrossing rules for social encounters actually want - the experience of being inside an engrossing and engaging story - and how the plan to get there (by "playing it out"), I'll will now try to explain why the tool they have chosen is so wrong for the job that it will never actually produce the experience and transcript of play that they want.  They have in fact tasked themselves with a job that is impossible.</blockquote>

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