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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8731194" data-attributes="member: 82106">I fall into the school of thought which says that there really aren't cut and dried analogies to actual melee combat to exploit here. Clearly certain individuals can 'beat' an 'opponent' in some kind of social contest in some fashion, but the types of such contests are vast and extremely varied. Nor are they necessarily very amenable to being bounded in some easy way into an equivalent of an encounter or even a complete contest. There's no necessary point where your opponent must perforce yield, for example. Nor am I convinced there are exactly very good analogs to some kind of 'state' (like say  hit points in D&D, though we could be discussing many different potential game designs). Like, I think you could, kinda sorta create a system to adjudicate something like a 'debate', or something like that, but I would think that it mostly boils down to each side having natural advantages and disadvantages based on both their strengths and weaknesses, and how they interact with the other contestant(s), and also factors related to some larger ongoing 'state of affairs'. So, yeah, a GM could basically eyeball that down to some kind of "you have a 20% chance of scoring a 'killing blow' on your opponent in each hour of debate, and he has a 38% chance of doing so to you" or whatever. But I don't see much in the way of generic tactics. I mean, sure, individuals may utilize typical ploys that work for them, but its VERY VERY individual! I don't see a way to really codify any of that. I mean, there are game designs, TB2 comes to mind and I think this generally applies to BW, which try to do that. IMHO it comes out as a very stilted and kind of awkward process. I like more loosely defined frameworks like the open-ended 'moves' style of play in PbtAs where you just 'do stuff', it may or may not be social, and the situation and outcomes are pretty much purely the fiction. 4e SCs can contain social conflict situations as well, either as a single element, or possibly the main thrust of the SC, and you can even make up special ground rules for them to account for certain factors that are unique to the situation (IE allowed skills, disallowed skills, etc.).</blockquote>

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