Necessity of a Social Negotiation System? – When Should It Be Relevant?

[Bill Zebub]

Look at people strongly advocating certain actions right now that they argued vociferously against just a year or two ago.

That would be a super fun idea to riff on....if it weren't for the everpresent danger of Red Text hanging over our heads.

 

[payn]

Here are a few questions I’ve been pondering:

• When do you feel social negotiation rules are essential for driving the story forward?

I think the results of social negotiations lead to paths forward, but shouldn’t be binary tests. Or I should say a 10% shopkeep discount is fine for a dice roll, but not for a mother sacrificing a child!

• Do you think social negotiation should be a constant feature of every roleplaying interaction, or should it be used more sparingly, reserved for moments where it truly matters?

I think it should be possible whenever relevant to interests of the players. If it’s overused it becomes a redundant exercise, so best run as an event with interesting leads.

• Are there any exceptions where the system shouldn’t intervene, and players should rely on roleplaying or narrative cues alone?

I think some folks are worried about losing agency like having a PC fall in love or give up a life goal because of a dice roll. That’s sort of the binary result that should be avoided.

Instead social interaction should be a context investigation leading clues to who is honest, who is lying, what are the agendas. The interaction provides more or less info leading up to an interesting fork in the road for the players to travel. In other words, the social interactions are the journey not the destination.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with this!

I’ve enjoyed the Ultimate Intrique from Paizo for PF1. It supplies skills and sub-systems that are great for expanding on social interaction if you want to. We used it extensively in the AP War Fir The Crown.

 

[Li Shenron]

Howdy everyone!

I'm currently refining the rules for social negotiation in my developing TTRPG, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the following matter.

In a lot of tabletop RPGs, social negotiation plays a significant role in interactions between players and NPCs. However, I'm asking myself, when social negotiation shouldn't be relevant.

For example, let’s consider two very different scenarios where social negotiation might play a determining factor:

1. Bartering with the local shopkeeper for a better price on potions.
2. Trying to persuade a mother of two to sacrifice one of her children to the demon lord Gruk'Xelgoth.

It's obvious that not every conversation warrants a negotiation check. During casual NPC interactions, such as asking directions or chatting about the weather, negotiation may not be needed. But in some cases, where the stakes are higher and the intent is more specific, players may engage in negotiation to achieve a particular goal. In these moments, should social negotiation rules always come into play, or should they be reserved for rare, high-stakes situations?

Here are a few questions I’ve been pondering:

• When do you feel social negotiation rules are essential for driving the story forward?
• Do you think social negotiation should be a constant feature of every roleplaying interaction, or should it be used more sparingly, reserved for moments where it truly matters?
• Are there any exceptions where the system shouldn’t intervene, and players should rely on roleplaying or narrative cues alone?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with this!

I think you are looking at it from a wrong perspective. You are trying to compare between using rules and using narrative (i.e. roleplaying) to resolve a situation, depending on how important the situation is.

But the choice is completely independent from the importance. The choice depends on whether the players want to exercise player's skills or character's skills, and secondarily on how much the players want randomness in the outcome.

For example, a gaming group might be a lot into roleplaying and want to directly handle social negotiations. The importance of the matter may determine whether they want to spend an hour in social interaction narratively when the stakes ar high, or just a quick question on small matters before moving on. If you think they should switch to using rules in the first case, you are ruining your players' fun.

In the opposite case, another gaming group might enjoy strategic character building and rolling dice as a way to see if they design their characters well. In a high-stake social interaction case they might want to roll a lot and/or be able to intervene with choices to get a result that converges to average (therefore more representative of the value of their strategic design choices), but they would probably also want to roll at least once in a lower-stake interaction for fun and because on the long term many interactions resolved by dice once again will be representative of their character's skills. Sure, on absolutely trivial matters they might not care at all about rolling or using rules, but if someone for instance has invested skill points (or whatever) on being good at bartering for better prices, you are doing that player a disservice by deciding to resolve by roleplay because it's below your threshold.

 

[AnotherGuy]

When do you feel social negotiation rules are essential for driving the story forward?

One should apply the same metric they use for combat.
Is every combat necessary? Does every combat drive the story forward? What is the purpose of the combat if not to drive the story forward?
Answer those questions for the social negotiation you wish to implement.

Also, in the same way one uses the environment for combat, one should be able to use the situational fiction to gain an advantage or disadvantage in the social negotiation.

Do you think social negotiation should be a constant feature of every roleplaying interaction, or should it be used more sparingly, reserved for moments where it truly matters?

Much depends on how far you zoom out or zoom in to the storyline.
Is there a risk of failure? Is it meaningful? Is it engaging for the players?
Should a fast-talking rogue have the ability to distract a guard without a roll?
Should a fighter be able to lean into his acolyte background to negotiate with the priest a better price for their services, without a roll needed?
You may instead decide success is automatic, but a player deciding to roll risks failure, but also may be rewarded with a critical success. That is a cool decision point for the player.

Are there any exceptions where the system shouldn’t intervene, and players should rely on roleplaying or narrative cues alone?

When the fiction invites no conflict or no meaningful result for failure then no roll is required, IMO.
When the fiction doesn't invite a purpose for a roll.
i.e. you cannot convince everyone, no matter how much your +x on the die roll is.

 

[Reynard]

We generally take it as a given that the swing of a sword requires a die roll because of the complexity and uncertainty of combat. Often, we assume too much simplicity and certainty in social interactions as an excuse to ignore the dice and just go with the role-play. "Going with the role-play" is fine in and of itself, but it puts a lot of weight on the GM as well as favors players that are better at conversation than those that aren't. We have beat that particular subject to death, though, so I don't want to belabor it.

In general, a negotiation system that relies only on rolls is a bad idea, IMO. Important NPCs from whom the PCs want something will have their own desires, motivations, biases and needs. I think it is a much better system to employ these factors in the negotiation. If the PCs can tick off any or all of those boxes, if there is still uncertainty that would require a roll, then that roll and/or its results are impacted.

For bartering, if I were to bother at all, I would make it a single simple roll with a knowable result (up or down 10% cost) and maybe allow for an easier difficulty if the PC hits on something important to the shopkeeper.

For the more complex mother scenario, you definitely want to think about where she is starting, and what kinds of approaches and engagement would push her one way or the other. That said, I am hard pressed to imagine a situation in which this scene would be fun.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You can get people to do pretty much anything with the right pressures. Even something unthinkable today can become acceptable tomorrow. Look at world events 80 years ago and world events happening right now. Look at people strongly advocating certain actions right now that they argued vociferously against just a year or two ago.

I would not draw the same conclusions than you. I don't think you can get anyone to act against their principles, it is just that a lot of people really do not have principles or lie about what their true principles are. Then again, in a RPG we might not have pre-established how principled every NPC is so one might just let the dice results determine that.

In my game Other Worlds I discuss this issue (social conflict, not fascism). My game has stake setting, which means that the player and GM have to agree that the result being sought is reasonable given all of the circumstances. So, if you want to try to convince the King to give up the throne, I don't want to say it's impossible, but you have to do the work and build the leverage to make that a plausible outcome. Or, perhaps, stumble into those circumstances. It can't be a two minute conversation out of the blue when everything's going great.

Whilst some things might be genuinely impossible, I agree with you that most aren't in the right circumstances. And then the challenge becomes engineering those right circumstances that make it possible to get what you want and to me that sound far more interesting gameplay than just hoping you roll well on the dice.

The second question is how this affects player characters. Can they be forced to give up the throne, abandon their existing world views, betray their friends? On any dice roll? My answer in Other Worlds is that for player characters these rolls create a pressure. This is within the agreed stakes. You can still choose not to go along with the new policies, help fight the neighbouring village, betray your friends, etc, but you will pay a cost. Maybe a severe one. You could be seen as unreasonable and uncooperative and overlooked for the next promotion. You could be ostracised in your community and have bricks thrown at your windows. You could be faced with prosecution, asset seizure, and eventually execution.

I really dislike social mechanics being used against PCs, but this I like. It is not that you were convinced by the demagogue that sacrificing the babies to the daemon lords of chaos is a good idea, but everyone else is convinced about it and now think you're a traitorous freak for not wanting to usher a new golden age via diabolical baby sacrifice.

 

[Committed Hero]

If it's a core activity the PCs will be doing.

Swords of the Serpentine has a neat mechanic where a character attempts to force action and the resisting target can give in or make a test against Composure (sort of a mental health track). It would work well for a "come out with your hands up" standoff.

 

[payn]

I really dislike social mechanics being used against PCs, but this I like. It is not that you were convinced by the demagogue that sacrificing the babies to the daemon lords of chaos is a good idea, but everyone else is convinced about it and now think you're a traitorous freak for not wanting to usher a new golden age via diabolical baby sacrifice.

There are a lot of outside the box ways to do social interaction that folks rarely think of. Those who dont like the idea usually start and stop at a single die roll forcing a character into something.

 

[Umbran]

I come to the thought that I am ot sure I need a "social negotiation mechanic".

Sometimes, I may want a "social conflict resolution mechanic". But those are hardly the same thing.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

I think some folks are worried about losing agency like having a PC fall in love or give up a life goal because of a dice roll. That’s sort of the binary result that should be avoided.

Well, like everything it depends on the game you are running. I have been running THE GREAT PENDRAGOIN CAMPAIGN for 2+ years now, and this kind of thing is a major part of the game and has solid backing both mechanically and in the fictional setting.

As an example, when you first see Guinevere, each player rolls to see if the knight falls in love with her. Because that is the game we are playing; one where people can fall in love, go mad from longing, give in to temptation or kill people out of a sudden burst of hate. These things happen all the time both in real life and (more importantly) in fiction. To me, it's a more natural way to play than one where nothing ever happens to a character that the player does not explicitly want to happen.

However, Pendragon has mechanisms for modifying the chances of this happening. If a player's character is continuously greedy, so their selfish trait goes up, that makes it significantly more likely that they will be required by dice rolls to be greedy again. If you haven't developed a love for anyone else, it makes it more likely that you'll fall in love with random fey woman who turns up in your bed one night.

As an example, a player in my game has a knight, Hwyel, who started behaving callously to others, and their cruel trait increased to 15. This means that if they test cruel against its opposite, they are 75% likely to succeed on cruel, and only 25% likely to succeed on being kind -- if they succeed on one and fail on the other, then they really should react in the indicated way.

However, if your trait is <16, the GM cannot force you to roll except for unusual circumstances (like the almost supernatural beauty of Guinevere). So it's only when Hywel hit 16 that he became known as "Hywel the Cruel" and and as a famously cruel knight, it is now very hard for him not to be cruel. But it took about 6 months of play to get to that state.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I don't think social systems can be bolted onto a game which is otherwise mostly about combat and skills. In D&D, for example, there is essentially no way to portray a character becoming more cruel (The closest might be an old-school type alignment chart, but I've ever actually seen anyone do that), so if a roll result causes the GM to say "and so you beat the merchant to death" it feels very wrong, very arbitrary.

Doe we need social X systems in a game? Not if you don't want to play that style of game. But more importantly, if you DO want to play that style of game, pick a system that deeply supports it, as otherwise it just won't sit well with many people.