D&D 4E Social interactions in 4E

[LostSoul]

If that's the way BW's Duel of Wits plays out, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy it. Sounds too intrusive.

I play BW/BE too, and it's slightly different from the way buzz handles it. I like the mechanics to be a little less intrusive.

Here's a simple "versus test" - a single roll - for something like social conflict that I played out on the weekend.

Situation: The Baron (NPC) is coming to grab Julius (PC) because he wants to use him as leverage against Julius' NPC brother. The Lord Steward (NPC, big boss guy) is talking to Julius on the vid-screen as the Baron and his marines come in.

Baron: "Julius, I am here to arrest you for treason!" He brandishes an arrest warrent.

Juluis: Hmm... "Lord Steward, these charges are preposterous! You can't really believe them. Have you verified the warrant for my arrest, as is your right?" I'm going to use Persuasion to convince the Lord Steward to tell the Baron to get lost.

Baron: Well, I'm rolling Imperial Law, FoRKing in Oratory for my big speech. "Blah blah blah, he has gone beyond his authority, spoken beyond his station, and has planted spies among your men! I demand that he be turned over to me!" (I have to make a speech in order to justify getting extra dice for my Oratory skill.)

We roll. It's a tie!

Lord Steward: "Hmm, I need some time to think it over. I will send my men to take Julius into my custody while we resolve this."

Baron: "I don't think so." BLAM! He shoots the vid-screen. Now his marines turn to Julius and shoot at him, trying to capture him. Rolling Close Combat.

Julius: "I dive over to the closet and grab my Stet Gun."

We talk a bit about how he doesn't have to make a roll to grab his Stet Gun; it's cool, he's got it. He rolls Close Combat, gets hurt, gets captured and taken away.

There were some more lines in there, along the lines of "Cool, do you have any skills to FoRK into that?" because it was a con demo, but regular players don't need that sort of reminder.

edit: When we do the Duel of Wits, it's usually something like this:

"Okay, what are you doing? I'm doing a Point."

"I'm doing a Rebuttal."

"Okay, let's play it out." Blah blah blah, in-character dialog. "I'm rolling Persuasion and FoRKing in Noble-wise."

 

[Malhost Zormaeril]

In general, yes. But that doesn't mean a player isn't going to sometimes, as Bluto Blutarsky did, 'get on a roll' doing something they just weren't cut out to, and in those cases, I choose to more or less suspend the rules, because negating the players input in situations like those looks like the less enjoyable option.

Except Bluto's speech isn't really out of character for him: he's a drunken frat boy, and dumb as a brick, but he could convince Flounder to bring a horse into the Dean's office and then shoot it, as well as steal the Omega president's girlfriend. He even makes it into the Senate after the movie! No, that speech was memorable exactly because it was completely in character for him: dumb, drunk, getting his facts mixed up, but utterly charismatic

I like lots of special cases. I'm all about the special.

Except when there's nothing but special cases, they really aren't special anymore... But let's just agree to disagree. I doubt I'll convince you to switch over, and I doubt you'll convince me. Until we see the actual rules in actual play, I doubt anyone will review their stance here...

 

[buzz]

I play BW/BE too, and it's slightly different from the way buzz handles it. I like the mechanics to be a little less intrusive.

Here's a simple "versus test" - a single roll - for something like social conflict that I played out on the weekend.

Very nice example!

 

[RFisher]

The way I've always used such mechanics is this: The player role-plays the situation. This establishes what the PC is trying to accomplish. Then the dice are rolled. This determines if he is successful.

I don't know that it matters, but I thought I'd clarify that I didn't mean the talking always came before the rolling.

Understand why social rules are needed. They are not needed to give the pc anything. They are there to insure the DM remains a judge and doesn't fiat stuff on a whim. Think about why AC exists. HEck a DM could just say arbitrarily what hits and what doesnt depending on how you describe your attack. Of course this gives too much power to the dm and eventually a player is going to yell favoritism.

In my experience, you have the "bad DM" & the "not bad DM". The game with social rules is just as bad under the "bad DM" as the game without social rules. Likewise, the game without social rules is just as good under the "not bad DM" as the game with social rules.

I've never seen rules make a "bad DM" better. (Broken record time: Only maturity & experience can do that.) If you have an adequate-or-better DM & mature players, then you don't need rules to make him fair. And the "bad DM" evolves or gets replaced in short order.

D&D should evolve. It should get away from its image of "wargame with a thin veneer or roleplaying" and the rules should reflect that. If D&D had proper rules to resolve diplomatic conflicts, like so many other games have, I think a lot of people who didn't want to play would consider playing it

I'm not convinced it would be a net-gain for the hobby, though.

& the truth is, D&D was never a wargame with a thin role-playing veneer. (Although I'd entertain an argument that it did become that with 3e. (^_^)) It was a role-playing game with a thin wargame veneer. Except for the "use Chainmail for combat" in the original set (which hardly anyone used & even those that did didn't for long) you can't seriously compare D&D to honest-to-goodness wargames. Heck, look at that review that the original set got from a wargame perspective. The wargame bits were stripped bare to make room for the role-playing.

But the brand of role-playing that it had was not one of mechanics & rules. It was of player negotiation & referee judgement. So, there weren't a lot of role-playing mechanics & rules added, which can make it look like more of a wargame than it was.

Your not asking for D&D to become more of a role-playing game. You asking it to have more rules & mechanics governing role-playing.

Which is a fair point-of-view.

Same here. But I also grant (small) bonuses or penalties if the roleplaying was particularly convincing/unconvincing.

That's something that I've been trying to get away from. I don't want to be the judge of whose role-playing style is good & whose is bad. There's a fine line, however, between the approach & the delivery. I do my best to consider the approach & ignore the delivery.

The game should also punish those who try to "cheat", by letting their character have weaknesses where they themselves are strong, and then ignoring the charater's abilities in favour of their own. That's bad roleplaying.

That's exactly the kind of attitude I've been trying to eliminate from my table. For me, this hobby shouldn't be about punishing or judging a player's approach to role-playing. I mean, I know what you're saying, but--I guess--the more I try not to think in those terms, the more the problems you're talking about seem to disappear.

Maybe I'm just lucky & it is just because those problems were never there with my current group anyway.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

In my experience, you have the "bad DM" & the "not bad DM". The game with social rules is just as bad under the "bad DM" as the game without social rules. Likewise, the game without social rules is just as good under the "not bad DM" as the game with social rules.

I've never seen rules make a "bad DM" better. (Broken record time: Only maturity & experience can do that.) If you have an adequate-or-better DM & mature players, then you don't need rules to make him fair. And the "bad DM" evolves or gets replaced in short order.

But there is more than just bad and not bad DMs. There are bad DMs who just suck at it. Rules can reduce the pain (because even bad DMs often follow the rules, and the players get to kick some ass, until the DM pulls out the "big guns")
There are good DMs. If the rules are lacking, they will make up with plot, pacing and cool NPCs that characters can interact with.

But there is also a middle ground. These DMs know how to use the rules (most the time), but sometimes they don't know well enough how to resolve a specific situation without them, especially not in a fair manner. Sometimes they feel forced to ignore the characters action or render them useless because they don't know what should really happen, and if the things implied by the players will be balanced or fair in any way.

Social Rules also have one advantage. Those players that are simply not good at acting/social interactions will rarely take a lot of joy in encounters involving them. But once you use rules for these types of encounter, it suddenly becomes "just" another type of combat. It becomes a role-playing GAME, it's not not just role-playing (like you might do in a psychology course or a management seminar), and not just a game (like Monopoly or Poker).

 

[LostSoul]

In my experience, I have found that social conflict mechanics (maybe I should say non-combat) have really expanded the scope of play. I've seen a lot more political- and character-based action using games with social mechanics than ever before.

I think this is because those resolution systems give players the ability to affect those areas of the game. They don't have to worry, "Does the DM think that my ideas on how you forment a revolution will work?" or "Does the DM have the same ideas about interpersonal relationships that I do?" or "Does the DM have the same ideas as I do on how you most effectively run the political system in a kingdom?" or whatever. You can just roll the dice.

 

[Carpe DM]

Great. Grapple rules, but for talking.

I love complicated social encounters and politics precisely BECAUSE they are not the same kind of turn-based number crunching that makes an 18-second fight take three hours IRL.

Color me grumpy.

Carpe

 

[Kae'Yoss]

I'm not convinced it would be a net-gain for the hobby, though.

New players are always good.

Those who will quit the game because they don't like those rules (instead of just ignoring them, which is always easier than leave holes in the rules you have to patch if you want those rules) are no great loss.

But the brand of role-playing that it had was not one of mechanics & rules. It was of player negotiation & referee judgement. So, there weren't a lot of role-playing mechanics & rules added, which can make it look like more of a wargame than it was.

You can't really praise a game for things it doesn't support. Saying that you should roleplay in a book is not the same as supporting roleplay.

That's exactly the kind of attitude I've been trying to eliminate from my table. For me, this hobby shouldn't be about punishing or judging a player's approach to role-playing.

So you think it's alright that a guy who can talk straight is able to have a character who is a great diplomat even though he doesn't put any of his character's resources into into things that would support it. That way, his character will be a combat machine and master diplomat. The shy guy, on the other hand, doesn't have a chance to play a decent diplomat (because you ignore skills like diplomacy - or if you do use them half-heartedly, he will be able to have diplomatical skills only at the expense of his combat ability). Now, that shy guy might happen to be a crack shot in real life, but he doesn't get to use that skill in the game.

I think the game should not punish anyone for real-world skills or lack thereoff, and neither should they be allowed to ignore some rules and have more powerful characters because of those skills.

I also think that if someone wants to play a character who has certain abilities, the character's stats should reflect them.

 

[buzz]

Great. Grapple rules, but for talking.

I love complicated social encounters and politics precisely BECAUSE they are not the same kind of turn-based number crunching that makes an 18-second fight take three hours IRL.

Color me grumpy.

FWIW, I have never seen a set of decent social combat rules that even remotely resembled this. Even BW's comparatively elaborate Duel of Wits felt absolutely, positively, nothing like a typical long, drawn out D&D or HERO combat.

Writing off social mechanics without examining or playing RPGs that use them well is, IMO, like wincing at a flavor of ice cream you've never tasted.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Writing off social mechanics without examining or playing RPGs that use them well is, IMO, like wincing at a flavor of ice cream you've never tasted.

Bad Example!