D&D General Social Pillar Mechanics: Where do you stand?

[Reynard]

......then why do we call it "spotlight balance"?

"Game balance" and "spotlight balance" are two different things.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

D&D still has a lot of crappy things in it yet to be discharged. There is a reason it was long a dudes-only thing: women weren't welcome.

I am sure it sadly has been so in many places. I have never seen this though. Our tabletop RPG circles heavily overlapped with LARP circles, and tended to be rather gender diverse.

I still vividly remember the misogynistic sludge spewed about how dragonborn shouldn't have breasts. Despite the fact that, as far as I can tell, that was essentially always coming from men...and the women I know who play D&D wouldn't let you take away their dragonborn massive tracts of land except over their cold, dead bodies.

That certainly is a rather unique spin of that discussion. I guess we need boobs on thri-kreens and tortles too to avoid this rampant misogyny...

Edit: To be perfectly clear, I am pretty sure the 5e designers removed this characteristic from the dragonborn in attempt to be less misogynistic, as giving such obvious feature of mammalian sexual dimorphism to a non-mammal might come across as unnecessary sexualisation. And I don't think it is cool to imply that people who made that decisions or those who agree with them are motivated by misogyny, as it is far more likely that opposite is the case.

 

[payn]

I'll just throw this out here.

For some people, social pillar is one where they actually role play as it leaves most room to free form. Robust mechanics for social interactions is viewed as gamefication. Combat itself is already gamefied pillar. It's pretty much all mechanics dependant with little room for free forming. Turning social pillar into social combat with robust mechanical sub system where you can settle everything via dice or character abilities, just makes it more like co operative board game. And to be honest, some old adventures are pretty much boardgames (looking at you Tomb of Horrors).

So, this seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back for you? Gamification is fine and not co-op board game until it crosses an arbitrary line. Go straight to Tomb of Horrors. How charitable.

 

[Shardstone]

IME, this can also be mitigated by having social encounters that don't hinge on success or failure. Just like some fun stuff to do with NPCs in downtime or as part of a larger scene. That let's people who want to do direct RP get it in even if they aren't mechanically optimal to deal with mechanically poised situations.

Also, ancient DM secret: steal from other media. The group needs to do a fancy thing? The face dolls everyone else and gives them a crash etiquette lesson while the DM quietly reduces the DCs and comes up for reasons why all the noble ladies might find it charming when the barbarian drinks wine straight from the carafe and the local ruler is actually tired of courtly manners and finds the awkward nerdy wizard intriguing.

This is the way. The system guides play, but it doesn't determine play. Play includes ideas you come up with on the spot, including scenes and scene adjustments.

 

[Corinnguard]

I still don't know how players always get the face in position to do the talking, seems very much outside my play experience. My 10 charisma fighter would often be the one rolling persuasion checks just because I was the one who came up with something to say. That's not to say that the rogue with high interaction skills didn't often get his social skills rolling, but the organic play experience meant anyone could be rolling those checks.

The rest of the party volunteered you for the job? In my role-playing group we have one player whose characters have always been the leader of the party. Not because they asked for the job of team leader or because someone in a position of authority picked them to lead, it just happened. We simply found our characters following his character around. His characters were good leaders. They listened to what the rest of the party had to say about certain things, offered up their own thoughts, and then got the group to reach some kind of consensus.

His character along with another character were the party faces.

 

[Shardstone]

I just read the Influence system for PF2E and its really sick. I'm not sure why people would be opposed to something like this. Its a round-based social structure, yes, but the mechanics and how it works seem to create natural conversations and enable unexpected RP moments. It's kind of silly that mechanics are so easily disregarded when they're often giving people exactly what they want.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Edit: To be perfectly clear, I am pretty sure the 5e designers removed this characteristic from the dragonborn in attempt to be less misogynistic, as giving such obvious feature of mammalian sexual dimorphism to a non-mammal might come across as unnecessary sexualisation. And I don't think it is cool to imply that people who made that decisions or those who agree with them are motivated by misogyny, as it is far more likely that opposite is the case.

They're talking about the edition war era discourse on the design which was.... staggeringly gross.

 

[Tonguez]

I'll just throw this out here.

For some people, social pillar is one where they actually role play as it leaves most room to free form. Robust mechanics for social interactions is viewed as gamefication. Combat itself is already gamefied pillar. It's pretty much all mechanics dependant with little room for free forming. Turning social pillar into social combat with robust mechanical sub system where you can settle everything via dice or character abilities, just makes it more like co operative board game. And to be honest, some old adventures are pretty much boardgames (looking at you Tomb of Horrors).

I’m not sure what the dichotomy is, RPGs are shared Storytelling, not improv theatre.
I love freeform play too, I encourage it, but that doesnt mean I get upset by rules (though I do prefer narrative focussed games like FATE). It is fully possible to roleplay during combat, actively narrating your interactions and doing in character dialogue, as much as it is possible to roleplay in any other aspect of the game, the DM can still mediate, and dice as a randomiser provides a prompt for further roleplaying, it doesn't prevent it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I’m not sure what the dichotomy is, RPGs are shared Storytelling, not improv theatre.
I love freeform play too, I encourage it, but that doesnt mean I get upset by rules (though I do prefer narrative focussed games like FATE). It is fully possible to roleplay during combat, actively narrating your interactions and doing in character dialogue, as much as it is possible to roleplay in any other aspect of the game, the DM can still mediate, and dice as a randomiser provides a prompt for further roleplaying, it doesn't prevent it.

I mean, not to drag out the emergent narrative vs. plotted narrative horse, but improv theatre is absolutely a part of a lot of shared storytelling at a lot of D&D tables, and would be missed very deeply if it were to vanish. Which isn't to say there can't be rules - improv works well with simple rules that allow good riffing. It's just that prompts like random tables and personality traits tend to work better than a usage of resources to achieve a victory.

One thing that I posit that a lot of games miss about the appeal of D&D is that a more freeform social pillar scratches a different itch than the more dice and math heavy combat pillar, and that this is a virtue, not a gap that detailed mechanics should step into. It works different brain parts, it brings different players to the fore, it works as a pacing mechanism and as a method of play that is more open-ended and less constrained than the mechanics-heavy combat. If you weave a lot of mechanics in there, you weaken that appeal and produce a more homogenous, less varied play experience.

Which isn't to say that social mechanics need to be absent or that certain classes or archetypes couldn't plug into some mechanics and benefit from that. One of my gripes about D&D for the last few editions is that everyone gets cool combat abilities in their class, but relatively few cool things to do outside of combat (even spellcasters are constrained on the social pillar, 'cuz no one trusts the dude casting spells at the party). 5e does a bit better than 3e/4e in this regard, but only a bit, really.

But the shape of social mechanics needs to look different than the shape of combat mechanics. It's not about expending resources to achieve a victory, it's more about introducing character traits and personal props and then just kind of seeing what happens when they all bounce together. More like playing with dolls. Describe what you're wearing. Describe how you sound. Even if your character is BAD at the social mechanics, the fun of play is still in describing how you are bad and what happens because you're bad. If I play a real rude boy, then farting in the Chancellor's face is a successful moment of social interaction, even if it means the Chancellor refuses to speak to us, because it means I impacted the story in a powerful way. Heck, the player agency in D&D's traditional social play is huge! Bigger than in any well-balanced tactical fight!

This is part of why one of my favorite social mechanics that 5e brought to D&D is that playing your Flaw could (should, IMO!) grant you a free Advantage. Be an idiot, make interesting problems, have a cookie for it.

Bad social mechanics look more like...Chaotic Stupid, or Lawful Jerk, or Kender stealing from party members, or paladins in the party fighting thieves in the party, or "girlfriend classes", or thinly veiled racism given a fantasy coat of paint, or Wandering Harlot tables. Those are the kinds of things that have historically broken the social pillar in D&D, because they can turn playing your character into a bad experience.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I am sure it sadly has been so in many places. I have never seen this though. Our tabletop RPG circles heavily overlapped with LARP circles, and tended to be rather gender diverse.


That certainly is a rather unique spin of that discussion. I guess we need boobs on thri-kreens and tortles too to avoid this rampant misogyny...

Edit: To be perfectly clear, I am pretty sure the 5e designers removed this characteristic from the dragonborn in attempt to be less misogynistic, as giving such obvious feature of mammalian sexual dimorphism to a non-mammal might come across as unnecessary sexualisation. And I don't think it is cool to imply that people who made that decisions or those who agree with them are motivated by misogyny, as it is far more likely that opposite is the case.

Look man, all I can say is what I saw. I saw a lot of dudes screeching about how utterly stupid it is for dragonborn to have mammary glands due to laying eggs (even though there are literal real world animals that have mammary glands and lay eggs, they're called monotremes), and never once saw a single woman complain about it, but saw and spoke to several who loved that they finally had a race that more resembled them (as dragonborn women tend to be curvaceous and/or well-muscled, without needing to be under five feet tall), and thus felt really excluded by all these dudes declaring what women should or shouldn't be.

I just think this sort of choice should...you know...be one primarily driven by what female fans prefer. Not driven by the mostly-male development team deciding one way or the other. Especially because (explicitly!) dragonborn are a divine creation, not an evolved species, so the alleged "realism" argument is and always has been bunk. Fiction is inherently creationist.