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

[Incenjucar]

I think when D&D players talk "systems," we can switch quickly to "things like combat and skill checks!" and miss the unique kind of play found in the social pillar.

IMO, a system that supports social play shouldn't be like combat. It shouldn't be like rolling dice and adding and subtracting modifiers. Maybe some of those elements are in play, but that is not the "core mechanic" of social play.

The core mechanic of social play is player performance. I don't mean skill, I mean in like the acting sense. Talking in a funny voice. Using body language. Making in-character choices that have impact on the story being told at the table. Making your PC come alive. Participating in a shared bit of nerdy improv.

Systems in that light are systems that support the player performance. Not systems that bypass it.

I get that not every D&D player is going to be strong in that pillar, just like not every D&D player is good at combat optimization or at puzzle solving. That's OK, and one of the areas that well-designed systems can really help with, just as they do in combat (where things like "no trap options" enable different skill levels to play characters of similar power). It's OK if not everyone can contribute to every pillar with identical effectiveness. In fact, I've seen some players bounce off of D&D because of the combat focus, because those systems are so demanding and so precise!

To really drill down to the micro level, system support for performative play means empowering players to make decisions about what their character does, and empowering DMs to solicit those decisions and to use them as the building block for how the game reacts to that decision.

Like, Alignment. It's definitely got its issues, but as a gameplay rule, it's a great social system. It gives you a simple set of descriptors and a dynamic of how they interact. In elder editions, race was also a bit of a social system (reaction tables!). The idea of awarding a free advantage for playing your flaw is a pretty good social system.

"Insult. DC 15 Charisma check or take 1d6 social damage" isn't as great of a social system, since it bypasses the kind of delight the social pillar adds to the game.

I feel player performance should be a fun extra. I don't want my real life advantages to overshadow someone who lacks those advantages.

It's like if I was able to use my boxing training as a way to win PC duels.

There are avenues for drama kids and improv experts to compete, but I don't enjoy those skills replacing character builds in RPGs.

 

[Lanefan]

I agree. There seems to be a deliberately obtuse reading of this topic where folks simply assume you either completely freeform role play or the dice decide everything entirely with nothing in between.

If the dice can take the last half-hour of roleplay and chuck it out by giving a different result than the roleplay would suggest, that would seem to make roleplaying redundant.

Flip side: if the dice cannot force a result, what's the point in using them?

So yes, in the end it does come down to all or nothing.

 

[Lanefan]

People do that regardless. "I roll persuasion on the guard" is something you hear all the time. Ideally this is something I mean, people roleplay with and around the game rules everywhere else. The social pillar is not special in that regard, IMO.

Ideally this is something you would hear no more than exactly once at any given table, because the DM would smack it down hard enough that no player would dare try it again.

 

[Lanefan]

The "main point" of RPGs to me is the agency they provide that other games don't and can't.

And that agency is expressed almost entirely through - and as - your character.

Further, a large part of that agency comes from being able to actually say what your character is saying, in that practicality dictates we can't often do what our characters are doing.

 

[Lanefan]

I will always advocate for systems over player skill.

Don't agree. Why? Because...

I should never be able to make Int and Cha dump stats and then get to use my decades of D&D experience and social development to make up for them.

...a key part of player skill is to be willing and able to intentionally roleplay as being unintelligent and-or boorish and-or slow etc. etc. as appropriate to the dumped stat.

A player who doesn't do this is IMO playing in bad faith.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Ideally this is something you would hear no more than exactly once at any given table, because the DM would smack it down hard enough that no player would dare try it again.

And this is how you keep people from joining the hobby and the hobby from growing.

'Smacking down' an honest attempt to engage at one's level of comfort is the kind of thing that should be quietly taken aside and told we don't do that anymore.

 

[Incenjucar]

Don't agree. Why? Because...

...a key part of player skill is to be willing and able to intentionally roleplay as being unintelligent and-or boorish and-or slow etc. etc. as appropriate to the dumped stat.

A player who doesn't do this is IMO playing in bad faith.

I don't really want player skill to be expected like this. I like roleplaying games as an equalizer. I want the shy, socially inept college kid to have the same success as the fifty year old dramatist at the same table.

 

[mamba]

Don't agree. Why? Because...

that is not really a disagreement though, it just means you think a player doing it is not roleplaying properly on top of the roleplaying not being the deciding factor

 

[Corinnguard]

WotC isn't sending book-ninjas to assassinate you for your impertinent refusal to use that system.

Now if these book-ninjas were from a public or private library and the books you had borrowed from them were really overdue, then you would really need to worry about them wanting to assassinate you.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If the dice can take the last half-hour of roleplay and chuck it out by giving a different result than the roleplay would suggest, that would seem to make roleplaying redundant.

Flip side: if the dice cannot force a result, what's the point in using them?

So yes, in the end it does come down to all or nothing.

Not at all.

The points of using dice (or any other randomness) are quite obvious:

1. To create tension; until dice are rolled, players don't know for sure what will actually happen. Note "for sure."
2. To prevent stale gameplay due to overuse of reliable patterns ("Standard Operating Procedures" etc.)
3. To allow for degrees of success, not binary pass/fail (e.g. ratios of success to fails in an SC, PbtA-like success ranges, etc.)
4. Opening design space, e.g. coordination (ally buffs), rerolls (good or bad), Ad/Dis, etc. More stuff to sink your teeth into.

There may be more, but these are the obvious ones. If you don't want dice to make roleplaying redundant, my best advice is...don't? Like just don't do that. If someone rolls and fails, turn it into a spur to action, leverage how they roleplayed and why, turn their move against them, etc.

To put it in a different way: Does success not also invalidate roleplay? They could have just rolled a die and been told they get what they want. But I assume you don't do that; instead, success means they did what they set out to do, which may be a mixed bag of their plan was poor or their word choice was unwise or (etc., etc.) In the worst cases (though I would try to diegetically alert the player about this), we wind up with that delightful Windows error meme, "Task failed successfully."

Attack rolls don't invalidate battle strategy, be it clever or foolish. They do reveal whether you achieved everything you set out to do in the way you hoped it would happen, but that's not the same thing, and one missed attack roll does not collapse the whole combat.

Why should a meatier social system, that goes behind "DM says", be any different?