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

[Reynard]

PbtA games, for instance, encourage the players to simply state what they're doing and potentially trigger rolls when certain key points are rereached.

Broadly speaking, that's just how PbtA works. It's not specific to interactions. I am sure there are PbtA games that zoom in on intrigue or trials or whatever, though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Broadly speaking, that's just how PbtA works. It's not specific to interactions. I am sure there are PbtA games that zoom in on intrigue or trials or whatever, though.

Right, that's the whole PbtA thing, you kind of put a lens on what you want to look closely at by focusing your moves in that area. I mean, there's a bit more to it than that, but you are right, there's no 'social system' or 'combat system' generally speaking in these games.

 

[Tonguez]

How are these not normal conversations, or series of them? Perhaps a trial isn't, as that indeed has formal structure diegetically as well, but it also isn't something that comes up often enough to warrant a subsystem. (I literally cannot remember ever roleplaying a trial. Perhaps it has happened at some point over decades and I have forgotten.)

Courtly intrigue has unequal power relations and potentially dire consequences of making offense or social faux pas - thus would benefit from a system

Seduction actions could probably require a system to avoid potential awkwardness

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I admit im not educated on the rules of other editions and systems but how does a games rules ever prevent a GM from saying ‘yeah ok i think you said all the right things there I’m just going to waive making the roll/check/using whatever mechanic is meant to be used and auto succeed that one’?

Nothing, and such things used in moderation are in fact very good and helpful. (Good Skill Challenge rules absolutely should include such things.) But the critical bit is what I italicized: used in moderation. If you'll permit the turn of phrase, that's the exception which completes the rule.

By which I mean: No one argues that a foolish, bullheaded application of rules without context, or judgment, is somehow a wonderful and noble thing. And yet rules are still useful. How do we resolve this conflict? In exactly the same way as we explain why having tools is useful to a craft like carpentry, even though being confined to only doing the things your tools can do would be foolish and destructive to the craft. The mere existence of a tool does not mean that it must be used in every context. The fact that the tool is not appropriate to all contexts, and indeed may never get used in any of a variety of projects, emphatically does not mean that the tool is somehow bad, or wrong, or worthy of being gotten rid of.

Instead, well-made tools, tools that work well for what they're made to do, are a powerful aid. Instead of viewing the circular saw with suspicion and opposition because you don't absolutely need it, the carpenter looks at such a tool for what it will make easier to do, when it is useful to use it, and what ways it might enable new approaches she could not use before.

Rules are tools. They are made to do something. They can be made badly, like any tool, but that simply reminds us to demand well-made rules. They are not useful in every circumstance, and even when they might be used, other tools (or even no tools at all) may be the wiser choice. Rules cannot tell you when it's wisest to use any given rule. They can help you think about it, but you still have to do the thinking. That we can, and sometimes should, avoid using a particular rule does not mean the rule is worthless. It means that human decision-making is still important, even when there are rules.

So the question is no longer, "why do we have this if we don't always use it?" Instead, we should ask other things:
"What does this do for us? Is that worth doing?"
"How well does this do what it was made to do?"
"How easy is it to know when to use this, and when not to use it?"
"Are there other ways we could achieve the same ends?"
etc.

And when you start asking these questions formally--with measures and testing and actual analysis--you have begun the process of real, actual design, and not just being an auteur fiat declaring whatever you like.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Courtly intrigue has unequal power relations and potentially dire consequences of making offense or social faux pas - thus would benefit from a system

Seduction actions could probably require a system to avoid potential awkwardness

Indeed. In fact, looking over the (non-exhaustive) example list I gave earlier:

1. Legal proceedings, court cases, etc.
2. Complex negotiations (e.g. a trade treaty)
3. Persuading a powerful figure to give military or financial aid
4. Trying to break a cult (or other org) by revealing how the rank and file members have been lied to
5. Sleuthing while attending a social function (e.g. a masquerade ball)
6. An academic debate
7. Impressing someone with a stage performance of some kind
8. Working through intermediaries and proxies to request a face-to-face meeting
9. Leveraging the corruption of a political establishment against itself
10. Fomenting a revolution, starting a mutiny, or rallying a town to defend itself
11. Convincing an enemy force to switch sides and support your cause instead

1, 2, 3, 6, 8, and 9 are all things that involve, to one extent or another, some kind of formal system with which one is grappling. Many adventurers have, at some point, a need to interact with civic society, and civic society revolves around formal systems in all sorts of ways. Rules that can reflect that procedural, stepwise character would be useful at least some of the time.

3, 4, 7, 8, 10, and 11 involve things in the direction of your seduction example: they are a form of wooing, of trying to induce a change of belief or attitude in a subject, where their current attitude is pretty deeply-held for one reason or another. Getting someone to change their mind is very, very rarely a matter of just saying the one right thing that gets them on your side. It's a process, a dialogue one might say.

2, 3, 5, 6, 8, and 9 all involve some form of your first example with courtly intrigue, where there are serious risks involved with making the "wrong move" in the interaction. Yet, in such circumstances, there's almost always options for saving face, or deflecting, or otherwise rebounding from a mistake--and it's exactly that give-and-take where a structure can improve over mere "DM says."

 

[Voadam]

I am sure there are PbtA games that zoom in on intrigue or trials or whatever, though.

I have not read PtA stuff in depth but it looks like there are a bunch that involve focusing in on social stuff or integrating social stuff into adventuring.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians, sword fighting with repartee flirting and zingers to achieve romance.

Pasion de las Pasiones, full on telenovela roleplaying.

Monsterhearts involves high school secret love triangles and teenage angst as sexy monsters.

 

[Umbran]

No. It's just that the more mechanics there are, the more players(in my experience) rely on mechanics over roleplaying.

That may be due in large part to the form of mechanics in question.

D&D's exception-based design has many strengths, including having wide open space for designers to give us scads of flavorful and tactically interesting exceptions. But, in doing that they generally tie narrative to mechanics. If you want to trip an opponent, this is how you do it, and here are the effects. If you want to throw a ball of fire, here's the specific spell for it, and its effects. If you want to pick a lock, here's the mechanic, and so on. There's a specific exception for everything, and we know how each one works.

Until, of course, we don't have a specific exception for it - exception-based design does not encourage designers to give a lot of guidance on how to produce your own exceptions. Which means players don't know how what they want to do will work, and they cannot make an informed judgement on whether to try it. From the player's side, there's a lot of wisdom to sticking to the exceptions they know.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

From the player's side, there's a lot of wisdom to sticking to the exceptions they know.

Absolutely. Doubly so when the all-too-common attitude from a number of DMs seems to provide even further incentives for never touching anything actually creative with a 10' pole. Improvised plans are given high difficulty, weak rewards, serious costs for failure, terrible risks, requiring multiple rolls, etc.

The game already makes it difficult. Waaaaaay too many DMs--especially common, I find, among the "DM empowerment" crowd, or the ones who so bitterly complain about "player entitlement"--take a bad situation and make it that much worse.

 

[Umbran]

Absolutely. Doubly so when the all-too-common attitude from a number of DMs seems to provide even further incentives for never touching anything actually creative with a 10' pole. Improvised plans are given high difficulty, weak rewards, serious costs for failure, terrible risks, requiring multiple rolls, etc.

The GMs are, I expect, reacting to the same situation - they aren't given much guidance either, after all.

At the other end of the spectrum, are games without any real exceptions. In these, players know how to do pretty much whatever they can think of, in terms of the narrative, but the mechanical results are going to be pretty standardized -- the mechanics enable narrative, but are themselves uninteresting. Fate sits in this space, for example.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The GMs are, I expect, reacting to the same situation - they aren't given much guidance either, after all.

At the other end of the spectrum, are games without any real exceptions. In these, players know how to do pretty much whatever they can think of, in terms of the narrative, but the mechanical results are going to be pretty standardized -- the mechanics enable narrative, but are themselves uninteresting. Fate sits in this space, for example.

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'interesting'. Say, in DW, play should be interesting, but the game doesn't spend much on 'playing the system'. There's still some strategy though. Most of the focus is on the characters. I'd note that early D&D was not exactly a deeply complex game in that sense either.