Social Powers?

[Fallen Seraph]

I was thinking about this last night, and was wondering what people on EnWorld would think.

So far we have seen in the Ampersand: Sneak Attack article; Combat and Utility Powers. We also know that there will be a "Social Combat Mechanic". This has got me thinking of perhaps another Power not shown in the article in the form of Social Powers.

While normal Social Combat would follow normal means of skill-based roleplaying, ie: Bluff vs. Sense Motive. Just like normal Combat would be Attack vs. AC.

There could also be special "At-Will", "Per-Encounter", or "Per-Day" Social Powers. Most likely these would follow under the above premise of Skill vs. Skill but with specific affects in place.

Now while it may seem odd for Social Powers to fall under the will, encounter, day formula.

I could foresee it being that will ones are very low-key, low-tension powers that can be easily done without any kind of worry/pre-development in the social encounter.

Encounter ones would be some where, there is a higher chance of failure causing serious harm in that social encounter thus amping up the tension and worry, ie: after done talking the PC would have to catch his breath because of how tense he had become.

Finally Day ones would be things that can make and break a alliance or possibly even cause the death of someone. This would be something so stressful and well plain-scary to do that you would feel absolutely exhausted afterwards.

As for the actual Powers here are a couple I envisioned off the top of my head:

Fame: Per Encounter
You may once per-encounter use your Bluff + Charisma to roll vs. Knowledge (Social???) or Streetwise.
If Succeed: They believe you are the famous individual you proclaim you are and act accordingly.
If Failed: They mistrust you, and increase their DC by 5 when being Bluffed.

Carouse a Fight: At Will
You may at will cause tensions to flare between two parties. Roll Intimidate + Insight vs. both parties Insight + Sense Motive.
If Succeed: If one rolls higher then 5 above opponent roll or succeeds 5 times in a row, they cause a fight to start between parties.
If Failed: Both parties view you hostilily.

Turn Ally: Per-Day
You may cause a NPC to turn against his allies. Roll Bluff + Insight vs. Sense Motive + Will.
If Succeed: NPC will view his former allies as enemies.
If Failed: He will view you hostilily as well as his allies.

Now... These may not be the best made powers, or make the most sense in terms of what is rolled. Since I am not that good at coming up with actual in-game mechanics, but I hope the idea comes across clearly enough.

I hope to hear what you think of such a idea.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

For me, social-oriented powers fall into the catergory of "hope there will be, doubt there will be". I'd really like to see them, but I'll be really surprised if I do.

 

[Tusz]

For me, social-oriented powers fall into the catergory of "hope there will be, doubt there will be". I'd really like to see them, but I'll be really surprised if I do.

This is pretty much my feeling. They'd be more of a nice side bonus than anything.

 

[WyzardWhately]

I have hugely high hopes that there will be social powers. A big chunk of one of a Burning Wheel campaign I played in revolved around the lasting impact of pulling out the right social skill at the right time - we had collected some dirt on a Noble adversary, outmaneuvered him behind the scenes, and the whole thing came to a climax with me rolling an incredible number of successes with my character's Ugly Truth skill, in the middle of a pre-wedding party. There were aftershocks we couldn't have imagined.

The natural results of this were a couple duels, one to the death, realignment of trade across the kingdom, one house being decimated, a small coup in the capital city, and numerous smaller conflicts.

That sort of courtroom drama, big reveal, impassioned speech, and huge reversal is exactly the kind of thing that should be supported with social powers, if that's the sort of thing a particular table is into.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

And here I was thinking that the idea of social powers be booed off the stage for being too "roll-playing not role-playing"

WyzardWhately I haven't played Burning Wheel so I wouldn't know this, so how are rolls done in that, are they simply skill rolls with specific affects, a combination of things or its own mechanic?

 

[Kunimatyu]

This sounds like the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a later DMG.

 

[kennew142]

We'll have to wait and see, since we've seen neither head nor hair of any non-combat related crunch in the preview material.

The designers have said that the whole social encounter system is optional. IMO this is a good thing. I like social skills, since they allow a player to play a character who is better at social interaction than he is. However, I do not like to do too much die rolling during RP encounters. I think that the dice detract from the role-playing elements of the game in ways that they do not detract from combat.

In 3e it seemed that every rp moment came down to a Diplomacy check. This skill rapidly became my least favorite mechanic in the game. I would be happy not to even have a social encounter system, unless it's more of a guideline than a die rolling system. I've never seen any mechanical system that can encourage good RP. Those tables that like it, will rp without a specialized system, while those that don't like rp won't be inclined to do it no matter what. JMO.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I wouldn't be fast to say PnP-groups that like roleplaying won't use a specific system given that one of the THE PnP's specifically catering to roleplayers/social situations is WoD and the social encounter mechanics is one of the most involved/important parts of the game.

 

[WyzardWhately]

And here I was thinking that the idea of social powers be booed off the stage for being too "roll-playing not role-playing"

WyzardWhately I haven't played Burning Wheel so I wouldn't know this, so how are rolls done in that, are they simply skill rolls with specific affects, a combination of things or its own mechanic?

The essentials: You roll a pool of D6s, 4+ is a success. You want to beat some number of successes, often determined by an opposed roll. The GM and player work out the difficulty and the stakes beforehand, so it's pretty flexible; you can attempt to get any end result you like, with the difficulty going up by how improbable it is. I was in this case attempting to discredit and humiliate this enemy noble. I got some bonus dice from what our investigations had uncovered.

There's actually an entire system for Duels of Wits, which is pretty useful for stuff like courtroom dramas, debates, fomenting rebellion, and anything else you want to turn into a dramatic and extended back-and-forth between antagonists. In this specific case, it was just going to be one speech to get the evidence out there in front of everyone at the dinner table (that is, all the NPCs at the party, not us players), and tell the bad guy how bad we'd screwed him already. So, the GM just set a number of successes I needed (it was a fairly difficult task, considering our relative social stations), and I happened to roll my socks off.

So, to sum up an answer to your question: There are specific mechanics for debates, fighting, etc. You can also turn almost any task into an ad hoc skill check by just working out what the PC is trying to accomplish, the skill to use, and setting a difficulty. Humiliating the crap out of someone and airing their dirty laundry is a very logical extension of a skill called "Ugly Truth," so in this case the GM let me use it to destroy someone's social standing.

[There's a lot of neat little innovations in BW, but this isn't really the place for it. If you're interested, shoot me a PM, I can point you toward some reviews and so forth. It's controversial, but easily one of my favorite RPGs ever.]

I really personally disagree with the assertion that having social mechanics leads to "roll-playing." Firstly, that term gets thrown around too much, and is often used as a label to dismiss arguments rather than address them. Secondly, what I have noticed is that it's mostly the people who like to play social characters who flock to social-fu type mechanics. Why? Because they want to have the same kind of in-game power that the combat monkeys have. If this guy's immense Swordery skill will let him remove your character from the game (by killing you), then it's not too much to ask that the other guy, who spent all his points in Drama Queen should be able to turn your allies against you.

And I think that holds up outside of intra-party conflict, as well. If you are going to spend your character's resources on different abilities, those abilities should give you at least a comparable amount of power over the course of events in the game world. And I personally find GM Fiat a much less satisfying solution.

That is, the sword guy would find it pretty disappointing if he was told he didn't have the option of whacking an NPC, or if he tried that the guy was invulnerable to weapons for no good reason. I want to have similar amounts of privilege granted to social skills. If not, the social skills on my sheet are only as valuable as the GM feels them to be at that time. And I like having a game system in place so that I don't always have to negotiate that out.

Now, clearly not everyone agrees with me, so it's a good thing that WotC is aiming for these mechanics to be ignorable. But I want to use them because my experience in playing social characters is enhanced by having the same kind of system validation that combat characters already have.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

For me, social-oriented powers fall into the catergory of "hope there will be, doubt there will be". I'd really like to see them, but I'll be really surprised if I do.

Honestly, I do think there will be no "social powers" in the game. At least not if they are competing with combat powers. It just doesn't work well.
Instead of charisma as "dump stat" you get "dump powers" - nobody is taking those powers unless he has a very special reason to do so.

There is still a slight change that it's possible - maybe power learning is "siloed" - one level, you gain combat powers, one level, you gain non-combat powers. In that case it will work.

I still trust their promise that there will be a social encounter system, but it will probably not rely on powers. I think it will work well, but it will lack the depth of combat.


I hope that a game like a 4E based D20 Modern will focus more efforts in providing in-depth rules for non-combat activities. But in the end, maybe even that won't happen.

One of the important goals of 4E is that every character gets to contribute something meaningful - even critical - to combat. You can't really make a character that is useless there. D&D always will have a lot of combats, so the goal is - in my view - worthy. If combat is as tactically complex as it at least since D&D 3rd edition, this just must be done. Combat takes too long to not have every PC (and therefor his player) engaged in it.


The problem might be to extend this philosophy to other areas. Social encounters, Research and similar things. It's very hard to make it reasonable for every character to contribute in each of it. And if you don't that, you have a problem of the wandering spot-light - in combat, it wanders turn by turn, and pretty quick. That's nice and works well.
But if only one or two characters of five are engaged in a social encounter, the spotlight can never turn to the other 3 during this time. You can try to switch to whatever stuff these 3 guys are doing, but that requires a lot of multi-tasking, since the scenes are so different - try switching from a romantic interlude to characters securing evidence on a murder scene and a character interrogating a suspect. And keeping every detail you wanted to describe the PC in mind. So you usually end up with a slowly wandering spot-light. And sometimes you might have less scenes for a certain type of character, so there is an imbalance of spotlight for a whole session - this can really hurt the enjoyment of the game for those neglected.

It remains to be seen if the WotC designers can address the unique challenges of "non-combat"-encounters as well as they can for combat encounters.