Social Skills, starting to bug me.

[Balesir]

Try to help me wrap my head around your frustration with one of the traditional aspects of roleplaying games and your desire to jettison it, as well as helping me understand what constitutes roleplaying in your eyes and what roleplaying you wish to include to replace what you wish to eject. Because, honestly, I'm seeing a number of folks speaking in similar terms over the years but they tend to conflate their terms. They also tend to want to replace roleplaying aspects with other game aspects (like rolling dice), which is all well and good for the sake of gaming (though not for roleplay gaming) and having fun, but at some point when you've removed much, most, or all of the roleplaying, isn't it just a good idea to not call it a roleplaying game anymore? Don't get me wrong, I have fun with many styles of gameplay, I just tend to use rules that focus prmarily on the style of gameplay I am interested in exploring at that time. So, tell me more about this frustration you feel with having a GM be your conduit to an RPG setting versus getting on with it and preferring that the dice be what gives you your information on how to make your next move in the game you're calling a roleplaying game.

I share your frustration with the diffuse notion of what, exactly, "roleplaying" is, but I don't think you have offered any clear definition of it from your point of view, to be honest. This is a very common stumbling block; I have started a new thread here to discuss it. If we can keep it civil, I think it might be useful

 

[S'mon]

But do you know that every time you were uncertain about the results it was due to mitigating circumstances and that you were accurately assessing your own abilities with the same precision a player gets from knowing die results?.

Near enough, yeah. A player who rolls 48% on a d100 knows they did average-ish or just below, in regard to their typical performance, that's close enough. They don't necessarily know whether they needed a 45 or a 50 to succeed.

 

[Hussar]

Removing the roleplaying doesn't make you a better GM, it just makes you a GM of a game with less or no roleplaying.





No. There are two components to the term roleplaying game. However, mechanics can exist without dice being in front of the eyes of the players. The interface with the GM, no matter whether there are dice randomizing things behind the scenes or not, are what constitute the roleplaying. When you substitute dice rolling for that interaction, you strip away some of the roleplaying. When you completely replace the interaction with dice rolling and no more interface than mere exposition, then the game becomes devoid of roleplaying.

I was thinking about this thread on my break at work and I was going through, in my head, all the games I've played over the past three decades. I'm not a huge gaming whore, but, I've hopped a few systems.

And, funnily enough, other than AD&D, not a single system that I can think of doesn't have social resolution mechanics. I played the 007 RPG back in the very early 80's and it had rules for seduction and other interactions based on skills. GURPS has always had social mechanics. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangenesses (another system we played quite a lot of) has things like Fast Talk skill and whatnot. Even rules light systems like Star Frontiers had social resolution mechanics.

As far as I can think, only AD&D doesn't.

But, apparently, every single system out there that isn't AD&D is bereft of role play or heading in that direction. Really? You want to argue that Vampire The Masquerade is less of a roleplaying focused game than AD&D because VtM has social resolution mechanics? That's the argument you want to make?

Look, I get that you like freeforming. I totally respect that. It's not for me, but, hey, whatever floats your boat. But, if the metric of a roleplaying game is whether or not it free forms "role play", count me out. I have zero interest in free forming anymore. I find it frustrating and boring. I WANT social interaction mechanics. I want social interaction mechanics that are as robust and detailed as the combat mechanics.

I want to take the idea that you are only roleplaying if you are freeforming and drop it into a deep dark hole.

But, then again, if I actually did that, I'd be just as guilty as onetruewayism as MarkCMG, so, I guess I can live with people freeforming. Not to my taste, but, hey, that's groovy.

I have long thought it was utterly mind boggling that a game would have longer rules for determining who goes first in combat than it does social interaction mechanics. To me, that's ass backward. If you want the game to be about something, the mechanics should reflect what the game is about. If your game has no social resolution mechanics, it's not about social interaction.

I can free form role play in Monopoly, but that doesn't make Monopoly a good RPG. For a game to be able to claim to be about something, it actually has to have some set of rules governing that something.

Otherwise, how do you like the mechanics for starship combat in AD&D? I think they're freaking fantastic.

 

[Mark CMG]

But, apparently, every single system out there that isn't AD&D is bereft of role play or heading in that direction. Really?

Many games have less roleplaying than other games? And a game with no roleplaying at all is not really a roleplaying game? What did you want me to say that you can next paraphrase incorrectly? I'm unsure how to post to most suitably allow you to misinterpret me. Look, if you want the dice to dictate the results of your gaming actions and have more limited facilitator control over the consequences, more power to you. But the less first person interaction you have, and the more metagame awareness you have of the setting and the consequences of your player character actions, the less you will be roleplaying to explore the virtual environment. If it gets to the point that you are not interfacing with the game in anything but a third person manner, and all of the actions and consequences are dictated by dice rolls, you might as well be boardgaming or wargaming as there isn't really roleplaying any longer.

 

[chaochou]

I was thinking about this thread on my break at work and I was going through, in my head, all the games I've played over the past three decades. I'm not a huge gaming whore, but, I've hopped a few systems.

<snip> lot of other stuff...

I've read the posts by [MENTION=10479]Mark CMG[/MENTION], and to be fair I think there's an element of miscommunication here.

I can't speak for him (and don't play in anything like his style, with hidden dice rolls and all that) but in my reading his point is simply that for something to be roleplaying you have to engage the fiction before the mechanics.

"I roll diplomacy against the Cardinal" doesn't establish anything in the fiction, so I (as GM or another player) have no idea what it means or what's happening in the scene - it could be a grand speech, a lunch invitation, an offer to rid the area of heretics, a compliment on his fetching crimson slippers.... we don't know what I'm doing or what I want.

I don't think it's being suggested that Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel or V:tM aren't roleplaying games by virtue of their systems. I think it's being argued that 'roleplaying' requires direct input into the fiction in order to activate the mechanics, whatever the system.

I love games with really strong social mechanics, btw, like Burning Wheel and Apocalypse World. But I can see an argument that if I just say "I roll diplomacy against the Cardinal" I'm not (at that moment) roleplaying - irrespective of the system - because I'm trying to engage the mechanics without engaging the gameworld.

 

[Janx]

[MENTION=1465]Li Shenron[/MENTION]'s singer/songwriter metaphor seems apt.

I'm a bit lost on where Mark and Hussar are going with this though.

Generally, I've always assumed the GM has the right to secretly roll for things where the outcome may not be fully realized by the PC. Searches, Stealth checks and social skills usually fall into this bucket.

As such, I'm not sure where Hussar thinks the player would get to know if he failed his Diplomacy check by any measure than how the GM portrays his reaction.

On the other side of the street, Mark's definition of roleplaying might be restricted to speaking in character. Or the quoted dialogue if roleplaying were a book.

I don't think that's quite broad enough. I'm pretty sure, even in a novel, there's just as much characterization in the non-quoted stuff. It may be roleplaying to say:
I snarl back at the king that he won't ever see his daughter again.

No quoted text. Not speaking in character. Describing one's actions, tone and intent does not require actually saying the words your PC says.

 

[Janx]

[MENTION=1465]Li Shenron[/MENTION]'s singer/songwriter metaphor seems apt.

I'm a bit lost on where Mark and Hussar are going with this though.

Generally, I've always assumed the GM has the right to secretly roll for things where the outcome may not be fully realized by the PC. Searches, Stealth checks and social skills usually fall into this bucket.

As such, I'm not sure where Hussar thinks the player would get to know if he failed his Diplomacy check by any measure than how the GM portrays his reaction.

On the other side of the street, Mark's definition of roleplaying might be restricted to speaking in character. Or the quoted dialogue if roleplaying were a book.

I don't think that's quite broad enough. I'm pretty sure, even in a novel, there's just as much characterization in the non-quoted stuff. It may be roleplaying to say:
I snarl back at the king that he won't ever see his daughter again.

No quoted text. Not speaking in character. Describing one's actions, tone and intent does not require actually saying the words your PC says.

 

[Mark CMG]

On the other side of the street, Mark's definition of roleplaying might be restricted to speaking in character. Or the quoted dialogue if roleplaying were a book.

I don't think that's quite broad enough. I'm pretty sure, even in a novel, there's just as much characterization in the non-quoted stuff. It may be roleplaying to say:
I snarl back at the king that he won't ever see his daughter again.

No quoted text. Not speaking in character. Describing one's actions, tone and intent does not require actually saying the words your PC says.

No definition I've ever given of roleplaying is restricted to dialogue. Here's one from another thread. "From my perspective, roleplaying in tabletop roleplaying games, is the first person interaction by one or more players (through their characters), with a virtual setting, its inhabitants, and one another, by means of a facilitator who acts as the sensory conduit for the player characters. The players detail the actions of their characters with first person narrative and/or dialogue, the facilitator describes the consequences (perhaps introducing additional exposition and elements of conflict), and the process continues in like fashion." As I have also said above, third person narrative doesn't rise to the level of roleplaying. Here's a quick summary of third-person view that explains why this is not an in-character perspective. As it states -

In third-person narrative, it is necessary that the narrator be merely an unspecified entity or uninvolved person that conveys the story, but not a character of any kind within the story being told.

While that is a literary definition, it plays well with the concept of roleplaying as it pertains to tabletop roleplaying games. The two examples you give in the other thread are both first person, one dialogue and the other narrative, and both are examples of roleplaying in a tabletop roleplaying game.

 

[Hussar]

"I roll diplomacy against the Cardinal" doesn't establish anything in the fiction, so I (as GM or another player) have no idea what it means or what's happening in the scene - it could be a grand speech, a lunch invitation, an offer to rid the area of heretics, a compliment on his fetching crimson slippers.... we don't know what I'm doing or what I want.

But, no one, least of all me, is advocating that. We all agree that that is bad play. Heck, go back a couple of pages and you'll see me questioning if that actually has come up in play for people or if it's more a hypothetical. I've certainly never seen it although, I will entertain the notion that others have.

The way I play, the player makes the pitch, the dice get rolled and the resolution determined. I prefer a mechanical framework for that. From what MarkCMG has been saying, he prefers a free form method. That's fine. I'm not the one claiming that his way isn't really role playing.

However, he has, repeatedly, stated that a mechanical method for resolving social interactions isn't role playing. That I completely disagree with. Even in this quote:

In third-person narrative, it is necessary that the narrator be merely an unspecified entity or uninvolved person that conveys the story, but not a character of any kind within the story being told.

basically says that any time you give authorial control to the players, you're no longer role playing. It's certainly one point of view of roleplaying. Just not one I ascribe to. The idea that players must always be in first person to be role playing is something I will not agree with.

 

[Eric Tolle]

So for the people who are advocating systemless roleplaying of social skills, why can't I do the same with other skills? I've been through scouting- why can't I just describe my survival , and tracking instead of getting a social skill? I've learned how to pick locks, so why can't I just describe the process of picking a lock? If I have the skill, why should my character have it?

I just see social skills being subjected to a strange double standard that doesn't apply to other skills, and I think a good part of the reason is the belief that social skills don't really exist.