The Game for Non-Gamers: (Forked from: Sexism in D&D)

[Ariosto]

Mechanics for social interaction ... oh, boy ...

That's a subtle matter.

The base idea of mechanics for romance is not a bad idea, any more than the base idea of mechanics for combat is a bad idea. They're both conflicts ...

A medieval courtly romance is a conflict -- between the adulterous lovers on one hand, and the spouse(s) and feudal obligations on the other. See, e.g., Tristan and Isolde or Guinevere and Lancelot. There can also be seductions with ulterior motives. More generally, though, people in love tend to be "on the same team", as it were; difficulties come not from internal opposition but from misunderstanding or external hindrances. Check a "chick flick" for the by-the-numbers.

I utterly loathe 4E skill challenges. There are almost certainly better (as I would think) ways to do an abstract, "brute force" resolution by the dice of any situation. I think the general approach is much better suited to a "narrative" than to a "role-playing" mode; it seems to me much more engaging when players set the stakes, or the stakes are being able as winner to take "authorial" control.

For what role playing means to me, the particulars matter more. Often, smooth going simply means knowing what to do (or not to do). That is usually best reflected in actual player knowledge. Is Sir Gavin mad about falconry? Does Dame Elsa think the only good rabbit is a cooked one, and go out of her way to pot the varmints? Perhaps Father Guillaume fancies himself a poet, and corners troubadors to "talk shop".

Characteristic/skill ratings can be a good way to determine how much information a player gets from a glossed-over undertaking such as "talking with the usual suspects". They can shift first impressions, and indicate ability to read or employ "body language" and other subtle cues. Personality traits and passions, a la Pendragon, can induce involuntary reactions even in player-characters; there can be within one person a conflict between virtue and vice, or between conflicting loyalties.

In most cases, though, the substance of a matter is not mere "fluff". To treat "game stats" -- rather than situational factors -- as the primary determinant of outcome is to my mind to get things backwards.

 

[LostSoul]

Mechanics for social interaction are only worth using when the result you get is better than what you would have had without using them, ie. freeform.

Good mechanics can do this.

edit:

In most cases, though, the substance of a matter is not mere "fluff". To treat a dice-roll as the primary determinant of outcome is to my mind to get things backwards.

Hell yeah.

 

[Jack7]

Actually I was making a point... Creating new classes aside from existing ones is IMHO rather patronizing. And that friends, is the quickest way to scare off female players. These things should be roleplaying considerations not actual classes.

I'm gonna reply here YSIM to your objections and concerns. Because I wanna expand a little bit about what you said and what this thread has made me think of. In regards to this kind of thing.

 

[Siran Dunmorgan]

It seems odd to me that no one here has mentioned the system that 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons already has for social interaction.

The rules regarding artifacts.

If one is interacting with a person, organization, or similar entity that can have an opinion of the character, the existing affinity rules provide a perfectly reasonable model for that interaction.

If one has, for example, an ongoing romance, is this not—effectively—identical to gaining affinity with an artifact? Or being rejected by it? Even the game-mechanical awards for each level of affinity are similar: being romantically associated with a lady of high station, for example, provides bonuses or penalties to skill checks when undertaking skill challenges associated with that lady's society.

It's not necessarily a model Dungeon Masters would want to do for every Non-Player Character with whom their players interact, but in the case of specific persons with whom the characters are expected to have ongoing relationships, it can effectively model the relationship, just as it does for artifacts.

I have not—yet—combined skill challenges with this system, where the skill challenge represents the initial acquisition of a romantic interest, e.g. success or failure in a skill challenge might indicate that one did or did not acquire a romantic interest at the Queen's Ball; pursuit of that interest is then handled by the affinity rules.

The ultimate goal of such a combined system is the playing out of something like the Showtime television series The Tudors, where the principal "artifact" with which the characters are associated is the King himself.

In the environment that I have in mind, the various out-of-court activities that alter one's affinity with court personalities are more traditional adventures, i.e. suppressing tribes of kobolds, goblins, or the occasional dragon, or retrieving items of interest. [1]

In-court "adventures" would indeed include things like building or beautifying palaces and houses, inviting famous artists to produce portraits of one's paramour, and so on: planting a hedge maze for the amusement of the Queen, for example, might provide a +2 to affinity with her.

These activities require expenditure of gold, of course, and may require expenditure of one's affinity with other personalities, i.e. "calling in a favor." The loss of wealth—which corresponds strongly to effectiveness at higher levels—is compensated by one's affinity with persons or organizations that have access to higher level equipment, e.g. holy weapons or symbols of the Church, famous weapons in the King's Armoury, or implements held in various personal collections. Note that this is not—from a rules perspective—notably different from acquiring different powers derived from a single artifact.

What's marvelous is that all of these rules and the means to adjudicate them already exist within the current rules set. Just consider—for example—the King and Queen as paragon-tier artifacts and go from there.

—Siran Dunmorgan


[1] This is different from The Tudors, in that out-of-court adventures in that setting generally involve assassinating the King's political opponents, putting restive but otherwise innocent peasants to the sword, locating attractive young women to catch the King's interest, and browbeating or bribing facile clergymen to agree with the King's position on marriage.

 

[I'm A Banana]

So, if romance, intrigue, guilds, fortress management are supposed to be an important part of the roleplaying experience, they should also have a mechanical representation.

For me, this also means it needs a certain degree of complexity. A single skill check is unsatisfying, there should be a decision making process involved, risks & rewards. Combat (a single one or a series of them) delivers that in spades. I think skill challenges* can also create some of that.

*) I notice that a lot of "new" skill challenges add limits and variations, like everyone has to contribute, or you can use a skill only a limited number of times, which forces you to make choices. That already adds some complexity, I think methods of expanding or losing opportunities to use skills might also be useful. For example, if you fail your first Bluff Check, you can no longer use the skill at all, but if you succeed at a particular knowledge check, you can open up uses for Diplomacy.

The basic framework of skill challenges ("get x successes before y failures") is quite solid. Where 4e kind of doesn't go far enough is that the structure is so loose -- and the opportunities for unique player contributions so scarce -- that there's not a lot of character diversity.

It's the "use almost any skill in almost any way" open-endedness that hurts it the most. Add this onto a skill system that is stripped bare to "adventuring-only skills" and given basically one difference between any two characters (either you have +5 or you don't), and there's not a lot of opportunity for unique character contributions.

There's potential there, really there is, but it needs some work to support more of a centralized campaign.

FFZ is currently toying with its own take on the matter, but even the FFZ challenge rules aren't really what I'd like to see in a D&D game (they're pretty OK for FFZ, where abstraction is easily par for the course and jobs are just skill sets, but not for D&D where your class is more of your character archetype). Still, those "options for trained people" are things I might port over to my 4e game.

In most cases, though, the substance of a matter is not mere "fluff". To treat "game stats" -- rather than situational factors -- as the primary determinant of outcome is to my mind to get things backwards.

See, I tend to think that this can be abstracted just like combat is abstracted. I don't specifically need to know that Sir Gavin is into falconry. I just need a way to represent how my character might know that. I don't specifically need to know how a pike pierces chainmail, I just need a way to represent how my character might know that.

I'm with you in thinking that 4e's skill challenge system doesn't represent that, but I do think that there are systems which can. The "Sir Gavin, you're into falconry!" line should come more as impromptu dialogue, like the "I stab him in the face with my pike!" comes up as combat spice. The details aren't important to the mechanics; they can be peppered in as flavor.

A dialogue system that requires you to have in-character/player knowledge of specific things like the hobbies of the royalty is, in my mind, like having a combat system with a detailed hit location chart: it's often way too much detail. We can abstract this out, get to the meat of the issue: does my character know enough about this NPC to romance them?

 

[Ariosto]

In social interactions, the details are the mechanics.

You can get stabbed with a pike (and just where might make a difference). If you get slapped wetly, then it's a fishy kind of pike -- and not well suited to stabbing. It makes a pretty significant difference which kind you're carrying when you face a cavalry charge.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In social interactions, the details are the mechanics.

You can get stabbed with a pike (and just where might make a difference). If you get slapped wetly, then it's a fishy kind of pike -- and not well suited to stabbing. It makes a pretty significant difference which kind you're carrying when you face a cavalry charge.

I don't think this is any more true in social interactions than in combat. I get hit in the head, I get hit in the arm, it's a tremendous difference in effect on me. In D&D, I get hit and it always has the same effect on me.

I don't need to know that Lady Elsa hates rabbits. I just need to know that my character has Royal Knowledge and thus will avoid bringing up subjects that royals hate, barring a horrible faux pas (a roll of 1 on the die).

I don't need to specify that I'm hitting the dragon in the neck. I just need to know that my character makes attack rolls and thus hits things, barring a horrible slip on the cobblestones.

It seems odd to me that no one here has mentioned the system that 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons already has for social interaction.

The rules regarding artifacts.

This is an interesting idea and deserves further thought...nice catch!

 

[Ariosto]

In D&D, I get hit and it always has the same effect on me.

So, that floats your boat. Maybe some folks don't care about any tactics at all, a mace is as good as a mackerel, just roll a die. Or maybe lots of dice?

Some people, though, do care. They don't read novels for abstract numbers, and they consider "playing a game" to mean more than just generating in an hour numbers that a computer could spit out in a few seconds. That holds for combat and for social interaction.

If the 4E artifact rules work for you, then groovy. How well whatever works for "gamers" who like 30 pages of combat rules (NOT counting the pages of powers) is going to work for the "non-gamers" of the thread title is another matter.

 

[Ariosto]

See, the idea that a lot of wonky number crunching is necessarily the way to go is bad enough in the first place. The idea that it should make no difference whether one is enfilading infantry with a machinegun from a pill box or standing in the open throwing water balloons at a tank -- just roll a die to see whether you die, with the same freaking chance -- is even worse.

In fact, as wacky as some combat systems are, I think most gamers would find the above situation thoroughly unsatisfying. Yet, some are ready to dismiss as irrelevant the equivalent tactical factors in non-combat situations.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Some people, though, do care. They don't read novels for abstract numbers, and they consider "playing a game" to mean more than just generating in an hour numbers that a computer could spit out in a few seconds. That holds for combat and for social interaction.

Well, you're basically right. Some people want detail to matter like that. There's plenty of game systems, even in combat, where those details do matter.

The reason I'd advocate against D&D going this route in the future is because of the thread's topic: if there aren't robust (but simple) rules for handling things that aren't combat, then such things become unsatisfying to play (especially if they become the focus of the campaign). The usual caveat of "a good DM can overcome anything" applies, of course.

Most people don't want to talk about falconry with the lord any more than they want to role-play sharpening your sword with a whetstone. What they want to do -- the challenge that is in play -- is to have a dramatic encounter. Like a combat with too many hit charts, a romance with too many conversations about falconry is going to be pretty boring to most audiences.

A more accessible D&D would have rules for doing things outside of combat that rival the complexity of D&D's rules for doing things inside of combat.

Personally, I think D&D could use some easing up on the latter, and some better pressure on the former, so finding a middle ground should be entirely possible.