To start, it should be known this is the current cumulation of whats nearly a year of on and off iteration, though in this iteration I have not yet had a chance to put it front of anyone other than myself. Skip to below the ==== line if you're not interested and reading through how I thought through this over time and just want to read what Ive come up with.
Anyways, the design problem Im picking at is the question of how to combine a natural conversation, through Improv, with the expression of a Character's earned social Skills, without the two contradicting one another. In other words, we want players to be comfortable putting effort into speaking in character if they wish, but we don't want a dice roll invalidating that effort so arbitrarily. This is blocking, and we don't want that.
When I first started thinking about how I could rethink social conflict to help with this, it occurred to me that, generally speaking, unless we take improv out of the equation entirely, its going to be very difficult to gamify the dynamics involved, and especially so if we also want the conversation to actually feel natural, as while a mechanics first approach would resolve any possibility of a contradiction, it also means your guy is susceptible to being made to look incompetant by random chance. Definitely not a satisfying way to fail.
So my initial idea was, we don't gamify the ins and outs of a conversation, we gamify ettiquette. This was rooted in pulling in my Reputation mechanics, and effectively hinging the whole thing around whether or not you were willing to accept the Influence you were hit with, choosing belligerence over reasonable conversation essentially. And as part of this, I tried to resolve the congruency issue, between player and character skill, by restructuring rolls as reactions, so as to diassociate failure from ones actions, and associate it with their opponents.
And this was okay, but it felt incomplete. For one it still resulted in a lot of unnatural conversation, and two it also just felt like it didn't capture enough of the dynamics these kinds of interactions would involve, even if I had inadvertently gotten peer pressure as a concept to emerge out of some of the mechanics.
So fast forward a lot of time (most of which not spent on my game at all unfortunately), and I've been thinking on it more, particularly recently given some changes I've opted for to unify the game better. Combat and Adventuring now share the same core mechanics and procedure, and so my brain started working at how I bring social into that fold.
What resulted from putting my brain to it was a system that goes farther than gamifying etiquette, and gamifies the emotional and the psychological aspects of a social conflict, and hits, I think, on that holy grail design of getting metagaming to be functionally identical to roleplaying and vice versa.
How I arrived at it, ironically, was through the very inspiration that lead to that initial iteration: Liars Dice. Except this time I'm using it a bit more directly, and seeing some very useful synergies emerge from other systems I already had in place, as well as a lot of new ones I've added.
==================
---
Anyways, let’s get into how it works. (Note I used ChatGPT to clean this up, as what I wrote originally was kind of disjointed. Its like 3am and I can't sleep
)
---
### Establishing Context
First, to provide context for the game's systems:
Each Participant has a Composure value, which functions like "HP." However, rather than deducting from this value, we only need to know it when the conflict begins.
As part of Skill Advancement, each Participant may have access to a Skill die specific to each of the 32 Skills in the game. This die can range from a d4 to a d12 and is used to augment the Talent die (1d20). The Skill die also allows players to generate Momentum in various game systems.
Momentum operates similarly to exploding dice. When you roll the maximum value on a die, you "explode," gaining one use of Momentum to spend on various options relevant to the action you're taking. More details on this will follow.
The five Skills primarily invoked in Social Conflict are Provoke, Appeal, Deflect, Charm, and Insight, although all remaining 27 Skills could factor in as well.
==================
The Procedure
The aim of this system is to generate a cumulative roll higher than your opponent's without exceeding your own Composure value. The twist is that neither participant will know the other's Composure or their total as the conversation progresses. This creates the central mechanical conundrum.
When a conflict begins, all participants roll their Talent die and add their Charisma Modifier, which forms their base Influence. It’s advisable to keep a running total on scratch paper.
Participants take turns speaking naturally—there’s no need to worry about rigid Turns. Whoever talks first, talks first; whoever talks next, talks next.
When you speak, your goal is to make an argument or counterargument. If applicable, you can roll the corresponding Skill die (Provoke, Appeal, Deflect, or Charm) to add to your total Influence.
However, if you feel that raising your Influence might push you over your Composure, you can choose to abstain from rolling another die. Keep in mind that this reveals information to your opponent about your status, so choose wisely.
The conversation continues until someone calls it. The results are compared, and the highest total "wins," but this doesn’t guarantee that they’ll comply with your wishes. More on that later.
Since Skills must be used to advance, it follows that there's no way to use a Skill without a Skill die. Outside of social conflict, the Social Skills have uses in other parts of the game, particularly Combat, and so could be advanced that way.
Within social conflict, however, each Skill has a unique ability (Insight has two) that enables it to be used even without a Skill die.
==================
Skill Abilities
- Provoke: This Skill involves using threats, harm, or intimidation to influence others. You can issue a Challenge to your opponent, which might be an insult or a dismissive comment about their argument. If they hesitate or struggle to respond after your Challenge, roll a d6 and add it to your total. (Once your Provoke Skill die reaches d8, you can use that die for this.)
- Appeal: This Skill uses logic or empathy. If your opponent concedes to your argument, acknowledging its correctness, you can withhold your die result (roll a d6 if you lack a Skill die) until the conflict ends, choosing to either add it to your total or subtract it.
- Deflect: This Skill employs lies, half-truths, and distortions. You can Bluff either within your argument or against your opponent's by rolling any die but not adding it to your total.
- Charm: This Skill uses flattery. If your opponent engages with your flattery, you can withhold any previous die result and subtract it from your total before comparison.
- Insight: You have two options with this Skill. First, you can expose your opponent’s Composure value by rolling your Skill die (or a d6). Your result must match or exceed their Charisma modifier, but you'll have to announce this total, revealing some of your results. Second, you can Synergize with another Skill. If your argument relates to one of the other Skills and you possess a Skill die in that Skill, you can roll that die to add to your Influence.
==================
Additional Mechanisms
Two additional mechanisms are integrated into this system.
First is the Momentum system, which with basic use allows for rerolls for higher totals with every max you roll. This is also how you can expose Composure, as Charisma can rise to +30, limiting you to a d12. While I've only got basic rerolls so far, I plan to explore new uses for this system in regards to socoal conflict.
Second is Leverage, allowing you to gain flat bonuses to your rolls by exploiting external influences. For instance, you might leverage Peer Pressure (related to Reputation mechanics) or physical actions to intimidate (e.g., harming a hostage), presenting evidence, bribing, and more.
==================
Conclusion
Once the conflict concludes, each participant sums their totals and resolves any Appeals or Charms. They then compare totals, with the highest without exceeding their Composure winning.
However, a win doesn’t equate to mind control. NPCs possess agency, meaning that even if they are influenced successfully, it doesn't guarantee they will comply with your wishes.
If they refuse, they may come off as belligerent, cowardly, or unreasonable, affecting their Reputation. The impact intensifies with the public nature of the interaction, reflecting how Peer Pressure manifests in the system. Depending on the NPC, they may still disregard this (as they might simply be an naughty word).
There's a separate system for NPC personalities that enables the Keeper to define personalities for any NPC players might encounter, which is relatively simple to manage. However, that system ties into my Living World mechanics, so I won’t delve into that now.
==================
Overall, it’s rough at the moment and will require playtesting, but theoretically, I believe the foundation is solid. Instead of trying to gamify conversation, this system gamifies the underlying emotional and psychological dynamics of high-stakes dialogue. Players manage risk, read their opponents, maintain control, and seek advantages while balancing the consequences of their own words.
In terms of what I think will probably be added overtime is some acknowledgement of interruptions and other such disruptions that'd pop up naturally, and I also wonder if having more than just two people going back and forth would beget some new mechanics to play with.
Another thing I definitely want to explore is how to integrate and acknowledge emotions directly, outside of the little bits the Skill Abilities do so that is. If I had to shoot from the hip on it, I'd be inclined some sort of benefit/drawback duality. Eg, being angry can benefit you in X way but can be detrimental in Y way.
Anyways, the design problem Im picking at is the question of how to combine a natural conversation, through Improv, with the expression of a Character's earned social Skills, without the two contradicting one another. In other words, we want players to be comfortable putting effort into speaking in character if they wish, but we don't want a dice roll invalidating that effort so arbitrarily. This is blocking, and we don't want that.
When I first started thinking about how I could rethink social conflict to help with this, it occurred to me that, generally speaking, unless we take improv out of the equation entirely, its going to be very difficult to gamify the dynamics involved, and especially so if we also want the conversation to actually feel natural, as while a mechanics first approach would resolve any possibility of a contradiction, it also means your guy is susceptible to being made to look incompetant by random chance. Definitely not a satisfying way to fail.
So my initial idea was, we don't gamify the ins and outs of a conversation, we gamify ettiquette. This was rooted in pulling in my Reputation mechanics, and effectively hinging the whole thing around whether or not you were willing to accept the Influence you were hit with, choosing belligerence over reasonable conversation essentially. And as part of this, I tried to resolve the congruency issue, between player and character skill, by restructuring rolls as reactions, so as to diassociate failure from ones actions, and associate it with their opponents.
And this was okay, but it felt incomplete. For one it still resulted in a lot of unnatural conversation, and two it also just felt like it didn't capture enough of the dynamics these kinds of interactions would involve, even if I had inadvertently gotten peer pressure as a concept to emerge out of some of the mechanics.
So fast forward a lot of time (most of which not spent on my game at all unfortunately), and I've been thinking on it more, particularly recently given some changes I've opted for to unify the game better. Combat and Adventuring now share the same core mechanics and procedure, and so my brain started working at how I bring social into that fold.
What resulted from putting my brain to it was a system that goes farther than gamifying etiquette, and gamifies the emotional and the psychological aspects of a social conflict, and hits, I think, on that holy grail design of getting metagaming to be functionally identical to roleplaying and vice versa.
How I arrived at it, ironically, was through the very inspiration that lead to that initial iteration: Liars Dice. Except this time I'm using it a bit more directly, and seeing some very useful synergies emerge from other systems I already had in place, as well as a lot of new ones I've added.
==================
---
Anyways, let’s get into how it works. (Note I used ChatGPT to clean this up, as what I wrote originally was kind of disjointed. Its like 3am and I can't sleep
)---
### Establishing Context
First, to provide context for the game's systems:
Each Participant has a Composure value, which functions like "HP." However, rather than deducting from this value, we only need to know it when the conflict begins.
As part of Skill Advancement, each Participant may have access to a Skill die specific to each of the 32 Skills in the game. This die can range from a d4 to a d12 and is used to augment the Talent die (1d20). The Skill die also allows players to generate Momentum in various game systems.
Momentum operates similarly to exploding dice. When you roll the maximum value on a die, you "explode," gaining one use of Momentum to spend on various options relevant to the action you're taking. More details on this will follow.
The five Skills primarily invoked in Social Conflict are Provoke, Appeal, Deflect, Charm, and Insight, although all remaining 27 Skills could factor in as well.
==================
The Procedure
The aim of this system is to generate a cumulative roll higher than your opponent's without exceeding your own Composure value. The twist is that neither participant will know the other's Composure or their total as the conversation progresses. This creates the central mechanical conundrum.
When a conflict begins, all participants roll their Talent die and add their Charisma Modifier, which forms their base Influence. It’s advisable to keep a running total on scratch paper.
Participants take turns speaking naturally—there’s no need to worry about rigid Turns. Whoever talks first, talks first; whoever talks next, talks next.
When you speak, your goal is to make an argument or counterargument. If applicable, you can roll the corresponding Skill die (Provoke, Appeal, Deflect, or Charm) to add to your total Influence.
However, if you feel that raising your Influence might push you over your Composure, you can choose to abstain from rolling another die. Keep in mind that this reveals information to your opponent about your status, so choose wisely.
The conversation continues until someone calls it. The results are compared, and the highest total "wins," but this doesn’t guarantee that they’ll comply with your wishes. More on that later.
Since Skills must be used to advance, it follows that there's no way to use a Skill without a Skill die. Outside of social conflict, the Social Skills have uses in other parts of the game, particularly Combat, and so could be advanced that way.
Within social conflict, however, each Skill has a unique ability (Insight has two) that enables it to be used even without a Skill die.
==================
Skill Abilities
- Provoke: This Skill involves using threats, harm, or intimidation to influence others. You can issue a Challenge to your opponent, which might be an insult or a dismissive comment about their argument. If they hesitate or struggle to respond after your Challenge, roll a d6 and add it to your total. (Once your Provoke Skill die reaches d8, you can use that die for this.)
- Appeal: This Skill uses logic or empathy. If your opponent concedes to your argument, acknowledging its correctness, you can withhold your die result (roll a d6 if you lack a Skill die) until the conflict ends, choosing to either add it to your total or subtract it.
- Deflect: This Skill employs lies, half-truths, and distortions. You can Bluff either within your argument or against your opponent's by rolling any die but not adding it to your total.
- Charm: This Skill uses flattery. If your opponent engages with your flattery, you can withhold any previous die result and subtract it from your total before comparison.
- Insight: You have two options with this Skill. First, you can expose your opponent’s Composure value by rolling your Skill die (or a d6). Your result must match or exceed their Charisma modifier, but you'll have to announce this total, revealing some of your results. Second, you can Synergize with another Skill. If your argument relates to one of the other Skills and you possess a Skill die in that Skill, you can roll that die to add to your Influence.
==================
Additional Mechanisms
Two additional mechanisms are integrated into this system.
First is the Momentum system, which with basic use allows for rerolls for higher totals with every max you roll. This is also how you can expose Composure, as Charisma can rise to +30, limiting you to a d12. While I've only got basic rerolls so far, I plan to explore new uses for this system in regards to socoal conflict.
Second is Leverage, allowing you to gain flat bonuses to your rolls by exploiting external influences. For instance, you might leverage Peer Pressure (related to Reputation mechanics) or physical actions to intimidate (e.g., harming a hostage), presenting evidence, bribing, and more.
==================
Conclusion
Once the conflict concludes, each participant sums their totals and resolves any Appeals or Charms. They then compare totals, with the highest without exceeding their Composure winning.
However, a win doesn’t equate to mind control. NPCs possess agency, meaning that even if they are influenced successfully, it doesn't guarantee they will comply with your wishes.
If they refuse, they may come off as belligerent, cowardly, or unreasonable, affecting their Reputation. The impact intensifies with the public nature of the interaction, reflecting how Peer Pressure manifests in the system. Depending on the NPC, they may still disregard this (as they might simply be an naughty word).
There's a separate system for NPC personalities that enables the Keeper to define personalities for any NPC players might encounter, which is relatively simple to manage. However, that system ties into my Living World mechanics, so I won’t delve into that now.
==================
Overall, it’s rough at the moment and will require playtesting, but theoretically, I believe the foundation is solid. Instead of trying to gamify conversation, this system gamifies the underlying emotional and psychological dynamics of high-stakes dialogue. Players manage risk, read their opponents, maintain control, and seek advantages while balancing the consequences of their own words.
In terms of what I think will probably be added overtime is some acknowledgement of interruptions and other such disruptions that'd pop up naturally, and I also wonder if having more than just two people going back and forth would beget some new mechanics to play with.
Another thing I definitely want to explore is how to integrate and acknowledge emotions directly, outside of the little bits the Skill Abilities do so that is. If I had to shoot from the hip on it, I'd be inclined some sort of benefit/drawback duality. Eg, being angry can benefit you in X way but can be detrimental in Y way.
