Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8950767" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Then don't reduce it to dice rolls. Like...I don't understand where you're getting the idea that making use of dice rolls is the same as reducing to dice rolls. By that logic, combat is the worst thing ever invented in D&D, because it reduces tactics, strategy, motion, critical thinking, etc. to nothing more than attack rolls.Yet we all recognize that it doesn't do that. That there's so much more to combat than just the attack rolls you make, even though those are a key part of working through the process of combat. Positioning (be it actual grid position or something more nebulous), tactics (considering the disposition and morale of enemy forces), terrain, extenuating circumstances (a ritual you have to stop, a victim you have to save, a prize you have to catch, etc.) and more.Do that for social SCs too. The exact nature of these things will differ, but the core idea remains the same. "Positioning" becomes a matter of the principles and goals of the people involved. Tactics would be basically unchanged, just swapping physical organization for some other kind (hierarchic, societal, economic, etc.) "Terrain" becomes a question of resources that can be leveraged, hangups that have to be discovered and worked around, learning the lay of the social landscape, etc. Extenuating circumstances remain essentially the same too.And, of course, just like with battle where every turn can change the state of play, make that happen with SCs too. Make every player's contribution actually advance the fiction, not just plink up a number on the scoreboard."Reducing [social challenges] to dice rolls" is always a choice, a matter of how you implement the thing. Using SCs intelligently--actually taking seriously the good advice about them in the books, and then growing beyond that to best practices discovered by the community--means not "reducing" anything--unless you have made the erroneous conflation between "reducing to dice rolls" and "making use of dice rolls."</blockquote>

Verification