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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8667287" data-attributes="member: 16586">In my experience when social influence is resolved through the mechanic of GM exclusively decides what the NPC does, thinks and feels and other players exclusively decide what their characters do, think and feel one of three is usually going on:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">We are limiting the social context to one that is a close facsimile to the social context at the table. Often you see this in games where every discussion involves reasonable actors and conflicts are resolved by providing rational arguments. It's also often accompanied by players playing characters that are basically self-inserts into the game's setting.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">NPCs are actually puzzles. The trick to get an NPC to do what you want them to do is to engage in investigations, asking open ended questions and leveraging information found elsewhere. NPCs are mostly static and do not act upon each other except when provoked by player character actions. I call this a social crawl.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">We are engaging in collaborative storytelling using improv style principles. Decisions from both players and GMs are made based on narrative outcomes we think would make for a better story. Often there is a level of player to GM and player to player negotiation of outcomes that exists either formally or informally through social cues.</li> </ol>In my experience most of the traditional RPGs and LARPs I have been part of follow these play structures in some combination. Nordic LARPs are almost exclusively #3.Addendum: To give credit where it is due I did not coin social crawl. The term comes from a meat space discussion I had with Paul Czege about a game he was designing based on experience with some old school modules like Keep on the Borderlands and especially Castle Amber in a certain. It's basically a dungeon crawl, except you are exploring people instead of dungeon rooms.</blockquote>

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