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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5953767" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm wondering if either of you has much familiarity with complex social interaction mechanics?The well-designed ones work so that it is impossible to resolve an action without knowing what is happening in the fiction. Just as, in D&D, it is impossible to resolve an attack in melee combat without knowing (at least roughly) where the attacker is and where his/her target is.The point of the dice rolls isn't to replace the roleplaying. It's to set up a structure whereby the consequences of choices are adjudicated independently of the immediate desires of either players or GM. Much like the dice rolls in combat.This is key (although perhaps we have slightly different conceptions of RPing). What I have in mind is - the system should work only when the player explains what his/her PC is doing in the fiction (eg what sort of thing s/he is saying to the NPC, with what goal in mind). Whether this is in 1st person or 3rd, and whether it is florid or prosaic, I personally care less about - 1st person and florid can be fun, but some of my best social encounter experiences have had plenty of prosaic 3rd person in there also.That's not complex social interaction mechanics. That's the rather poor 3E Diplomacy skill mechanics.The analogue of this for combat would be "I engage the orcs and fight well. My attack roll is 14, +7 BAB, for a a total of 21!" I've never encountered anyone who would call that a complex combat mechanic. In fact, that would be a good combat mechanic only for a game in which combat didn't matter, and the point of the combat mechanics was to quickly pass over the fighting to get onto the good stuff. Likewise the 3E Diplomacy mechanics are only good for a game in which social doesn't matter, and the idea is to pass over social encounters to get onto the good stuff.GM fiat is one way to go. I don't want it for social for the same reason I don't want it for combat - namely, I want the players to have a degree of agency, and I want the GM to be able to run his/her encounters hard without a conflict of interest between pushing hard and choosing what the resolution is.</blockquote>

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