D&D General Your thoughts on "Social Combat" systems

[Aldarc]

So what are your thoughts? Have you found any social combat or social mechanics that you think were a true boon to the RP experience?

On the whole, I prefer the use of social mechanics when there are clear stakes or consequences that amount to more than simply binary pass/fail resolution states hinging on a single roll. This often why IMHO "social combat" (if not a lot of skill usage) feels unsatisfactory in 3e/5e D&D.

 

[Umbran]

Not to pick on 4E, but that's one of the things I disliked about the skill challenges as presented in mods and run by most DMs. No matter what was said, no matter how convincing the argument, it just didn't matter. The DC was set, nothing matter but the die roll. So it set a pattern - figure out who had the highest mod, do some half-ass role play (if that) and roll the dice. It was all tactical, no "soul" for lack of a better term.

Does combat (physical conflict resolution) have soul? If it does, where does it get it?

 

[Oofta]

- double post, sort of -

 

[Oofta]

Skill challenges came out of the gate with borked math, and the rules did a truly terrible job of instructing DMs how to run them. Skill challenges could work well when run by the right DM, but in my experience most DMs did not run them
well, myself included. They ended up feeling awkward and artificial most of the time.

Skill challenges weren't inherently good or bad, unfortunately they felt rushed (like a lot of 4E) and in many cases overused. I get what they were trying to accomplish, but it's a tricky balance. I'm not convinced you could come up with a system that's generic enough while still encouraging the free flow that I prefer.

Part of it was also the presentation. As a DM you were instructed to let everyone know they were in a skill challenge, explicitly lay out number of successes and so on. I still use kind-of-sort-of skill challenge concepts behind the scenes, it's just more fluid and not as hard-coded. But that's not just social challenges, but also traps, navigation, any tricky situation that I want to involve multiple PCs.

 

[Oofta]

Does combat (physical conflict resolution) have soul? If it does, where does it get it?

Combat is more tactical, but yes it can also lack soul. For me it gets soul from being descriptive, tactical challenges, environmental variables. So in my combats the opponents scream epithets, try to gain tactical advantage, kill the hostage, run away with the McGuffin, drag unconscious PCs off ... a lot of things that I do to add interest.

Just having a hard time imagining how social encounters wouldn't feel like a board game if reduced to a set of rules and I can't really picture it. Maybe 5E should have more advice and guidelines on how to resolve complex scenarios similar in intent to skill challenges but it's not an easy thing to do IMHO.

 

[Charlaquin]

Skill challenges, out of the gate, could be used.

But... it helps if the players don't know how they work, and are predisposed to "take turns" and not just sit out and let someone else hand it. And that the DM just uses them as a narrative counter for when to finish a scene.

Yeah, I used to joke that the best thing you could say about skill challenges was that they didn’t suck if the players didn’t know they were happening. That was a bit hyperbolic, but expressed the frustration I felt that the majority of advice out there on how to run skill challenges better boiled down to “hide the fact that they’re skill challenges from the players.” IIRC, I think it was @iserith who finally explained it in a way that clicked for me, but by then the 5e playtest was happening and I was ready to move on from 4e.

You ask for them to do something working towards their goal. Then you call for a skill check; on failure, you narrate both what goes wrong, and count up a failure count. On success, you gain narrate what goes right, possibly describe another complication this revealed, and count up another success count.

The bolded bit is of crucial importance, and the rules just didn’t really tell DMs to do this. And if you do this, it doesn’t really matter a whole lot of the players know it’s a skill challenge or not. The biggest problem with skill challenges in my experience wasn’t that the players had to take turns, but that there was nothing for the players to respond to when their turn came up. Maybe for the first check made in the challenge you’d have a clear obstacle and come up with an action to try to overcome it. But more often than not, after that first success, the DM would just be like, “ok, what else?” and you’d have no idea why that first success wasn’t enough or what else to do to make progress, except that this was apparently a skill challenges and you needed more successes. So you’d just sheepishly ask to make a check with your highest skill until the rules decided you’d gotten enough successes to move on.

They lack mechanisms to enforce or encourage round-the-table turn taking.

Well, the DM is the mechanism. Just ask a specific player what they do instead of asking the whole table at large. This is good practice in general, skill challenge or not.

The DCs where off, especially at higher levels or under character optimization. The complexity was mainly about how long the challenge took (at the table) and not how hard it was. And they require a DM already capable of improvising complications to a plan.

About the only thing they do is tell the DM that every successful skill check should actually move the PCs a measurable, bounded below, distance towards their goal. But that isn't nothing.

It isn’t nothing, but it also isn’t what was really needed. Yeah, sure, narrate clear measurable progress towards the goal, but what’s more important is to narrate a complication, otherwise the player will just be like “umm... I try to make more progress, I guess?”

 

[Charlaquin]

Does combat (physical conflict resolution) have soul? If it does, where does it get it?

Dynamic conflict.

 

[robus]

As in any encounter you have to establish what it is that the NPC has and also establish why they won’t just give it to the PCs. A simple social encounter might have just one point of opposition, a complex one might have multiple points of opposition.

Then you need to establish how much convincing is required to overcome the opposition. Is the NPC friendly or hostile for example? Or is the NPC scared of the consequences?

And then finally you need to set a time limit on how long the NPC will listen to the PCs prattle on before they lose patience/interest, with options for extending the limit thanks to clever idea “another round of drinks!”

With that framework in place the PCs can attempt to succeed at the encounter. The DM of course should communicate the NPCs objections through role-play so that the players know what the obstacles to overcome are.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Most such systems feel, to me, like combat where all you can do on your turn is swing your weapon, with no movement, no choices, no resources to expend, no special abilities....no other options. And your weapon does fixed damage.

However, "The One Ring" has a good system for social encounters, and there are promising hints of what might come in 2e (currently under development). Of the various attempts at formalized systems for social encounters, it's the one I enjoy the most.

It's an asymmetric system, meaning that it's not just opposed rolls, but rather the PCs making rolls against the particulars of the NPC. PCs can use Insight to figure out what the best strategy might be with this NPC, and they can learn additional details with particularly good rules (TOR has regular success, great success, and extraordinary success).

Then, using that knowledge, they basically "roll-play" but hopefully by narrating what they are doing. The NPC has a threshold of failures, and once the PCs fail that many times the "combat" is over. What makes it interesting is that the players don't know two things:
1) What the threshold is
2) What happens if they cross it. Do they lose all progress (e.g. the NPC gets angry and throws them out) or does it just mean they can't achieve any additional successes?

So they might want to stop trying at some point, to avoid crossing the threshold.

Assuming they conclude without angering the NPC, the encounter includes a table of what they "get" depending on how many successes they have.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't think I'd want a system more detailed that what's in the DMG. That plus roleplay does more or less all I need. Come up with a good idea in the social interaction and the player has advantage, totally mess things up and you have disadvantage.

Yeah I tend to agree, though I do like the Audience system from AIME and TOR, and 4e skill challenges, and tend to combine them when a social challenge is going to be complex or have a lot of PC participants, or be the focal point of a session or part of a session.

What I’ve been considering is also making combat work about the same as TOR social and exploration challenges mixed with 4e skill challenges.

One of the appeals of Roleplaying has always been the ability to play something you are not, the true fantasy element of the genre. Just as weak people get to play strong, hulking characters, shy people often wish to play the smooth talking charismatic character.

To that end, many rp systems have attempted social mechanics or "social combat" systems, a way to augment roleplaying with more detailed mechanics so that a person who is not good at talking can still be "diplomatic and smooth talking" in game.

In my 10+ years of RP experience, though I really appreciate the sentiment, I have found that social systems like these simply fall flat. For all the good they attempt to do, what I have seen at the table is that they deaden roleplay. Players get into a different mindset when they are thinking mechanics, and that mindset detracts from good smooth roleplaying. For every person who is bolstered by the system, I find the rest of the party's roleplay declines.

At the end of it all, the simple "persuasion" check at the end of the roleplay conversation seems the best compromise. It at least adds a little mechanical arbitration to compensate for a person who has trouble with roleplay, but it keeps the mechanics more out of mind to allow roleplay to commence. Anything more complicated than that seems to do more harm than good in the long run.


So what are your thoughts? Have you found any social combat or social mechanics that you think were a true boon to the RP experience?

My advice to running more complex social challenge systems is to stop focusing solely on Charisma for the “main check” or the “convincing” check.
Let the Insightful guy use insight to see the right moment to mention a key factor, bypassing the need for posturing and direct force of will.
Let the genius use observation and deduction and a logical knowledge of how people are convinced of ideas to take apart counter arguments without getting hackles up.
Have fun with it.

I found that 4e's Skill Challenges worked wonders for social combat if you kept the complexity low.

Yep. I realized recently that many of the Xanathar’s Guide downtime activities have a similar basic structure, but use more dice than just the d20. Not a bad way to structure skill challenges.