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

[Dannyalcatraz]

I’ve rarely been so frustrated to apologize for something, and I am justified, but fair enough. My apologies. I may PM when I’m less angry, but I’ll drop it for now.

Dude, you’ve been here long enough to know the first rule of red text in threads is we don’t talk about red text in threads. That could have earned you a warning.

(Letting it slide with just this comment to remind others.)

 

[Voadam]

I would not add effects that impact player character motivations or emotional states to D&D which from my perspective works best as a challenge based game, but I do not think inviolate control of character thoughts and emotions is a requirement for RPG play. It certainly is not a feature of our daily lived experiences.

I personally like a number of games that have binding social conflicts or mechanics where your emotional state impacts how well you do certain things. I cut my teeth on Pendragon and Vampire though.

In your experience were there lots of times where social game mechanics in those systems were used to override player control of their characters? I have experience with Vampire and there was the vampire dominate and presence powers for mind control and emotion control, blood bond mechanics, and humanity rules for frenzying where failure leads to fight/flight/uncontrolled feeding, but my memory of the social skill mechanics like seduction rules was generally used on things like if that was your usual background/downtime feeding method, not for an NPC seducing a PC or PCs seducing each other. Were your experiences different?

I and those in my groups had done plenty of D&D before Vampire so that may have colored how we used the rules.

I own Pendragon and have a number of region sourcebooks for it, but have never played it and I am not familiar with a lot of its specific mechanics.