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Making decisions for my character is such an important part of RP for me that I find it unlikely that allowing the other players to compel my character's decisions will minimize confusion(what does my character think now?)), disagreements(you convinced me of x, and that doesn't apply to y!), hurt feelings(stop controlling my character!), or maximize enjoyment(this sucks!). I understand the problem of the charismatic character that can't convince anyone of anything, but that is something that should be handled in NPC interactions.
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Jan 12, 2011 16:44
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Again: if you think your character is not convinced, then they are not. Duel of Wits (and pretty much all the others) specifically only shows who "wins" an argument. I'm sure you're familiar with real-life examples of someone losing an argument, but not changing their mind. Even if you convince someone to "agree" to something, they are no more bound by that agreement than they would be in real life. Characters are charismatic because they have charisma stats. Characters are strong because they have strength stats. We know that the strength stats are strong because when we roll them we can lift this much. We know that the charisma stats are strong because...? e: and I think this definitely applies to ORE, because wild talents doesn't just have a charisma stat, it actually has two of them, and I don't like how strangely vestigial they seem. They really could just be combined into a single "Willpower" stat, if we wanted it to be impossible to convince anyone of anything via dice. e2: VVVV That reminds me of another fantastic example: Weapons of the Gods. The optional complex mechanics for Social/Medical/Magical manipulations what I am continually forced to call "social combat" amount to putting conditions on characters that give their players a pleasant choice in how to react. So I could give my friend's character a condition "Infatuated with the maiden Pai-Li," such that he gains experience every time he blushes or stutters or otherwise convinces us that he is subject to it. Or I could give an enemy NPC's character a condition "Overactive Silver Chi," which gives him a penalty to all rolls unless he narrates himself as suffering from chills, a cough, etc. Or I could give myself the condition "Addicted to Yung-Fa Mountain Three Needles Tea", which gives me a bonus to all rolls as long as I am seen drinking said tea. But all of these give the players new choices, rather than taking them away. This is typical. Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Jan 12, 2011 |
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Jan 12, 2011 16:49
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clockworkjoe posted:If a player in FATE doesn't have M&Ms or whatever, would he be compelled to go along with the peace treaty then? It's reasons like this that I prefer the way Strands of Fate handles things, where you're not forced to pay an M&M if you don't want go along with the treaty, you just give up the opportunity to gain one. Further, FATE wouldn't really require you to take on "Swayed by the words of NPC Diplomat," you could also take on, "Enraged by the diplomat's mewling attempts to negotiate a treaty," or any other player-determined consequence of losing an argument that has potentially negative consequences. At least as I understand FATE, the standard consequences for losing a social combat aren't agreeing with your opponent, it's emotional devastation, which can be focused in a direction of the player's choosing. Basically, social combat systems can and have been built that never really take character control away from the player. They might force the player to pick some sort of potentially-negative emotional reaction for the character, but that's a fairly minimal amount of player control being given up, and in return you get tools that provide structure and a sense of progress to social encounters. counterspin posted:Making decisions for my character is such an important part of RP for me that I find it unlikely that allowing the other players to compel my character's decisions will minimize confusion(what does my character think now?)), disagreements(you convinced me of x, and that doesn't apply to y!), hurt feelings(stop controlling my character!), or maximize enjoyment(this sucks!). FATE never hands control of your character to the GM or another player. What it does is allow them to tempt you with a game resource (fate points) if you're willing to play out the character descriptions you've chosen for your character in the way they request. You're never really compelled, it's more like you have the option of being bribed.
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Jan 12, 2011 16:51
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clockworkjoe posted:Fantasy D&D type setting - PC 1 is a brash headstrong warrior. NPC Diplomat represents a kingdom PC 1 hates. The GM and PC 1 go through a social combat scene where the diplomat attempts to convince PC 1 to accept a peace treaty with his kingdom. The player wants to start a war. The GM rolls really well and uses the social combat system to say that PC 1 accepts the peace treaty. PC1 may get some kind of system benefit - bonus points or whatever - for not getting what he wanted - but the player wanted to define his character as a brash headstrong warrior by choosing war over peace. As said before, the fact that you are entering social combat means the character's willing to enter it. In your example: Diplomat NPC: "Let's talk about this, I'm sure we can come to an agreement." Brash PC: "No." -> no social combat ensues. Diplomat NPC: "Let's talk about it, I'm sure we can come to an agreement." Brash PC: "Maybe. Tell me more." -> now the PC has opened himself to negotiation. He will listen to arguments. Posters above me have put quite well that social combat loss does not mean your character's opinions are changed, they merely indicate that you lost an argument. Also, even if the PC lost and signed the peace treaty: quote:but the player wanted to define his character as a brash headstrong warrior by choosing war over peace. The whole deal just served as a means to character development!
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Jan 12, 2011 17:05
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I guess I'm just confused by the use of the word "combat" in "social combat." I fully support something that tempts people to respond correctly to the social capabilities of the other players' characters(GM included). My problem is that "combat" is not something that a)Produces an opportunity for your goal to be achieved. You want to kill goblins, you use combat to kill goblins, not to get the chance to maybe kill goblins. b)is dependent on your willingness to engage in it But this is probably something where that's just what it's called, and it's too late to change it. counterspin fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Jan 12, 2011 |
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Jan 12, 2011 17:24
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FATE, as it turns out, refers to it as "social conflict" not "social combat," just as it refers to physical combat as "physical conflict," which I think produces a functional analogy between the two. If you want to force a goblin to leave town, you can choose to use physical conflict, causing him to take physical consequences (torn muscles, broken bones, etc.) until he agrees to leave or you can choose to use social/mental conflict, causing him to take mental consequences (anxiety, depression, fear) or social consequences (public shame, a poor reputation) until he agrees to leave. [edited to provide an expanded example] Sir Kodiak fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Jan 12, 2011 |
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Jan 12, 2011 17:37
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clockworkjoe posted:If a player in FATE doesn't have M&Ms or whatever, would he be compelled to go along with the peace treaty then? "If your players automatically spend fate to resist your compels, then you are being too harsh; you are dictating their actions too much, or making things too complicated. If your players automatically grab the fate point when you compel them, then you are being too lenient; you aren't complicating things enough, or aren't being restrictive enough." quote:Also why are we talking about this in a Greg Stolze thread? Shouldn't someone make a new thread about social combat and controlling PCs?
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Jan 12, 2011 18:36
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Jimbozig posted:I agree, that it would make a good thread. I won't be able to post it today, but if somebody else does I'll certainly contribute. If nobody gets to it by tomorrow, I might find time then. Writing the OP now. edit: I roll my charisma to get you to click here. Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jan 12, 2011 |
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Jan 12, 2011 19:16
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Little_wh0re posted:I've agreed to run a one-off of UA for some friends friday, I've never played myself either so I don't want a scenario thats too complex. Current plan is for 4 or maybe 5 players and I have the one shots book. I played Jailbreak with 5 PCs once and it worked fine -- 6 would have been better, I think, but it wasn't too bad. If the players haven't played Bill In 3, though, I'd go with that.
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Jan 12, 2011 21:49
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counterspin posted:My problem is that "combat" is not something that Posting about this in this thread instead of the new one because it's relevant to the original topic: Keep in mind that you're saying this in a thread about Unknown Armies, the game that famously starts its combat section with a page full of advice on how and why to avoid combat (it's even in the OP!). Not every game operates under the assumption that you'll be getting in fights to the death regularly, or at all.
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Jan 13, 2011 00:00
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Yeah, I printed of 3 bills after work today. I'll be at a bigger gaming event in a few weeks so I think I'll try and run jailbreak then, I should be able to get 8/9 players there.
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Jan 13, 2011 00:43
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Thuryl: You're misunderstanding what I mean. Or I'm miswriting what I mean, more likely. Combat is not dependent on mutual consent. Only one party needs to want it. I was responding to the comments that you don't have to engage in social combat if you don't want to.
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Jan 13, 2011 01:24
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counterspin posted:Thuryl: You're misunderstanding what I mean. Or I'm miswriting what I mean, more likely. Combat is not dependent on mutual consent. Only one party needs to want it. I was responding to the comments that you don't have to engage in social combat if you don't want to. Of course combat is dependent on mutual consent. Even if someone is actively trying to kill you and absolutely won't settle for anything less, and there's no possible way to escape, then you still have the option of refusing to resist and letting them kill you. That's an extreme example, but there are situations where it'd be a reasonable thing to do once absolutely all other options were exhausted -- and a situation where the only options were to fight or die would be a pretty unusual one in the first place. And if a situation does crop up where the only options are to fight or die, you have to ask why the GM allowed a situation like that to happen in the first place. If he's a good GM, then the answer is going to boil down to some form of "the players wanted situations like that to happen in the game", which means consent is implied. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Jan 13, 2011 |
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Jan 13, 2011 01:35
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Yeah, we shouldn't take the D&Desque assumption of "people will regularly attack you and need to be killed" as the norm. Even in D&D it only makes sense because the players and their characters are implicitly seeking out that sort of lifestyle. Generally, if someone wants to physically fight you, they have an objective more subtle than "get these adventurers out of my dungeon" and all sorts of ways to achieve it.
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Jan 13, 2011 07:37
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Combat is in no way dependent on mutual consent of the two parties. People get forced into fistfights, gunfights, and other scuffles without their consent all the time. If someone pulls out a gun and starts shooting at you, you are in a gunfight, regardless of your thoughts on the subject. My assumptions come from the English language. Referring to an argument as a "combat" in English is a metaphor, which is a stretch for me. Call the thing "social conflict" and I have no beef. Or at least no beef that applies to this thread rather than the other.
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Jan 13, 2011 17:16
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How can you be fighting in a firefight if you immediately surrender? That's like saying Gandhi was fighting in a war.
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Jan 13, 2011 17:20
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I didn't say you were fighting. I said you were in a combat. And in an RPG that fact is illustrated by the fact that the rules of combat have come into play. The guy shooting you has rolled his weapon skill and you have either utilized or rejected your defensive options.
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Jan 13, 2011 17:30
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Wh...why would you ever roll any dice if one of the people said "My character is not resisting"?! e: also, in your last post, you defended your usage of combat as being common-sense and real-life, but now we're talking about explicit rpg rules situations again
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Jan 13, 2011 19:12
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Because the shooter is nervous, because there may be other combatants who are resisting, because as much as people bluster about it, it takes a huge amount of mental effort for a human being to kill another human being, etc. If you're confused about my last post just ignore everything after the second sentence. Everything after that is an attempt to ground the real in the game, and is secondary to the argument, which is mostly about connotation. "I didn't say you were fighting. I said you were in a combat." Additionally, I figure I've taken up enough space here, as well, given that I'm the lone dissenter and we're talking about an admittedly minor lingusitic quibble. counterspin fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Jan 13, 2011 |
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Jan 13, 2011 19:57
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counterspin posted:Because the shooter is nervous, because there may be other combatants who are resisting, Yeah, but if you have as much time as you like, can walk as close as you like, take as many shots as you like...players shouldn't have to roll to cross the street either. quote:because as much as people bluster about it, it takes a huge amount of mental effort for a human being to kill another human being, etc. Woah. Now you're talking my language: rolling to see if your character actually wants to kill someone! That sort of thing would add a great deal to many Greg Stolze designs, especially Unknown Armies, which is what this thread is now officially about again. 
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Jan 13, 2011 23:41
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In Wild Talents if you kill someone in cold blood you take a trauma check, and if you fail you can choose to power through and lose a ton of willpower points, or drop out of the scene (fetal position, fleeing, vomiting) and lose less willpower points. Wild Talents is cool. Also, you can add the Horrific tag to your powers which makes them so terrifying that they incur a trauma check on the people you harm with it. But you have to take the trauma check too. Wild Talents is cool. Edit: Checking the rules again, another option is to simply not go through with it. Capntastic fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Jan 13, 2011 |
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Jan 13, 2011 23:56
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Doc Hawkins posted:Woah. Now you're talking my language: rolling to see if your character actually wants to kill someone! If you're forced into a situation where you have to do something but can't, that's a helplessness madness check. See above Wild Talents post. e: whoups could've sworn I was in the other thread. stop confusing me.... first part still holds, though PlaneGuy fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Jan 14, 2011 |
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Jan 14, 2011 00:22
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I'm compulsively checking on Violent Planet waiting for it to pick up that last 70 bucks.
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Jan 14, 2011 00:29
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Yeah, it's weird. It's almost like the section on pointblanking in the UA book is in the combat chapter. It says that you make an attack roll to try to kill a helpless victim. Success means instant death, failure does firearms damage for melee or maximum damage for the weapons caliber for firearms.
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Jan 14, 2011 01:03
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Benagain posted:I'm compulsively checking on Violent Planet waiting for it to pick up that last 70 bucks. I don't recommend it. Kickstarter won't release the content until the final day, even if the goal was met like a month early.
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Jan 14, 2011 02:20
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Evil Mastermind posted:I don't recommend it. Kickstarter won't release the content until the final day, even if the goal was met like a month early. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck
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Jan 14, 2011 03:27
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counterspin posted:Yeah, it's weird. It's almost like the section on pointblanking in the UA book is in the combat chapter. It says that you make an attack roll to try to kill a helpless victim. Success means instant death, failure does firearms damage for melee or maximum damage for the weapons caliber for firearms. The lowest damage gun in the game is about 20, so that's at least 50% of an average person's wound points even if you fail the roll, and you can always try again next round. I think the intention is to deal with a situation where someone's executing a hostage during a combat situation; if a player wanted to murder someone in cold blood I'd skip this rule and move straight onto the shitton of stress checks they're about to get.
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Jan 16, 2011 22:25
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The whole point of the pointblanking system as presented in UA is to present a gap in the process where you can decide against it. You shoot, you fail to kill, and then you take your first round of checks. If you're capable you can then proceed, followed by your next round of checks, etc. It could also come up if your are pressed for time, such as in a hostage situation. Did you really kill them? People get shot in the head and survive all the time, after all.
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Jan 17, 2011 17:23
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Who cares what happens in real life? There's no Godwalkers or functional magic in real life. But I now see that it absolutely could be interesting if the dice tell you that your character non-fatally shot someone, then couldn't bring themselves to finish the job. Thank you for explaining that: I just wasn't getting it for a while.
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Jan 17, 2011 18:18
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The new sci fi Reign setting has hit its goal! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gregstolze/out-of-the-violent-planet I've been working on a sci-fi campaign for a while, and I like ORE, so I'm pretty excited about this.
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Jan 23, 2011 06:17
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Now we just gotta wait 2 weeks. Joy of joys.
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Jan 23, 2011 21:25
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Tiny story. My party of TNI headcrackers was crashing a Naked Goddess Temple in downtown Syracuse, and got pinned down by cultist fire. The party gunner decides to cut a new entrance in the drywall with some machine gun rounds. He shoots the outline of a door into the wall, hearing cries of pain from the enemy henchmen on the other side, who retreat to cover. The party point man, a masterless man avatar wearing kevlar armour, pumped up to an obscene 160 hp, smashes through the wall with a gun in each hand, blazing away wildly, in a thunderous rush of drywall dust and gunsmoke. And then the nearest enemy guard rolls a 01 on his attack, and the PC dies instantly. UA combat is merciless.
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Jan 24, 2011 03:29
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I've taken to skimming RPG.net lately for news on ORE and Stolze stuff, and someone asked about making duels with various weapon styles interesting in REIGN. This lead to me realizing that in Wild Talents you can add extras to hyperskills, so you could take hypersword with a bunch of levels of goes-first or interference to be unblockable, etc. I know that WT isn't hard to break over your knee, but for some reason the idea of taking a bunch of crazy extras like non-physical or penetration on hyperpunch or Variable Effect (Any Extra) on hyperkarate seems like it could be fun, stylistically. Or you could put stuff like, uh, daze on hyperflirt. Or spray on your hyperresearch, which I guess would be like reading eight books at once. And on and on. And then you can also add flaws.
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Jan 26, 2011 11:04
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On upcoming Unknown Armies supplements posted:Regrettably, we ran into some issues in the editorial process. To make a long story short, these projects are now on the back burner indefinitely. It looks like Thin Black Line: The Order of St Cecil and the other two upcoming UA books just got canned.
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Jan 27, 2011 01:11
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Sorry.
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Doc Hawkins posted:Essentially, I would play or run the crap out of a game of Dogs in the Vineyard but with the Unknown Armies setting. It's one of those systems that is no longer best-of-breed for its stated mood and purpose. I did exactly that: a conversion of Dogs for Unknown Armies. I'm not sure how balanced it is right now (because of how differently adepts and avatars work), but that's precisely why I'm posting it up here for review, use and comments. PDF file of about 200kb. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Z8QCK51Z
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Jan 28, 2011 18:13
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Out of the Violent Planet is out!
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Feb 13, 2011 03:50
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Evil Mastermind posted:Out of the Violent Planet is out! Awesome! I'm downloading it now and will have a look at it tomorrow. Thanks for reminding me of its existence. While I'm at it, I might be starting a REIGN campaign soon. I know someone was discussing doing statless ORE a few pages back and I asked what changes people would specifically make to REIGN to make it statless but got no replies. Anyone have any advice now?
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Feb 13, 2011 04:07
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Evil Mastermind posted:Out of the Violent Planet is out! Yesssssss. Everyone should download this immediately.
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Feb 13, 2011 21:45
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Gundaddy sounds like slang from Shadowrun. Also, the new mechanics for the thing are basically "alien rules, shotgun rules, social media rules". You can't not have a fun campaign with these toys.
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Feb 13, 2011 22:32
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Squidster posted:- http://blog.atlas-games.com/2009/10/call-for-unknown-armies-pitches.php ( posted 1/26/2011 12:45:00 PM ) Well that's kinda poo poo.
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