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Mendrian posted:Play with Advantage/Disadvantage, the Skill Die, Ability Checks and so forth. Part of the problem is that none of these stand out as particularly unique or compelling terms. You don't look at them and see the same potential as something like WHFRP3 hieroglyphic dice, 13th Age's Escalation mechanic, or the even/odd roll thing that showed up midway through 4e. I'm sure someone could do something clever and fun within Next language, but unless you're really invested in the Dungeons and Dragons brand, you've got any number of other systems better suited for that sort of design.
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Mar 22, 2013 17:43
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Jimbozig posted:I think the worst thing about those rules for charm isn't that you can take a feat to be able to charm someone, gaining advantage on future rolls with them - that seems cool. It's the implication that you can persuade someone of something with a skill check vs their wisdom. That idea is absolutely the killer of roleplaying - my friends and I played wrong for so long because of those rules in 4e. No matter what kind of penalty you give or what difficulty, somebody will spec their character to be able to routinely crush it and convince anybody of anything. Finally I realized that what I had to do was just roleplay out conversations naturally and when uncertain of how the NPC would react tell the player to roll. It was a tough adjustment because my players were thrown off at first when I told them they couldn't just roll to persuade the NPC of their opinion. I'm running a homebrew game that's not D&D-based at all, but it does have a skill system that is roughly analogous to D&D's skills, but I intentionally do not have any social skills. Instead, characters have aspects that players can invoke with per-session points that can assert something about the NPCs reactions to them. But it's ultimately still my discretion on how the aspect will actually impact the situation. I think it works pretty well, because a loose mechanic like aspects can be more naturally resolved in a loose way. When you've got pass/fail skill checks, it sets up a natural expectation that the results will be very clear-cut. And skills can still impact social encounters by changing the narrative context they occur in.
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Mar 22, 2013 17:49
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Many people want to play big, burly swordsmen because they personally couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. Many people want to play slick, smooth-talking charmers because they personally couldn't talk an alligator into biting them. If you dispense with social skills in favor of "just roleplay[ing] out conversations naturally" you've prevented them from being able to do so.
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Mar 22, 2013 17:57
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Rolls exist to add a random possibility of success/failure where fiat would do instead. Fiat is usually determined by the person running the game, though some systems have a sort of "player fiat" as well. I enjoy skill systems that allow a random possibility of persuasion. A big part of roleplaying for me (as a DM) is seeing how the game unfolds; the story doesn't exist, to me, outside of an outline until the game is actually played. By giving players a chance of narrative control, I get to enjoy the game more. I'm frequently surprised by the events that happen and I enjoy integrating them into the game. If you can convince an Orc warlord to take off his armor, it's fun for me to figure out why he would agree to do that.
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Mar 22, 2013 18:02
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fatherdog posted:Many people want to play big, burly swordsmen because they personally couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. Many people want to play slick, smooth-talking charmers because they personally couldn't talk an alligator into biting them. If you dispense with social skills in favor of "just roleplay[ing] out conversations naturally" you've prevented them from being able to do so. Right. I am 100% in agreement with what you are saying and I use social skill rolls in my games. I think I was unclear about what I was saying. Before I made the switch, the way a social situation used play out was something like: quote:"I want to use my intimidation to talk him into sending the garrison out to help us fight by playing up the threat the enemy poses." It also helped in those circumstances where a certain tactic was simply not going to work. I could roleplay out their reactions and make clear where a certain line of conversation was a non-starter. It used to go something like: quote:"Nope, you can't scare them into sending out the garrison because they are 100% convinced of the efficacy of their town's defenses - a topic about which they know a lot and you know frankly nothing." This problem can also come up in exploration-type situations, where description falls by the wayside in favor of skill checks, but we were particularly prone to it in social situations.
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Mar 22, 2013 18:29
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Jimbozig posted:That's simply not the way I wanted the conversations to go, but that's exactly the way they were going. With my group, we HAVE to roleplay them out naturally and then call for rolls when appropriate or else we end up with the above. Maybe your group is okay with that, or maybe your group roleplays out the conversations without any prompting. I wasn't okay with how the situations went in my game and so I made the decision to change it while still maintaining the efficacy of social skills. Ahhh I can totally see that. Yeah it varies a lot by the group I've been in. Some groups just want to roleplay, while others don't. Thankfully I've never been in a mixed group. Usually we found that best way to handle it was to figure out what a player wanted to say and then allow them to roll it. 4e has a real problem during any skill situation where the solution tends to be (Find Highest Rated Skill) - > (Roll Highest Rated Skill). Forcing someone to at least articulate what they want to say first is illustrative of how goofy their methodology actually is. I've played with people who applied a similar methodology to exploration, but I found that substantially less enjoyable. 4e already handles Perception in a fairly binary pass/fail way and encourages maxing out Passive Perception by 1 and exactly 1 member of the party. Honestly finding a solution to that particular problem is something I'd like to see addressed; there's virtually no point in having hidden things in 4e, but at the same time I don't like the oldschool BS way of handling it either.
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Mar 22, 2013 18:40
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Oh, I just remembered another thing that changed: my players started getting what they wanted without needing to roll a lot more. One of my players used to complain that my NPCs were all assholes because they would never help the PCs even when it was in their own interest unless the PCs talked them into it. I used to approach NPC interactions like "Player wants X from this NPC. Player will determine how to get X and then will roll to see if he succeeds." The result was that all my NPCs had their level of helpfulness determined in large part by the outcomes of skill checks. If the player failed, the NPC might still help but would demand something in return. Which, of course, makes them seem like assholes because now they're DEMANDING things. When we started playing out conversations we would often come to an agreement or a deal that was mutually acceptable to both parties without needing to roll at all. Often it would be the same deal that would leave a bad taste in my players' mouths if it was "demanded" of them.
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Mar 22, 2013 18:46
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How do you address the problem that this devalues Social skills? I don't mean that just in your particular case; the problem with rarely-used skills, particularly skills that can be swapped out for other skills, is that players sac them and put all of their available specialization into 'useful' skills like Stealth, Perception, and Athletics.
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Mar 22, 2013 18:52
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Mendrian posted:How do you address the problem that this devalues Social skills? I don't mean that just in your particular case; the problem with rarely-used skills, particularly skills that can be swapped out for other skills, is that players sac them and put all of their available specialization into 'useful' skills like Stealth, Perception, and Athletics. In our group it's by making social rolls matter a lot when they matter at all. I see a lot of people make the claim that anytime you encounter an NPC and solve the conflict through roleplaying that you're devaluing the investment your character put into social skills, but I feel like a lot of the time this is equivalent to a player complaining that they encountered a horse tied up outside the inn and he didn't get to try and kill it with his ultra combat skills.
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Mar 22, 2013 19:15
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I feel like the big problem with social skills is still that they don't really work in the same way as combat. I'm not saying there's an easy way of fixing it, but the openness of elf games leaves a huge problem with social skills. "The king tells you that if you want to pass through the kingdom you need to go and slay the ancien..." "I manipulate him into letting us through!" "No...he won't go for that. I mean, maybe you can manipulate him into giving you some extra rewards, or giving you an additional clue or..." "So we have to fight the ancient whatever, great, what a waste all those points in manipulate turned out to be!" So yeah, either you make skill tests a drawn out affair like combat with multiple layers, or you make it clear that skills are secondary to combat and make the resources spent at character creation to gain social skills come from a different pool than combat stuff.
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Mar 22, 2013 19:20
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Captain_Indigo posted:I feel like the big problem with social skills is still that they don't really work in the same way as combat. I'm not saying there's an easy way of fixing it, but the openness of elf games leaves a huge problem with social skills.
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Mar 22, 2013 19:26
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Jimbozig posted:A sword and torch at Weathertop. Or is that just in the movies? Just the torch, in the books IIRC. I'm reasonably sure he never wields a sword until he gets Anduril/Narsil reforged, and then he uses only that, two-handed, for the rest of the book. Also, content: why the gently caress can these people not maths? Giving up double roll for +1d6 damage, is almost certainly going to be a loving ridiculous idea unless the hit rate is already staggeringly high.
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Mar 22, 2013 19:28
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Captain_Indigo posted:So yeah, either you make skill tests a drawn out affair like combat with multiple layers, or you make it clear that skills are secondary to combat and make the resources spent at character creation to gain social skills come from a different pool than combat stuff. The latter is where D&D ought to be. And there was a time when I thought that was what they were going to do in Next. In fact, largely inspired by talk about Next, around that time I significantly refactored the game I'm running to split combat abilities, skills (the Exploration pillar), and social aspects (the Interaction pillar) into separate pools of character creation options, with no tradeoffs between them, just within them. I'm quite happy I did.
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Mar 22, 2013 19:30
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MadScientistWorking posted:Your example sounds more like railroading than it does an actual problem with the system. Perhaps, but I don't mind if the party go "gently caress that, let's wait until night and sneak through" or "Why bother? Let's go through the next kingdom instead" or "Let's hack our way through the king's guards and then slay him infront of his court." What I don't want is "Plot opening" "I use a single skill to stop the plot opening."
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Mar 22, 2013 19:31
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thespaceinvader posted:Also, content: why the gently caress can these people not maths? Giving up double roll for +1d6 damage, is almost certainly going to be a loving ridiculous idea unless the hit rate is already staggeringly high. Some enemies have ACs as low as 8, so sometimes the hit rate is actually staggeringly high. The problem is that unless you've either played a lot or dug through the monster stat blocks beforehand, you generally can't figure out whether it's worth the tradeoff until halfway through the fight. Or maybe you get into the habit of asking the DM 'how tough do they look?' and they're willing to give you ballpark estimates. I believe that the +xd6 damage is enough to start making one-shot kills noticeably more frequent in Next, but whether it's worth giving up your to-hit is something that would need a lot of number crunching.
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Mar 22, 2013 20:00
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Captain_Indigo posted:I feel like the big problem with social skills is still that they don't really work in the same way as combat. I'm not saying there's an easy way of fixing it, but the openness of elf games leaves a huge problem with social skills. I can understand this, and I also understand the whole "someone shouldn't need to actually be charismatic in order to play a charismatic thing in a roleplaying game" argument, which is pretty huge. I think your second suggestion is still the best option, although it might be nice to include a "high social skills are going to generally make your life easier by boosting rewards, lowering costs, and making people like you more" type clause. The way I always tried to handle it was: Charisma/social skills are important in so far as they determine how the people you are interacting with view and relate to you, even if they don't come with an automatic "win or lose" clause. So, one of my friends played a Necromancer who had a blazingly high Charisma but also loved to just make stupid claims or say obnoxious stuff to the NPC's because that was his sense of humor. The way I played it was, they didn't necessarily believe him if he said the rusty sword he was trying to sell belonged to the Great Knight Jaspar who used it to slay a dragon and was super magic, but they would find him endearing rather than insulting, and might chuckle and bump up the asking price slightly. Or when he was obnoxious to them they treated it as playful ribbing rather than a grave insult, and laugh it off. Then on the flip side, someone who had INT or CHA in the dirt who was making smart or funny observations wouldn't be ignored but nobody would fall all over themselves to reward them, or even trust them anymore than they did before. They wouldn't automatically fail their "roll" but they would be penalized in some way, even if its just that the NPC's were still rude and distrustful after their good faith suggestion. So in your scenario, I even think the built in "he agrees to pay you a hefty reward as well as letting you through, but he is just really in a corner with this ancient whatever and is desperate for you to slay it" still gives them a major benefit for their manipulate points. If you were like "he has a super high Will save and he says no  " then, yeah, that would be dumb and lovely.
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Mar 22, 2013 20:12
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Captain_Indigo posted:I feel like the big problem with social skills is still that they don't really work in the same way as combat. I'm not saying there's an easy way of fixing it, but the openness of elf games leaves a huge problem with social skills. How is he going to manipulate the king? What is going to be his excuse, alternative or suggestion to the king that gets him out of the dragon slaying? The player may not be able to sell a beautiful lie to a king personally, but he should at least have a few of the details for you to work from. You can always apply modifiers to a skill check that correspond to the difficulty of the request, just like combat. "I want to shoot the giant in the eye." "That'll be difficult - are you sure you want to try it?" "Uhh yeah." "Alright roll high for me."
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Mar 22, 2013 21:28
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Captain_Indigo posted:Perhaps, but I don't mind if the party go "gently caress that, let's wait until night and sneak through" or "Why bother? Let's go through the next kingdom instead" or "Let's hack our way through the king's guards and then slay him infront of his court."
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Mar 22, 2013 22:24
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Halloween Jack posted:What's funny is that in OSRIC it's easy to find the dual-wielding rules, which I can't do in the AD&D PHB. Originally I think that anyone could dual wield - with noteworthy penalties. Later on it was altered so that somehow rangers could get around the penalty by wearing light armor. After the style specializations and nonweapon proficiencies (ambidexterity) you could minimize the penalties to-hit by really focusing on being the two-weapon person. Guy A. Person posted:So in your scenario, I even think the built in "he agrees to pay you a hefty reward as well as letting you through, but he is just really in a corner with this ancient whatever and is desperate for you to slay it" still gives them a major benefit for their manipulate points. In the manipulation scenario "manipulation" should be used to massage a situation to the best possible ends. That doesnt mean you can make people believe the sky is green when it is in fact red. Jimbozig posted:When what I really wanted was a conversation where the player ROLEPLAYED the things his character was saying, and then based on what he said I would tell him to roll the appropriate skill. He could still go through with the same plan and make the same roll with the same results, but it actually involved roleplaying instead of just rolling one skill after another until the next fight happened and we could roll some more dice. MadScientistWorking posted:Well that also goes into the other problem in that the sort of behavior that this entails is one that RPGs really never actively try and help people with. I've seen material on the DM side of things but never on the player's side. Its a weird skill set that that not a lot of people actually have and I don't know how you actively encourage it.
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Mar 22, 2013 23:31
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It's ROLE playing not ROLL playing! Here are some rules for rolling dice to make people become your friends. D&D has always had a bit of a problem with social skills. One guy in my group was opposed to the social skills in 4e, because previously he'd only played 2e and he didn't like the idea of just rolling dice to convince people to do what you say. We tried explaining how it didn't just work like that, and you still had to, you know, come up with a plan and at least a few points to make, but he wasn't having it, didn't want to play if this was in the game. One of the other guys managed to come up with a reasonable way of explaining why these rules exist. (Bear in mind that I was the GM, and I do know how to fight with longsword and smallsword). "Would you like to play a game where you could roll to convince people of stuff, but when combat broke out you had to beat the GM in a sword fight?" "No, that's ridiculous, I don't know how to use a sword." "Nobody's going to actually cut you, the swords are blunt and you can have armor, or we'll use padded wooden ones and you can still have armor." "But I couldn't possibly win." "Well, some people don't know how to make a convincing argument to a King, but the way you want us to play means that we have to pretend to actually do that instead of rolling dice. You still get to say what you're saying, just like you get to say what you're doing in combat. The dice roll is to see how well you did. You'll get a bonus on it if you made a convincing argument, just like you'll get a bonus for flanking or sneaking or something in combat." "...I get it, let's make these characters and get playing."
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Mar 23, 2013 00:20
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That's the default argument for including social skills in games, really...just like you (in all probability) can't swordfight a half dozen orcs, then scale a cliff in full armor before wrestling an owlbear but still might want to play a dude who can, some people aren't smooth-talking silver tongued bastards with a cunning plan for every occasion but still might want to play a dude who does. The counterargument to this is usually something along the lines of "yes, but fighting fantasy monsters is clearly not a thing that people can be expected to do because that's ridiculous but everybody can talk or come up with a lie and therefore social skills are lame and you should just roleplay everything instead of rollplaying it," but at that point you can pretty much just tune them out because they are clearly dumb. I think that part of the issue, maybe even most of it, with social skills and the like comes from two things: 1). Most social skill rules are basically "make a check versus a TN, pass/fail" where something like combat almost invariably has more robust rules and more concrete and definitive goals you can work towards. With social skills a lot of the time it's up to the GM to figure out on the fly what a successful Persuade roll actually gives someone, which can (rightly or wrongly) make the whole affair seem kind of capricious, like a combat system where you roll once and the GM decides you whether success means you just sorta grazed'em or cut their head off. So some people come away thinking "social skills are crap because they don't ever seem to work how I want" and some people come away thinking "social skills are crap because they work too good so why bother roleplaying it out?" 2). Most players seem to absolutely hate the idea that anything like social skills could be used against them, and the more robust you make your social skill rules the more pushback you'll get from people who don't want to be "mind controlled." Having their characters killed is totally acceptable, that's "fair," but the idea that their character could lose an argument with the persuasive diplomat and suddenly be convinced of something that they the player don't want them to be convinced of is utter anathema to a whole lot of elfgamers.
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Mar 23, 2013 01:39
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Wow Asmodeus's stat block is terrible, I mean, it's just like 3 SoDs and a laundry list of spells. Mearls, your homework is to read Bahamut or Lolth's stat block in 4e to figure out how to make a final boss of a campaigns stat block, I'll wait.
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Mar 23, 2013 02:48
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There's also another thing you didn't quite include, Kai: I, personally at least, hate the idea that I can bomb a crucial situation because of circumstances outside of my control. People would balk if combat came down to a single hard to modify roll against a nebulous target with catastrophic consequences for failure. For that same reason, I balk when I am making a badass speech in front of a jury that I took half a week to write in advance, or trying to convince that ambivalent enemy who wasn't a bad dude and wracked by guilt that yes, the final battle IS the time to give the BBEG up and fight for waht's right, and the DM tells me 'roll diplomacy' and leaves it up to chance that I get a 1 and a pivotal story moment fizzles out. I just plain don't want that poo poo in my games. If I'm going to fail at a key moment, I want a legit reward like a FATE compel, and if I'm going to roll I want to be able to get enough limited boosts to straight up tell the DM I'm succeeding regardless of the roll if it matters to me just like in combat, and without becoming significantly worse at fighting because I wanted to not screw up diplomacy. Otherwise, social skills can get the hell out.
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Mar 23, 2013 02:54
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Yeah, that's a valid point...it's the inverse of the "social skills are too good, you can just roll high and make the king give you all his gold" thing, the "well your speech was super awesome but you rolled a 1 so that's a failure and nothing happens."
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Mar 23, 2013 03:45
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I think that 4E tried to mitigate the binary pass/fail problem with skill challenges, but those didn't work out so well. In any case, both the DM and the players probably need solid advice on how to handle skills and social encounters, and you could probably even make it modular (if that is even still a thing) depending on your group's tastes. Another thing I thought was missing from 4E was the little "replay" section at the beginning. 2E had the players infiltrating a warren of wererats, but I think the other editions had similar introductions. Examples like that are wonderful to illustrate how the game is played to new players, and I enjoy reading them. Why was it removed from 4E? Are they frowned upon these days or something?
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Mar 23, 2013 04:06
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jigokuman posted:In any case, both the DM and the players probably need solid advice on how to handle skills and social encounters, and you could probably even make it modular (if that is even still a thing) depending on your group's tastes. Cyberpunk made this thing to drive (their version) of some of those points home: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/50383/Listen-Up-You-Primitive-Screwheads http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/50091/listen-up-you-primitive-screwheads quote:From the Back of the book... An advice/intro book should be an automatic idea considering all the horror stories people have shared in these threads.
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Mar 23, 2013 04:13
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, that's a valid point...it's the inverse of the "social skills are too good, you can just roll high and make the king give you all his gold" thing, the "well your speech was super awesome but you rolled a 1 so that's a failure and nothing happens." Just say at the end of his speech, the character let's loose a massive fart. ( in all seriousness, I prefer to make my speeches AFTER I roll for this reason )
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Mar 23, 2013 04:17
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Transient People posted:There's also another thing you didn't quite include, Kai: I, personally at least, hate the idea that I can bomb a crucial situation because of circumstances outside of my control. People would balk if combat came down to a single hard to modify roll against a nebulous target with catastrophic consequences for failure. For that same reason, I balk when I am making a badass speech in front of a jury that I took half a week to write in advance, or trying to convince that ambivalent enemy who wasn't a bad dude and wracked by guilt that yes, the final battle IS the time to give the BBEG up and fight for waht's right, and the DM tells me 'roll diplomacy' and leaves it up to chance that I get a 1 and a pivotal story moment fizzles out. I just plain don't want that poo poo in my games. If I'm going to fail at a key moment, I want a legit reward like a FATE compel, and if I'm going to roll I want to be able to get enough limited boosts to straight up tell the DM I'm succeeding regardless of the roll if it matters to me just like in combat, and without becoming significantly worse at fighting because I wanted to not screw up diplomacy. Otherwise, social skills can get the hell out. This is also deeply related to the issue Kai pointed out where there's no granularity or nuance to the social system. You might balk if you made a single catastrophic roll against the BBEG and lost immediately. However, missing a crucial attack roll or failing to get into the correct position, or failing to perform some discrete action as a part of the combat, would probably be considered acceptable. Hell, that's how we know it's 'hard'. If social rolls had a more nuanced effect, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. If you could break down social rolls into a series of discrete "points" through RPing, that would be pretty seamless, but it's the road that Exalted 2E's "Social Combat" system went down. And that was a complete failure. Really at the end of the day you want the Social roll to support Roleplaying, and vice-versa. Maybe as the DM you sort of on the fly come up with a Bad/Better/Best scenario for a Social roll, and you adjust one tier upward for a well RP'd scene, ensuring that even a failure might result in the 'Better' result. Or maybe you could have 4 tiers! Like Fail/Easy/Medium/Hard... oh. Oh wait. Hm. I don't mean to be snarky. I seriously wonder if 4e's DC model would be adjusted to make Social Rolls work super awesome, minus all the other problems that are inherent in 4e's skill system.
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Mar 23, 2013 04:19
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Mendrian posted:
Feel free to correct me on this, but couldn't the skill check (bluff, diplomacy, whatever next is using) result indicate the response to said social interaction? You can make an impassioned speech, but if you fail the roll, they don't buy everything you're selling. It wouldn't have to be binary, and partial successes could still work.
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Mar 23, 2013 04:38
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Better designed systems, like WFRP3e or Smallville, have better social systems and either do so with a variety of factors (WFRP3e's dice, with multiple avenues of information) or player psychology (positive reinforcement for acting in a certain way. We're never going to see something like this from D&D and I am not entirely sure it's possible in a binary system. Pass/Fail is pretty dumb since that isn't how things actually work, I would love to see more RPGs designed under the Cause/Effect assumption than the Pass/Fail assumption.
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Mar 23, 2013 04:46
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Mendrian posted:Maybe as the DM you sort of on the fly come up with a Bad/Better/Best scenario for a Social roll, and you adjust one tier upward for a well RP'd scene, ensuring that even a failure might result in the 'Better' result. I'm a little leery of a system that would encourage DMs to fudge results based on how good prepared speeches are. You can come up with a brilliant battle plan, but when it's time to put it into action you should still be following the rolls of the dice. Prepared speeches granting advantages starts treading back into the territory where the more OOC charismatic players can monopolize those roles. I'd say it falls into the same category as making highly detailed character backgrounds: it's encouraged and everyone loves reading them, but it's something you do because you enjoy doing so, not because you're hoping to eke out advantages.
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Mar 23, 2013 04:55
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Transient People posted:There's also another thing you didn't quite include, Kai: I, personally at least, hate the idea that I can bomb a crucial situation because of circumstances outside of my control. People would balk if combat came down to a single hard to modify roll against a nebulous target with catastrophic consequences for failure. For that same reason, I balk when I am making a badass speech in front of a jury that I took half a week to write in advance, or trying to convince that ambivalent enemy who wasn't a bad dude and wracked by guilt that yes, the final battle IS the time to give the BBEG up and fight for waht's right, and the DM tells me 'roll diplomacy' and leaves it up to chance that I get a 1 and a pivotal story moment fizzles out. I just plain don't want that poo poo in my games. If I'm going to fail at a key moment, I want a legit reward like a FATE compel, and if I'm going to roll I want to be able to get enough limited boosts to straight up tell the DM I'm succeeding regardless of the roll if it matters to me just like in combat, and without becoming significantly worse at fighting because I wanted to not screw up diplomacy. Otherwise, social skills can get the hell out. This is one of the things 4e did so well at fixing in combat. It's absolutely crucial you hit that ghost since you're the only one with a weapon that can affect it! Roll! 1, oh poo poo! Oh wait, leaders, especially bards and warlords, just freakin' love to hand out emergency rerolls to their allies, thank goodness! In fact in our 4e games we routinely houseruled that the cleric or warlord in our group could also hand out a reroll to a critical social die if it came up, since it's just a different form of combat. It was pretty easy to RP out, since the warlord was the company leader and could pop in briefly as a character witness or a commanding officer or whatever, and right the ship for the main talker.
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Mar 23, 2013 05:05
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isndl posted:I'm a little leery of a system that would encourage DMs to fudge results based on how good prepared speeches are. You can come up with a brilliant battle plan, but when it's time to put it into action you should still be following the rolls of the dice. Prepared speeches granting advantages starts treading back into the territory where the more OOC charismatic players can monopolize those roles. Well I mean, it allows a social player to overcome the deficits of an asocial character in the same way that tactics tend to allow a physically inept character overcome physical situations. Particularly in 4e, where "physically inept" is sort of a non-issue.
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Mar 23, 2013 05:27
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The problems that have been brought up here with social mechanics are mostly problems with a pivotal plot point resting on the result of a single binary pass/fail roll. The answer isn't "remove social skills", it's "improve social skills (and really all noncombat skills) so they're not just a case of rolling once to see if you succeed". Simply introducing a degrees-of-success system for noncombat skills would be a great start. When you think about it's, there's already degrees of success in combat, due to damage being a roll and not a flat number. Did you convince the Duke to let you through the secret tunnels? Not exactly, he wants either 5,000gp in bond so you don't wreck the place, or to prove that you're on his side by taking out Baron Badguy. If you'd rolled higher, he might have just wanted 200gp in back taxes, or maybe nothing at all. If you'd hosed it all up, you might have just got "gently caress off". Roll again to see how far you have to gently caress off and how fast you have to do it before he gets angry.
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Mar 23, 2013 07:13
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I guess I'd have to ask, "How much responsibility does the game system, as opposed to the gm, bear for treating a non binary situation with a binary response?"
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Mar 23, 2013 07:24
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AlphaDog posted:Did you convince the Duke to let you through the secret tunnels? Not exactly, he wants either 5,000gp in bond so you don't wreck the place, or to prove that you're on his side by taking out Baron Badguy. If you'd rolled higher, he might have just wanted 200gp in back taxes, or maybe nothing at all. If you'd hosed it all up, you might have just got "gently caress off". Roll again to see how far you have to gently caress off and how fast you have to do it before he gets angry. Combat is a pretty interesting thing, particularly in modern games, because 'failure' is rarely an immediate possibility. E.g., you have to fail very hard for character death to occur. Instead, efficiency and narrative consequence are more important than 'you didn't die', since 'you didn't die' is sort of assumed. How much HP did you lose? How many limited resources did you expend? How much noise did your encounter make? Did you manage to spare any survivors? Social rolls should be like that. The idea of using GP as an HP analog in social situations is an especially amusing similarity. What if the default assumption is, "you will pass through this social gate", rather than a binary either/or proposition? In combat, the DM assumes you will 'pass' an encounter (not die) or else he would stop writing at that very encounter and throw his pencils away. So we can 'assume' players will 'pass' through social rolls, but when we judge the results in terms of efficiency and narrative form. How much money did you have to spend? How many favors did you burn? How much goodwill did you lose? What will your relationship with this person (and their organization) look like after this conversation is over? That would be a good place to start.
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Mar 23, 2013 07:25
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On the other hand, measuring success in gold spent means you need to provide ways of regaining that lost gold, or a bad social encounter permanently sets back the party for the rest of the game. Sure, the party could do the same thing by using consumables in combat, but that's generally stuff they found as part of loot or is so inexpensive that it makes no appreciable difference. If you're not running a sandbox campaign, there's not a whole lot of room to jam in wealth balancing without quite a bit of experience as a DM, not to mention a lot of modules seem to ignore wealth by level guidelines and leave the party very little at the end. Basically, can your social system work in a module format, with the penalties for mismanaging a conversation no worse than mismanaging a standard combat? The only way I can think of doing that reliably is to have successful conversations provide benefits towards a later combat, e.g. NPCs that assist, a free buff or two, a significant clue as to the weakness of the BBEG, etc. Failure means more reliance on your own resources and probably greater expenditure of them, but not any penalties that will last beyond the end of the module.
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Mar 23, 2013 07:55
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Lord Frisk posted:I guess I'd have to ask, "How much responsibility does the game system, as opposed to the gm, bear for treating a non binary situation with a binary response?" That's a very apt and kind of sticky question because you could reasonable argue it either way, but ultimately I would say the game system bears the lion's share of the responsibility because for a lot of people the game itself is going to be what they look to to learn how to play elfgames. There's a narrative of "I learned D&D by having other people teach me" which some people use to handwave away rulebooks that are sloppy, inconsistent, or don't offer good advice, preferring instead to assume that anyone who wants to get into RPGs will do so as part of some sort of nerd oral history, but the one common element between a hundred gaming groups playing your game is probably going to be the game itself, therefore that's where most of the burden should fall when it comes to teaching stuff like this.
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Mar 23, 2013 07:55
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My biggest worry related to social skills is that you risk sapping meaning away from what you're actually saying if the die roll is too important, and trying to come up with a engaging and convincing delivery is a lot of fun in and of itself--turning it into a garnish on top of a bit of math is a drat waste. Not all social skill systems risk doing this, but games that allow a lot of character customization and have binary (or maybe even # of successes-style) resolution systems can be really bad about this. It absolutely is important that even uncharismatic players can play charismatic characters, but it's also important that the player has a reason to try their best in presenting a convincing argument in an in-game social situation. If a low-effort description of your conversation has the same in-game results as a high-effort one you really risk draining player social engagement. Unfortunately, it can be hard for game mechanics to tell the difference between a low-effort conversation from a charismatic player and a high-effort one from someone shy. I really like social skill systems where you use your successes to buy specific influences on the conversation, Apocalypse World style. Directly feeding the player info on, like, what the King's goal is in this conversation gives even shy players a good foundation to build their interaction off of, but prevents unwanted Diplomancy (which can be kind of awesome, but can be pretty game-breaking if not expected beforehand).
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Mar 23, 2013 08:24
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OtspIII posted:If a low-effort description of your conversation has the same in-game results as a high-effort one you really risk draining player social engagement. I approach this by saying "if a group doesn't really like to roleplay anything, then they'll be happier with some kind of social mechanics than nothing. If a group really likes to roleplay, you can't actually stop them no matter what you do to the game". My main group would happily keep on roleplaying even if a game absolutely forced them to use a mechanical social system, or had no rules or gamespace for social interaction. I mean, I've seen them roleplaying (literally roleplaying) when the game on the table was Risk. Not special themed Risk, just Risk. They were pretending to be incompetent English generals in Victorian times, and having a great time in spite of playing Risk. Apparently we really need to play Dungeon World.
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Mar 23, 2013 09:04
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