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Elfgames posted:Do you let people just say "I roll climb?" I mean they should at least attempt to justify how they are climbing poo poo. IE. using their fancy climbing gear or looking for handholds or whatever. So when someone says "I roll intimidate." even if they don't have to have improv training it isn't much to ask a player to come up with at least some vague threats like "i threaten the death of his firstborn son or i threaten to leak the news of his dirty affair with the chambermaid."
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Dec 29, 2013 03:31
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moths posted:Really though as long as you're being consistent, it doesn't matter what the reason is. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 03:33
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Well yeah, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what "charisma" really means. But in DnD it's forever been a catch-all social attribute. In the framework they've established, it is what it is.
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Dec 29, 2013 03:46
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Mr. Maltose posted:Sailor Jerry is a good cheap rum as well. (It's one of those odd life rules that the higher the rank the shittier the rum.) Old Kentucky Shark posted:Buffalo Trace is fine (I almost got a job there, several years back), Knob Creek is better. quote:I really like Bulleit Bourbon, especially Bulleit Rye, which is maybe the best rye whiskey in the world. quote:Four Roses Single Barrel is fantastic. quote:Evan Williams Single Barrel is not the best bourbon, but it is a $25 dollar bourbon that tastes like a $50 bourbon, which makes it my go to whiskey. On the subject of social skills, remember that in OD&D, Charisma had the straightforward effect of increasing your ability to command followers and get some sweet sorceress pussy. Impersonating the moon wasn't even a concern. Gygax and Anderson posted:Charisma is a combination of appearance, personality, and so forth. Its primary function is to determine how many hirelings of unusual nature a character can attract. This is not to say that he cannot hire men-at-arms and employ mercenaries, but the charisma function will affect loyalty of even these men. Players will, in all probability, seek to hire Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and/or Clerics in order to strengthen their roles in the campaign. A player-character can employ only as many as indicated by his charisma score:
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Dec 29, 2013 04:10
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Honestly, I've seen people experiment with just attributes versus just skills in the various heartbreaker design contests (and, you know... heartbreakers in general), and the thing I've noticed is that they're generally just better then the ones that have both. I'm not saying a well-executed hybrid class-based game is impossible, but it generally seems to muddle the waters. Funnily enough, though, that's one of the things that actually makes me a little hopeful for Next. It's not the choice I would have made, but the designers seem aware that the combination has some issues and are at least trying to deal with them. Or I'm just being optimistic.
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Dec 29, 2013 05:09
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moths posted:The thing is, it's obviously bullshit when a DM has you explain how you employ pitons, how weight is distributed in your pack, and what specific rope knots you're using instead of letting you make a mountain climbing roll. Yep, that's why skill rolls work great for that sort of thing. Expecting people to roleplay out social interaction pretty clearly isn't bullshit of anywhere near the same sort. quote:If a player isn't a smooth talker or quick-witted, you're penalizing his character by forcing him to roleplay out conversations. But more frequently this is abused the other way, with the player using his own social skills to negate the penalties his neckbearded fedoramancer should be incurring. The penalty only exists if social mechanics exist, and there's an opportunity cost for having a character that uses them. If social mechanics don't exist, or if they're silo'd away from other skills, this problem goes away. AlphaDog posted:What I'm really getting at is that I don't understand the need some people have for the rules to cater to a 90 pound weakling pretending to be Axebeard Muscleface, but not to a shy weirdo pretending to be Frank Abagnale or a punch-hosed boxer pretending to be Gandalf. Those are different things, so this is a false equivalence. Mechanics for combat are relatively easy, and there's no good alternative to having those rules. Mechanics for most skills are still pretty straight-forward. Mechanics for social interaction have proven to be much more difficult, and there's a decent alternative available by default. Your example upthread actually illustrates this well. LARP combat is wildly impractical in general, but roleplayed social interaction obviously isn't. People "just roleplay" social stuff all the time, and it generally works pretty well. Yes, it's unfortunate that doing that could mean that a shy introvert might not be able to play a sly conman, but not every game should be expected to support everything. It's better to acknowledge the difficulties, and keep mechanics focused on what they're good at, rather than just shrug and stuff social skills into the same mechanics used for climbing, jumping, and picking locks, and then complain when people don't want to interact with NPCs the same way they interact with stone walls. No mechanics is better than bad mechanics. Now, sure, even better would be good social mechanics, specifically designed for that particular context, but I don't think that really belongs in a tactical-combat-focused game like modern D&D.
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Dec 29, 2013 06:20
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eth0.n posted:Yep, that's why skill rolls work great for that sort of thing.
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Dec 29, 2013 07:13
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I mean the alternative is that you DO give bonuses for well made social arguments, and go on to give bonuses to people who describe their attack in such a way that it would give bonuses in the first place...but then you get "stunting" rules which, if hyperbole is to be believed, turned every action in Exalted into a short story.
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Dec 29, 2013 08:10
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I still think treating social obstacles the same as other obstacles is a mistake. Dialogue is the result of characters talking; and dialogue is an important element of roleplaying. Dialogue with stakes tends to be more engaging, imho. I recognize that this presents difficulty for someone who absolutely cannot make an argument in real life who wants to play a character that can, and for that girl/guy I'm willing to make a special effort to level the playing field, but in general, I wouldn't eliminate those interactions for dice most of the time. Argue first, then roll dice has always been the rule at our table, and I've never had a person so introverted they couldn't even half-fumble through a series of arguments that their character would make. It is absolutely not the same thing as figuring how to use climbing gear. Everybody understands the basics of human interaction, even if they don't know precisely what to say. They understand emotional stuff and irrationality and all the other elements of drama. Describing exactly where you place your climbing spikes is boring. If talking to a character would be equally boring, then I wouldn't need the details for that either (and that happens some of the time, such as when shopping). All that being said I wouldn't want to tell anybody else how to play their elfgames and D&D's social mechanics suck no matter what way you slice them. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 09:26
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I can see both sides of the social mechanics argument. I just think it's strange that it's the social mechanics that get argued about this way and not the skill/exploration stuff. I've always loved in-game puzzles, riddles, and mysteries, and while I can see why some people don't, I'm always surprised by someone who comes across a puzzle and wants to solve it by making an INT check. That happens fairly often though, even when the puzzle is part of a big set-piece with combat and stuff going on at the same time. To be fair, they have a good point - it feels to me like a smarter character (18 INT is a genius after all) should be able to do it like that, and maybe a dumb character shouldn't be able to try at all. I just like puzzles and would be sad if I was excluded from trying to solve one because I have a low-int guy or because the wizard rolled his d20 and got it on the first try. ProfessorCirno posted:I mean the alternative is that you DO give bonuses for well made social arguments, and go on to give bonuses to people who describe their attack in such a way that it would give bonuses in the first place...but then you get "stunting" rules which, if hyperbole is to be believed, turned every action in Exalted into a short story. Or it turns into Dungeon World, which doesn't seem to inspire people to speak for ages about their actions. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 10:03
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I think the puzzle analogy is apt, because a puzzle is more than just an obstacle - it presents unique dramatic opportunities apart from success or failure, much like dialog. And it turns out the sane answer most of us use most of the time is to wing it - sometimes the puzzle is of significant dramatic importance and INT checks net you clues and other times it solves the whole thing. Much like social stuff. I mean it turns out the interesting part of climbing is whether or not you fall. Social actions aren't always like that.
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Dec 29, 2013 10:26
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Part of the reason Exalted's stunts go completely off the rails so quickly is that you get more bonus for a cooler stunt. On paper this is pretty great, you get rewarded for being cool, and if you can argue with that on paper you're crazy. In play though, everyone is shooting for that 3 die + Willpower recovery ultrastunt, and trying to out-rad the last guy who made a big play quickly becomes a good way to outword Homestuck. The reason Dungeon World's mechanics don't do quite the same thing is that you need to put in a bare minimum of effort to even roll, but after that its pretty much all just icing. As for social situations, its hard to put numbers on social interaction without it turning into mind control, but at the same time I don't see a reason why CHA 18 shouldn't be greasing the wheels of social situations just as much as STR 18 greases the wheels on physical combat. The problem is that when you add it into a skill system a Diplomacy or Bluff skill turns into the equivalent of "I make a Murder check, I got a 35, the opponent is now dead." EscortMission fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 10:27
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EscortMission posted:The reason Dungeon World's mechanics don't do quite the same thing is that you need to put in a bare minimum of effort to even roll, but after that its pretty much all just icing. Also, the latter has the advantage that the GM doesn't have to decide if it's cool or not. GMing a hugely crunchy system like Exalted was hard enough without having to add on the difficulty of fairly judging aesthetic actions every single time someone does something, and the stunting bonus was big enough that it was a major effect on the fight.
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Dec 29, 2013 10:31
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AlphaDog posted:I can see both sides of the social mechanics argument. I just think it's strange that it's the social mechanics that get argued about this way and not the skill/exploration stuff. I've always loved in-game puzzles, riddles, and mysteries, and while I can see why some people don't, I'm always surprised by someone who comes across a puzzle and wants to solve it by making an INT check. That happens fairly often though, even when the puzzle is part of a big set-piece with combat and stuff going on at the same time. I think part of it is the function it plays in gameplay. A puzzle gets placed in the dungeon purely to be solved, while a social interaction is something that just sort of arises out of what the PCs try to do with NPCs. If you skip a puzzle by rolling a die and declaring it solved you're negating explicitly designed gameplay, while NPCs (even ones placed specifically to be socially defeated, like a guard that needs to be bluffed past or something) don't quite feel that way in practice. Puzzles (and especially riddles) are a dangerous side-topic, though. The intersection of skills and 'you may not proceed until solution is given' obstacles is its own whole thing. People are dynamic, so you can always make plot out of someone failing a social check, but failing to solve a puzzle/climb a wall/etc by default just grinds the game to a halt. Edit: EscortMission posted:As for social situations, its hard to put numbers on social interaction without it turning into mind control, but at the same time I don't see a reason why CHA 18 shouldn't be greasing the wheels of social situations just as much as STR 18 greases the wheels on physical combat. The problem is that when you add it into a skill system a Diplomacy or Bluff skill turns into the equivalent of "I make a Murder check, I got a 35, the opponent is now dead." I think that's another big thing. Single-roll challenges are boring. A crunchy and fun social mechanics system adds a lot more to the game than just 'roll a 19 or higher to win the conversation'. OtspIII fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 10:43
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I like to use and interact with puzzles that won't halt progress but will have some other effect - like making the boss weaker, spawning X minions per round unless they're resolved, or granting some kind of benefit that's useful but not necessary for your final goal. Basically, that sort of thing should be optional in D&D. Not "you can just not put it in if you don't like it", but "you don't have to interact with it to get to your goal". The problem with D&D here (at least in published adventures) is that it tends towards puzzles and social interactions being "win to progress" instead of plot-branches or bonuses/penalties. Just as failing to climb a wall shouldn't stall the plot, neither should loving up the magic candelebra puzzle or failing to talk your way past the guard. You're right though - I'd prefer no social mechanics to binary social mechanics.
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Dec 29, 2013 11:03
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AlphaDog posted:I like to use and interact with puzzles that won't halt progress but will have some other effect - like making the boss weaker, spawning X minions per round unless they're resolved, or granting some kind of benefit that's useful but not necessary for your final goal. Well, everything in D&D tends to float into "win to progress." That's due to it's wargamer roots that it never dropped. If your goal is "steal every single motherfucking gold coin," then finding hidden doors into treasure rooms or opening locked doors without alerting all nearby monsters is something with a definitive pass/fail system that works in the context of the game. When the locked door leads to the plot, now there's no real "pass." It's "continue the plot or nothing happens." In the first case, unlocking that door was rewarded; in the second place, it's the "given." Likewise, when parlaying with a monster means getting a cool sidekick (to soak attacks for you) or convincing them to back off and let you enter the room of one thousand gems, you again have a definitive reward/penalty state. But with you're trying to convince the king to let you continue playing the game, there's no "win." The best example of this were those awful playtests that WotC did of Next, where Mearls had the players just jerk off for half an hour until they could roll the magic number that let them continue playing.
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Dec 29, 2013 12:37
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God, those playtests. Everyone make a wisdom check. We all fail. ... Everyone make another wisdom check. We all fail. gently caress's sake; unless failure is also interesting, don't roll. Not everything has to have dice.
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Dec 29, 2013 13:11
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ProfessorCirno posted:Well, everything in D&D tends to float into "win to progress." That's due to it's wargamer roots that it never dropped. If your goal is "steal every single motherfucking gold coin," then finding hidden doors into treasure rooms or opening locked doors without alerting all nearby monsters is something with a definitive pass/fail system that works in the context of the game. When the locked door leads to the plot, now there's no real "pass." It's "continue the plot or nothing happens." In the first case, unlocking that door was rewarded; in the second place, it's the "given." Well, yeah. That's what I was getting at. D&D has this weird thing where it keeps stuff for the sake of keeping it rather than because it still makes sense with the new stuff that's put in, or removes stuff without considering changing other stuff to compensate. One good example is the spell system, which I've posted about before. Wizards are shitloads less powerful when they have to transcribe every single spell beyond their starting spells from scrolls or found/captured spellbooks, with a chance of failure, with randomly determined spell drops. Which is how the AD&D rules are written. But it honestly kind of sucked to play like that as a wizard. Removing those restrictions without changing other stuff was one of the prime factors in wizard supremacy though. Or what about the way fighters stopped getting their army at 9th level and thus became increasingly useless at levels beyond about that? But they don't get anything extra, because they're "just sword-swingers and always have been". Yeah, true, right up to the point where they suddenly became King Arthur, anyway. Lets not even get into character generation, where it went from a 5-minute process in B/x to at least half an hour by the end of 2e and your character could still start the game with exactly one hit point and die in the first room because that's D&D even though it's stupid now.
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Dec 29, 2013 13:28
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MadScientistWorking posted:If you are going for boring then yes it isn't bullshit. If you aren't then it is on the same level of trying to figure out how climbing pitons work. I don't know what kind of bizarro RPG groups you've been playing with, but I simply can't relate to this perspective. But yes, if roleplaying conversations is "boring", and skill rolls are not, by all means, stick with the skill rolls. AlphaDog posted:I can see both sides of the social mechanics argument. I just think it's strange that it's the social mechanics that get argued about this way and not the skill/exploration stuff. Because we have good skill/exploration mechanics, and those mechanics are basically necessary to have a functioning game that features those things. quote:I've always loved in-game puzzles, riddles, and mysteries, and while I can see why some people don't, I'm always surprised by someone who comes across a puzzle and wants to solve it by making an INT check. That happens fairly often though, even when the puzzle is part of a big set-piece with combat and stuff going on at the same time. Don't lump this in with other skill/exploration stuff like climbing checks. This is different, and falls into a category similar to social stuff. It's something that can be engaged with by the players directly, where mechanics aren't necessary. I think the difference is that good puzzles and riddles are a lot more difficult to design than social encounters, and can quickly become frustrating in practice.
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Dec 29, 2013 14:26
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Maybe the problem is in the way the game presents the skills, then? If you regularly climb up walls with a Climb skill check, it's reasonable to expect to bluff your way past a guard with a Bluff skill check, or open the magic puzzle lock with a Lockpicking and/or Arcana skill check.
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Dec 29, 2013 14:55
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AlphaDog posted:Maybe the problem is in the way the game presents the skills, then? So long as Bluff uses the same mechanics as Climb, or Lockpicking, or Arcana, and being good at it means being less good at other things, I'm not sure much can be done with "presentation" to fix the problem. Advice and other such things don't speak as loudly as the mechanics themselves.
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Dec 29, 2013 16:27
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It really comes down to whether the DM lets you use the Bluff ranks and Cha you paid for or if he wants community improv theater and those points are wasted.
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Dec 29, 2013 16:39
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Someone mentioned retroclones that didn't have skill systems being on the average better than the ones that had. And I sort of have a feeling it might be true. I think there's kind of an issue there I'm aware of but I really can't put my finger on why, but something about how the skill system since 3rd ed has been kind of an afterthought that doesn't really fit into the rest of the character sheet at all, since you know, neither fighting or magic actually use skills and you can't become a better fighter through skills. It's amazingly clunky in so many ways and the fiddlyness of it all makes it almost impossible to guess at what kind of level in a given skill a fighter might have at a given character level.
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Dec 29, 2013 16:43
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moths posted:It really comes down to whether the DM lets you use the Bluff ranks and Cha you paid for or if he wants community improv theater and those points are wasted.
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Dec 29, 2013 16:50
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Well yeah, just as you would with any other skill. E: That is, "I threaten the guard" should be just as effective as quoting some threatening movie line in a ren-faire accent. The trouble comes in when a narration of "conversation happens" isn't good enough because Todd wants to have more ~Roleplaying~ moths fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 17:04
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moths posted:It really comes down to whether the DM lets you use the Bluff ranks and Cha you paid for or if he wants community improv theater and those points are wasted. What I'm actually talking about is whether those Bluff ranks and Cha should exist at all. I certainly agree that if you're playing a game that includes them you ought to use them. Or, agree to houserule them out in advance. My point is that games shouldn't be obligated to include social mechanics, and it can be better to not have them them at all, rather than just stick Bluff and Diplomacy next to Climb, Jump, and Lockpicking and calling it a day.
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Dec 29, 2013 17:15
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moths posted:Well yeah, just as you would with any other skill. Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 17:27
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Splicer posted:"I threaten the guard" is a bit barebones for my tastes. If I was GMing and someone just said "I threaten the guard" then I'm not really sure what to do with that, and I'll say "Threaten them with what?" or something. However "I threaten to get him fired if he doesn't let us in." will be just as mechanically effective as a ten minute tirade of don't you know who I am? This is what I meant when I suggested earlier having the whole group pitch in OOC on social stuff. "I threaten the guard" is a perfect starting ground for everyone else to pitch in. As a GM, it absolutely sucks to hit a brick wall in an interaction, it wrecks the natural rhythm of the exchange and throws everything off. But as a Player, it is equally poo poo to be expected to do something you're either uncomfortable or unable to do just because you had the gall to be a shy reserved dude who wanted to play the Bard, while being unable to "think fast on your feet" irl. Easiest way to mitigate this is to crowdsource it in my opinion, otherwise you're basically penalizing one person/character for something taken for granted with another.
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Dec 29, 2013 17:36
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Kemper Boyd posted:Someone mentioned retroclones that didn't have skill systems being on the average better than the ones that had. And I sort of have a feeling it might be true.
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Dec 29, 2013 17:43
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My biggest problem with skills in D&D is that they are added onto your ability scores so a fighter gets less out of increasing his bluff skill than his climbing score making it feel like a waste to increase things other than what you're already good at.
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Dec 29, 2013 17:48
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In My Fantasy Heartbreaker ability scores are what you roll if you don't have training in a skill. If you have training in a skill then you roll the trained-in-a-skill number for your level. A beefy knucklehead trained in arcana can arcana just as well as a genius wizard trained in arcana, but if neither is trained in healing the genius wizard will probably do a better job of winging it. Then there's the Mutants and Masterminds approach where you have ability scores and skills stacking, but there's a cap based on your current power level. So the muscleman and the genius have the same maximum capability in superscience, it just costs the genius less points.
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Dec 29, 2013 18:00
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eth0.n posted:I don't know what kind of bizarro RPG groups you've been playing with, but I simply can't relate to this perspective. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 19:03
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MadScientistWorking posted:No you definitely do as you basically restate my argument a few paragraphs below in the very post. Its incredibly dumb to expect people to be able roleplay out being competent at something when being competent at something usually takes years of practice in real life. And yes social interactions are just as trained of a skill as swiping around a sword is if not more. I straight up had a person in my group who would completely freeze when asked absolutely anything relating to a social check and that was what her character was primarily good at. Her stats were there but she as a person wasn't good at coming up with convincing lies, threatening comments, or really anything outside of her own personality. We shouldn't expect that from people and there is no reason to mandate someone who never practices being an actor to have to actually be a dramatic at the table to earn the right to use the numbers on the character sheet. That said, I do subscribe to the notion that "I intimidate the guard" isn't enough but the table can pitch in with how they want him intimidated and as a DM that works perfectly fine for me. I'll also state that I've never played with a group of players who would ever willingly describe an action outside of basic outlines before they knew if they succeeded or not. It seems cruel and exhausting to expect players to fully invest in an action when they know completely random chance rather than effort determines success in situations where rolling is required.
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Dec 29, 2013 19:16
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MadScientistWorking posted:No you definitely do as you basically restate my argument a few paragraphs below in the very post. Its incredibly dumb to expect people to be able roleplay out being competent at something when being competent at something usually takes years of practice in real life. And yes social interactions are just as trained of a skill as swiping around a sword is if not more. 'Social interactions' are a skill but they aren't the same as swinging a sword. Most people understand the basics of conversation, and they have at least a subconscious understanding of how what you say or how you react reflects who you are. Yeah, it takes years of training to be a fantastic trial lawyer, or a politician, or whatever, but it's not like medicine or climbing where few people have real world experience with it. Not to mention glossing over conversation has consequences that glossing over rope tying does not. I'm not saying it's always right for every group to roleplay every conversation, but I'm arguing against what I perceive an opinion that suggests you should always roll (EDIT: and roll abstractly, e.g., 'I diplomatize the Elf Queen') for that stuff so that a hypothetical extreme introvert can play a specific archetype. One thing conversations in RPGs afford us that we rarely have is time; you can stop and think about what you want to say. We also have the luxury of approximation - you can spout off what you want to say IC, and then sort of waffle and be like, "wait, I'd rather have said it like this" and a good DM will roll with that. I have literally never played with a person who couldn't manage that. ^^^ Also the group-spitballing stuff. I'm fine with a player taking a few moments to conference and think about what they want to say but I need something to go on. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 19:18
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AlphaDog posted:Maybe the problem is in the way the game presents the skills, then? It's more of a problem with the way the game presents challenges, to be honest, or with the way that skills and challenges interact. Some challenges are naturally short and binary, while some challenges are open ended with opportunities for several different outcomes and changes of tactics, and some are on a spectrum between the two, or are even capable of flipping from one to the other. Within the skill system, you have some skills that are pretty much always going to be used to overcome short/binary challenges (jumping, lockpicking, etc), and some skills that are almost always going to be used for bigger, open challenges, and some that bridge the gap, but nowhere is this really openly examined or acknowledged (except for Skill Challenges, but, well, you know how that went...). Stealth is a good example. Would you say "I stealth my way past the guard?" and then drop dice? Sure. Would you say "I stealth my way into the heart of the king's castle so I can assassinate him" and then just drop dice? Probably not. Social challenges, by their nature, almost always have the opportunity to blow open into bigger, wider challenges like the sneaking into the castle example, which is why people don't feel comfortable blitzing past them with a single roll. It's the underlying subtext behind the claim that "social skills are different because everyone knows how to talk"; that understanding that talking is an open-ended multi-stage process, whereas, in most people's eyes, climbing or lockpicking aren't*. *They probably are also complex, multi-stage processes, but gently caress if I know enough about either to handle it at the table. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 20:11
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MadScientistWorking posted:No you definitely do as you basically restate my argument a few paragraphs below in the very post. I really don't see how. I barely talked about social mechanics in that post. Either I've misunderstood your argument, or you've misunderstood mine. quote:Its incredibly dumb to expect people to be able roleplay out being competent at something when being competent at something usually takes years of practice in real life. And yes social interactions are just as trained of a skill as swiping around a sword is if not more. First off, I don't see what this has to do with your "boring" comment. Second, being able to converse, form arguments, understand social situations is something that people have years of practice with, in real life. For nearly their entire lives. Anyone that isn't a very small child, or afflicted with a serious mental disorder can do these things. If you're designing an RPG for autistics (real ones, not "sperglords" or whatever), for whom social interaction is as foreign a concept as the correct use of pitons, then sure, social mechanics might be just as essential as climbing mechanics are to the rest of us. Finally, to be clear, when I say "roleplay out", I don't just mean amateur ren-faire stuff. Third person narration, collaboration between players, "hold on let me think this through", whatever gets across the intent and squares with the play dynamic desires of the group. That's a matter for the DM and players to decide, not game designers. Basically, my point is that DM fiat (or in PbtA terms, "The Conversation") works relatively well for social encounters; much better than combat or rock climbing, and thus mechanics for social encounters aren't nearly as useful, and potentially harmful. People understand, at a basic level, how the implicit mechanics of conversation and argument operate. The back and forth can be engaging in its own right. People can distinguish between good and bad arguments; if the PCs don't succeed because the DM found a flaw in their argument, that doesn't generally feel like bullshit. Whereas with something like rock climbing, the DM has essentially no basis for anything; it's all left to their whims, and it's generally a simple, one-off decision. If the DM fiats that a character falls and injures themselves, just 'cuz, that can easily feel like bullshit. This means the marginal utility for providing social mechanics is much smaller than for other skills. All mechanics have downside; at a bare minimum, headspace to remember and understand them. Additionally, they often introduce a hiccup in the natural flow of play for dice rolling or whatever, and they often come with an opportunity cost so that if someone "takes" them and they're not used in practice, they're screwed over. My point is that social mechanics might not have enough upside to overcome this, whereas other skill mechanics certainly can. And I believe this is borne out by how frequently people ignore social mechanics in favor of the roleplayed interaction they evidently prefer.
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Dec 29, 2013 20:19
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MadScientistWorking posted:If you are going for boring then yes it isn't bullshit. If you aren't then it is on the same level of trying to figure out how climbing pitons work.
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Dec 29, 2013 20:24
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Payndz posted:Skills were always something I associated more with Traveller than D&D when I played as a kid, and it was kind of a surprise when I started looking at RPGs again last year to discover that D&D had sprouted a long list of them, and an even longer collection of feats. I would chalk this up to the unique character creation method of Traveller which controls skill selection, whereas in D&D it's always been "Oh, I guess I should take these skills". The skill glut in D&D existed even as early as 2nd edition.
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Dec 29, 2013 20:26
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eth0.n posted:People can distinguish between good and bad arguments;
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Dec 29, 2013 20:32
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I really hate it when people try to shoe-horn real puzzles into elfgames. "Yeah, you can keep going on the adventure - if you take thirty minutes to figure out this tower of Hanoi puzzle I've placed in front of you that exists only to take you out of the game for a huge chunk of time."
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Dec 29, 2013 20:46
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