The Social Domain - why's it so tough to design?

[Daniel B]

What's so tough about building social systems?

(That social domain is a tough one to deal with.)

How so? (I'm imagining in terms of making social actions more complex and providing mechanical consequences to the results, but please correct me if I am mistaken.)

[Vulpinoid]

WARNING: CONTROVERSIAL RESPONSE.


This is not aimed at anyone in particular, and is based on the experiences I have had over the past 20 years of table-top gaming, miniatures gaming and LARP (including Boffer, Salon, Costume and Freeform styles).

Roleplaying is typically used as a form of escapism. Escaping into a world where you can be someone else; where you can fight with the skill of a expert fencer without needing to take a lesson, where you can adopt the personality of a 1000 year old vampire, where boys can pretend to be girls for a couple of hours (sure there are clubs where you can do that sort of thing, but there are a whole heap of other risks involved if you take that option).

The commonality is that the game is an escape, and those who seek the escape most are the ones who have trouble dealing with the real world.

This isn't a class in psychology 101, it's just an observation that the most fanatical gamers I've met in a half dozen cities are all the least comfortable in the world around them. Many of them are socially intimidated by the world around them, and many use their gaming as a socially acceptable release with other people who share their nature.

Live Gamers, whether costumers or freeformers, tend to be more socially inclined, and this tends to be reflected in the games being played. While wargamers and crunch fanatics are more happy with playing the numbers and maximising their characters to control the world this way. Trying to develop a crunchy/realistic social system seems to be an oxymoron to me.

[Please discuss other opinions and raise valid points to the contrary if you can think of them].

Me, I can admit I've got problems in this regard. I've got Asperger's. I know the symptoms, and I'd be surprised if a lot of the gamer's I've met haven't got the same condition. As a result I can understand the rules of social engagement, but I don't have the instinctively hardwired into me like a lot of the general populace. If I don't remember to react "correctly" to certain situations, people think there's something deeply wrong or disturbing. Conversely, this give me a slight advantage when playing inhuman character types because I just adjust the social rules I play by to match the new race. I'm not bogged down by trying to overcome the instinctive reactions that most people don't even realise they have.

A lot of folks with Asperger's don't realise they have it, and they just mimic the world around them with a feeling of emptiness and loss. Feeling apart from the world around them because they instinctlively react to things differently. As a result, they try to find an outlet where their reactions won't be judged as quickly by the "in crowd".

I've been trying to develop a social system for a roleplaying game based on my understanding of the rules of social interaction. While some people have said that I've nailed certain concepts, others have simply noted that something isn't quite right. In real life I often miss body-language cues if I'm not careful and I take things too literally, and this sort of thing could easily be missing from my social systems if it hadn't been noted. I guess that's just my lack of full understanding of social intrigues, but then again those people who do understand these concepts at a deeper level, probably take them for granted and don't realise what is actually happening.       

That said, I think one of the biggest hurdles with social emulation is the fact that most of the result from a social interaction is internal. A successful interaction can change the thought patterns of the target, and many players are playing the game because they are seeking empowerment through escapism. They don't want to be subjected to the same effects of petty social cliques that the suffer in real life, so instinctively they rebel against it when the same things happen to their avatar in the game world.

Just my 2 cents, I hope it provides meaningful discourse and not just flames.

V

[dindenver]

Dan,
  OK, its not THAT hard. There are at least a couple of approaches:
Social combat: Exalted 2e does this. Its just as crunchy physical combat with maneuvers and everything.
Universal resolution: Dogs in the Vineyard does this. The rules are agnostic to the domain of the conflict. You bid your dice and narrate accordingly.

  I know that a lot of games have fallen flat in this regard, because they rely on GM fiat or are just poorly defined.

  I think that should be part of your design goals too:
1) Define when a roll is required
2) Define exactly how to interpret the results

  It sounds like that is already your goal, so have a little faith in yourself and feel free to move forward with confidence.

  Good luck with your game.

[Patrice]

	Logged

[Daniel B]

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[Patrice]

...and only serve the purpose of providing boundaries on the space of choices that the player has. So it is with Intelligence and Memory stats. So it is with traditional<

Now that sounds self-contradicted to me, but I maybe don't really get what you're at. You both state that you don't want to set a finite set of rules and yet, that you want a finite space of character descriptions or modifiers. I don't get this. There must be a choice somewhere hidden in this contradiction and I feel (yes, feel) that if you can see it, you'll find the answer you're looking for. It's maybe about abilities. One might have an ability to produce something others can't when involved in a social interaction.

I'll take an example. You can maybe describe abilities. Say, soothsaying, or meaningful muttering, or lipsynching. Paul's character has soothsaying, Diana's one has meaningful muttering and Albert lipsynching. When Paul roleplays his character and tries to cool down someone angered, he might say that his character uses soothsaying, thus creating a specific and unique consequence, or adding some kind of bonus, extra die, whatever. Should Diana try too, she could but wouldn't get the same result or benefit. Now Diana mutters in order to roleplay her character, she mutters meaninglessly at the game table, impersonating her character, but her power would allow her to give a written note to someone she wishes telling what her character actually said, because she has the meaningful mutter ability. Let's say she hands the note to Paul. Albert would try to get the meaning too and states his character uses lipsynching. But lipsynching doesn't allow his character to read lips, just to copy any sentence he's just heard. Thinking a little, Albert decides to copy what Diana just muttered to one of his allies, and to ask him what he heard. This would involve a resolution mechanic, maybe taking into account the difficulty of what his character is attempting.

Ability. This is one possibility, or example of what an ability system would look like, taking into account your need for a finite space of characters descriptions or modifiers.

[greyorm]

Now.. figuring out what this means, and how to actually pull it off..

Can you give us an in-game example of how you envision it happening, with as much or little detail as you can muster for any particular aspect of the example? A "this is how I see it playing out" glimpse.

[Daniel B]

Can you give us an in-game example of how you envision it happening, with as much or little detail as you can muster for any particular aspect of the example? A "this is how I see it playing out" glimpse.

Oh ... absolutely, but I'll respond to Patrice's comment on the apparent contradiction first. I'm afraid I misspoke .. (whoopsie)

I don't actually require that character descriptions and modifiers be confined to a finite space, and would actually want to avoid that because it would seriously hamstring the creativity of the players. However, practically speaking, a given player will have only a limited set of key notes or concepts that define his character during play. For example, I could describe my character as simply "Mean", "Ugly", and "Intimidating". This set of words is far away from the near limitless complexity of a living, breathing human being. And that's fine. The tiny description-space is just meant to push the imagination of a real human being in the proper direction. So there's no real contradiction; the description keynotes are not boundaries, but simple weights that pull on the infinite conversational space without forcing it.


At least .. that's the idea. Putting this into practice is where I'm having trouble. (The abilities you mention, Patrice, are artificial constructions and don't really make sense for the system I'm envisioning.)


I imagine that the players would be sitting around the table, and one of them would say that they want to Zoom In on such-and-such conversation for whatever reason. Maybe that player suspects the bartender to be more than just the simple, dumb NPC he seems to be. When this happens, there would be a pre-social phase followed by the social conversation itself.

The pre-social phase would consist of the players generating values for the social impression point and social velocity for each character. (I describe these terms later.) Once that's done, the social encounter would involve the players having what might appear to an onlooker to be a regular in-character conversation, except for the fact that a die is regularly tossed from one player to another, with the recipient player giving it the merest of glances. (NO look-ups in a book, NO math) In fact, there would be several dice wandering around, but a given player would toss only a single die to another player at any given moment.

The benefits of a pre-social phase, that I can see, are:

• 1 - it allows us to reduce the amount of rolling done during the conversation, which would otherwise disrupt the natural flow of a conversation
• 2 - it may allow us to bring handling time of those mid-conversation rolls to zero (ie just a glance at the die and you know if you succeeded)

These two points would, I'm really hoping, achieve the effect I'm going for: namely, the feeling that you, the player, is the one who's actually doing the conversing (not the character), but being virtually oblivious to the empowerment provided by your character. ("Oh! I was able to swoon the princess! ME!") I haven't worked out the mechanical details on this yet, so I can't answer deep questions. The modifiers seem straightforward(ish), but I'm having trouble figuring how, exactly, the character descriptions would play into this. I want them in there, but I'm not sure how to make them act as weights on the conversation itself, past the pre-social phase. I'm also not sure when rolling should be done during a conversation, and how precisely it would affect the impression point and social velocity.

Here's the terminology I'm using:

• Impression Point - starts as the first impressions of the other social party, determined in the pre-social phase, but moves during the conversation
• Social Velocity - bias in the interpretation of everything the other party communicates; highly related to but quite different from the Impression Point

A large negative initial velocity will imply a low beginning impression point, while a large positive initial velocity will imply a high beginning impression point. The starting point would be affected by modifiers for social class, race, and inherent character or society bias, as well as circumstantial modifiers such as accidentally wearing one's shirt backwards. The value for the social velocity would be generated during the pre-social phase, but it may swing up and down as people talked, and would shove the impression point around. Socially adept characters would be better able to control the social velocity of another character. So, an ugly, hairy barbarian with spinach in his teeth (ie LOW starting point) but great charisma may yet be able to change the mind of the king, by bumping up the king's social velocity into a positive direction.

Now that I've put down how I envision a social encounter to play, and possible mechanics, I should say that it's all just fluff for now. Any or all of it could change, including my envisioning of a social encounter, if I can find a more appropriate way to reach the goals I mentioned.

Dan Blain

[Patrice]

That is sure a different way to go, I think I was a bit mislead by the "finite space and modifiers" expression. You are heading towards something very different from what I've been thinking when I read your message in the first place and, as you state it, you want the player to be the main stage actor of the conversation. Since this is exactly what I try to avoid in my own designs, I don't feel much at ease with the whole idea. I do totally and really respect this choice, though, don't take me wrong, but I understand better why and how my suggestions were quite a few miles away from your target.

Now, to talk about your design as you describe it, it seems to me that what you use to describe the characters is actually Traits. Traits could have influence over the pre-social phase or even both phases. I think, when I read, that the core aspect of the system you describe is about the way of defining the swing that occurs during the social interaction. It reminds me a bit of SPI's Swords & Sorcery (the wargame) diplomacy system. You had a scale, and your goal was to move a counter from one position to another, reaching it meaning success. Of course, as a wargame it used dice rolls and no talking at all, but you could have a scale, or even a map, showing the distance the social impression travelled during the interaction. Now, Traits could bend it a way or another, maybe helping to define starting positions or target positions. Last but not least, if what you want to obtain from dice would imply no math nor reference checks, why would you use dice? This could be tokens, pools, position signalers of some kind, anything. I quite know that you could use dice in a non-math and different way, like fudge dice, whatever, but it sounds like you don't want the rolls to influence the outcome of the social interaction. Am I mistaking myself about what you wrote again?

Let me know.

[greyorm]

Hm, hm, hm...that's very interesting. Not sure exactly how to work it out in play, but I like the general idea. I'll give it some more thought, but for the moment, off-hand I can think of possible inspiration in Death's Door.

As I recall, the game's mechanic involves pushing dice back-and-forth during narration/conversations, and other players can award you dice for making a statement they found awesome/poignant/true/tricky/whatever. At the end of the narration, you call for a roll, and whoever rolls best with all the dice they have gained during the conversation, succeeds at the social roll. (Someone please correct me if I'm misremembering the mechanics; the game is currently still packed away somewhere, so I can't double-check my recollections of how it works.)

I think there might be something you can use in there or develop from for your own mechanics.

[maddman]

Here's some rules that I came up with for my Buffy game - http://maddman75.googlepages.com/expandinginfluence

The idea was noted as inspired by Weapons of the Gods, though I'll admit that I've not read that game, and they're more inspired by what someone told me WotG are about.

The basic idea deals with the problem of having the social skills that dictate actions.  The approach I used is that a successful Social action will apply a penalty if the target doesn't do what the social character wants, or a bonus if they do.  This takes care of the Inclusive, Realistic, and Meaningful Choice categories.  By making it a modifier to other actions rather than a dictate, you aren't taking agency away from a player, nor is an NPC effectively mind controlled.  There's strategy and depth, because the social aggressor has to be careful exactly what they are persuading someone to do, and its possible to get around the persuasion or simply accept the penalty.

The amount of the modifier is based on the actual roleplaying, with notes that simply saying "I use my influence skill on them" results in a penalty.  Really roleplaying the encounter will give a much higher modifier.  Some may complain that socially inept people are going to be at a disadvantage.  That really isn't a concern for me.  I mean, should we not have tactical elements in a game because some people are not good at tactics?  Still, a socially inept character with good social skills will be effective even with a token effort toward roleplaying.  This handles the Player and Character Ability and Concurrency requirement.

As for Fun, well its fun when I've done it.

For some examples (I'm an example kind of guy), say there's a huge monster that a character wants to provoke, so the other PCs can get the McGuffin.  He rolls his Influence vs the monster's Brains and gets three successes, throwing rocks and calling the monster uncouth names.  If the monster does anything except a hostile action against the character, he's got a -3 on his actions.  Now the GM could decide that the monster isn't going to attack, he's got no obligation to do so.  But the successful social action has his distraced, so he'll be at a penalty.  He could also do something that doesn't quite fit the PC's plan, maybe throw a boulder toward the PC - a hostile reaction, but he's still guarding the McGuffin.

[Daniel B]

Hi folks,

I'll definitely be checking out the games everyone mentioned, for inspiration. (The premise for that "Death's Door" sounds particularly gripping.. I love the idea of how it asks for the players'  lists of what they'd want to do before they die.)

Spot on Patrice. Traits are definitely something to consider; I had been working on trying to put something similar to D&D's ability scores in earlier, but I've just recently been considering scrapping that in favour of allowing players to define their own social traits, to be roleplayed as they themselves envision, but affecting the game through regular social modifiers. EG instead of "Charm" and "Appearance" granted to each and every character generated by the system, one player could go with "Dashing Smile" and "Clever Wit", while another could go with "Brutish Appearance" and "Bad B.O." (for a character with poor social mods). (PS .. great idea on tokens versus dice!! The handling time will be precisely zero in that case, until the end of the chat!)

Madman .. while the WotG system (as you've described it .. I haven't checked it out yet) sounds interesting, there's a few things I'm trying to shy away from for our system.

One is the application of penalty by the system itself. By having a penalty applied by the system to a target if the target doesn't do what a social character wants, I think it would feel artificial and irritating for the players (.. I know I would feel that way!). Take an example: a socially adept NPC prince approaches the PCs and asks them for a favour. If they refuse, the prince himself will just decide to move on, but the system hits them with a penalty. Luckily, this dodges GM plot-railroading, but it feels like it is the system that is doing just a dash of railroading.

Instead, if a player's character refuses to do what a more socially adept character wants, the 'penalty' should come from other characters, the environment, or the situation itself, if at all; maybe the prince didn't warn them that the favour would result in saving a town from destruction, or alternatively a great monetary reward for the PCs. In either case, the players are far more likely to feel that they brought the "penalty" upon themselves, so, although they may lament it, they'll feel it to be perfectly justified.

Furthermore, I'm actively trying to avoid a system that gives advantages to players who are inherently social and disadvantages to players who aren't. A player's natural sociability will unavoidably spill over from the player to the character somewhat anyway, and a system like that you've described would merely amplify players' existing personalities. I don't really think the "tactical elements" rebuttal you gave is the same thing; in such a game, the rules are the same for everyone, and the players who are bad at tactical thinking can improve by playing. A social system that amplifies existing personalities would tend to do the reverse.



Okay, now that that's all said .. I'm going to be responding to my own initial post, sort of thinking out loud. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm posting just to "hear" myself post, but I feel I owe it to people who've been active in this thread to put up the conclusions I've reached with their help.

Patrice made that point about swapping about dice and using simple tokens and rating them on a linear scale. I'd already been thinking of a linear scale with the impression points and social velocity. It got me thinking.. this setup really looks like a tug-of-war, which is again not what I'm looking for. (Although, it would be appropriate for a debate.)

I think .. for the kind of conversation you'd want to focus on in an RPG .. it's more like trying to move a boulder from wherever it already is (point A) to some other point B. You know you can't shift a boulder with pure strength alone, so you have to try and engineer a way to move it. If your plans work, the boulder is moved just about where you'd hoped, enough to not bother trying to move it again. If you do really well, or are incredibly lucky, the boulder ends up exactly where you wanted it to go. On the other hand, maybe you miscalculate and it doesn't go where you wanted, or worse, a catastrophe occurs and it rolls over your pet cat. This new description does not resemble a tug-of-war, since the boulder isn't actively opposing your attempts to move it, it just sees no reason to move on it's own. It also doesn't resemble a linear scale, since there are an indefinite number of results which are more or less acceptable to the boulder-pusher, as well as an indefinite number of undesirable results.


I think I can work with this X-)

Sincere thanks again to everyone who's responded!! The inspiration has really been helpful.

Back to more mulling,
Dan Blain.

[greyorm]

Heya Dan,

(My name's Raven, BTW. greyorm is just the handle.)

...but the system hits them with a penalty. Luckily, this dodges GM plot-railroading, but it feels like it is the system that is doing just a dash of railroading.

Just a quick note: this is not railroading. At all. In any fashion.

It is not because it is no more railroading than "the creature's attack costs you a point of strength which prevents you from lifting that chest" is railroading. A penalty is a system produced guideline affecting (without outright controlling the result of) potential actions, just like "-1 to Strength" or "At 0 HP you fall unconscious", where as railroading is "No matter what you do, the following outcome occurs."

As long as the system isn't saying "You HAVE TO do this", it isn't railroading*, as long as the options for response and outcome are open, even if those options are no longer ideal, such as situations of "You CAN, but there's a penalty."

(*And sometimes, even when it does, it isn't railroading, such as "If you want to attack, you must roll a d20" or "You must lose 1 hp each turn until healed" or even "You can't lift that much weight by yourself.")

I suggest system-wrought penalties to social actions may feel like railroading to you because traditionally "what my guy does" in pure role-playing (ie: social) terms is treated with a thoughtless sacredness in the hobby, often due to GMs stifling creative input into the game by players, resulting in those players clinging to what is established as unquestionably an unassailably theirs and outside the GM's control--the internal world of the character/what the character says or tries. So when the system enroaches on that domain, the stifled player sees it as an assault on the last part of the game over which they have any personal control or input rather than another extension of the system providing choices and difficulties.

As such, I would caution further consideration (or at least not outright rejection) of mechanics based on utilizing systemic penalties to actions, depending on what you want your system to do. (And perhaps this also helped to answer the question in the title about why it seems so tough to design social mechanics: not due any inherent difficultly to their design, but due the interference of baggage.)

However, one note about the system madman describes, because I agree with you about not overly rewarding more socially capable players, but also because I believe it true some people are just going to be better at certain metagame tasks than others and it is thus silly to handhold them and penalize the others. There is, however, another way to approach this: reward fun rather than skill.

What do I mean? For starters, "roleplaying" is a very loose and icky term that means a billion things to a billion different people, so it isn't a very good description of "when to hand out bonuses" because what one person thinks deserves a bonus may not be what another thinks deserves a bonus, nor is "roleplaying" a good measure at the table if immersive character-acting or flowery narrative prose isn't one of your primary goals in play (or is and you just aren't that good at it). What to do if a player can't "roleplay" (ie: act in character) worth crap, but his ideas are fantastic and others at the table love them?

This is where "rewarding fun" comes in. Did someone else at the table get jazzed about a suggestion, event, action attempt, or whatever? Then give the acting player a bonus! This method doesn't rely on role-playing talent or storytelling skill and also encourages group engagement with and interest in play and the other players at the table.

Much more could be said about this, but I'd be rehashing old territory such as in this thread, and the chain of other threads it links to, on how such is utilized in Sorcerer.

I know you're back to pondering at this point, but hopefully that will provide some more useful bits to add to the mix as you move towards designing a social system for your game.

(Ok, yes, that was longer than a quick note. Longwinded = me.)

[Daniel B]

Hi Raven,

As long as the system isn't saying "You HAVE TO do this", it isn't railroading*, as long as the options for response and outcome are open, even if those options are no longer ideal, such as situations of "You CAN, but there's a penalty."

A creature's attack that takes away a point of Strength truly is just a simple penalty because the players can decide to run away, accept the penalty and fight, or find a way around the penalty such as by nullifying their poison with an antitoxin. As the combat progresses, their options will naturally diminish as they make choices, but everyone knows this to be true so they won't be surprised.

The same is not true with a social penalty. Let's say you have a virtuous Paladin. He is interested in the greater good, and so he wants to cross through Sodom and Gamorrah to go save a princess from certain death in the nick of time, without bothering with people who are pretty much already lost to evil. While he's hustling through town, the townsfolk offer him bad deals and the chance to participate in nasty events that would go against his moral code, but he's got a job to do. With the application of social penalties, even if the townsfolk are really bad at social situations, statistically he cannot avoid falling prey to one of these people eventually regardless of the player's choices ... (unless he runs through town, fingers in his ears, screaming "la la la I'm not listening!")

I suggest system-wrought penalties to social actions may feel like railroading to you because traditionally "what my guy does" in pure role-playing (ie: social) terms is treated with a thoughtless sacredness in the hobby, often due to GMs stifling creative input into the game by players, resulting in those players clinging to what is established as unquestionably an unassailably theirs and outside the GM's control-

In fact, we uprooted this assumption, examined it, and not only decided it was valid but made it (yet another) core principle of the game. Maybe it happens that some GMs stifle players' creative control enough that those players feel they want even more authority over their own characters, but in my experience, this is in general not true. I know for myself and for the guys with whom I'm building the game, we all felt automatic control over our characters for no other reason than because it was our creation, like a piece of art. We weren't just rolling up stats and writing down meaningless historical factoids for the character on a sheet of paper .. we felt like we were building the soul of the character. For me at least, even those characters I spent less than two minutes building, I know I felt that same sense of ownership and it was entirely independent of the guy running the game.

This is not true for all players, sure, such as gamists who treat their characters like simple pawns. However, we decided that we should indeed treat characters like these sacred creations, belonging to the players who built them. Such a viewpoint appeals to the sense of ownership, without impinging on the gameplay experience of gamists. Incidentally, further to this goal, we are putting extreme limits on character-controlling aspects of the game. There will be no fear effects, such as caused by dragons in D&D, and spells like "Charm Person" will either be non-existent or heavily penalized. (I'm voting for their non-existence entirely .. what fun would it have been if Darth Vader used mind control instead of juicy intimidation-through-throat-grabbing-via-the-Force!!)

This is where "rewarding fun" comes in. Did someone else at the table get jazzed about a suggestion, event, action attempt, or whatever? Then give the acting player a bonus! This method doesn't rely on role-playing talent or storytelling skill and also encourages group engagement with and interest in play and the other players at the table.

Hmmmm .. this would work if one expressly discussed Creative Agenda ahead of time and had everyone agree with it. Even in that case, it depends heavily on the question of what is fun, or "bonus-grant-worthy". One player might be easy to impress (like me) and be quick to applaud a lot of suggestions, while another might be more reserved, and unwilling or unsure of whether to express his appreciation.

Furthermore, for the gamists at the table (ie those who enjoy reveling in the rules and structure because it grants them a standard by which they can decide if they're ahead), they'd feel like other players are gaining an unfair advantage and would manipulate the system to "catch up". Granted, I'm specifically designing the social domain not for gamists, but what you're describing would allow fun for certain players at the expense of gamists. Instead, I want the social domain to be something they would simply be inclined to skip by (zoom out from) if they don't want to participate and are able not to, or use as a nice little area of respite between combats, a vacation, when they do want to participate in it.

I'm sure it works in "Sorcerer", but there's too many risks for me to be comfortable with it in our system.

Any thoughts? I'm curious to hear what you think Raven (or anyone else), if so. I realize this is treading upon the forbidden ground of mashed-up CAs.

Dan Blain