So I was re-reading Neuromancer the other day, and there's a passage pretty early on which got my attention this time. It's describing the social atmosphere of this city, and it specifically mentions something along the lines of: move too slow, and you're swept beneath the current; move too fast, and you break the fragile surface tension; and either way, you're gone and forgotten.

And there've been some high school-set games over in IGD over the past couple of months.

This would be a pretty interesting way to approach conflict resolution in a game with a very strict social atmosphere.

Say the Jock is running track. He gets, I don't know, 3 or 4 successes. The Cheerleaders expect him to perform at least at 5 successes, so he loses a little bit of cred. He was still successful, though, so maybe it's just an off day.

But then the AV Nerd scores 5 successes. It's important that he beat the Jock; it's way, way more important that his expected performance was at 0-1 successes. What the hell is this guy, some kind of freak? Et cetera.

So obviously you could take this away from just dice/karma (although I think there's a lot of potential there with buying up, buying down, "why am I like this", and so on), but it seemed a pretty cool way to get game-y with social environments.