- D&D: Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate; Sense Motive
- Fate: Deceit, Rapport, Intimidate; Empathy
- FSuns: Knavery, Charm, Impress; Empathy
- NWoD: Subterfuge, Persuasion, Intimidation; Empathy
Somewhere along the line, it became accepted fact that RPGs with social skills break them down in very similar ways: you have a skill to lie, a skill to persuade without lying, a skill to be scary, and a skill to tell when you’re being manipulated. The occasional game mixes it up a little, either by combining a couple of the skills or by adding one or two others for specialized uses (e.g., NWoD’s Socialize for being the life of the party). But, by and large, it’s common to arrange skills in a way that you will use a different dice pool for social encounters depending on whether you’re lying, being honest, or being scary.
Social combats are hard to model in general. Even in games like Smallville and Technoir where social combat is functionally identical to physical combat, the cadence of the fight is hard to pick up at the table. We’re used to modeling trying to kill people with whatever pacing mechanism any particular game requires, because it’s never going to get in the way of us standing up and just roleplaying out the fight. But for social conflict, it’s natural for most gamers (particularly those that grew up on systems with at most one die roll being involved in any argument) to just roleplay out the scene in character. Adding a social conflict mechanic with a back and forth similar to combat requires you to break up your roleplay in a way that doesn’t feel natural, only roleplaying out a small portion of your speech before pausing to roll and then giving the other side a chance to rebut when you weren’t even done talking. Or you completely abstract the social combat (as the examples in a lot of indie games seem to suggest) by merely stating your intent in the scene and barely saying a word in character. That latter method is a really hard sell to gamers used to doing everything in character that’s at all practical at the table.
But, getting back to the initial point, I believe that part of the difficulty in making a really workable social conflict system is over-reliance on the standard four-skill model of social skills.
From a purely simulation perspective, these skills are weird. I finished reading The Big Con last week, and one of the things it hit home is that there’s not a bright line between any method of persuasion. There may be poor liars that are good at persuading people with the truth (though politics makes that dubious), but there are probably not many excellent liars that suddenly become unpersuasive if they’re telling the truth. Sure, you can buy multiple social skills in most systems, but the game system doesn’t often reward you for avoiding specialization. So you get situations like my paladin in a previous game: as soon as my attempts to convince NPCs drifted from pure fact to concealing information or being evasive, the GM was suddenly justified in asking me to roll my +5 Bluff skill instead of my +17 Diplomacy skill. Despite the fact that, in my mind, it was all part of the social patter required of being the party’s Face, the system didn’t see it that way. If we’d needed the NPC to buy a lie, I should have deferred to the party rogue (which, itself, would have been suspicious).
The inclusion of a social detection skill (empathy/sense motive) creates further complications to roleplay. The active social character is often at a severe disadvantage against a target with a high rank in this skill, because even the simplest and most believable lies can be detected in a way that borders on the magical. Even experienced police detectives often have to have ideal circumstances (such as an interrogation room and facts to catch the target off guard) to reliably detect lies, but RPG characters specialized in empathy can do it in any scenario (frequently against an opponent in the seat of his power). The converse is also true: a character that doesn’t specialize in this skill doesn’t allow its player to make up his or her own mind about a lie, but can be told that even the most bald-faced lie sounds perfectly correct (not that players regularly actually proceed with that assumption when they know they blew their sense motive check or are up against a character that they expect outclasses them in bluff).
Whether or not you believe that the divide in skill is a realistic simulation, the fact remains that it’s part of the problem in making social conflict similar to physical combat. While games typically silo physical combat ability in a similarly weird way (how many martial arts experts are useless with a weapon?), the typical combat offers the ability to contribute with any relevant skill (except in situations where firearms would be too loud or the PCs were disarmed before entering). The martial artist, the fencer, and the pistoleer are each contributing in their own way. But social conflicts are frequently constructed in a way that makes it way more obvious that certain types of skill can’t contribute. We’re trying to befriend this guy, so the party heavy with intimidate can’t help. We’re not actually lying (or we’d blow everything if we were caught in a lie), so the rogue is cooling his heels. Not only do you have the roleplaying need to just let one guy do the talking for simplicity’s sake, there’s little game benefit in the other players trying to contribute anyway.
So what’s the solution?
The easiest answer is to just have one really broad social skill, but that’s probably not something many game engines want to do (if you thought Diplomancers were bad now…). It is worth noting that the standard methods for adding more skills to what a game is focused on creates a paradox of incentivizing the “wrong” builds. For example, it’s way easier to get good at social conflicts in D&D than in combat and it’s way easier to become great at combat in any flavor of WoD than to become adept at intrigue.
The real answer probably starts with the intrigue tactics available in the Song of Ice and Fire RPG (which itself uses pretty close to the standard four skills, except with intimidate as a subset of persuade, so it isn’t a full solution). Specifically, cutting up social skills not by lie/truth/fear/detect but by whatever the verbs are in your social conflict system. For example, if “convince” is a tactic in your system, perhaps that’s the skill and it doesn’t matter whether you’re using lies, facts, or intimidation to convince the target. The trick would be creating a conflict system where any particular social encounter could map victory conditions to more than one such verb in a natural way. And I haven’t quite gotten to that particular holy grail yet.
So am I missing implementations with the standard four skills where they’re a natural fit to the social conflict mechanic? Can anyone come up with a list of verbs that would be applicable to a broad range of social conflicts?
Dec 05, 2011 @ 12:04:26
You could always go with maneuvers, like Push, Deflect, Obscure, and Reveal. To Push somebody, you’re trying to impose your will on them, whether that’s having them believe you, fear you, or respect you. Deflect is your parry equivalent, but it’s the technique that lets you change the topic, spin the subject, make it somebody else’s problem, or even turn it around and put it on the other person. Obscure is concealing information, hiding truths, covering up lies, or just flat out stonewalling. And Reveal is uncovering information, piercing the lies, and in some cases putting all the cards onto the table.
Dec 05, 2011 @ 12:24:05
Seems to me you’d want some kind of break-point system for social skills to make them a little more reasonable. For example, if you’ve gained the target’s trust with Persuasion, you should be able to switch to Deceit and lie convincingly, or at least *more* convincingly. If your target doesn’t trust you to begin with, it won’t really matter whether you’re telling the truth or not. And you should be able to pull a Good Cop/Bad Cop by Intimidating someone until they’re more susceptible to Persuasion.
Even still, social interaction is far more complicated than that. Some people can be convinced using facts, while others will stick to their viewpoint no matter what. The usual dividing line between Persuasion and Deceit is that the former relies on facts while the other doesn’t — but this ignores the reality that facts can often be used to support the truth or a falsehood equally well.
FATE does this pretty well, IMO, with aspects and consequences. You can use Intimidate to maneuver an aspect on target like “Softened Up” that someone else can tag using Rapport to squeeze out a confession. You could represent the presence of factual evidence with an aspect, like, I dunno, “Candid Photographs” — which you could tag on a Rapport roll or a Deceit roll. The aspect doesn’t care either way.
Anyway. I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t know, but those are my initial thoughts. I definitely agree with the idea that social interaction has a lot more subtlety and nuance than most games can handle, though.
Dec 05, 2011 @ 12:27:02
Personally, I’d ike to eliminate the social skills and dice rolls from any system and let such encounters be all roleplay. The GM can simply take into consideration which pc is speaking when evaluating an Npc’s reaction. Yes, the paladin will generally be more believable. The half-orc will be more intimidating. And the bard will be more charming. Give the dice a minute to cool down before the next battle!
Dec 05, 2011 @ 13:03:29
Yeah, the nebula of stuff I’m thinking of is very related to Mike and Cam’s points: I keep thinking back to the Fate dream navigation combat that was posted for a Fate fantasy game on RPGnet a while back by Fred or Rob. Effectively, mapping out some kind of Fate-style zones where the zones are topics of conversation rather than physical spaces. Diaspora does something like this, but I haven’t dug deep enough into it yet to see what I think works and what doesn’t.
The trick is just figuring out a zone structure for a social combat that’s both analogous to a physical combat’s zone structure and fun in the same way and isn’t conceptually difficult to set up every time. Part of the latter might be coming up with a small handful of “maps” that work for a lot of different social encounters, just with people starting the conversation in different zones.
Dec 05, 2011 @ 13:04:59
To some extent I think the solution might come from emphasizing the base statistic. In the various d20 games, social skills are often based off of a single stat, charisma. The charisma bonus applies to diplomacy, intimidate, and bluff. The higher someone’s charisma is, the best they are at all of that.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is easier to raise your individual social skills then it is to raise your charisma. However in d20 skills generally raise far higher then ability modifiers ever do. So at first level, the influence between the two can be pretty balanced (18 charisma gives +4, 4 skill ranks gives +4) however at higher levels it gets more extreme (24 charisma gives +7, 23 ranks gives +23)
White Wolf seems to solve this by having a general cap on skill ranks, usually nobody will have a Persuasion score above 5. However the base stats for the skills are different. I believe the current set is Presence, Manipulation and some sort of resistance stat?
If however you were to take Presence and Manipulation, and combine them into a single Charisma stat, you would have a pretty good solution to the problem you bring up. Someone wants to be awesome at lying, they would aim for +5 Charisma, +5 Subterfuge giving them 10 dice. Even if they didn’t put a single rank in persuade they would still be quite good at it having 5 dice available.
You could also try and make a solution for d20 games, perhaps having stats matter more as you gain levels, or increasing the ease of boosting base stats? If someone could have say, half their level as an ability bonus, then you would avoid the stated problem.
Also… in White Wolf I often found Social Combat to be easier then physical combat. People generally seem to rely on their disciplines or other magical powers, and don’t pay as much attention to the uses of the standard social rolls. I once played a socially focused Gangrel, and had no difficulties getting things done with just Presence + Persuade, or the underrated carousing.
As far as rolls interfering with roleplaying, the usual way I handle it is to make the argument first in character, and then roll to show how convincing it was. It can be fun to make some outrageous lie or threat in d20 and then follow it up with a 35+ check.
Dec 05, 2011 @ 13:13:40
Yeah, part of my impetus on this is that, if there is a raft of social skills in the game, I want them to be part of a really fun system rather than just feeling included because everything has a skill and social skills shouldn’t be any different.
In the complete opposite direction of what I’m talking about in this post, I’ve been thinking about something much closer to what you’re talking about for D&D and other games where the social aspect is less front and center. I’m wondering if certain classes of stuff, if you wanted rules for them more complex than GM fiat, couldn’t be rolled into 4e-esque special abilities. Basically, expendable abilities that you can bring up in non-combat scenes when you want a little rules help to swing the GM’s impression of how a scene is going. The trick would be to make them useful but broad enough that they don’t feel disassociated or force the player into a samey playstyle (“If I don’t make a sarcastic comment every conversation, I don’t get to use my ‘Cutting Remark’ card!”).
Dec 05, 2011 @ 13:15:53
Hmm… you could also adapt some of what pathfinder has going on with its diplomacy skill: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/diplomacy
The DC of any diplomacy checks changes based on your relationship with the target. It is much easier to ask a close friend for a favor then someone you just met, or someone who is trying to kill you. You could maybe set it up as a bonus on bluff checks. -10 for Hostile characters. -5 for Unfriendly characters. +5 for friendly characters. +15 for Helpful characters.
This would let many of the skills work better together. If you want to convince someone of a lie, it works better to make them friends with you first, or bully them (Intimidate can make people temporarily friendly)
Dec 05, 2011 @ 13:34:14
I’m not a tremendous fan in general of single-roll resolution, particularly in d20 where there’s a big swing on a given roll. Part of the quest for more “combatesque” social skills is to make them easier to work into the ebb and flow of an argument and justify making enough rolls to curve the result. D20 combat where you made one attack roll and won or lost the fight based on whether it hit would be much less fun.
Dec 05, 2011 @ 20:11:08
I go the single skill route with BRP and my modified Ironclaw that I now run my
GloranthaDragon Isles game in.I just have a single skill Influence that allows you to influence other people. However you can choose the mode you wish to use, which is dependent on the situation and relationships involved, particularly if you want to maintain a good relationship with the other person you are dealing with. So difficulty increases with an inappropriate mode and decreases with an appropriate mode. Although characters can also take Gifts to make their preferred mode of operation easier.
For example using “Oratory” (the preferred Air mode of Influence) on Orlanthi is easier, whilst using “Persuasion” (the preferred Water mode of Influence) is much harder. So give a rousing speech, boasting about your prowess and the great feats you have performed, and you are much more likely to get people to follow you, than if you were to try and individually convince them that it is a good idea. [Incidentally Fire has Command/Leadership, Earth has Bargain/Negotiate, and Darkness has Deceive/Innuendo, if anyone is interested.]
Sometimes the downside is in the time it takes (gossip and carousing), or the negative reaction that is likely to result (intimidation, or the other person discovering that he or she has been lied to).
Then again, I also only have one Melee skill too (at least for non-exotic weapons), although in this case it’s your own inclination (rather than that of your opponent), that determines the preferred mode. Practice continually with a sword and you can use sword at no disadvantage. Again Gifts can provide benefits for specific weapon modes.
It all works out much easier and quicker in both cases.
Dec 06, 2011 @ 03:22:38
The problem I have with this is that it pretty much says “If you’re a good talker in RL, then your character is good, and vice versa”. Which is pretty ass backwards in terms of gaming. People who suck in RL at social skills should be able to PLAY a social master.
I mean if we’re getting rid of social stuff in lieu of RP, then we should just get rid of combat in lieu of description.
Ultimately Social skills, like combat skills, answer the question “I want to do this. Do I succeed?”
That, and sometimes you don’t want to freaking RP getting past the guards, you just want to make a roll and get on with it.
Dec 06, 2011 @ 09:49:23
My problem with social skills is that they are, for some reason, generally treated as having a very binary effect on the NPCs. Did you roll well on your bluff check? Then the NPC believes you, even if he has a ton of evidence otherwise! For example, the exact wording in Pathfinder is “If you use Bluff to fool someone, with a successful check you convince your opponent that what you are saying is true.”
Not “you convince your opponent that you think what you are saying is true.” You convince him that is IS. http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0767.html Intimidation, Sense Motive, and Diplomacy have other, similar oddness with them.
It’s just not indicative of how actual socializing in real life works, where you aren’t actually ever SURE of anything. I suspect a lot of the issues many folks have with social skills could be alleviated a bit if the player weren’t ever told exactly how well they worked.
Side Note: I freaking hate sense motive. The way real people tell if you are lying or playing them, is to do a little background. Gather up evidence, like the detectives Samhaine described. Have a feat to catch liars, and a high Wisdom? Fine. But unless you catch a guy saying something that is provably untrue, or have his journal detailing his motivations for persuading you, the results you get from sense motive make no damn sense.
My take on verbs:
Confront
Deflect
Distract
Anger
Soothe
I’m sure there are more, but that’s what I think of at first blush.
Dec 12, 2011 @ 12:47:56
No one has yet mentioned Burning Wheel’s Duel of Wits as something to borrow ideas from: http://www.burningwheel.org/wiki/index.php?title=Downloads#Duel_of_Wits
Social Skills: Evil, Twisted, or Misunderstood? - Gnome Stew, the Game Mastering Blog
Dec 22, 2011 @ 04:23:23
Dec 22, 2011 @ 13:42:43
In my own homebrew system attempts I’ve started to settle on the following:
Express (lies or truth)
Barter (or persuade)
Inquire (subtly or overtly)
Dec 22, 2011 @ 13:46:39
I like those. I’ve been toying with a similar solution informed by the Celestine Prophecy control dramas (Inquisitive, Aggressive, Aloof, and Pitiable), but they’re not verby enough
.
Dec 22, 2011 @ 20:29:21
Have you checked out the Dying Earth rpg? I’m still getting my head around it but it seems to just use 2 primary skills ( Persuade and a defense skill, resistance maybe?) and then different subtypes (glib, obfuscatory, etc). You can tell, the truth or lie tobyour hearts content, but you are better at some types of persuasion than others. Worth a look i think.
Dec 24, 2011 @ 12:17:29
I don’t have much of an answer but I figured I’d drop a comment that I absolutely love this line of thinking. The use of skills in a fight has always been pretty good in RPGs, but the use of skills in a conference or to solve a puzzle have generally been abysmal. This is definitely an area I’d like to see discussed more!
Jan 08, 2012 @ 11:58:28
Stumbled on this article, and this is a problem I’ve had with social skills in the past (among other things). I’m currently running Fate, so it’s fairly easy to change skills & trappings around, but when I was still running Pathfinder a couple years ago, I found this: http://forums.randominsanity.org/showthread.php?t=558
It still uses the stock 4 social skills, but expands ways to use them to affect people that aren’t one roll wonders. I think it’s a strong starting point for what you’re getting at here. In Fate, most of those could be trappings of the base skills, maneuvers that anyone could pull, or possibly stunts for the more outrageous tactics. (I like the model of Bluff/Deceit as a stunt to a Persuade skill, but it leaves some of the other trappings of Fate’s current Deceit skill in the lurch).
Feb 05, 2012 @ 04:36:58
It’s been a long while since I checked in here. I hope my comments are not unwelcome for having been absented so long, and for not being made here until well after it appears you have moved on to other matters.
The following is the system I planned to use for a game that never quite materialized. As it lacks play-testing, it is somewhat unrefined, and there’s probably no need to go into detail of the specific dice engine I developed it for; the framework could probably be grafted or ported to other engines without strenuous effort.
In essence, you had People Skills (general sociability, with specializations for appearance, charm, dignity, empathy, and guile), which were used in conjunction with Command, Persuasion, and Rapport. I defined six different interactions, each of which you could specialize in: Cajole, Inspire, Intimidate, Manipulate, Mingle, and Parley. (I suspect I need not define the terms, as they weren’t really re-defined for game purposes.) The choice of which skill to use largely depends on whether the character is dominant, equal, or subordinate in an interaction. Dominants tend to command, subordinates must try to persuade, and equals rely on both persuasion and rapport for the most part. Most of the value lies in having high ratings in People Skills and one or more of the subordinate skills; on really good or really bad rolls, the specialties have very little value other than minimizing the threat of catastrophic failure. Although it wasn’t specifically spelled out in my original notes, the underlying assumption is that deceit is something that guileful characters do well, and it probably influences most or all of their social interactions, any time they either lie or lie by omission. Likewise for charming characters, or those with good looks, or those with a dignified bearing. Empathetic characters may not get much of a boost when they try to intimidate, but they’re likely aces at everything else. And the system did not have many exclusions built in (you can use up to three specialties between available choices), so a character might be good at using some combination of the above five specialties, and therefore most of the time you will be playing to your strengths. The charismatic paladin you mention above would probably develop skill at parley, using either Rapport or Persuasion, and his guile or lack thereof would only apply at the point in which he begins omitting details, a penalty which would almost certainly be offset by his advantages. (If that were my D&D campaign, I would consider perhaps a negative synergy penalty to your Diplomacy check for not being good at dishonesty, but that’s off topic, and anyway a +5 bonus only looks bad compared to +17.)
The main caveat is that a test is only needed when the character is attempting to influence a specific outcome, and mostly only when it is PC vs NPC. If the player is simply relaying information, or a command/request, the results are out of the character’s hands (and dice). If the character withholds information, or lies, or makes a deliberate “error,” then you roll. NPC interactions with PCs are mostly considered to fall under the first scenario; no rolls are made to see how convincing or not is the information they receive. If the players are suspicious (as they often are), they can possibly make a Perception/Insight check (completely different genera of skills) to look for “tells” and run the risk of getting a false positive if the person happens to be twitchy or whatever. Or if they’re too trusting they can get burned another way. (The system included a personality system with benefits and drawbacks for things like the spectrum of paranoid/suspicious/trusting/naive, incidentally.) The long and short of it is that any manipulation of the PCs is actually GM vs. players, not NPC vs. players.
There wasn’t any real concept of a social combat system in my game, though. So I can’t really address that portion of your observations other than to say I lean toward minimalism with respect to any kind of system of social hit points or whatnot.
Fate: Fading Suns, Skills « System sans Setting
Jun 04, 2012 @ 11:31:58
Jun 13, 2012 @ 21:45:49
I think a different approach would be required. Have skills cover their conversational style rather than the method. A fighter has a fighting style, but can still disarm, trip, etc dependent on the combat skill. A face can lie, be honest, be convincing, point out facts in a different manner than say the seducer or a con man.
I’d map skills like this:
Yes Man – appease the target
Seduce/Charm – use the target’s nature against him/her
Large vocabulary – use intelligence as part of diplomacy
Blunt Conversation – direct, forceful dialog
Intimidate, persuade, and charm would all be attack maneuvers. Certain skills would have bonuses to certain checks. For example, a blunt person would be great at intimidate, alright at charm, and poor at persuasion
And regarding you idea about zones for social combat: have you considered looking at the zones as emotional states? You’re not going to have an easy time charming an angry person, so consider anger a few zones off of aroused. Does that make sense?
Folge 28: Soziale Fertigkeiten | Polyeder Podcast
Apr 16, 2013 @ 03:09:11