Social Interaction Yet Again (Phonelobster stay out)

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Grek
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Social Interaction Yet Again (Phonelobster stay out)

Post by Grek »

We all know that social interaction systems based on the exchange of favors or dictating NPC actions don't work. Let's try a different incentive structure and see if that could be turned into something workable.

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The basic skills involved are Speech, Bluff, Knowledge, Etiquette and Intimidate. The first three are used to make claims and the last three are used to ignore, refute or contain claims. Making a claim generally requires at least one minute of conversation.

You may make a Speech check to establish a social norm regarding an activity or opinion. This norm should be phrased as something along the lines of "X should/shouldn't do/think Y". Examples include "Orcs shouldn't trust elves.", "The Royal Guards should keep their armour polished.", or "Everyone should obey Wordules Maximus the Bard." If a norm would apply to the person establishing it, they receive a +2 bonus to their check. If it would not, they receive a -4 penalty.

You may make a Knowledge check to make a statement of fact regarding a topic to which the knowledge applies. This statement should be phrased as something along the lines of "Kanar is a province in Eastern Olot.", "Red Dragons have three horns.", or "Silent Image requires a piece of wool as a material component." You receive a +4 bonus to making statements that you know to actually be true and may make a free Knowledge check to determine what the truth actually is prior to making a statement.

You may make a Bluff check in order to make an assertion regardless of accuracy. The assertion should be phrased just like a statement of fact. Examples include "Kanar is ruled by Wordules Maximus the Bard" or "That pouch of gold rightfully belongs to me." Unlike a statement, assertions receive no bonus for being true and don't grant a free check to determine the truth. Instead, you receive a +2 bonus against anyone who is not trained in any relevant Knowledge skill.

Regardless of what sort of claim you make, your check result determines the spread of the claim. A result of 10 means that people will acknowledge the claim and be effected by it. A result of 15 or higher means that they will spread the claim to others over the course of a week, causing them to acknowledge the claim with a result equal to the original check -5. This penalty stacks with every degree of separation from the original speaker. Norms are spread to everyone they apply to. Statements and assertions are spread to anyone with ranks in the relevant Knowledge and to anyone who asks about the topic the claim regards. A character may always choose to acknowledge a claim if they wish to (even if the claim did not meet the minimum DC of 10), but may not refuse to acknowledge a successful claim simply because they disagree with it. The strength of a claim fades at a rate of -2 per week. Apply this after the claim has spread to anyone it will be spread to.

Going against a claim requires a mental effort and can be frightening or unsettling. If you have acknowledged a claim, speaking out against it requires a Will save with DC = 10 + 1/2 claimant's HD + claimant's Cha Mod against becoming shaken for an hour. This does not prevent you from speaking up, even if you fail, and negates the fear on a success. The shaken status from multiple failed will saves due to challenging claims does not stack together to create more severe forms of fear. It does stack with any other source of fear, however. If anyone else present as acknowledged a norm (but not a statement or assertion) that you have also acknowledged, acting contrary to it requires an additional Fort save with the same DC against becoming sickened. Again, this only applies the first time you act against the norm and does not prevent you from acting, even if you fail your save. Regardless of success or failure on your saving throws when challenging a claim, you may choose not to spread any claim you have challenged.

Etiquette can be used to politely ignore a claim. If your Etiquette check exceeds the strength of a claim, you do not count as having acknowledged the claim until the next time you are exposed to it. You suffer none of the penalties for going against a claim and do not spread the claim in conversation. Continuing to ignore a claim despite repeated exposure is difficult. You suffer a -5 penalty to your Etiquette check for each time you've previously ignored a given claim.

Statements and assertions can be refuted using a Knowledge skill relevant to the topic of the claim, while norms may be denounced with an Intimidate check. Doing so reduces the strength of the claim by the check result in all listeners and, if it is successful in reducing the strength of the claim below 10, creates a new norm with strength equal to the check result against listening to the original claimant.

Social interactions are not entirely negative. Associating with people who believe the same things you do is refreshing and comforting. If your norms have no substantial disagreements with the norms of anyone else present, you receive a +2 morale bonus on all saving throws. When using the Aid Another action, you grant an additional +2 insight bonus to anyone who acknowledges a statement or assertion you have made on a topic relevant to the check being aided for as long as they do not attempt to refute or speak out against your claim. Note that while the former bonus usually does not apply during combat (as your opponents almost always have at least one norm that is significantly different from your own), the later usually does.

PCs and NPCs are subject to these rules equally. The DM should have an NPC go against a claim only if the NPC cares more about the truth or their own opinions on a subject than they do about the discomfort of speaking up. Trivial statements will be ignored, while major impositions should be met with outrage and challenged on the spot. If it is unclear whether an NPC should dispute a claim or not, consider having them reluctantly play along and do the minimum required to abide by a claim until they are away from the claimant or with friends who would back them up in their disagreement.

Aid Another Sidebar: The aid another rules are broken. If your table does not already have an agreed upon house rule to fix Aid Another, apply the following restriction to Aid Another in order to make it play nice with this system: "Aid Another bonuses cannot increase the result of a check higher than than the maximum result attainable with a natural 20 prior to Aid Another bonuses. As an example, a roll of 1d20+8 cannot produce a result of more than 28 no matter how many helpers use Aid Another to increase the result."

---

tl;dr version:

You can use Speech, Knowledge or Bluff to make a claim. If someone disagrees with your claim or takes an action contrary to it, they have to save vs a minor debuff. Alternatively, they can use Etiquette to delay acknowledging the claim or either Knowledge or Intimidate (depending on if the claim is a fact or opinion) to remove your claim and replace it with one calling you a liar.
Last edited by Grek on Sun May 01, 2016 8:08 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Lokey
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Re: Social Interaction Yet Again (Phonelobster stay out)

Post by Lokey »

Same response as last trainwreck thread on a simlar topic: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56445

Which system/version? In any case, state what you want the rules to accomplish first then build the mechanics. Unless of course there's a paycheck, then you can make them as crappily as you want.
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Post by Mord »

Using this system, what rolls do you make when negotiating with the King to build you a bridge over the impassable river?

It seems like the domain of "norms" is very large and could potentially encompass concrete actions; e.g. "build me a bridge over the river" can be phrased as "it is good for you to build a bridge over the river." Do you have to phrase all requests like this in your system?

If that's the case, how do you use this system to convince a merchant to pay you more for the Dire Tiger pelt with fourteen stripes that you just brought him? "Dire Tiger pelts with fourteen stripes are the finest and most valuable kind of pelt" is the closest I can figure.
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Post by Blicero »

So you don't have any mention of the magnitude of a claim. It seems like establishing the social norm "The current King should abdicate every day and appoint his successor randomly" should be more difficult than establishing the norm "People should take their shoes off before entering a house". Unless you're just implicitly baking magnitudes into the Etiquette part of whether or not people decide to obey a norm.

It seems that you might want to add something like After Sundown's Ethical Taboos system to allow characters to select some set of beliefs that it is harder than normal to override with norms. So selecting the ethic "any money that I earn is rightfully mine" helps you resist the norm "charity is important", and selecting the ethic "matrilineal royal succession is sacred" helps you resist the norm "the Queen should adopt me as her successor", etc.

Continuing to ignore a claim despite repeated exposure is difficult. You suffer a -5 penalty to your Etiquette check for each time you've previously ignored a given claim.
Is the intent that the -5 penalty applies to the next Etiquette check required, regardless of whether it is required a minute or a month after the first one?


Also, one might presume that NPCs are going to be norm-ing, statement-ing, and assertion-ing each other pretty much constantly. So unless the PCs never interact with any NPCs ever, they are going to be running into extended belief networks pretty frequently. Is the intent that Mister Cavern should be trying to model those belief networks in any way at all? Or should they be ignored on a systemic level?
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Post by Grek »

@Lokey: Pathfinder/3.5 of course. The aim is to make basically usable social interaction rules which A] avoid 3.5/Pathfinder's problem of being a skill based Save or Die, B] avoids Exalted's problem where whenever a social character opens their mouth, everyone stabs them, and C] avoids the problem where the best way to make friends to to beat up whoever you're trying to befriend.

@Mord: You aren't required to phrase your in character statements in any particular way, but it does have to be the sort of statement that could be phrased in that way without changing the meaning.

Once you're speaking with the King, you can use Speech to claim that the king should fund the building of a bridge over the river. Alternatively, you can use Bluff or Knowledge (Engineering) or Knowledge (Geography) to tell the King that building a bridge across that river is strategically, economically or symbolically important. Assuming you get at least a 10, the king needs to either politely decline to comment (requiring an Etiquette check to pull off) or outright tell you to pound sand (which makes the king save vs shaken) in order to disagree. Alternatively, if the king has advisors present, they can argue it out with you instead using Intimidate or an appropriate Knowledge.

For the merchant, the claim would be either, "You should give me extra for this fine tiger pelt.", or "This is actually an ultra rare DOUBLE Dire Tiger pelt that is worth more."

@Blicero: The magnitude of the claim is for the DM to judge because I know of no good way for a rules system to judge or even classify how important various statements are to various NPCs. People can be convinced to go along with a claim if and only if they care more about avoiding the save vs shaken (and maybe sickened) than they do about whatever the claim is requiring of them. How much they care about the save depends on how hard the DC is (and in turn on how powerful and charismatic the speaker is) while how much they care about what the claim requires of them depends on the magnitude of those requirements. Unless the King was already planning to abdicate, they probably care a lot more about staying king than they do about avoiding taking penalties for a single hour.

Yes. The -5 penalty applies every time someone brings the claim up in conversation. If someone keeps hammering a point home, it becomes harder and harder to ignore. On the other hand, people only make those Etiquette checks if their answer was ultimately going to be "No.", so repeatedly bringing up the point doesn't make you any more convincing. It's only a useful goal if your end goal all along wasn't the claim itself but just pissing people off and bullying them into emotional exhaustion.

Mister Cavern should model these, yes. If the underlying framework isn't completely shit I'll work on some guidelines for what the default claims in an area might say. That said, most settlements are going to have a few unusual norms the DM is going to have to fill in on their own.
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Post by Ice9 »

Ok, here's the problem I see.
1) I'm assuming that the Shaken effect doesn't stack up to Frightened/Panicked (if it does, then this is completely fucked from the start).
2) Making statements is super-easy, and there's no real disincentive to spread a bunch of ones favorable to you, especially since you can do it indirectly.

So a given settlement isn't going to have "a few unusual norms" floating around, it's going to have hundreds of them. Many in the style of "Gloin the Cobbler is the town's finest citizen, and people should be honored to give him a free drink or buy his shoes for whatever price he asks."

Which seems likely to end up with people Shaken and/or Sickened more often than not. In which case they won't give a shit about any further statements, because hey, they're already Shaken. So in fact, your impressive speech to the king about building a bridge means nothing, because he's already shaken from denying several dozen bullshit statements just since this morning.

Also, in a case where the statements are actually important, like the town is holding an election or something, then the number of different statements floating around simultaneously with different result numbers is going to be seriously hard to track. And what happens when someone hears two contradictory statements ("Gloin would be an excellent mayor" / "Gloin is an asshole who shouldn't be listened to") anyway?
Last edited by Ice9 on Fri Apr 29, 2016 11:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Chamomile »

Does the shaken penalty stack up over multiple diplomacy failures to become frightened or panicked? If so, is the intended failure state seriously that you flee the room outright? And in what way is that a failure state, anyway? While embarrassing by real-world standards, there's no indication that there will be any consequences for this in-game. Even if the GM is just supposed to MTP something about the king having lost enormous amounts of face (which is not unreasonable, since any diplomacy system is going to require some amount of MTP), you should come out and actually say that.

And if you can't stack up to panicked, why does the king care at all? The skill checks or saves he's making are to prevent him from taking the shaken penalty. It's a penalty to his ability to avoid taking a penalty. At no stage are there any actual consequences.

Why does someone spread a norm if they make their will save? Norms can be spread if you make a certain DC even if the person you're making it against is completely unruffled by denying it. In fact, based on the six degrees of Kevin Bacon effect, they can be spread through entire societies by an average +30 check, and +30 isn't that hard to get (although granted it's supposed to be).

Is the GM really expected to keep track of how many NPCs are X hops away from one another? A system that requires you to map out social networks like this can have merit, but it had better have a lot more options and depth than rolling dice once followed by five minutes of accounting to find out who was effected by the roll (or front-loading the accounting by listing every member of the court and how many hops away they are from one another in some kind of database, paper or digital).

Why doesn't it make any difference that the king is a king? Having large amounts of power and status is an enormous advantage for setting norms, but the system doesn't seem to model it at all.

I've argued before and still maintain that it's not the fault of any particular skill-based sub-system that Aid Another can break it, because Aid Another can be used to get insane bonuses with only a few dozen helpers, and GMs will need to solve that problem if they want to use skills at all, so it is not unreasonable to presume that they have done so. However, I revoke that benefit of the doubt for skill systems that actually draw attention to Aid Another and make its brokenness worse, which yours does. If you're going to mention Aid Another rules directly, you also have to mention how you've fixed them such that thirty peasants (or fifteen peasants who agree with each other) can't pass any conceivable skill check.
Last edited by Chamomile on Fri Apr 29, 2016 11:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Grek »

@Ice9:
Shaken from challenging a claim doesn't stack with itself. I will specify that to be the case.

When someone acknowledges multiple claims, they have to reconcile the claims into some sort of cohrent whole, make their save or politely ignore one with the etiquette skill.

@Chamomile:
The king cares because he might fail his save. He probably won't, he might.

People should probably stop spreading claims if they've challenged them. I'll add that in. Claims should also probably fade over time.

The six degrees of Kevin Bacon effect is intentional. But do note that every additional degree of seperation requires another week for the claim to spread. Initially, the DM is only expected to care about those who were immediately present. Only after the session is over and its time to do the post-game bookkeeping does the DM need to work out which claims spread to who.

I subscribe to the view that kings only get to be kings if they (or their allies) are higher level than any pretenders. Rulers should preferentially have some combination of high charisma bonus, lots of hit dice, trained social skills and skilled advisors. If you don't have any of those things you aren't very good at establishing norms and coincidentally you probably won't stay king much longer.

Fixing Aid Another is outside the scope of this project. Continue to assume there is either a house rule or a frowning DM preventing Aid Another from breaking the RNG in half. Also note that the bonus to aid another from this system is typed and doesn't stack with itself.
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Post by Kaelik »

Why not just write: "All characters are always Shaken, and I don't know how to write diplomacy rules!" It would have been a lot shorter, and saved a lot of time.
Last edited by Kaelik on Sat Apr 30, 2016 1:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Grek »

Why don't you go fuck yourself and then come back when you have useful commentary?
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Post by Kaelik »

Grek wrote:Why don't you go fuck yourself and then come back when you have useful commentary?
I did provide useful commentary. Everyone in the entire game is always shaken (except people who are immune to fear? That's probably a bug, but there it is) and no one gives a flying fuck about anything you say, because they are already always feared because any of the thousands of things that are floating around the village that are mutually contradictory already got them shaking.

The unintended consequences of your poorly thought out rules is useful commentary. It's not praise, which is the only thing that would make you happy, but hey, if you want praise, maybe try sucking less.
Last edited by Kaelik on Sat Apr 30, 2016 2:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

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Post by Chamomile »

Grek wrote:snip
When the king fails his save, he becomes shaken. When he becomes shaken, he takes a -2 penalty to skills, saves, and attacks until...Actually there is no standard duration for status effects that I know of, but let's say until the end of the encounter, since that's usually how it'll get run in absence of other rules. So the king fails his save and takes a penalty to skills, saves, and attacks. Now, what else is he going to be doing for the rest of the encounter (or even the whole day) that he might need his skills, saves, and attacks for? Unless he's about to be assassinated, the answer is "make more diplomacy saves." So the only thing penalized is his ability to avoid the penalty he's already taken. He doesn't care.

My objection to the six degrees of Kevin Bacon problem is not that it exists at all, but that #1 the system isn't in-depth enough to justify the level of bookkeeping involved and #2 it operates on a static DC that is easily flattened by well-prepared characters. Having successful will saves stop the spread of the norm solves the second problem, but the first still stands. The ratio of interesting player options created to GM bookkeeping required is way out of whack. If you want to fix that problem by fleshing out the system, a good place to start might be to give players some options to spread things farther, faster, in exchange for a cost somewhere else, like to the longevity of the claim. An easier solution would be to cut down on bookkeeping by limiting norms to one hop.

It's fair that kings are expected to either be high level (relative to competitors) or else be drinking buddies with people who are, but it's still bizarre that the entrenched and established king of the realm has no greater ability to spread norms in his own court than a similarly-leveled outsider who just showed up.

The rules for Aid Another (and therefore their broken status) cannot be outside the scope of this project if you are using them in your project. Well, they can be, but it's hella sloppy work. So long as your rules reference Aid Another, you're running the risk of a GM's house rules not meshing with your system.

EDIT: Oh, and it should be mentioned that skills and saves aren't really balanced against each other at all.
Last edited by Chamomile on Sat Apr 30, 2016 4:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Grek »

Chamomile wrote:
Grek wrote:snip
When the king fails his save, he becomes shaken. When he becomes shaken, he takes a -2 penalty to skills, saves, and attacks until...Actually there is no standard duration for status effects that I know of, but let's say until the end of the encounter, since that's usually how it'll get run in absence of other rules.
For an hour. The rules I posted specify as much.
EDIT: Oh, and it should be mentioned that skills and saves aren't really balanced against each other at all.
Which is why you very specifically never compare the two in this ruleset. You always make saves vs 10 + 1/2 claimant's HD + claimant's Cha Mod and skill checks against set DCs or other skill checks. You can make an opposed skill check to delay having to make a save, but that is the extent of it. You never make a Will save vs someone's Speech check because that is obviously fucked.

I've posted the changes in the OP. They're underlined.
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Post by Zeybek »

I can't see players engaging in linguistic analysis and epistemological arguments whenever they want their characters to say anything. Rolling dice whenever you want to state a fact seems excessive. The "Knowledge" skill seems particularly iffy: how are you supposed to keep track of facts your character actually knows? Write down every last tidbit?

Social interaction in games should be modeled like all the other problem-solving skills: picking locks, climbing walls, sneaking. There's a thing that you want that's behind a barrier, and passing a social skill check is one of the ways to get to it.

The problem with social skills is that, unlike lock-picking, which only becomes relevant in the presence of a locked lock, everyone NPC can speak and therefore a social problem-solver might be inclined to apply their skills to everyone they meet. This needs to be disincentivized the same way you stop the thief from picking every lock and the acrobat from climbing every wall: by making clear that it's pointless unless it's a story-relevant moment, i.e. it's a waste of time to use social skills on passersby.

From that point, just make a list of problems you want your social character to solve and turn them into skills with limited perimeters:

Negotiate: Used to obtain goods and services and to negotiate agreements.
Con: Used to make someone believe a falsehood.
Impersonate: Used to assume another identity and remain in-character.
Small Talk: Used to hold a person's attention by engaging them in unobtrusive small talk, keeping them effectively distracted.
Influence: Used to alter a person's mood, either to set them at ease or to scare and intimidate them.

All five of those are useful effects of limited scope, comparable to other manageable skills. If you want more long-term effects, to allow a social character to establish long-term allies, make it so that some of the skills add a positive "Good will" counter: Once a day, if you use a social skill on a person and they come out of it feeling happier, you get a +1 to social interactions with that person. Do it again on following days to increase the bonus as you gradually befriend them up to a maximum of +6. The "good will" bonus degrades after a week without contact, but the person remembers you fondly, so it only degrades to half of its total value, rounded down.
Last edited by Zeybek on Sat Apr 30, 2016 8:09 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Grek »

Zeybek wrote:All five of those are useful effects of limited scope, comparable to other manageable skills. If you want more long-term effects, to allow a social character to establish long-term allies, make it so that some of the skills add a positive "Good will" counter: Once a day, if you use a social skill on a person and they come out of it feeling happier, you get a +1 to social interactions with that person. Do it again on following days to increase the bonus as you gradually befriend them up to a maximum of +6. The "good will" bonus degrades after a week without contact, but the person remembers you fondly, so it only degrades to half of its total value, rounded down.
This has been tried before. I know your idea sounds like it would work, but it really doesn't. In particular, you're not going to be able to work out good guidelines for what X points on the good will counter means in terms of actions.
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Post by Lokey »

Probably need to deal with the scope problem next, so Kaelik will have to read more than the first few lines to declare it's shit. Get that hammered out then worry about the results of success/failure and the numbers involved in the rolls.

What is it appropriate to use these rules for? It's very difficult to overlay a mechanic that's useful for street beggars pestering the pcs for a copper to something more complicated that allows the pcs to save a world.

Let's say there's a slavering undead army approaching a non-fortified small town which the players want to save. They + absolutely everyone can't win with combat mechanics, and there's no time for getting outside aid.

Resolve convincing people there's a problem, convincing the rulers of a solution to the problem of everyone getting their brains eaten and convincing them to help implement the solution.

Then we can think through some other examples.

(Granted like diplomacy I think there's just way too much situational stuff that's going to make any universal system creaky and/or too complex to bother with over hand-wavery, but still think worth throwing some poop at the wall anyway and seeing if any of it sticks.)
Last edited by Lokey on Sat Apr 30, 2016 9:04 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Zeybek »

Grek wrote:This has been tried before. I know your idea sounds like it would work, but it really doesn't. In particular, you're not going to be able to work out good guidelines for what X points on the good will counter means in terms of actions.
Just a simple bonus on social checks on that person, for example extra dice in a dicepool system a la Shadowrun, which already accommodates rolling extra dice in certain circumstances.

Example: You use Influence six days in a row for a cumulative +6 bonus to make the paranoid nobleman feel at ease in your presence then go adventuring for a while. You come back and the noble still remembers you, being at half the bonus (+3) when you meet him again. You now Negotiate a favour at +3, potentially also Conning him into thinking he gets a good deal, for a +1 Good Will bonus, or setting him at ease again with Influence, leaving him at +4 in any case, since you only get +1 Good Will per day. If you leave him now to go adventuring again, when you return he'll only be at +2, otherwise you could try to stay for two more days to get his Good Will back up to +6 so that when you come back he's at the maximum +3.
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Post by Grek »

Kaelik is extremely allergic to admitting that he hasn't read something or that he was incorrect and only posts on this forum so that he can get into huge thread derailing shitfits with other posters. Reworking anything on the sole basis that it will allegedly satisfy Kaelik is a complete non-starter. That said, you do raise a good question:
What is it appropriate to use these rules for?.
The intended purpose of these rules is to represent Man vs Society conflicts in the rules and to provide a framework for the players to engage in those conflicts. At low levels, the players are on the Man side of the equation, working within or struggling against the rules laid down by the powerful above them. This is the time when you defy the king's unjust taxes, join the Resistance against a foreign oppressor, call out the Cleric of Hextor for his evil preaching, etc. etc. At higher levels, the players metamorphose from being the ruled to being the rulers. Not in any nationalistic sort of way where they declare themselves king and steal a crown off the corpse of the old king, but in the iron age "I am the greatest for miles around and all of you will obey me" sort of rulership that's based more in personal power and charisma than in the authority of any particular office. The challenges stop being how to defy authority and turn into how to wield it appropriately and how to keep those pesky rebels from disrupting your rule.

It's very difficult to overlay a mechanic that's useful for street beggars pestering the pcs for a copper to something more complicated that allows the pcs to save a world.
This, I think, is a false dichotomy. Mechanically there's no reason why you should use different rules for a beggar begging the PCs for a copper vs the PCs begging the king for a bridge. The only differences here are the power of the beggar and the wealth of the begge. Well, that and one of the parties is a PC, but I dislike rules that put an emphasis on who's a player and who isn't.
Let's say there's a slavering undead army approaching a non-fortified small town which the players want to save. They + absolutely everyone can't win with combat mechanics, and there's no time for getting outside aid.

Resolve convincing people there's a problem, convincing the rulers of a solution to the problem of everyone getting their brains eaten and convincing them to help implement the solution.
If there is no time for getting outside aid, there is no time to ask anyone for help. If there IS time for getting outside aid, then any functional society to which you could make such an appeal and reasonably expect it to be answered at all will already be aware of invading undead army. So what this description actually means is "I, the DM, am forcing you to succeed at a diplomatic encounter or have a bunch of NPCs eaten by the undead. I will not accept any alternate solutions other than the two I've presented." and I refuse to base my rules on that, no matter how prevalent that sort of encounter is in adventure modules and bad railroad plots.

But let's say that you did take the rules as presented and tried to run that situation with them. And I do mean YOU take them and try to run the situation. Go on, it's easy. Try to use the rules. Lets see if my reading and your reading match up, and if what a normal player would try to use the rules for will produce a reasonable outcome.
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Post by Lokey »

Alright, my example isn't an intended use. (I was thinking low level without punpun/omnificier level gouda by the by, should have specified.)

It is info we needed up front. Probably something that needs to fall outside the normal skill system, that's not exactly equal access.
Zeybek
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Post by Zeybek »

Grek wrote:But let's say that you did take the rules as presented and tried to run that situation with them. And I do mean YOU take them and try to run the situation. Go on, it's easy. Try to use the rules. Lets see if my reading and your reading match up, and if what a normal player would try to use the rules for will produce a reasonable outcome.
Ok, let's give this a try. So the nearest town is 3 days away for a courier to reach, but the undead army that's pouring out of the previously harmless ruins will be here in 4 days' marching time. The most feasible solution is clearly to enlist everyone's help and get them to dig a moat around town and fill it with holy water, so the undead can't cross.

We need to convince the people to help us, including the merchant class which refuses to do manual labour and we need to figure out the logistics of digging a moat and blessing water in bulk.

The first issue I run into is that your "speech" checks seem to require phrasing what I'd like to be a command into a "norm" statement. So our mage casts a spell of Booming Voice on the diplomat, who stands in the town square and tells everyone to get digging. At this point, for immersion-breaking metagame reasons, the diplomat player is going to carefully sort out his speech so that everything he needs people to do is phrased as a "should/shouldn't" norm statement that he can actually roll a Speech check on. This is... not good.

The diplomat rolls his dice well and the social norm "we should all get moat-digging to ward off the undead" is spread. It is now pretty unclear exactly how compelled people are to follow a social norm. Does it become a priority for them? Will they agree to stop their day jobs and pick up a shovel? Would they have done the same if the new social norm was "scones are delicious and you should all eat a plate"? Somebody mentioned the system currently doesn't care about the magnitude of claims and we run into it here.

Anyway, as we said before there's a group of bourgeois snobs who will not get their hands dirty. They try to roll Etiquette to resist the new social norm (hopefully not individually!) but fail, because our diplomat is just that good. Being Shaken or even Sickened, they take a skill penalty, I think? Are they now not only unwilling to dig but also worse at digging? Are they allowed to keep challenging the new norm or will they just incur cascading failure until they no longer can?

On to moat-digging logistics: we need a Knowledge check to find out the best way to dig a moat with the available people and shovels. The group's Alchemist has the demolitions skill due to making bombs and this is sort of related to construction, so he attempts a Knowledge roll to propose a solution. How do we know that moat-digging falls inside his area of knowledge? And indeed, if none of the players IRL know how to dig a moat and google is not being helpful, how do they verify the truth of whatever the Alchemist says so he can get the "Truth" bonus on his roll?

Also, what impacts do Assertions have? If the Alchemist successfully asserts that you can dig a moat effectively by using spoons instead of shovels, does that become verifiably true?

Finally the party Cleric goes to talk with the local priests to get the holy water. There's a problem: the accepted rites only allow a priest to bless one chalice of water at a time. The Cleric wants to Bluff the priests into the idea that they can bless whole vats of water at a time as long as they drop a chalice inside the vat because it's been recently okayed by the pope, they just haven't heard about it yet.

The Cleric makes a mental Intimidate check against herself to convince herself that she is only telling a white lie, since lying is taboo in her religion, and that it's ok because it's an emergency. What would normally be an interesting roleplaying moment where the player weighs on how her character's actions will impact their development and world-view, is now locked behind a dice-roll, which is a pretty bad way of removing player agency over how her own character thinks and acts.

Then she succeeds her Bluff check and the new blessing ritual succeeds, because again, successful Assertions bend reality? Maybe we don't even need a fake ritual, let's say the Cleric found the True Bible of Forgotten Rituals and the chalice-in-vat is totally legit, we're still left with the problem that if "lying is bad" is a social norm the whole Bluff skill becomes difficult to use.

In any case, it's entirely too clunky and metagamey. It takes away player choice as their characters are all too open to manipulation by outsiders and it makes social interactions unnatural as players wonder "is this a norm or an assertion?". I can already picture the quibbling at a table.
Last edited by Zeybek on Sun May 01, 2016 2:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Grek
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Post by Grek »

Zeybek wrote:The first issue I run into is that your "speech" checks seem to require phrasing what I'd like to be a command into a "norm" statement.
Grek wrote:@Mord: You aren't required to phrase your in character statements in any particular way, but it does have to be the sort of statement that could be phrased in that way without changing the meaning.
You're not required to phrase them like that in character, only out of character. I'll be clarifying that in the rules text as soon as I work out a good phrasing.
Zeybek wrote:It is now pretty unclear exactly how compelled people are to follow a social norm.
Grek wrote:If you have acknowledged a claim, speaking out against it requires a Will save with DC = 10 + 1/2 claimant's HD + claimant's Cha Mod against becoming shaken for an hour. This does not prevent you from speaking up, even if you fail, and negates the fear on a success.
They're not compelled at all! That's the most basic mechanic. How did you miss that?
Zeybek wrote:Anyway, as we said before there's a group of bourgeois snobs who will not get their hands dirty. They try to roll Etiquette to resist the new social norm (hopefully not individually!) but fail, because our diplomat is just that good. Being Shaken or even Sickened, they take a skill penalty, I think? Are they now not only unwilling to dig but also worse at digging? Are they allowed to keep challenging the new norm or will they just incur cascading failure until they no longer can?
The bourgeois make Etiquette checks to avoid the penalty for refusing to dig. If they are willing to dig, they take no penalty and if they take the penalty they are not willing to dig. But yes, they would take a -4 to every skill check they made while not digging, if they refused. They make a new etiquette check every time the party pesters them about digging and they would like to politely refuse.
Zeybek wrote:On to moat-digging logistics: we need a Knowledge check to find out the best way to dig a moat with the available people and shovels. The group's Alchemist has the demolitions skill due to making bombs and this is sort of related to construction, so he attempts a Knowledge roll to propose a solution. How do we know that moat-digging falls inside his area of knowledge? And indeed, if none of the players IRL know how to dig a moat and google is not being helpful, how do they verify the truth of whatever the Alchemist says so he can get the "Truth" bonus on his roll?
The DM makes up a plausible sounding answer if nobody knows (or ideas conflict) about what would really be true. As always, since the dawn of RPGs. In this case, that answer should probably not be "use spoons" because that's a stupid and non-plausible sounding answer.
Zeybek wrote:Also, what impacts do Assertions have? If the Alchemist successfully asserts that you can dig a moat effectively by using spoons instead of shovels, does that become verifiably true?
If the Alchemist uses Aid Another to help one peasant in particular with their spoon, that one peasant gets an extra +2 (for a total of +4 from Aid Another) on their "digging with spoons" check. Presumably, they'd also get a penalty to using a fucking spoon, but oh well.
Zeybek wrote:The Cleric makes a mental Intimidate check against herself to convince herself that she is only telling a white lie, since lying is taboo in her religion, and that it's ok because it's an emergency. What would normally be an interesting roleplaying moment where the player weighs on how her character's actions will impact their development and world-view, is now locked behind a dice-roll, which is a pretty bad way of removing player agency over how her own character thinks and acts.
First, no. Even if the Cleric has a norm against lying (perhaps instilled into her by her superiors in Cleric school) she only takes the penalty on the first time she decides to tell a lie, and only if she fails a save. The Cleric is probably NOT going to want to make a 'mental intimidate check' to denounce religion in her head with the intent of removing her own taboos against lying and replacing them with a taboo against listening to her religious superiors. On the other had, she might make an Etiquette check to accept that it is OK "just this once" to tell lies for the greater good, freeing her from having to make the save until someone reminds her of her religious duties toward the truth.
Zeybek wrote:Then she succeeds her Bluff check and the new blessing ritual succeeds, because again, successful Assertions bend reality? Maybe we don't even need a fake ritual, let's say the Cleric found the True Bible of Forgotten Rituals and the chalice-in-vat is totally legit, we're still left with the problem that if "lying is bad" is a social norm the whole Bluff skill becomes difficult to use.
No and fuck you, you willfully ignorant asshole. Pay attention to the rules as written, not to the massive strawman you summoned up to give you a self-congratulatory handjob.
Last edited by Grek on Sun May 01, 2016 8:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by spongeknight »

If your social skills can't actually force anyone else to do anything they have failed on first principles. What is the fucking point if successfully spreading the "social norm" of "help defend this town" results in peasants telling you to fuck off because they have livelihoods that need tending to? Fail.
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Voss wrote:Which is pretty classic WW bullshit, really. Suck people in and then announce that everyone was a dogfucker all along.
Lokey
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Post by Lokey »

Grek's previous post, that's not really what the "skills" are for. More societal norms: creation and opposition to them...I think.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

But if people choose not to conform with essentially no meaningful penalty (or enforcement mechanic) what is the point? If the town is destroyed by rampaging undead, there isn't much likelihood of a lynch mob forming against anyone that didn't defend the town, norms be damned.
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Post by DSMatticus »

I don't know if this is really the thread, but it's a thread, and it sort of came up, so I'm going to say it.

No social system anyone ever writes is ever going to be able to explicitly quantify the magnitude of the stakes that the social system will be expected to cover. The game cannot tell you how hard it is to convince a farmer to let you sleep in his barn tonight in all circumstances. The game cannot tell you how hard it is to convince a king to name you his heir in all circumstances. It cannot be done. There is absolutely 100% going to have to be an "insert values here" part of the process. It should absolutely be semi-guided, but you're never going to 100% purge all arbitrariness without also 100% purging all sanity. A lot of the "penalties for refusing" designs are intended to be a last-ditch sanity check so that you can't toss out a 143 diplomacy result and make the king give you his kingdom, his daughter, and fuck it why not his wife too. "You will break this system, but after you've broken it you can't do anything with it." It's... a compromise with the insanity that is the 3.5 skill system, but it is fundamentally bad to have the results of diplomacy checks be arbitrarily invalidated.

So here's a question: can you design a system for assigning difficulties (accepting that certain inputs into this difficulty assignment will be arbitrarily decided by the DM) that produces "DC Not Applicable" results? That way you can genuinely use diplomacy to "force" certain NPC's to do things (insofar as convincing someone to do a certain thing is forcing them to do a thing), without also being able to force ANY NPC to do ANY thing? Because that is probably a much better way forward than this "DM arbitrarily decides the NPC takes a penalty instead."
Last edited by DSMatticus on Mon May 02, 2016 4:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
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