The Gaming Den

So I'm in the middle of reading Dune and love the 'social combat' part where Duke Leto Atreides invites the big wigs to dinner and they figure out who's aligned with who.

The key part wasn't in "I diplomance someone to be on my side" but "I figure out who's siding with who by analyzing their speech pattern and comparing it to what I know about how different espionage schools teach, and lure them to reveal more information about their goals with seemingly idle chatter".

Now actually using your voice to mind control people was elaborated on as a special Bene Gesseritt power, but still required working within the goals of your target, like rape.

How to mechanically do this in a fun way, I dunno. Lots of people like direct converation, but I would be content with a functional skill challenge kind of system where every round your party commits to prying for information or defending their own side from prying until the dinner table ends.

Weapons of the Gods (and its successor, Legends of the Wulin) had a social system I liked, where successful social rolls (among other things) created various incentives, from bonuses for complying to penalties for defying, and even xp modifiers. So the persuadee was never hard compelled, but only given varying degrees of encouragement.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Weapons of the Gods (and its successor, Legends of the Wulin) had a social system I liked, where successful social rolls (among other things) created various incentives, from bonuses for complying to penalties for defying, and even xp modifiers. So the persuadee was never hard compelled, but only given varying degrees of encouragement.

This is sounding much more like something I'd like to do. Can you provide additional information?

echo

echoVanguard wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:So the persuadee was never hard compelled, but only given varying degrees of encouragement.

This is sounding much more like something I'd like to do. Can you provide additional information?

The whole spiel is pretty involved, but let me see if I can boil it down.

1) There are emotional conditions which can be positive or negative. Positive conditions give you some sort of carrot when you RP them, negative conditions give you some sort of stick when you don't RP them. So a positive 'Revenge on the Yagyu clan' condition might give you a bonus to all rolls that are pursuing revenge on the Yagyu clan, and a negative one might give you a penalty to all rolls that aren't pursuing revenge on the Yagyu clan.

2) These conditions are created on a character by another character making a 'perception' check, because the fluff is that they were always there, the second character is just noticing them. The MC sets the TN to notice a condition based on how likely it is that such a condition would be there (based on RP elements). So it is very easy to notice that Scrooge McDuck has a greed condition, and very difficult to notice that Donald Duck has a tranquility condition.

3) Conditions have different levels of effect. The weakest is Trivial, which has no mechanical effect except to exist and possibly be made stronger (or removed). Most conditions that are 'noticed' come into being at Trivial, explaining why they've had no mechanical effect until then.

4) Persuasion checks can manipulate discovered conditions, making them stronger or weaker or changing them or even creating new ones based on the old ones.

OgreBattle wrote:Players stumble across a much more powerful dragon's den, the dragon wants to eat them. How will social rules work in this situation

Okay, in this case Rushed Diplomacy (i.e. Diplomacy that takes 1 6 second round; instead of 1 60 second turn) comes to the fore. Unfortunately, unless the PCs have a dedicated diplomat; the Rushed Diplomacy might fail due to the -10 to the check.

For the Dragon's "diplomacy"; I'd probably adjudicate it slightly differently. Probably with the Dragon presenting their position to the PCs as rhetorical questions (e.g. "is killing robbers in your home; Self-Defense?"; "Does a hungry creature not have the right to hunt and feed itself?") that they can't easily argue against (without undermining their own ethical codes).

In 3.X, Intimidate can be used to apply conditions to targets (like Shaken). I think that conditional operations could be used to some degree like this. For example, using Charm on someone would give them a Reluctant condition when attacking you and when defending against you, disincentivizing them from attacking you. Similarly, Intimidate could be used to give a Fear condition which made fighting them while Intimidated an unpleasant prospect.

These examples aren't very good, but I think the general idea would interact well with the combat paradigm and provide concrete incentives to do various things in response to social actions. Thoughts?

echo

I don't particularly care about a diplomacy version of an intimidate combat but that's not a particularly difficult issue to tackle. Of the issues that surround Diplomacy I don't think achieving the same combat use as intimidate is one of them. I the only use of Diplomacy in combatI have ever seen people feverishly argue for is using it to halt combat so they can attempt to diplomance instead of fighting. Giving an in combat penalty to stuff a'la intimidate might be alright but I think people want a get out of combat card instead.

WotG is Borgstromancy. Be warned.

For NPCs using social skill on players, just make the rolls fairly early, and use that to inform how you present the NPC. You can even give different descriptions to different players, right at the same table. Either they'll roll with it and roleplay it out (most likely), or they aren't interested in doing that anyway (also okay, and saves everyone some heartache). The DM is the only interface the players have on the world, so you need to be skeptical of unreliable narration, but any place players already explicitly rolling to see how well they evaluate the world is fair game for bad information.