How do you make rulings on social interactions?

[T. Foster]

Don’t get hung up on my casual Han Solo reference. It wasn’t the point. Substitute some other example from fiction of a character who actually is an effective fast-talker and the point remains that some players will want to have a character like that even if (and in some sense likely because) they don’t have that sort of personality and talent IRL. A big appeal of roleplaying is getting to imagine yourself as someone different than who you really are, and not just in terms of athletic or fighting ability.

 

[AsenRG]

As for Han Solo, I think he's smart and has some Fast-Talk skill, more Streetwise skill, etc, but you're right those aren't at especially high levels. High enough that he survived, and that he knew when to blast Greedo before Greedo fired. He had penalties for trying to fast-talk Death Star security right after blasting his way into the detention level, may have not rolled well, and also, that was maybe never going to do more than delay an investigation.

That was Streetwise, IMO!

 

[Agemegos]

Don’t get hung up on my casual Han Solo reference. It wasn’t the point. Substitute some other example from fiction of a character who actually is an effective fast-talker

On a bit of a tangent. what character actually would make a good example here? It'd be handy to have a go-to example.

I think immediately of The Saint and Jim Rockford, but they're not so well-known any more. Michael Westen uses too many other different approaches.

 

[AsenRG]

On a bit of a tangent. what character actually would make a good example here? It'd be handy to have a go-to example.

I think immediately of The Saint and Jim Rockford, but they're not so well-known any more. Michael Westen uses too many other different approaches.

Bourne - at least the one from the books!

 

[Exploderwizard]

The best fast talker from Star Wars was certainly C3PO. No matter what crap he made up, the Imperials believed him!

 

[Skarg]

Obi-Wan could just go wherever he wanted on the Death Star, wearing a bathrobe, but no doubt using Jedi mind and sneak tricks of some sort, not social skills. But in the hands of a smart RPG player, he probably could've just set the Death Star to blow itself up by himself, if it weren't for Vader being aboard.

Jim Rockford is a great example, and also of how it doesn't always work, and what the limitations and eventual consequences can be like. (Find the Rockford Files episode(s) with "Lance" (played by Tom Selleck) who instead just uses charm, which is really funny in contrast to Rockford's style and approach to everything.)

Various types of social manipulation:

Frank Abagnale Jr. in Catch Me If You Can.

Richard Roma (Al Pacino in Glengarry Glen Ross)

Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer in Tombstone)

Gus Fring in Breaking Bad

Saul as conman in Better Call Saul, and Lallo Salamanca as intimidator (and in a later episode, as seducer)

 

[Black Vulmea]

I'm late to the party - no surprise there - so most of what I want to say's already been covered, probably a lot better than I will here.

On the other side of the screen being able to roleplay a bunch of weird little guys is just one of the core things I like about GMing.

I'm going to start with this because Hell. Yeah. I get to roleplay everyone in the game-world not roleplayed by a player? Sign me straight the fuck up for that! Once the maps are drawn and keyed, the random tables codified, and whatever bits of background exposition I think are important written, then actual play is roleplaying nirvana.

Okay, so, social skills and roleplaying then.

First, I like social skills and skill systems, with the caveat that I like simple, robust skills. If the game has anything even as basic as a reaction roll, then social skills can and, in my feeling, should play a part in offers, negotiations, and such, because there's a good chance the rules for player characters include a modifier that affects that roll.

As far as simple and robust, here's an example of what I might use in a game, inspired in this case by 2e Boot Hill, using a reaction roll and an NPC Bravery score as morale.

Reaction and morale checks.

Negative reaction, fails morale? Cowed, seething, spiteful.
Neutral reaction, fails morale? Resentful, compliance with the letter of the demands and not one jot more.
Positive reaction, fails morale? A potential ally emerges.

Negative reaction, passes morale? Congratulations, you have a new enemy!
Neutral reaction, passes morale? Disinterested, shows you the door but won't hinder you further.
Positive reaction, passes morale? Willing to negotiate, demands a significant price in exchange.

In practical terms, it's two rolls, made simultaneously - quick 'n' easy. In my experience, this opens up a lot of possibilities for how an interaction may go when applied to the facts on the ground, the specific situation facing the adventurers.

Second, social skills should not be "charm spells." Moving a character's Attitude from Hostile to Helpful doesn't mean a successful Diplomacy check gets you the keys to the Vizier's personal library, the King's liquor cabinet, or the Princess' chastity belt. It means they're receptive to negotiation which may also involve subsequent tasks or a cost, aka, "Willing to negotiate, demands a significant price in exchange."

Third, don't roll the dice until you get to The Ask. What is "The Ask," you ask? "Making "the ask" in business lingo usually refers to the final moment of truth, when you ask investors or customers to buy into your business or product and they do … or not." Many of my PC-NPC social interactions often involve significant conversations - or multiple conversations, more on that in a moment - before I ask for a roll, depending on how tractable, frex, an NPC might be. Make the players carefully define The Ask: present their terms, what they're offering, what they expect in return. As I blogged way back when, "Here's the thing: social skills are used to resolve your attempts to accomplish a task. They don't do your roleplaying for you. (emphasis in the original - BV)" Once they give you The Ask, consider the different ways in which a non-player character may respond. Maybe the Vizier can pawn off the adventurer wizard looking for a rare spell to a sage in another city rather than letting them run loose in her Sanctum Sanctorum. Still "Helpful," with the bonus of More Gameable Content.

And no, those conversations don't need to be actual conversations. While I love first-person roleplay, I'm more than comfortable with third-person. It's the strategy, the approach, which shapes the results, less so the actual words.

Fourth, nothing is ever as simple as it looks. One Ask may be insufficient on its face. The Gentleman of the Bedchamber has the keys to the King's liquor cabinet, but he can only release them with a letter from the Grand Chamberlain on stationery from the First Secretary to the High Chancellor, so if the Gentleman of the Bedchamber is intractable - difficult to influence - be prepared to make lots of new friends. The Flashing Blades' short adventure "Scavenger Hunt," in Parisian Adventures, is a fun example of this.

Another approach to this is a series of step-wise skill checks, as seen in the seduction rules for Victory Games' James Bond 007: Roleplaying In Her Majesty's Secret Service, which I blogged about: "JB 007 breaks seduction down into a series of five evocatively named skill checks: 1. The Look, 2. Opening Line, 3. Witty Conversation, 4. Beginning Intimacies, 5. When and Where? Each skill check is increasingly difficult [as] determined by the Ease Factor, which is multiplied by the character's Primary Chance, which is equal to the character's skill plus the relevant attribute score; as a frame of reference, The Look is EF 10 whereas When and Where? is EF 4. What this rule does is divide a social interaction into discrete steps of increasing difficulty." In other words, you're not unlocking the Princess' holiest-of-holies without completing a checklist first, and looking for ways to make completing those increasingly difficult checks easier - does she like flowers? music? poetry? - becomes, yes, you guessed it, More Gameable Content.

Single points of failure aren't interesting. Make navigating your social milieu complex.

Fifth, and to me this one's really, really important, look after the non-player character's interests. Believable, fully realized non-player characters have ambitions, values, fears. They should form the basis for the way(s) an NPC may satisfy The Ask. Treat them like real people, not vending machines.

Sooooo . . . there was this whole tangent about designing and roleplaying non-player characters . . . *le sigh* . . . okay, here we go . . .

Game rules require gameable elements to resist them. NPCs are a core class of that thing.

I absolutely agree 100% with this. I also think it completely misses the mark.



Let's look at the example of the security guard, since that went so well upthread. I'm creating two security guard characters for two different warehouses. The first guard, at Warehouse Aleph, is a retired bank clerk looking to make a little extra money to supplement his income. He's mid-sixties, kinda skinny, thick glasses, but super reliable, always fills out paperwork correctly. The second guard, at Bet Bonded Storage, is late-twenties, served two tours in Afghanistan, benches 305, and he's working security until the interminable hiring process for the local police department plays out and he can go to the Academy, earn a "real" badge.

Clearly, in terms of the game rule representations of these characters, they're gonna look pretty different, and that may affect their interactions with (1) the adventurers and (2) other non-player characters and stobor in the game-world. Where I put these characters can significantly impact how the game plays out.

But there're two things that seeing them as "gameable elements," as "challenge or obstacle," misses, at least in the way I approach running a roleplaying game. First, my approach is to "build[. . .] the setting from behind a veil of ignorance - that is, with no foreknowledge of who the actual player characters will be - leaning heavily on [. . .] genre tropes to develop situations which invite the player characters to engage." Those two guards may a "challenge or obstacle" to the adventurers, or they may be a resource for the adventurers. Let's say they're looking for an invoice - they better hope it's at Warehouse Aleph because the retiree guard can help them find it a lot faster, if at all, than the grunt guard at Bet Bonded Storage.

Second, I random the living FUCK out of my games. That invoice, or a crate of widgets salvaged from a UFO, or the kidnapped secretary of the vice president of overseas operations? Roll d6: 1-3 Warehouse Aleph, 4-6 Bet Bonded Storage.

(And this is why the Angry GM makes me want to throw things at my monitor. His approach is an anathema to me.)

Yes, the game rules underpinning non-player characters matter. HOW they matter, in the games I run, may be mystery until the adventurers actually interact with them.

 

[Fenris-77]

Just so you don't think I'm ignoring you I walked away from that part of this thread, so I'm not getting back into certain aspects of your post. There was a lot of salt and crust flying around and the notion isn't important enough to me to warrant the strife it was causing.

Generally I tend to use random elements quite a lot in my own games which means that the game elements of the NPCs usually do get deferred to the last moment. At least they do in terms of coming into complete focus. Even a casual sketch of an NPC often still at least suggests or gestures at the gameable elements that may need to be addressed. Resource NPCs have their game elements closer to the surface from the start of course just by dint of their place in the game world. Inn Keepers and the like exist, barring special attention, to allow PCs to pay for rooms to sleep in, buy food, and collect gossip, so the in-game stuff matches up almost perfectly with the game element stuff.

 

[AsenRG]

Just so you don't think I'm ignoring you I walked away from that part of this thread, so I'm not getting back into certain aspects of your post. There was a lot of salt and crust flying around and the notion isn't important enough to me to warrant the strife it was causing.

I can only commend your temperance!

 

[Triumvir]

Very late joining this table in the Pub... I'm fortunate that my current players are generally self-policing in this respect and willing to play within their PCs' characteristics. That said, once or twice, the player of the dumbest PC has had smart ideas (kind of involuntarily - you can't unthink or unsay it), and we have RP'd it that actually it was the smart PC who thought of it.

There was a good point above that nobody thinks waving your arms about athletically should give you a bonus in your combat throw, so why should giving a great speech benefit your persuade throw? The problem arises essentially because RPGs by their nature are a talking game. I wonder what LARPers do if someone who is athletic IRL is playing a wheezy wizard. (I have never been anywhere near a LARP so I have no idea if this is even a thing.)

It seems to me that player skill is about putting their PC into the situation where their mechanical skills can be deployed to best effect. That could mean being tactically well-placed for combat, or approaching a major domo for a favour after building some trust and not after being caught climbing in through his window, or whatever.

Or, Mythras has a system for social combat that consists of chained throws of social skills and "hit points" calculated from stats like INT or CHA depending on the challenge. That gives another outlet for a role for player skill as opposed to character skill in selecting the right ordering and combo of skills to throw.

A smart player should be able to put a PC with poor social skills into situations where the disadvantage is lessened (or advantage increased).

But ultimately I don't see a robust game-mechanics answer to the smart-player-dumb-PC problem, and have to throw it back to expectations of being a good player, with rewards in the approbation of the group.

 

[Exploderwizard]

Very late joining this table in the Pub... I'm fortunate that my current players are generally self-policing in this respect and willing to play within their PCs' characteristics. That said, once or twice, the player of the dumbest PC has had smart ideas (kind of involuntarily - you can't unthink or unsay it), and we have RP'd it that actually it was the smart PC who thought of it.

There was a good point above that nobody thinks waving your arms about athletically should give you a bonus in your combat throw, so why should giving a great speech benefit your persuade throw? The problem arises essentially because RPGs by their nature are a talking game. I wonder what LARPers do if someone who is athletic IRL is playing a wheezy wizard. (I have never been anywhere near a LARP so I have no idea if this is even a thing.)

It seems to me that player skill is about putting their PC into the situation where their mechanical skills can be deployed to best effect. That could mean being tactically well-placed for combat, or approaching a major domo for a favour after building some trust and not after being caught climbing in through his window, or whatever.

Or, Mythras has a system for social combat that consists of chained throws of social skills and "hit points" calculated from stats like INT or CHA depending on the challenge. That gives another outlet for a role for player skill as opposed to character skill in selecting the right ordering and combo of skills to throw.

A smart player should be able to put a PC with poor social skills into situations where the disadvantage is lessened (or advantage increased).

But ultimately I don't see a robust game-mechanics answer to the smart-player-dumb-PC problem, and have to throw it back to expectations of being a good player, with rewards in the approbation of the group.

There is no answer because none is required. I did do LARPing in my younger days and in the organization I played in, your real combat skill was your skill. The number of "hits" you could take never improved with level. Only armor prevented anyone getting one-shotted. The weapons were padded but the combat was fought out in real time. Wizards could cast spells and also fight. Even though they had no armor the wizards could fight as well as the person playing them could. It was fantasy organized pillow fighting but a lot of fun.

For tabletop play I don't make the players lower INT characters "play dumb". There are mechanical disadvantages for player characters with low INT and WIS scores. The inability to learn languages, possible illiteracy, a penalty on saves vs magic, etc. These are the penalties for those low scores. Limiting the ability of the player to actually play the game is not something I engage in. I will sometimes make humorous side comment, such as when the 7 INT fighter explains to the party his genius tactical approach to a combat, with " says the dumb fighter" just as a joke.

 

[Skarg]

...

There was a good point above that nobody thinks waving your arms about athletically should give you a bonus in your combat throw, so why should giving a great speech benefit your persuade throw? The problem arises essentially because RPGs by their nature are a talking game. I wonder what LARPers do if someone who is athletic IRL is playing a wheezy wizard. (I have never been anywhere near a LARP so I have no idea if this is even a thing.)

It seems to me that player skill is about putting their PC into the situation where their mechanical skills can be deployed to best effect. That could mean being tactically well-placed for combat, or approaching a major domo for a favour after building some trust and not after being caught climbing in through his window, or whatever.

Or, Mythras has a system for social combat that consists of chained throws of social skills and "hit points" calculated from stats like INT or CHA depending on the challenge. That gives another outlet for a role for player skill as opposed to character skill in selecting the right ordering and combo of skills to throw.

A smart player should be able to put a PC with poor social skills into situations where the disadvantage is lessened (or advantage increased).

But ultimately I don't see a robust game-mechanics answer to the smart-player-dumb-PC problem, and have to throw it back to expectations of being a good player, with rewards in the approbation of the group.

Right. Well, a player waving arms impressively might not give their PC a successful attack or even a +1 (at most tables), but their description of what they do (and/or technical moves in the combat system) will affect what happens in combat and/or the odds of success (except maybe in really abstract combat systems), just like the success of doing some athletic activity like breaking into a building will be affected by how the players say the PCs try to do that. It's the part of the game where the players get to say what the PC approach is. And some of that is similarly in a grey zone between player knowledge/skill and PC knowledge/skill, which can be an issue either for OOC roleplaying, or where the GM should help the player by letting a less-informed player know what their PC would know about their options.

The social situations are similar, but different in that first-person roleplaying can be pretty close to the in-game event, which both makes it less clear where the lines are, and also means the lines could be set almost all the way in the direction of the roleplaying being what happens in the game world.

 

[Fenris-77]

The social situations are similar, but different in that first-person roleplaying can be pretty close to the in-game event, which both makes it less clear where the lines are, and also means the lines could be set almost all the way in the direction of the roleplaying being what happens in the game world.

Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, are you then suggesting that people who aren't naturally gifted social creatures should get to play social PCs because their real life social skills aren't up to the challenge? I ask because that seems like the obvious outcome of the bolded idea.

 

[Skarg]

Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, are you then suggesting that people who aren't naturally gifted social creatures should get to play social PCs because their real life social skills aren't up to the challenge? I ask because that seems like the obvious outcome of the bolded idea.

I must have been unclear. What I meant in the bolded part, was that an option some people (e.g. ExploderWizard above) do is just have players roleplay social interactions with no real effect of their characters' social stats on interactions, so PCs' social successes are determined more or less entirely by the roleplaying.

But also yes, as I and others (e.g. Black Vulmea above) have also mentioned before, it's also of course an option to do the opposite extreme, and not even roleplay social interactions at all, just describe intent and roll. OR, to roleplay, but use dice and PC stats/skills to determine the result, so yes, a socially inept player could roleplay a suave charmer, make an awful RP performance, then roll the dice and succeed, and everyone should imagine the PC was actually charming and said appropriate things.

 

[Exploderwizard]

Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, are you then suggesting that people who aren't naturally gifted social creatures should get to play social PCs because their real life social skills aren't up to the challenge? I ask because that seems like the obvious outcome of the bolded idea.

I would say not really if you are basing success or failure on the substance and intent of what the player says rather than the presentation.

 

[Fenris-77]

I would say not really if you are basing success or failure on the substance and intent of what the player says rather than the presentation.

I completely agree. I was just trying to clarify what the post above mine was saying. We're all on the same page here.

 

[Agemegos]

For tabletop play I don't make the players lower INT characters "play dumb".

Neither do I. But when I am playing a low-INT character myself I prefer to play dumb. So it turns out that the only time that I have ever won a role-playing prize at an RPG convention was for playing a mentally retarded character in a a Rolemaster tournament.

Another time I played in a campaign that was a lot of fun because I played a crafty, taciturn, and secretive master of Xanatos speed chess, which freed up the smartest guy in the group (who was usually stuck with playing prudent, strategising leaders) to play my character's impulsive, soft-hearted, and easily-confused cousin. There was no need at all for mechanisms or incentives to make him play dumb: he did it because it was colossal fun.

 

[Exploderwizard]

Neither do I. But when I am playing a low-INT character myself I prefer to play dumb. So it turns out that the only time that I have ever won a role-playing prize at an RPG convention was for playing a mentally retarded character in a a Rolemaster tournament.

Another time I played in a campaign that was a lot of fun because I played a crafty, taciturn, and secretive master of Xanatos speed chess, which freed up the smartest guy in the group (who was usually stuck with playing prudent, strategising leaders) to play my character's impulsive, soft-hearted, and easily-confused cousin. There was no need at all for mechanisms or incentives to make him play dumb: he did it because it was colossal fun.

Any playstyle a player finds fun, so long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's fun is perfectly fine. That is what the whole thing is about in the end. I played a half ogre once named Targ. He was the sort of fellow that looked up to a box of rocks and marveled at its intellect. It was great fun playing that character.

 

[Turkey Lurkie]

I keep it simple: I know what the NPC will like, dislike or be neutral towards.

So based on that and what the PC says I then use any Character mods from Cha or other class abilities. If the player really tried or brushed it off might earn an additional +1 or -1 and Bob's your uncle.