Some members of our group are unhappy with the way social interaction is handled mechanically. Where combat is generally a whole series of steps with back and forth before arriving at an eventual conclusion to the “conflict”, diplomacy/bluff/intimidate is generally a single opposed roll.
If social skills are really going to be about coercion – at least of NPCs – then there ought to be a more involved system than the equivalent of “I roll my attack. If the target to defend, it dies.” We do make an effort to roleplay the situations, we don't just roll dice, but ultimately the resolution comes down to a single die roll.
What we'd like is something more like a haggling system, where the "back and forth" could be better modeled, especially for players who don't have the same social skills as their PCs are supposed to.
One of our group members has an annoying tendency, when he GMs, to run NPCs that will smile and say nothing when captured and questioned, no matter what we do. When it came around to his turn to GM again, I decided to optimize my character for social interaction to counter this. At 9th level, my aasimar cleric has +24 to Intimidate and close to that in Diplomacy and Sense Motive. Few NPCs are built to withstand that, so either she gets her way in almost every interaction, or the GM decides not to allow a skill check. This isn't really satisfactory for anyone.
9 ranks in the skill (fully 20% of her skill points)
+5 from 20 CHA
+4 racial bonus (alternate aasimar racial ability, replaces the daylight spell-like ability.)
+1 trait bonus (Soldier of the Faith; you gain a +1 trait bonus on Intimidate checks, and Intimidate is always a class skill for you.)
+3 class skill
+2 feat (Persuasive)
Anyone know of any 3pp systems we might take a look at? I haven't seen Paizo's Social Combat cards, except for the two sample images, but my impression is that you play cards to affect the final result, not necessarily that it allows for back and forth play. Let me know if I'm wrong about that.
One thing to remember is the difference between combat and social.
First off, combat is generally a cooperative effort while social issues tend to spotlight one or two people. So you'll need two find a way to get everyone on board without leaving anyone out.
Also social issues are really the only thing in any game that punishes you for real world ineptness. If you can't fight or swing a sword, you can still be a fighter in game. But if you aren't the best speaker in the real world, then gms feel the need to punish you. Definitely keep this in mind when doing social combat with people that aren't method actors.
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Problem is, in my opinion, diplomacy, intimidate, and bluff shouldn't be skills at all.
At the very least, they need to be revamped to work differently than they currently do.
Personally I would like to see diplomacy changed such that it doesn't chnage people's attitude's at all. It doesn't make people friendly, only long term interaction with people can do that. Instead, it should be the art of making a deal.
Further, I think bluff should be the defined as convincing someone you believe what you are saying is the truth. Not that they necessarily believe your words are truth.
Hell, you could tell someone the sky is red. And it's only a -20 penalty to do so. If you have a high enough bluff check, the way the rules are written, they look up at the blue sky and say "Damn, my eyes must be up. But I guess you're right the sky is red."
Instead, it should be more like "The sky is red". "Well sir, clearly you believe the sky is red. Do you have some form of color blindness? Are you mental well?"
Unfortunately, there aren't any really good ways of dealing with all these problem that we experience with the "social skills".
This was a proposed fixed for 3.5 diplomacy, but it would be easy to update for Pathfinder. I think the most important thing is the increased ranged of modifier for relationship that make the DCs much more difficult than before. So that there are more relevent factors.
Atlas Games' Dynasties & Demagogues has some debate systems that could potentially be adapted for social "combat." But be wary: Under the RAW, this system will heavily favor bards, and any character who hasn't buffed his social abilities will get squished.
I think I still have that book. I'll take a look. Our current AP has no bards on either side (so far, where NPCs are concerned) but if any character who hasn't buffed will get squished, it doesn't sound promising.
I've started using a modified Skill Challenge mechanic from 4E to represent social encounters. I don't yell "this is a skill challenge!" but I give my players opportunities to use their skills vs. a DC. If they fail their rolls a certain number of times before getting the requisite successes, the players lose the skill challenge.
I never played 4E and am not familiar with how skill challenges work. Is it mostly a matter of getting "X" successes before "Y" failures?
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The main thing social combat ends up missing is a burning fuse. You need some sort of timer, representing the other party's willingness to listen.
Once you have that, it's a matter of making sure everyone can participate and you're off to the races.
I'd probably create two pools: reluctance and patience. Reluctance is the pool you're trying to chip down (the enemy's HP). Patience is the pool you're trying to keep up (your HP).
Each round, everyone gets an action. At the end of the round, the target's patience is eroded (effectively, it deals damage to the party based on its social "CR"). The busboy at a tavern probably loses 1d4 patience when this happens, but a baron could be looking at 3d6+10.
Successful diplomacy checks reduce its reluctance. A poor argument might reduce it by 1d4, a really great one a 1d12. In any case, add your Charisma modifier to the damage. There's no penalty for a failed diplomacy check.
Intimidate makes the target shaken, as normal. DCs to effect it are reduced by 2 while it's shaken. A failed intimidate check erodes the target's patience... and might start a fight if you're threatening them physically.
Bluff can do a few things. By adding "facts" it can open new arguments for Diplomacy. But it's main use is making you seem more important, increasing the size of the patience pool. A failed bluff check erodes the target's patience.
Sense motive gives you information, possibly letting you know what arguments are better for diplomacy. It'll also reveal any information you're missing about the target's patience or reluctance.
Lastly, but certainly not least, other skills can be used to blunt the target's impatience. A successful check with an appropriate skill will prevent the end of round erosion of patience. This may be perform for a bored princeling or knowledge (religion) for a vicar.
If patience runs out first, they're unconvinced and not going to become convinced if you continue talking (see: every argument ever). If reluctance runs out first, they're swayed to your point of view.
Cheers!
Landon
Isn't there a 3pp product?
You could adapt Burning Wheels Duel of Wits
Edit: check out Debatable Actions for PFRPG by LPJ Design which apparently adapts social combat from Atlas Games excellent d20 Dynasties & Demagogues.
And on a tangent there's Alexander Augunas Psychological Combat which adds a social/psychological aspect to actual combat.
a 3pp came out many years that fixed the problem in an absolutely amazing way it's called skill focus talk
It's actually called Skill Focus Talking At only $2.95 I'll have to check out that one...
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To the OP : I once considered using the combat system for this, through substituting Mental attributes for Physical attributes (Say, CHA for STR, WIS for CON and INT for DEX). I never got through it but it did bring up interesting ramifications ("Ranged" social combat, feats for INT-based social damage, social DR …)
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I have DMed for 32 years and I totally agree.
we dont expect you to wear heavy armor or start doing pushups that your PC should be capable of doing. So why does a GM resort to this involuntary sense of expecting you to act out a high wisdom or intelligence. ...
Some do, but more of us don't.
As I've said in some other threads, I do expect something more than "I roll diplomacy."
I think of it as analogous to the tactics used in combat. Very few players just say I attack [[roll dice]] on their turn. Instead, you usually get at the very minimum something like, “I take a 5’ step around to the right (toward setting him up for flanking) then I use power attack.”
Ok that may have effects and responses. “Well the bugbear can tell you are trying to surround him and the hits are already hurting, so he backs into the doorway so you can only come at him from one direction.”
So give me your tactics for the social interaction. This a rewording of an actual example situation I encountered from a few years ago.
I would have liked something like these:
“I flirt with the Seneschal to get him to give us a good introduction to the merchant prince today.” OR “I will bribe the Seneschal.” OR “I will be polite but in the way refusing to leave until the Senschal lets us in to see the merchant prince”
“I try to point out to the merchant prince that helping with the caravan troubles will profit his clan and make the guild think he is altruistic.” OR “I will threaten to tell the guild leaders that the authority figure that is collecting fees to protect them refuses to pay for someone to take out the bandits.” OR “I will emphasis that it is his duty as a noble to protect those under his care.”
“I will tell the guild leader that I am composing a play in her honor to show the world that the victory would not have been possible without the generosity that she will surely shower on our endeavors.” OR “I will say that the merchant prince is willing to pay part of the fee, but not enough for the risk involved in us to taking out the bandits.” OR “I’ve heard rumors (and I will start them) that the reason she won’t pay for anyone to take out the bandits is because they really work for her.”
Those could make a difference both immediately and long term.
Maybe the Seneschal is gay or his spouse is standing right behind you. Or maybe he really is a horn-dog and will expect follow through on the flirting. Maybe your blaster sorc destroyed the caravan as well as the bandits. So the merchant prince lost money and the guild hates him for hiring you trouble makers. Might make getting the next job more difficult. Maybe your bard forgets (or never intended) to write a play. That betrayed rich woman is now a lifelong enemy.
Those give me ideas on how you are trying to proceed and what some likely ramifications are.
But instead the spokes person for the group just said “We go into town and roll diplomacy to get someone to hire us to take out the bandits. I got a 32.”
“So who do you talk to and what do you say to them?”
“Whoever seems best. I got a 32. That’s pretty good”
What can I do with that? Ok, I can either give you a big penalty for being an ash-hat and making my life more difficult or I’ll have to make something up.
So I said, “Ok, Cassi flirted with the Seneschal to get into see the merchant prince (he’s expecting you for a date tomorrow night), Gregor managed to convince the merchant prince to hire you guys. But he is expecting to see a profit and you better make him look good for the guild. And the guild leader is giving you guys some mounts and supplies and expects a successful play making her seem a generous heroin.”
Then I had a bunch of players screaming at me. “I wouldn’t flirt with a human, I certainly won’t go on a date with him! We would never guarantee that he’ll get a profit! None of us have the skills to write a play!” To damn bad. Then give me something to work with.
Do you just make 1 good attack roll and expect to win the entire fight? I would hope not. So why should this be different?
No. I don’t expect the exact words, facial expression, body language, tone of voice, etc… to be used. Just like I don’t expect you to know the correct way to hold a claymore, perform a rising block, or what the exact angle of entry between the ribs to hit the heart. But I want to know in general what you are doing. In other words, the tactics of both combat and social encounters.
I prefer to first-person role-play it out, then make social skill rolls. I'll give ad hoc circumstance bonuses/penalties depending on how the role playing went. If I bother with rolling at all. This allows the players to use social tactics, and mot letting it all boil down to one die roll.
I also use "the rule of cool" to guide me: If the players say or do something that's really cool, I'll either just allow it to work, or ill give them a big circumstance bonus on the roll.
Basically, if a game mechanic enhances the story, I'll use it. If it doesn't, I'll ignore/downplay it.
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We use social combat like cmb/cmd like this:
Social combat defense
Half level + social status + sense motive
Where social status is based on your birthright rating:
-1 criminal/outcast/merchant
0 peasantry
1 freeman
2 vassal
3 military/clergy
4 titled
5 nobility
Obviously, this draws on social standing from a true caste system.
Social combat bonus
half level + influence + social class + skill
Where Influence is a point pool derived from cha and int bonus + level. Influence points are
invested in NPCs to represent persistent relationships. You can only allocate or deallocate 1 + int bonus influence per session if you interact with the target NPC.
It works really well and encourages RP/intrigue. Again, this is primarily for games where people are not all born equally in the eyes of society and npcs fairly static.
Excellent post ElterAgo.
But instead the spokes person for the group just said “We go into town and roll diplomacy to get someone to hire us to take out the bandits. I got a 32.”
“So who do you talk to and what do you say to them?”
“Whoever seems best. I got a 32. That’s pretty good”
What can I do with that? Ok, I can either give you a big penalty for being an ash-hat and making my life more difficult or I’ll have to make something up.
This problem is solved nicely by applying the Alexandrian's Diplomacy fix, I.e. reducing the impact of one diplomacy roll to a better defined and smaller scale result: getting someone to a accept a specific deal/bargain.
Problem is, in my opinion, diplomacy, intimidate, and bluff shouldn't be skills at all.What if I am not a good orator, liar, or very intimidating, but want to have a PC that is, what would represent that?
Me knowing you as a person and having you attempt to talk through the situation.
Hint: I'm probably going to let it work, at least to an extent. I actually like it when players attempt to talk things through, rather than just kill everything.
Groups vary, but what I've seen more often with the experiences that involve GMs trying to get stuff out of players, well it depends. Generally, I found you don't want to make the player feel like they're doing unnecessary work just to please a GM, especially if they're using the gaming-day as relaxation FROM work/real life. In a similar vein you don't want to guy who happens to be a litigator in real life to get away with a low social score just because they can orate well in real life.
In general, I agree with the complaints re: social skills. And all too frequently we see them (via players posting their "look at me!" builds in threads, etc) built as situation bombs exploiting the weakness of the system.
I like the sense that social skills are broken because they include both a 'to hit' and 'damage' component, rather than splitting them up. So to fix it you need to change it up a bit, where the super diplomat might make excellent points, but fail to do significant change because the target has "social skills damage reduction" or "fast healing".
A real life social exchange can include 'really good points that fail to make a positive impact'. Otherwise you'd have things like "well thought out argument destroys fundamentalism" as the mechanics of social skills in PF/etc have it set up.
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I haven't done this for all social encounters, but I have done this for discussions at big plot points or for the talk with the BBEG prior to fighting him (the outcome has the chance of giving a slight combat bonus or whatever). I've used rules similar to the chase rules - I think they're in the GameMastery Guide, right?
Basically, your PC is "chasing" the NPC through checkpoints in the conversation and needs to catch him. So in the example of you-tie-up-the-last-living-bandit and question him (the "chase-ee" begins one point ahead, and sorry in advance for the bad dialogue):
"I ask him which direction the other camp is"
"Ok, make an intimidate or survival check" (the bandit is making a sense motive or maybe a bluff check, the PC fails his check, and the bandit makes his, now the bandit is two points ahead)
"That doesn't seem to shake him. He smiles and tell you he doesn't know but if you need directions to yer mom's house he'd be happy to tell you ;)"
"I put my knife to his throat and say "How about now?""
"Alright, make a Bluff check - he'll be making an opposed sense motive check" (The PC makes his check against the bandit, the DM decides that was intimidating enough for two points, now the PC and the bandit are even and the bandit gives in)
"He looks scared now and says "Ok, let me live and I'll take you there."
But, you can of course make it much more lively than that.
I like this because it's already set up to deal with an exchange between two people and it's really easy to adjust based on anything you want - starting attitude, likelihood of the person even talking to you in the first place, noise in the room, rumors already around town, etc can all affect the DC of checks and the "length" of the conversation.
This is a good way to involve several different skills into a conversation (e.g. the Knowledge skills) but you'll need to give the players sort of a guide on how to do it since they'll want to be able to play to their strengths. The whole idea is to allow the PCs to prepare and use some kind of - however simple - tactics when in the encounter.
I haven't done this for all social encounters, but I have done this for discussions at big plot points or for the talk with the BBEG prior to fighting him (the outcome has the chance of giving a slight combat bonus or whatever). I've used rules similar to the chase rules - I think they're in the GameMastery Guide, right?
Basically, your PC is "chasing" the NPC through checkpoints in the conversation and needs to catch him. So in the example of you-tie-up-the-last-living-bandit and question him (the "chase-ee" begins one point ahead, and sorry in advance for the bad dialogue):
"I ask him which direction the other camp is"
"Ok, make an intimidate or survival check" (the bandit is making a sense motive or maybe a bluff check, the PC fails his check, and the bandit makes his, now the bandit is two points ahead)
"That doesn't seem to shake him. He smiles and tell you he doesn't know but if you need directions to yer mom's house he'd be happy to tell you ;)"
"I put my knife to his throat and say "How about now?""
"Alright, make a Bluff check - he'll be making an opposed sense motive check" (The PC makes his check against the bandit, the DM decides that was intimidating enough for two points, now the PC and the bandit are even and the bandit gives in)
"He looks scared now and says "Ok, let me live and I'll take you there."But, you can of course make it much more lively than that.
I like this because it's already set up to deal with an exchange between two people and it's really easy to adjust based on anything you want - starting attitude, likelihood of the person even talking to you in the first place, noise in the room, rumors already around town, etc can all affect the DC of checks and the "length" of the conversation.
This is a good way to involve several different skills into a conversation (e.g. the Knowledge skills) but you'll need to give the players sort of a guide on how to do it since they'll want to be able to play to their strengths. The whole idea is to allow the PCs to prepare and...
Yoink!
Thanks!
(Seriously, this is a good idea, kudos to you)
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Ok hate to say this and it is gonna annoy people, most likely. If you're bad at it, learn and improve. Being able to communicate is key to living in society anyways.
Anyway, gaming examples. I am bad at RTS games and things like DOTA. Should I be given a free pass because I am bad at it or be allowed to use some kind of cheat/trainer program? Or should I have to actually learn how to play them better? Magic:the Gathering. New guy sits at a tournament with a deck he bought and, while knowing how the game rules go, he is not good at strategy and resource management. Should everyone just go easy on him or just let him win, or should he take the loss and learn from it?
When people just give you a pass in these social things, you'll never learn to do better.
Back when I was new and we played 2nd edition, we never used social rolls (don't remember if there were any) and we had to actually talk out scenes like we were talking to real people. We had to make reasonable arguments, convincing threats, etc... and over time, with being really bad at it at first, we actually got better. This helped a lot both with in-game social interaction and real life social interaction.
So again, if you just want to skip the social stuff in a storytelling game, tough. Learn and improve, don't sit and stagnate. Imagine how boring a book would be if all the dialog was replaced with the characters shouting "Diplomacy!" or "Bluff" instead of actually saying something. Sometimes also, being bad socially can be really entertaining. Flaws are fun too.
Edit: It is almost like saying if I am bad at basic tactics and strategy in combat scenes, you should not punish me for standing in the open and firing my bow at or in melee instead of being smart about it and firing from any cover that is available like a pillar. You know, "just because I am bad at tactical combat doesn't mean I should be penalized for dumb tactics. Just make it easier for me because I don't want to learn from mistakes." Sounds kinda...
Well, my first question is since I am pretty bad at magic and spellcasting.. do I have to improve that too for myself before my Wizard can?
The social combat cards are really good.I only wish there were more of them.They aren't played to modify anything,the cards themselves are challenges within the social engagement that must be overcome.
So if you haven't actually tried them I highly recommend them,they've been working great in my game.
Well, my first question is since I am pretty bad at magic and spellcasting.. do I have to improve that too for myself before my Wizard can?
heh, nah but I find it more ironic that the post you quoted was essentially a failed diplomacy check, in real life. :)