Conversational Skills and Combat

I was talking with my mother the other day (she is the one who got me into tabletop roleplaying games in the first place) about having a resolution mechanic for conversation with real consequences, like combat's consequence of death.  I wholeheartedly agree with Alexis here (http://tao-dnd.blogspot.ca/2015/05/limitations.html) that most conversation systems fail because they do not have meaningful consequences.

I feel we can use the art of acting as a foundation for a proper social combat system - in any good play, characters are constantly opposed by other characters, all trying to achieve their (often mutually-exclusive) goals.  This is, or can be, exactly what happens in a social situation in a roleplaying game.  Think of Macbeth - Lady Macbeth wants to be Queen of Scotland, so she bullies her husband into killing the king and seizing the throne.  Macbeth is ambitious, but not to the point of killing the king, so Lady Macbeth wheedles him, taunts him, and berates him to accomplish the deed.  Most actors, looking at that scene, will subdivide the scene into smaller units, called beats.  Beats are the smallest unit of theatrical time, and in each beat each character uses a tactic to achieve their current objective.  So, in one beat, Lady Macbeth uses the taunt tactic by questioning Macbeth's manhood to cow him into killing the king.  If this works, then the conversation is done and Macbeth goes off and does the bloody deed.  If it doesn't, then Lady Macbeth tries a different tactic.  If you can think back to seeing an awful high school play, one of the reasons they can be so boring is that the actors often will use a very limited range of tactics, so the scenes turn into a hack-and-slash fest of each character going at it with the same tired tricks over and over again.  Sound like one of those really awful battles that took forever and were just a waste of everyone's time?  Or that one dungeon with the rogue saying "I check for traps" / "There aren't any" / "I move to the next door and check for traps"… ?

Now, the consequence in a theatrical sense, is not achieving your goal or losing your goal entirely in favor of someone else's.  In the scene prior to Macbeth killing the king, Macbeth's goal changes from pursuing a happy status quo to killing the king and ascending to the throne as a direct result of Lady Macbeth's persuasive prowess.

So, looking back on this example, it seems like we can take away two things: the first is that a good social combat system will feature a broad number of different tactics, each with pros and cons, and the second is that the consequence for failure is losing your personal objective or, more simply, doing what the other person wants instead.

Now, there are games with excellent social combat mechanics, like ASOIAF's remarkably detailed Intrigue system.  What are the differences between a game like D&D and FATE, the White Wolf line, or ASOIAF, with regard to social conflict?  In my somewhat limited experience with those systems, it is the willingness of the players to relinquish control of their characters on a somewhat regular basis.  In a D&D game, players are often psychically invulnerable to the demands of others.  The DM can seize control of character behavior only in very limited circumstances - domination, geas, etc. Do so in any other situation will result in players calling out "bullshit" and "railroading!".  I know Alexis will require his player's characters to make Wisdom rolls to avoid putting their feet in their mouth (by divulging unpleasant secrets, etc.), and I think this is an excellent choice.  It adds value to the Wisdom attribute.  Looking at the blogosphere, though, it seems this is a rather unconventional choice.

I actually this has to come down to the OSR idea of player skill.  Player skill, like recognizing yellow mold or bringing wooden shields on dungeon delves just in case a rust monster appears, is very clearly an important part of how many people play D&D.  However, to me, this makes D&D more like a board game than a roleplaying game.  One of the things I love about D&D is that it mirrors the real world.  How often have you had the goblins cackle for a round instead of pressing their advantage?  Or had a villain monologue?  Our NPCs don't always respond 'optimally' in a given situation, and I think that makes the game better.  I feel that the PCs not always responding optimally also makes the game better.  A board game is all about player skill - that is the quality being tested (well, that and luck).  Think about the epic board games like Talisman or Mansions of Madness - both games involve acquiring items and character power, but they are ultimately testing player skill, not character skill.

One of the ways player skill and character skill come into conflict with regard to diplomacy is in how your players conceive of the conversation, and this was my mother's point.  We can conceptualize a natural 1 - we have stubbed enough toes in our own homes, bashed our thumbs in with our own hammers sufficiently to understand that fumbles happen, and we can accept them in our D&D game.  But what does a natural 1 in a conversation mean?  Or a natural 20?  If we can find mental models for these results, maybe we can finally come up with a meaningful mechanic for social conflict resolution. 

 

So, here are my thoughts to help create some social conflict expectations.  A 1, to me, is that year you spent sitting next to your crush too timid to say anything.  Or the off-hand comment delivered at the critical moment that ends a friendship.  It's the inopportune cough right in the middle of a caesura that gets you ejected from the symphony hall, or the presentation of Medea so powerful it incites the entire audience to riot and kill you.  Hmm.  The range of consequences for this natural 1 seems to depend entirely upon the circumstances in which it happens (just like fumbling on the edge of a volcano's edge is a lot worse than fumbling in your home with a hammer).

Now, for a natural 20.  Maybe it's that interview where everything you said made your interviewer lean in closer and closer, and you leave the interview having signed the contract.  Or that time when you managed to charm your professor into giving the whole class an extension on the term paper (or let you make up the final exam when you slept through the exam's time slot).  The acting audition where everyone after you copies your acting choices because they were that good.  Or the choreography of Rite of Spring that incites the audience to riot (no performers dead, this time).

 

Both of those performances were probably 20s on execution, but 1s on sensitivity/audience reception.  But that's an issue we probably don't need to unravel right now.  I'll post my particular social combat rules up in a few days, and I'd love to hear some feedback.