originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/767538...
not a metaphor this time
so. a comment prompted by seeing this float by the dash.
some TTRPG mechanics are designed to abstract over something. you don’t want to intricately simulate climbing a wall so you make a mechanic that says ‘roll your Climbing Up Shit number and see if you get up the wall in time’ (or whatever the stakes may be). any time you need to climb a wall, you just roll one die, and done. maybe offer a little description.
some TTRPG mechanics are designed to draw the game towards the thing they’re simulating and make it a focus. these rules might be elaborate, intricate subsystems - the combat rules in D&D being the archetypal example. particularly in later editions, D&D is really interested in combat, it wants to have an elaborate tactical sim where you’re juggling different resources to gain an advantage, it wants combat to take up a lot of game time.
in D&D the combat rules are largely self-referential (i.e. game constructs interacting with game constructs) and don’t leave a lot of room to determine things by pure narrative logic, so the system needs to have enough depth to carry that. some systems, such as The King Is Dead, structure nearly every interaction.
other TTRPG systems leave more to player improv. there are various frameworks to account for the interface between the fuzzy narrative game world and the hard, procedural, mechanical one. PbtA has its ‘moves’, which trigger based on conditions to push the narrative in a certain direction. OSR games like to say ‘rulings over rules’, where the rulebook is silent on a subject and the GM makes a call on the spot based on the narrative situation. exactly what qualifies as ‘going aggro’, or whether your gambit is feasible and what dice you should role, is a judgement call.
exactly what should be precisely litigated by a rulebook and what should be left to the improvisation of the players, shaped by various vague prompts, is a huge part of the art of TTRPG design. it depends a lot on the group as well.
I think when it comes to social situations in RPGs, it is easy to get lost in these ambiguities. 5e D&D has three numbers on your character sheet called Deception, Persuasion and Intimidation. (in 3.5e the first two were instead called Diplomacy and Bluff). exactly when you should roll these numbers, and how it interacts with the fiction, is left to the discretion of the group.
the stereotypical “I roll to seduce” could be one approach, an approach where the dice system completely abstracts over social encounters - pretty boring. but equally there is the approach where you roleplay a conversation, and after a certain amount of back and forth, the DM declares ‘OK, role me a Deception check’ and evolves the fiction accordingly - now you’re using it a lot more like a PbtA move, pushing the course of events down bifurcating paths at specific moments, and otherwise pursuing free improvised roleplay. however, from the numbers-and-dice side of things, this looks exactly the same.
some games like Burning Wheel offer a conversation system of comparable complexity to its battle system, designed for tense debate-like confrontations. it has something like a dozen actions - e.g. you can make a Point, Obfuscate, or make a verbal Feint, just as in combat you can Attack, Push or Disarm. Is this to Burning Wheel’s advantage? it worked pretty well the one time I played it like 10+ years ago, but I also had a very talented GM who could probably have staged a very convincing debate scene regardless. however, the system provided structure, and prompts (how do I make a point? how do I obfuscate?), so it would surely have played out differently without it. it certainly led to a very intense and fun moment of roleplaying where I had to step out onto the ‘stage’, which has honestly informed me in TTRPGs ever since.
that said, a lot of the time, the best system for adjudicating social situations is literally just to roleplay it out and make a decision - ‘what is this character feeling’, ‘what that character would say’. no mechanical abstraction can beat the human mind when it comes to simulating human beings. that is the unique advantage of TTRPGs as a medium, which no computer or board game can match! don’t throw it away lightly.
the problem for a lot of discussions of RPG design is that how the group handles social situations at the table - what they say and when, when they call for dice - is something that depends a lot on the specific group dynamic, rather than something that can effectively be engineered by a rulebook. like many aspects of RPG practice it is something you learn by doing it and watching other players, not by reading about it in a book. you can try pretty hard - Apocalypse World and cousins are statements of a paradigm as much as anything, most trad games have pages and pages of GM advice - but that’s not the same thing.
what makes D&D D&D, what makes indie story games indie story games, are their various play cultures, their habits and traditions - and the book is only part of it.
some players might find the prompts given by the notional buttons that say ‘persuade’, ‘deceive’ and ‘intimidate’ (or equally ‘go aggro’, ‘seduce or manipulate’ etc.) to be useful pushes in the right direction to play a highly social character, especially if they feel shy or awkward in life. others might find these limited options constraining, or simply irrelevant. or they might find a way to make them fit the rhythms of their group.
thing is, though, it’s highly contextual and you aren’t going to solve it forever by turning it into an argument about which is the best book-product-tribe to belong to.</p>
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