Social Interaction 1: What do social interaction mechanics need to do?
In the last post I wrote about how social interaction and modelling unfamiliar worldviews is at the heart of the RPG experience. On the one hand, thrusting ourselves into alien situations and on the other, interacting with other people who are products of foreign milieus can broaden our own experience. There is a degree of sleight of hand here as all RPGs are hosted in our own imaginations, but experience gained through imagination is still real experience.
Non-Designed Mechanics
Social interaction is an important part of RPGs but it is often underserved in terms of game mechanisms. I think that because tabletop roleplaying is fundamentally a conversation, many designers tend to assume social interaction can be handled in a naturalistic manner without dedicated mechanics. Also, fish probably don't design ttrpg mechanics for breathing underwater.
In fact, those pescatory designers are often right! For most interactions players can just use their inherent conversational abilities to model and judge how PCs and NPCs interact. I will call these social mechanics naturalistic interaction mechanics. Naturalistic interaction is characterized by conversations in which players interact with NPCs by speaking for or narrating their characters' actions. The GM adjudicates naturalistic interactions by imagining what NPCs would do.
There are a number of complicating factors to even this most basic conversational interaction mode. For example, how much should a player's arguments sway an NPC's attitude? There is a huge scope for judgement whether GMs use elaborate criteria or personal intuition to determine NPC reactions. There are other questions too: how directly correlated are players words and the in-world words of their characters? For example, when players use anachronistic or slang language that would not be understood by in-game NPCs how should the GM respond? In general I assume most GMs would simply correct for the players so that their language matches players' intents but this varies from table to table. The fact that even the simplest, 'non-designed' interactions require such consideration highlights the complexity of the game.
Social interactions rules, whether free-form and naturalistic or more abstracted and mechanical become useful when there is conflict or uncertainty.
So what do social interaction mechanics need to do?
The most common scenarios when social conflict arises are persuasion, seeking information and maintaining relationships.
1) Persuasion is fairly self-explanatory: getting someone to do what you want, especially when they would prefer not to do it. Mechanics can be inserted to help determine how likely a character is to persuade others or how likely they are to resist persuasion attempts.
2) When seeking information that NPCs would rather not reveal players must either persuade the NPC to tell them that information and/or determine when characters are lying. This could be broken down into a number of subcategories, but should mechanics cover both finding information and attempts at hiding it.
3) People need to develop and maintain relationships in order to achieve their goals and players are no different. Social mechanics should include ways to develop/lose rapport, track relationship status and how relationships affect character interactions. These mechanics should also consider the means by which relations might fray to hostility.
Note that each of these situations arises when conflicting goals create uncertainty in the outcomes. Social mechanics exist to help GMs adjudicate situations and to help players reasonably predict the outcomes of their actions. If there is no uncertainty there is no need to use game mechanics (in the same way that players do not roll to open most doors).
There are dozens of systems for different RPGs designed to address the social sphere. I will look at a number of them in the next post. However, before we look at individual systems I want to write about the factor I consider important when addressing whether social actions should succeed.
Making social actions work
Broadly, modifiers to social actions can be broken down into three categories: content, rhetoric, and relationship.
Content is the message the characters are trying to convey. Are they asking for passage on merchant ship Herald of the Morning? Questioning witnesses about the identity of the owner of 46 Gordon Square? Haggling over the price of magic beans? Most of the time you can assume that what comes out of a player's mouth is the message, whether they are speaking in character or simply narrating a goal of the interaction. The key thing to evaluate is how likely are the characters to get what they want if they plainly state their goal? Are the players and NPCs working in opposition? What is the risk or sacrifice involved? What can characters provide in return?
Rhetoric is persuasive language, including the method of argument and how people try to convince others. Many games include separate skills for different types of arguments: persuasion, deception, intimidation and charm are some examples. Some systems collect social skills under a single stat, like Charisma. Rhetoric also includes the reasoning behind an argument.
For example, a player character might be asking a tribal leader for support a coming battle. One approach might be reciprocity, citing a history of favors and mutual aid. A different approach might be to invoke self-interest, suggesting that if the players were to lose the battle then the enemy might turn their eye to NPC's tribe next. Even though the goal (content) is the same, these two rhetorical approaches could have very different outcomes depending on the background and attitudes of the listener. In the previous article I talked about how cultural context contributes to favoring certain types of rhetoric.
Relationship context is a vital part of communication. People are more willing to help and take risks for others who are similar to them and with whom they share social groups. It also helps to be a valued member of the community.
Some positive relationship factors include: being family or friends, holding higher relative social status, shared goals / beliefs, harboring common enemies, a history of positive/ non-negative interactions.
Negative factors: having opposing goals, a history of distrust, being members of opposing groups, having strange or alien customs, lower social status
These modifiers not only affect the ease of maintaining relationships but also the ease of most other social purposes (persuasion, information-gathering).
A Framework for Social Mechanics
Moving forward we will look at social interaction systems from published rule sets. We can evaluate these mechanics based on the idea that in a complete system players should be able to:
persuade and resist attempts at persuasion
seek information, lie, and distinguish honesty from deception
form and maintain relationships, track social status
We can also consider how different rule systems apply contextual modifiers to social mechanics based on different goals, rhetorical approaches and relationships. I will compare how different rules record and track social characteristics and how players and GMs are asked to interact with the systems.
Not all systems will cover all of these situations and that may be the right design choice, but I want to be as completist as possible when considering the potential design space. If you think I am missing any facets of social interaction please mention them in the comments!
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