Welcome back to your seat at the Epic Table! Today I’ll be finishing up the topic I started last week: the challenges “verisimilitude” presents to social mechanics, also known as “Let Persuasion Rolls Succeed, You Cowards.” I’ll ultimately be talking about possible solutions to this topic, but there are a few points I want to clear up first.
The most important is a mea culpa. I said last week, “As such, all of us think we have a pretty good handle on how this whole social interaction thing goes.” That was not inclusive of me, and I’m very sorry. A better way of putting it would have been, “We all have our own set social dynamics with which we are comfortable.” And for those who aren’t comfortable with mainstream social dynamics, this whole discussion tends to manifest in two other ways.
First, people who aren’t comfortable in a social situation tend to get stampeded by people who are—because people who are comfortable in those situations tend to be very comfortable in them. That’s a very real problem. Unfortunately, the voices of the less abled getting trampled in favor of more abled voices is way beyond the scope of this humble blog to solve. The other manifestation is when no one at the table is comfortable with these types of situations. In both of these cases, though, I’d recommend proceeding in the same manner I describe below for the sake of fairness.
Now, before we discuss that solution I want to zoom in a little bit more on the problem. There are two common situations I want to address with my advice.
Problem One: Forcing Failures Like A Coward
Alex’s party arrives at a door to find a guard blocking their path. Alex says, “I’d like to convince the guard to let us through.” Bailey, the GM, says, “Okay, what do you say to the guard?” Alex says, “I don’t know, but I try to be earnest and convincing.” Alex’s character rolls very well for this game’s version of persuasion, and they are relying on that.
Bailey then says to Alex, “No, what exactly do you say to the guard?” Alex frowns. Social interaction isn’t their strong suit, and they’re not that good at thinking up lies on the spot. After a moment, they say, “I guess I say that we have permission from their commander to come through.” Bailey shakes their head and says, “Nope, the guard would never believe that. The guard shouts, ‘Intruders!’ and moves to attack you.”
In a certain sense, this seems to follow the rules: Bailey has determined that a particular action is impossible, and therefore determined that the attempt fails automatically without a roll. The problem here is that Bailey isn’t relying on whether Alex’s character is persuasive—they’re relying on whether Alex is persuasive. It doesn’t matter if Bailey decided that based on the guard’s own judgement (they simply don’t believe Alex’s character) or outside information (the guard’s commander ordered them not to let anyone in without written authorization). They’ve still robbed Alex of the use of their character’s abilities as allowed by the game.
Problem Two: Allowing Successes Like A Coward
This time, let’s consider a third member of the group: Cameron. After dealing with the previous guard, the group proceeds through the door and down a corridor. Turning a corridor, the group runs smack into another patrolling guard. The guard says, “Hey, you’re not supposed to be in here!”
Cameron’s character has the worst social stats in the party, but regardless, Cameron says, “Hey, I got this. I say to the guard, ‘Yes we are. The commander got wind of a plan to break in tonight, so we got hired on as extra security. We’re only here for tonight, though, so we don’t have uniforms.'” Bailey chuckles and says, “Yeah, that’ll work. The guard shrugs and continues down the hall.” Alex, visibly frustrated at this point, gets up from the table and has to take a short walk to cool down.
What happened here? Again, Bailey wasn’t going by whether Cameron’s character was persuasive—they went by whether Cameron was. Cameron saying the right thing allowed them to circumvent their lack of investment in social mechanics simply by saying the right thing. Not only did this give Cameron a boost, it also penalized Alex: Alex’s investment in social mechanics is actually made more worthless every time this happens. After all, if bad social mechanics can be overridden just by saying something clever, then what’s the point in investing in them?
The two problems together—and they do frequently come together—create an even worse situation for Alex, who invested into being good at social mechanics at the expense of other options. When both are in play, the entire social subsystem is essentially defunct. Alex might as well have just started with fewer creation options than Cameron (ability scores, points, feats, skills, whatever).
So how to fight back against these problems? Here are three possible solutions. None of them are absolutely perfect, but they’re better than invalidating large sections of people’s characters. These don’t line up with the problems one-to-one, by the way, which is why I’ve listed them differently.
Solution Alpha: The Dice Determine What You Say
The first solution I’d propose is to reframe your thinking about social rolls. Rather than determine what’s said and roll based on that, have the dice determine whether or not you get “lucky” enough to say the right thing. In our example above, if Alex rolls well enough to persuade the first guard then clearly their character found a thing to say that didn’t contravene the commandant’s orders. The GM can just think of something that would work, let the characters know what excuse they used, and the scene proceeds from there. This does put some more work on the GM (and doesn’t work well with systems without a random element), but ultimately it’s to the benefit of stopping social encounters from being guessing games.
Solution Beta: Fuzzing Specifics
This is similar to the last one, but a little more drastic. In combat, it’s pretty rare that we ask, “How are you attacking that dragon? Are you swinging your sword vertically or diagonally?” In the same way, you can “fuzz” social encounters to get less specific about what’s said. The player simply says, “I make up a good lie,” or “I say something persuasive,” the roll happens, and the game moves on. While this is the most mechanically sound way to resolve the issue, it does come at the expense of roleplaying out the interaction. Social encounters are generally a chance to actually interact with your fellow players (including the GM) on a conversational level, which is part of why we’re all playing a tabletop game instead of some MMORPG.
Solution Gamma: Expand Your Minds, You Cowards
Finally, there’s the solution no one wants: actually confronting your definitions of verisimilitude and your assumed subject mastery.
Almost every game of which I’m aware has some level of the fantastic in it. Fantasy and sci-fi, paranormal, superheroes, all of them involve people doing the more-than-everyday. Even games set in modern settings with no special powers involve the players performing feats that few people get to do more than once or twice in their lives. Sometimes this is because we don’t know what truly constitutes “realistic,” but more often it’s just the nature of roleplaying games.
The simple fact is that we all do unbelievable stuff in games all the time. Hitting a target with ranged weapon at even 50 feet is hard, let alone doing it in the middle of combat with three people in your way. Jumping on the back of a monster is a classic maneuver, vertical leap records be damned. And in the same way, sometimes the answer is to just let the social roll work, you cowards.
You’re suspending your disbelief for all these other fantastic acts. Set it aside for the social stuff too. Have the guard be convinced that their commander is fine with this. Offer up the additional reward money. Let the character with the high social skills demolish a social encounter the same way the combat monster demolishes fights. Acknowledge the impossible that happens in our games every day. It’s no more unrealistic that someone surviving three stab or gunshot wounds and then defeating five foes in six seconds. (And yes—this does also mean, “Stop the thing from working if the roll was low even if the thing they said was believable.” Expand your mind about what doesn’t work too.)
No one said this is easy. Your “subject mastery” is going to be yelling at you the entire time to not let any of this fly. But I guarantee you: your games will be better—and your players will have more fun—if you do.
The contents of this post are © 2024 H. Tucker Cobey. All rights reserved.
