How can you make social skills more useful in RPGs?
What if instead of rolling to see if what you've just said convinces someone or not, you roll a skill and are told what you should say, or the direction you should be taking the conversation to and things to look out for when speaking to a person? Almost exactly like a knowledge skill, only for talking with a given person. It would let players who aren't socially adept be able to play social characters as well as a martials.
>>46113325
Social skills don't need to be made more useful, in most cases.
If social skills aren't useful in your campaign, I can almost guarantee you that it's an issue with your GM, not with the system you're using.
Making it so a high skill means the GM gets to railroad you into the right response seems like a really shitty solution either way.
Personally, I'm fond of adapting the Apocalypse World 'Read a Person' rules.
Depending on how well you roll, you ask either one or three questions from the list:
• is your character telling the truth?
• what's your character really feeling?
• what does your character intend to do?
• what does your character wish I'd do?
• how could I get your character to __?
If you get the advance for it (basically a feat) and you roll very well, you can ask any three questions you want.
The GM tells you what that character is trying to get out of the situation and what their levers are, and you figure out how to pull them in-character.
>>46113407
/thread
>>46113325
>told what you should say, or the direction you should be taking the conversation to and things to look out for when speaking to a person?
There is a perk like that in Shadowrun. It's called common sense.
>>46115250
Don't /thread that, it's a lousy post. "It's the GM, not the system" is the worst possible 'advice' anyone can give on this board. It's useless in 99% of cases because you don't know a damn thing about their GM, and the system absolutely effects how you play. Anon has an interesting idea that deserves to be talked about.
That post is a waste of a first response.
>>46113407
What about players who aren't smooth talkers but want to play one? Don't they get shafted?
>>46116230
We're not playing this game today, thanks. Well, I'm not. I don't know about the other faggots that will inevitably reply to this.
>>46116230
This is how we play it:
You either just say you just roll to persuade seduce, what ever. This represents your standard diplomacy attempt, focues mainly on nice voice, look or other Charisma parameter.
Or you try to back up your attempt with roleplaying and/or coming up with arguments that might help your course. This way you get boni on your roll.
Compare this with using tactic in fights like you get boni for attacking from behind, outnumbering and similar things.
>>46113407
This.
Social skills are incredibly DM-dependent and vary from 'if you make an insanely good roll you get some slight bonus' to 'build a character for it and, as long as you don't shit the bed, everyone will do whatever you want.'
Personally, I like social skills as providing passive bonuses (mainly in terms of what prices people will offer you) and the rest of the time they're saved for special circumstances where you need to actually spend some time and effort convincing someone to do something.
>>46113325
I'm always nervous about seeing player skill and character skill merge, and some people are just not good at talking when something matters. It might work for your group (I don't know you guys so I can't say), but I'd be very careful with trying it out.
>>46113325
>what you should say, or the direction you should be taking the conversation
I would honestly love this. Playing a witch who's all about manipulation and corrupting others to her viewpoint, a real sauve devil type... but everyone I target seems incorruptable because the DM is waiting on me to RP the exact right things that would turn NPCs to evil, and I have no idea what they're looking for. The PC is a mastermind of corruption, not me. Cut me some slack or tell me I get a hunch on what to say or something.
>>46115470
> it's a lousy post
But it's 100% correct. Just because you don't like what it implies doesn't change that. Social skills are one of those awkward things that can't really be done 'right', but the flipside is that there's no real wrong way to do it either.
It's not like a weapon or a spell where one does less damage than the other so it's obviously underpowered. Social skills are all about getting the opportunity to use them. If you're on a dungeon crawl and everyone you meet is some variation of mindless monster, of course social skills are going to suck. On the other hand, if you're running a political campaign with lots of talking, your Bard might be the most OP motherfucker in the party, while your Fighter gets so bored he spends most of the session playing Candy Crush.
That's all on the GM, and has absolutely nothing to do with the system you're using.
You can talk about designing a social interaction system that is more complex, or more interesting to play, or relies more on your rolls instead of your roleplaying. that's all completely valid discussion material. But the way to making social skills more USEFUL lies entirely with your GM.
>>46117331
That's being exceptionally pedantic and you know it, anon.
The context of OP's post makes clear that he's talking about how to improve the rules for social skills so that when you roll them they produce good, enjoyable results that move the story along. Saying, "But one DM runs dungeon crawls, and the other does court intrigue, so you can't make the rules better" is asinine. You could say that making combat useful relies entirely on the DM not putting you in an endless series of 10x10 rooms with bland monsters, but that wouldn't make combat any better for the guy who wants to run exciting aerial battles over a volcano but is told, "you can roll this dice to hit (which gives you a binary hit or miss), this one to do damage (from 1 to 8 points), and that's it. A good GM can do everything with those two and only those two rolls."
>>46117285
>The PC is a mastermind of corruption, not me.
This right here is the crux of the social skill issue. I'm not my character. I can no more be a 30 cha sexual tyrannosaurus than I could cast a fireball spell or kill a hundred bears while wearing full plate. If a DM wants me to know exactly what to say every time I attempt to persuade a given NPC, then he better expect the rogue to dodge a hail of paintballs directed at him to get the benefits of Evasion or get the druid to domesticate a feral alleycat if he wants an animal companion.
And before anyone suggests it, I'm not against roleplaying it out. I much prefer it, in fact. But some nights I'm just wiped out from work or sickness or whatever, or I'm just at a loss for what to say because I'm not *actually* there and I don't have a 25+ cha. I doubt I'd even qualify for more than a couple ranks of diplomacy irl.
>>46113325
Hey anon. how about a radial solution cales free-formm Roleplaying?? You know, talking to peple, immersing youself in your haracter and suc things..
but who am i talking too me and my radical ideas
>>46117917
I think it's trying to communicate, potentially even to use sarcasm, but it's grasp of the English language is such that it's impossible to understand. I'll try to establish friendly relations.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
>>46117582
>The context of the OP's post makes clear that he's not saying what he's saying, but what I'm thinking.
Ok.
The OP provided no context, no system, no nothing. All he asked was for a way to "make social skills more useful in RPGs". The only correct answer to that is to have your GM
I definitely agree that what you're suggesting makes for a far superior topic of discussion, that's what the end of my post was about. But that doesn't mean that being a pissy bitch over a correct answer is justified.
And comparing rules for the actual roleplaying part of roleplaying games with combat rules is not only a false equivalence, but also completely retarded. If you want to reduce interacting with NPCs to a purely mechanical thing and turn it into a video game that's fine, but that does absolutely nothing to make social skills "more useful" in any way.
>>46118416
What are you even talking about?
If the social skill rules in a given rulebook are "make an argument and roll if to see if the NPC is convinced" then what does that have to do with the GM? Is it necessary to have the GM homebrew social rules that make it possible for non-charismatic players to play charismatic people?
>>46118416
Holy shit, dude. Read past the first line of OP. The suggestion OP makes is how the rules should not be a basic mechanical 'do I succeed or fail in convincing him', but allow for you to proceed from information given by the DM, as with a knowledge skills. The combat example is not false equivalence, it's a demonstration of how a game could take what is a very basic issue and extrapolates it.
You're missing the forest because you're stuck on the 'useful' tree.
>>46118047
underrated post
>>46116230
Only if you base success very heavily on the roleplaying approach, to the point that a weak OOC suggestion foils a good roll.
But there's no reason why you couldn't instead put the weight primarily on the roll, with the approach RP'd being a relatively more minor modifier.
Personally, I find the best way to *narrate* social skill checks so that story and mechanics mesh is to state intention, roll the dice, then describe the details. Start out with just the gist of the general approach you're going for. Doesn't have to be any nitty-gritty details, just a very broad-strokes summary. Then you roll. With a good roll, the GM helps you fill in the details with what exactly that entails, accounting for factors you may not know but your character would be able to figure out. With a poor roll, no such luck.
This is pretty much the same way as you'd descriptively narrate combat rolls. You don't say, "I lunge at the orc, deftly weaving past his guard to run him through, spilling blood and viscera all over the floor"...then roll, only to actually miss. You say, "I lunge at the orc, trying to get past his guard", then with a good roll you get to narrate the way you get through and make abstract art with his insides, whereas with a bad roll you narrate the failure. General approach, roll the dice, narrate the details of how that pans out.
It can also help to just let the results of the die roll define elements of the NPC's personality as it relates to their reaction to the approach, if there's no compelling reason it needs to be otherwise. If it's just a minor NPC whose detailed personality is not really predefined or even relevant, or even if it's just a detail you hadn't really thought about for a major NPC, you can just let the dice decide. If the player rolls high, turns out their approach hit the nail on the head. If the player rolls low, whoops, seems they were barking up the wrong tree with that angle.
