Striking Appearance

[dmjalund]

Zoolander lives!

[Sean Waters]

Blue Steel!

 

I like the idea of social interaction, but I've never really seen a system that makes it work really well, although some have come close.

 

I've never been entirely happy with PRE rolls either.

 

I think my biggest problem is that, as a GM, players can sometimes expect high social skill rolls to work if the roll succeeds, pretty much regardless of what is being asked, no matter how inappropriate or weird it is.  Arguably ANYTHING is possible and, if you roll a 3, then something unusual can occur, but more often the roll is not so extreme, but the piling on of PRE and SA and skill levels makes the extraordinary commonplace.  

 

People are not that easily swayed: well, not all of them anyway.  The army chap on guard outside the barracks is not going to go against orders and let some femme fatale wander in without phoning it through, because his orders say he has to follow procedures.  He MIGHT let someone dressed as a four star general go through though, if he is ordered to.

 

That is an extreme example, and most people do not have such clear cut goals, but people are not just generic background noise.  To an extent the bell curve deals with this, but there is limited variation even with 3d6.

 

The flip side of this is that players can get really tense if it suggested their characters should be subject to social skill roll results by NPCs.

 

Generally I'm more than happy to give people a good chance to succeed with some sort of social interaction roll if they set it up.  For example if the PCs have gone and got a four star general costume or, even better, spent a lifetime becoming a four star general, well, they are going to get a fair shake at intimidating the guard.  If they just swan up, flash a dazzling smile and saunter through, they are going to get shot.

 

I have this feeling we should be making more use of complications here.  There is a game called Unknown Armies which has some interesting mechanics.  Players are required to define the things that motivate them, make them angry, scare them, bring out the best and worst in them.  We could use complications for that.

 

Pick an emotion/situation and pick a trigger, for example you get angry when you encounter bullying, or you are a soft touch for a hard luck story, or you are willing to overlook all kinds of logical inconsistencies in a yarn if the teller has big green eyes.

 

I think that, if players had defined their own triggers, and the GM did not abuse them, well, we might get a more realistic level of social interaction in the game.

 

Hmm.  Anyway.  Off topic and rambling.  

 

As usual.

[Vondy]

Blue Steel!

 

I like the idea of social interaction, but I've never really seen a system that makes it work really well, although some have come close.

 

 

Social interaction is a highly subjective, contextual and open to judgment and interpretation. This doesn't even take into account genre, special effects, and desired aesthetics and play-style. Or that people are individuals who react to and perceive the same objective stimuli differently. I tend to take a phenomenological view of human experience. As a result, it is incredibly difficult to produce a mathematical model (which is what game mechanics are) to represent it without being ham-fisted and failing to adjust for the myriad of necessary variables. This is why I have always been opposed to comprehensive social interaction - or social combat - systems. They are too narrow, limited, and restrictive to model human interaction and can only properly handle a very controlled and pre-determined style of ply. I do like that the system has "something," but also believe it has as much as it could possibly need - a very loose and soft resolution system that is open to interpretation so that individual game-masters - which the advise and consent of their gaming group - can apply it as needed to their game in a way that fits their groups desired style and "sense" of things.

[Vondy]

People are not that easily swayed: well, not all of them anyway.  The army chap on guard outside the barracks is not going to go against orders and let some femme fatale wander in without phoning it through, because his orders say he has to follow procedures.  He MIGHT let someone dressed as a four star general go through though, if he is ordered to.

 

 

You mean a theoretically normative army chap in theoretically normative operational circumstances with theoretically normative life circumstances and theoretically normal judgments, right? We aren't talking about a greedy army chap, a disaffected army chap, a horndog army chap, an inexperienced army chap in training whose supervisor is in the head, a booze-hound army chap, a dumb-as-rocks army chap with poor judgment, a distracted army chap, and army chap who sees a full bird colonel walking through who looks like that colonel no one wants to expletive-with. My point is - social interactions are driven by the people involved. In a game they are also affected by genre conventions (tropes). Its all a question of circumstance, presentation and set up. Just leaving it to a die roll with no discussion, explanation, and context is - as you intimate - very dissatisfying and can, based on individual perspective, be taken as "unrealistic" depending on what assumptions are in play.

[Sean Waters]

All very true, but the difficulty with a 'soft' system is that it leaves you with players who have generic social interaction skills at a decent level and make a decent roll to use them.  That leads to an expectation, in a 'soft' system that they will succeed.  If they do not succeed then it can feel like the GM just overruling the dice.  You can't really explain that this particular guard is currently on parole for letting someone through without following procedure last week, and is therefore not going to fall for anything direct at all.

 

The other approach you can take is that if the roll succeeds, well, it succeeds and it is up to the GM to explain why, even if it seems unlikely.  As (mainly) a GM, I know that can make characters with high social interaction skills a pain to write for, and you can end up sidestepping a lot of plot on a lucky roll.

 

In superhero games with very high PRE characters it can be a nightmare.

 

I appreciate that a soft system can incorporate complexity if the GM and players want to include it, but that is more work, and can, again, feel like the GM imposing limits on a particular character.  I would rather have a more structured approach in the rules, even if it is optional, with the 'soft' system being default.  I would probably get a lot more mileage out of a more involved social interaction system (not social combat: hitting someone constantly with the same argument increases resistance in a lot of cases).  If the players are expecting some complexity under the hood, they will be less concerned when their good roll and polished skills fail to get them what they want.

[megaplayboy]

I think one option for a GM is to take the "general guidelines" for bonuses and penalties to skill rolls, and nail them down to be more campaign specific--"If you do this, you get this bonus; if you try to do this, it's at this penalty"--if those bonuses and penalties are consistent, then you can have a "soft system" that gives you fairly consistent results. 

[Vondy]

I think one option for a GM is to take the "general guidelines" for bonuses and penalties to skill rolls, and nail them down to be more campaign specific--"If you do this, you get this bonus; if you try to do this, it's at this penalty"--if those bonuses and penalties are consistent, then you can have a "soft system" that gives you fairly consistent results. 

Very much agreed. I want to know the "how" of it and the circumstances being created for social interactions. Give me a good narrative - even if you aren't a good actor - and I will be much more inclined to "play along" as a GM.

[Vondy]

All very true, but the difficulty with a 'soft' system is that it leaves you with players who have generic social interaction skills at a decent level and make a decent roll to use them.  That leads to an expectation, in a 'soft' system that they will succeed.  If they do not succeed then it can feel like the GM just overruling the dice.  You can't really explain that this particular guard is currently on parole for letting someone through without following procedure last week, and is therefore not going to fall for anything direct at all.

 

The other approach you can take is that if the roll succeeds, well, it succeeds and it is up to the GM to explain why, even if it seems unlikely.  As (mainly) a GM, I know that can make characters with high social interaction skills a pain to write for, and you can end up sidestepping a lot of plot on a lucky roll.

 

In superhero games with very high PRE characters it can be a nightmare.

 

I appreciate that a soft system can incorporate complexity if the GM and players want to include it, but that is more work, and can, again, feel like the GM imposing limits on a particular character.  I would rather have a more structured approach in the rules, even if it is optional, with the 'soft' system being default.  I would probably get a lot more mileage out of a more involved social interaction system (not social combat: hitting someone constantly with the same argument increases resistance in a lot of cases).  If the players are expecting some complexity under the hood, they will be less concerned when their good roll and polished skills fail to get them what they want.

I think this all boils down to "managing expectations." If you and your players discuss how the social system will be used, and its explained that context and the how and why are all apart of the story-telling experience, you are far less likely to run into any issues. My mantra has always been: communication, communication, communication.

[Tasha]

What I usually hate about the way most GM's run Social Interaction skills is that no matter how high I have the roll it always seems to come down to how good I the Player am at the particular Social Skill. Sometimes I the player am not at my best or for some reason I have drawn a blank. For too many GM's it becomes like pulling a tooth to get them to allow you to make a Social Skill roll. I would rather see GM's who allow me to do some role playing and then say "Roll your Oratory Skill or what ever skill is relevant" Giving the roll a bonus (or penalty) for my Role play or lack there of. I Shouldn't have to use MY personal Social skills on the GM to make stuff happen. Just like I don't use my meager combat skills to win a fight in the RPG.

[Vondy]

What I usually hate about the way most GM's run Social Interaction skills is that no matter how high I have the roll it always seems to come down to how good I the Player am at the particular Social Skill. Sometimes I the player am not at my best or for some reason I have drawn a blank. For too many GM's it becomes like pulling a tooth to get them to allow you to make a Social Skill roll. I would rather see GM's who allow me to do some role playing and then say "Roll your Oratory Skill or what ever skill is relevant" Giving the roll a bonus (or penalty) for my Role play or lack there of. I Shouldn't have to use MY personal Social skills on the GM to make stuff happen. Just like I don't use my meager combat skills to win a fight in the RPG.

I agree. I've never conflated acting and playing a table-top RPG. They aren't the same thing. The former is a performance. The latter has a much heavier emphasis on third-party description and "meta" elements. If a player can "act" that's great - and is one way of conveying what the character is doing - but, if the player can describe what their character is doing and explain how they see the scene playing out, that is just as good - if not better - in my book. RPGs have a distinctive "meta" element to them that distances them from a live performance. Its more like a group of script writers hammering out a screenplay with an odd framework of writer's guidelines (the rules). Players typically provide stage directions and descriptive prose as much, if not far more, than dialog. At least, that's been my experience. And, the dialog need not be acted out with a bravura performance. Simply providing the gist is enough for me. "I tell him X, my demeanor is Y or I'm trying to convey the impression Z" or "my big entrance goes down like this" is sufficient in my book. We're supposed to be imagining it, right? If I wanted to be a total ham I'd get up on stage -- or LARP.

[Sean Waters]

The trouble is that the meta element of social interaction skills means that, if the player is not willing to make a stab at a conversational solution then the onus passes from the player to the GM to explain why Mother Theresa decided to go crazy with a machine gun just because Allura made a jammy roll of '3' and spent lots on Persuasion.  OK, silly example, that is really not the point, what is the point is that either you just assume that social interaction is game mechanistic or you try and explain what just happened: if the player is not willing to, the GM has more work to do.

 

I usually play social interaction as a series of rolls.  I expect players to engage and give me some idea of how the character approaches the social interaction, so that I, knowing something about the character they are interacting with, can gauge how well they do i.e. assign bonuses or penalties.  Something simple might then involve a single roll.  Something complex might involve several rolls.  The player can decide to do it all on a single roll of the dice, but if they do, there will be substantial penalties for rushing the job.

 

So, for example, if the PCs want to go through a military checkpoint without being reported, as is the usual procedure, they have to get the guard to cooperate.  There are a lot of different approaches they can take.  Dress up as a general and bluff through might work.  Or you could engage in conversation to try and feel out if the chap is open to a bribe.  They could follow him home and threaten his cat.  There are lots of things they can do, and no two of them are likely to have exactly the same chances of success, but we are only looking at one or two rolls at most.  As a GM, I'm going to want to know WHY the guard let you through as it might impact on the plot later.  For example if you claim that you are there for a secret and unscheduled inspection, I might decide to be a bastard and have a real secret and unscheduled inspection turn up just after you.  I might even have the guard be a member of a heist team who has overpowered the real guard and is absolutely adamant that on one is getting in (or, conversely, because of some plot), is keen for the PCs to go in, probably as scapegoats for whatever is happening.  Who knows?

 

Well, I do, I'm the GM.

 

If they want to pull a major sting with all kinds of cunning (basically anything Locke Lamora might pull), that is going to take more than one roll, and a lot of role playing.  I'm not asking the player to persuade ME, I'm asking them to tell me how their character is persuading the NPC.  Once I know how they are approaching it, I can make a judgement.

 

It's just more fun that way.

 

I don't expect players to actually fight me when we are doing physical combat, but I do expect them to tell me how they are approaching it, what powers and abilities they are using and any other tactical considerations.

 

Social interaction is more complex, but the same overall approach helps me, as a GM, to make the story more involving and interesting.  In fact it often is the story.

[Vondy]

The trouble is ...

 

The trouble is, you always seem to be looking for theoretical problems that may not be problems in actual play. I also reject your assertion that a player can simply refuse to explain the how or why and foist that on the GM. You are talking utter nonsense and basing your concern on a fallacy..The GM need not comply with such tom-foolery. All social endeavors - including role-playing games - have minimum expectation of behavior and participation. In table-top RPGs taking responsibility for your character and describing their actions and how they do what they do is expected. It is the price of admission.

 

I don't mean to be a right hard-horse bastard and eschew post-modernism, but a player who doesn't is not only doing it wrong, but is being a lazy, selfish tool. And so is a GM who allows them to take such an unreasonable and abusive position. A rule-set is like a code of law, and anyone who has studied law understands statutes cannot cover every situation - and often fail miserably when they try. Instead, we accept that custom, precedent, and concepts like "reasonableness" are critical components of the law and are key in interpreting it. Why would RPG rules be any different?

 

A game-master, with the advise and consent of his players, must set the expectations for play for the game to work. That includes explaining how soft-systems like interaction skills in Hero will be adjudicated, judged, handled, etc. Insofar as they are consistent and reasonable,  its fair to hold players to the expected level of effort. Honestly, this is only a problem if you let unimaginative and intellectually lethargic rules-lawers dictate how the game is played - which would require one to be invertabrate.Such players need to be reformed or kicked to the curb.

 

But then, you yourself said you have expectations of players and explained how you handle social skills - which is almost identical to how I handle them. And how almost every GM I know handles them. Which only serves to underscore the point: the problem your propose in your silly example is purely theoretical and has nothing to do with a real-world problem that needs solving.

[Sean Waters]

Yes, well, if we are all going to be perfectly reasonable about it, we probably don't need to discuss anything anyway, do we?  Everyone can just work toward a mutually acceptable solution for them and, as an encore, sort out world peace.

 

The Mother Teresa thing was there to make a point.  I acknowledged that it was a silly example, but the point it makes is not.  I explained the way I would approach dealing with a social interaction in game, but then I have the luxury of playing with people I know and have played with for years.  Tasha's point, which is what I was responding to, is that,

 

"What I usually hate about the way most GM's run Social Interaction skills is that no matter how high I have the roll it always seems to come down to how good I the Player am at the particular Social Skill."

 

If the GM wants to run social interaction without any kind of rule mechanism, well, that seems like a problem to me, if you are playing a particular set of game rules you can expect to be playing those rules.  It seems like Tasha's GM goes too far that way.  My point though is that there are players I have come across who do expect a good roll to be enough of itself.  If I am GMing a game where that happens, I can deal with it, I've been doing this stuff for years.  If I am playing in a game where that happens between the GM and another player it is harder to do so.  It seems to me that neither extreme is much fun.

 

What I thought I was suggesting was a middle ground.  I would like to see more in terms of structure for the rules and I think you could do that without overly constraining the flow of the game.  NPCs should be real people too.  In many cases a 'generic NPC' is not someone that is worth putting a lot of build time into, so a dice roll is a fine indicator of whether that NPC takes a particular approach favourably or not, but if I've written an NPC as having some structure and personality, well, I've put the effort in, I don't want very basic social skill rolls to be the only real determinant of the outcome.  Equally I don't want to just be arbitrary or let my thespian chops loose on poor unsuspecting players.

 

There is an awful lot of rulage in Hero I've never used in game, and probably never will, but social interaction happens all the time.  No one moans when we have pages devoted to combat options that refine rather than change the way you play.  It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that a bit more thought and effort could be put into the single biggest opportunity in most games for actual role playing.  There is not even a dedicated 'social interaction' section, it is all lumped into the skills rules.  There is a bit on Presence Attacks, but the clue is in the name there: it is combat, really.

 

Of course I can add any level of complexity I like, but I'm not buying a game system so that I can finish writing it.  If this stuff was in there, I would not need to be managing people's expectations.  Hero does not have a soft system for social interaction because that is the best that can be done.  Skills were tacked on afterwards and have never really been overhauled since.  It was very literally an afterthought.

 

Anyway, I clearly rolled an 18 on my charm roll with you...

[Chris Goodwin]

I'm fond of pointing out that we have social mechanics in games for the same reason we have physical combat mechanics, namely that we don't expect players or GMs to necessarily be expert enough in either.  For combat, at least in the HERO System, we expect players to make some effort to describe what they're doing when they use a combat maneuver; I'd expect the same level of effort when using the social mechanics.  

 

For those who want more than what we've got in the core books, APG2 has some ideas on how to run "social combat".  It's entirely optional, of course, but it's there.  

[Tasha]

Skills were tacked on afterwards and have never really been overhauled since.  It was very literally an afterthought.

 

Well, no as a Champions Player you may think that the Skills were an after thought, but had you been a player of Espionage, you may think that the Powers were added onto the Skills system. It took the Champions II supplement to officially add the skills from Espionage to Champions.

 

The truth is that the Skill system has been tweaked nearly as often as the powers. The Basic system of Stat roll (Dex, Pre, Int) has stayed the same. But things like General Skills (skills deemed too complex to base them on just one Characteristic), later those skills were assigned a Characteristic.  Things like Breakfall, and Acrobatics being split out of one skill. The Skill system has gone though quite a few changes though the years. Seduction becoming Charm is just one of the newest changes.

[Sean Waters]

Espionage was based on Champions 2nd edition rules: basically the only skill in the original was 'martial arts', and, possibly, Find Weakness, so Espionage added skills to second edition Champions, but Champions, the nascent Hero System, had been around without skills for some time before that.

 

I accept that there have been changes but it is not really anything that impacts on the way the skill system plays for social skills except the idea of opposed rolls and skill contests*.  It seems to me that we have the tools to make significant steps in defining personality in our characters.  There are suggestions - and good ones - as Chris Goodwin points out, in APG II.  It is amazing to me that this is not part of the core rules though: character reaction (by which I mean both PC and NPC) is absolutely central to most games, and important to all of them.  The basic system does not even have a defined method of 'resisting' an attempt at Conversation and uses an EGO roll to resist most other social skills.  Why don't we have a 'social insight' skill that helps a character determine when someone is trying to socially manipulate them**, for example?  Why do we use EGO as a resistance value?  I'd have thought that a lot of people with high EGO would be relatively easy to Charm: that is practically a staple in many genres - the high EGO chap wants to believe that people like and adore him.

 

The thing with Hero is that it is a toolkit.  I think a couple of additional skills might be useful, as well as a defined system for improving your resistance value for social interaction attempts, but the bones are all there - they just never get explicitly uncovered.

 

The Complications system seems almost ready made for that sort of thing.  So, for instance, some players and groups do not like social skills being used against PCs and the PC then having to play the consequences.  You could use a Complication to define situations in which characters will react irrationally i.e. will go along with successful social interaction attempts even to their detriment.

 

If a group does try and role play social interaction results already then you could use Complications as modifiers in certain situations.

 

All of this is just about do-able, but needs work.  One of the criticisms that I see of Hero is that it is not particularly 'grown up' as a system.  Considering that we use more pages to describe how to build a base - in some detail - than we do on how to deal with social interaction, that is perhaps an understandable criticism.  Hell, we probably spend more words on how to adjudicate a Grab than we do on social interaction.  I have not counted.

 

Finally, I've got no problems with all of this being under 'optional rules', but they should be there if only to show we can.

 

 

 

 

* Which are great tools but which are not really covered in relation to social interaction in any depth.

 

** You can use 'Analyse: social situation', but, again, I come back to 'Why is this not in the basic rule set'?

[Tasha]

Champions Second edition is mostly a restock of the rules with some MINOR changes mostly to spelling. It was released a year after 1st edition. The Text within the books were nearly identical.

From my point of view at the time. Champions Boxed Set (2nd edition) came out, with Champions II and Champions III quickly following. Espionage was out there and Justice Inc came all within a 2 year span of time. All of those books ex Champions III had the same layout style. Very primative and feeling very cut and paste (ie pre Desktop publishing).

Skills were an afterthought in 1st/2nd edition Champions. With Acrobatics, Climbing, Computer Programing,Detective Work, Find weakness,Martial Arts Security Systems, Luck and Skill Levels . Just what they thought you needed to make Batman or any other superhero. With Champions II they added a ton of new skills filling out the skill list with everything we expect from Hero.

[Greywind]

Mostly what was noticed from DI/JI was skill recosting. Skills tended to be 5+ in Champions at base and 3+ in DI/JI at base.

[Tasha]

There is some extra stuff about how to use Interaction skills in "Ultimate Skill" now named something different under 6e (same book, with Seduction renamed Charm).

I agree that we need a skill for resisting/detecting Interaction skill use.

BTW don't think of Ego as being egotistical, they mean it as having a strong will.

 

The fans are the biggest problem the system has. Most of us are fairly resistant to change of any kind. Look at the reaction to the smallish changes in 6e. Huge negative reaction. Also Hero players tend to play hero exclusively. That has left us as a group with only hero to base our assumptions about what is good in gaming. Now that d20 has become so dominant many of us are starting to play other RPG's and discovering things about them we like (ie a skill for detecting Interaction skill use, better ways to use "hero Points" etc).

I am starting to see that perhaps we need to take a long look at a bunch of things in the system. Perhaps it's time to simplify where it makes sense, and add stuff where it makes sense as well. I like 6e in many ways, but I still see things that could make the system better.

[Tasha]

Mostly what was noticed from DI/JI was skill recosting. Skills tended to be 5+ in Champions at base and 3+ in DI/JI at base.

OF course Danger International was based on 3rd edition Champions just like Fantasy Hero was. It was published in the same time when the guys discovered Perfect Binding (Softcover Glue Binding). Skills in the Base 1st/2nd edition rules were more expensive (some of them did a lot more too, ie Acrobatics, which was Breakfall, Acrobatics and +2 DCV all on a dex roll).

[Sean Waters]

...

 

BTW don't think of Ego as being egotistical, they mean it as having a strong will.

 

...

 

Good points well made.  I highlighted this bit because, well, I agree, but...

 

The problem with using 'willpower' as a resistance value for persuasion assumes that you have become entrenched in your position and are unwilling to change.  You can resist that change with willpower.  The situation is more likely to be that you do not necessarily subscribe to what the person is trying to persuade you of but you do not necessarily have a pre-defined/entrenched position of your own.  To take an example, someone with high willpower is not necessarily going to be hard to persuade to give money to a charity or a homeless person.  Now you could argue that is because of their underlying nature, but assume that the character has no particular preconceptions*, the fact that they have a lot of willpower is unlikely to affect their decision making.  

 

In fact decision making might well be based on the sort of approach taken.  I could make arguments for PRE, INT or none of the above being appropriate resistance values.  If, for example, the argument is based on logic, and the subject is willing to engage in a logical argument, then INT might be the best determinant of success.  OTOH you might be trying to engage someone with logic and they respond with passion instead.  That might mean they use EGO or PRE to resist or it might mean that the discussion is doomed to stalemate.  It seems to me that the area is rich and complex.  The fact that it is could be an argument for keeping things simple, but I don't think we have things simple in a way that necessarily works to determine the outcome of social interaction in a consistent and explainable way.

 

I think that we can use existing systems, especially Complications, to help define the personality of characters and we can refine the skill system so that we obtain more consistent and repeatable results, and I don't think that would necessarily make the game more complex to actually play.  In fact, if we have an idea of the starting values it might make it smoother.

 

We will probably never get to a system that is acceptable to everyone, so it makes sense to have a solid base system with options for people to pick and choose from.  I'm not even sure we have a solid base system yet though.

 

 

*OK, everyone has preconceptions, but work with me

[Tasha]

Actually the rules state that you can use either Pre or Ego to resist interaction skill. That it's up to the GM to determine which (or both) is appropriate)

[TheNaga]

Why did 6th edition choose get rid COM and replace it with +/- Striking Appearance?

[NuSoardGraphite]

Because some people felt that COM didnt gel with the standard hero mechanics. That it wasnt very well defined and that it felt unnecessary. striking appearance has a specific purpose, has proper granularity and is well defined.

 

I disagree with those people whole heatedly. i loved COM. I feel that it did everything that Striking appearance did with more granularity and was just as well defined. but then again i seem to read more into hero than a lot of people do.

[Steve]

Negative COM was a strange mechanical effect to me, so having Striking Appearance as a way of portraying horrifying ugliness or incredible beauty, depending on how it is defined, works a bit better for me.

 

(In 1st and 2nd Edition, I think the Monster and Hideous had negative COM scores.)