Interest Check: Changeling: the Lost

I blame you for making the original post that got me sucked in ;)

I gratefully accept the blame

That’s a tough list of requirements. i don’t know enough systems to be of help :( Genesys is supposedly good for non combat interactions, but i’d consider 6 types of dice with 4 outcomes on the crunchy side.
I’ve never played Fate thought, so that could be something interesting to try...

If you don’t find anything published that satisfies you, allow me to me shamelessly advertise the experimental system me and mr b. are playtesting. I think it may somewhat address all those points 😝

A lot of that starter list reminds me of Mouse Guard, but that would require quite a bit of hacking to work. #4 reminds me of MG's "Nature" skill, which encompasses activities natural to mice. Acting within your nature increases it, and if it gets too high you become too mouselike to belong in the Guard. Tapping your Nature for actions outside of usual mice behavior can tax it, potentially making you too strange to fit in with other mice in general if it gets too low. (This ties into #1, as different roleplaying activities can be rewarded with Persona points that are used to tap Nature for better odds of success).

Similarly, #5 could be modeled on the Circles ability in MG, which is used to find somebody who is willing and able to help the group with a problem. On a failed Circles test the GM can invoke the "Enmity Clause," and instead of finding someone helpful, you find someone antagonistic who may try to undermine the group and is difficult to convince to be helpful in any way.

As I said, though, MG would require a lot of hacking to make work for this game, and it would be no help at all with #3. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of "what could we steal from this and bolt onto another system that is lacking."

Heard really good things about MG! Definitely wanting to try it sometime :)

Does a gameable system for social and mental conflicts encourage or defuse dramatic roleplaying?

Debate at 11.

Yes.

Thank you for coming to the debate.

This game will definitely not be a good fit for anyone who thinks the answer to this question is "defuse."

Well, the counter-argument is that gameable social/mental conflicts can lead to situations of narrative drama being derailed or defused by bad dice rolls or mismatched statistics. If someone gives a dramatic and heart-affecting speech and then rolls like a butt to convince a person or crowd of their point, the act of making that speech is deflated and the dramatic narrative can be derailed.

It can also lead to emotional and motivational dissonance, especially when PCs are affected. If an NPC convinces a PC to do a thing the player thinks the PC doesn't want to do for motivational or emotional reasons via mechanics and dice rolls, it can lead to flat roleplaying at best, and some wonky stuff at worst. Worse yet, if a PC affects another PC in the same way, the feeling of being mind controlled can be pretty alienating. This is especially bad if system mastery results in a player being able to dictate the actions of others, rather than drama, narrative, and emotional appeal.

Now... I'm completely not blanket against systems that have mechanics for social and mental conflicts, but the above points are really important to address in some way - especially because so many systems have systems for social and mental conflicts that are so simple as "Roll dice -> now he is your friend forever." See 3.5 diplomacy. Imagine in a D&D game if the BBEG walked up to your Player Character and rolled a 35 on Diplomacy, so now you had to roleplay that your attitude towards him is "friendly," even though he murdered your beloved Aunt.

The most interesting system on this axis is, imo, Legends of the Wulin, which uses a system of conditions to reflect everything from "your arm's off" to "I am in love with this person." However, the mechanics of the game are very, very closely tied to the narrative structure of Wuxia. Despite my vague frowny face at Powered by the Apocalypse as a system, a similar system of "tags" pointed me towards City of Mist. Both Mouse Guard and its progenitor Burning Wheel, for all I love them, express the latter problem pretty profoundly with their "let it ride" mechanics.

System influences behavior, and it's really, really important to consider how it influences that behavior before you make blanket statements like, "I want gameable social conflict." What does that mean? What does that look like? How does that affect how the game is played and the story is told? Are there limits and what are those limits? What happens when the players lose one of those conflicts?

Point of clarification, GreyGriffin: Are you interested in this game, or did you just drop in on the presumption that we are ignorant of the pros and cons of social conflict mechanics in roleplaying games and need to have them explained to us?

Oh, I'm certainly interested in Changeling. I am a sucker for tragedy, and the story of the Lost is really compelling. I'm just leery of the blanket enthusiasm for rolling dice at my feelings. Especially as someone who's had at least some experience with BW/TB/MG, I just want to be clear what's meant by "gameable social and mental interactions."

I feel like those problems are more caused by systems that weren't developed with a focus on social encounters in mind and that then try to still cover them (like D&D/PF).

To be fair, I don't have much experience with many games that have in-depth social mechanics so it might be an issue for some (or many) of them. But in Cortex, for example, "social combat" (if you want to call it that) never amounts to forcing a character into a certain action. The player can decide to give in or the PC might end up feeling bad or having doubts about their decision but they're not forced to act against their character.

Certainly, social and mental conflict mechanics can have drawbacks, just like combat mechanics can have drawbacks. Both can lead to character actions being reduced to rote mechanical actions, e.g. "I roll to hit," "I roll to persuade." Both can also cause lovingly crafted descriptions to be "wasted" on a failed attempt, as in your example of the dramatic and heartfelt speech that falls flat, or if someone describes a masterful strike from their combat veteran that completely whiffs (though both of those cases can be explained by the fact that targets do not always react as anticipated).

Those mechanics are still useful, though, because they make it easier for players to give up some of their agency over their characters and counter the natural desire to see their characters succeed, or else fail on their own terms, and they make it easier for the other players to accept when one character does something "stupid" that puts them all in a bind. I may be willing to decide my character has an emotional breakdown in a scene with low stakes, but can I be relied upon to do that when the outcome of the story is riding on what my character does? Will the other players accept that choice readily, or will they wonder if I'm falling prey to "it's what my character would do" syndrome? A random element mediates that, just like a hit point counter mediates the decision of when a character falls unconscious and relieves a player of responsibility for the tight spot it puts the rest of the party in.

Edit: All of which is a long way of saying that I'm okay with a mechanical system that might tell me that my character's impassioned plea that I spent an hour crafting fails because the target just can't be bothered to care, or that they are fooled by a smooth-talking con man, or that they find themselves empathizing with and wanting to save the "bad guy" despite everything they've done, or that my character is going to act out because they're fed up with the situation, or that the mental stress is just too much and my character has to effectively shut down in an attempt to process/make it stop.

Combat mechanics are usually more oriented towards moment-to-moment action, and are typically much more dense with mechanical interaction. A bad combat roll is usually one of at least a half dozen in a given combat scene. Social mechanics, and the interactions they represent, tend to either be more reliant on either summary rolls in more dense systems, or on core task resolution mechanics in more generally rules-lite systems. That makes systems that flub their social mechanics tend to flub them hard and fast.

I'd be much less concerned about character agency if I wasn't concerned about good narratives being stonewalled by bad rolls, or bad narratives being pushed forward by good rolls. In drama, empathy with the character is really important for investment, and if the character does things on the back of a bad scene backed up by good rolls, or a character just shrugs off a good, emotional scene just unaffected because of bad rolls, it can make it hard to empathize with the characters taking part.

It's easy to chalk up a bad roll in a physical conflict to a stumble or some environmental circumstance, or bad luck. You can do that to an extent with social and mental conflict, but there's a much more limited and subjective vocabulary to use.

The best social conflict system I've ever seen was Legends of the Wulin, where you got Conditions for everything, from "Peg Leg (-20)" to "Madly in Love (-50)" You either had to act in accordance with your conditions, or incorporate in your description and fiction a way that you were expressing or overcoming your condition, or you'd get the penalty to your action, if it was something that'd affect you in the scene. So, to take an action that would alienate your lover (like, say, stabbing him/her in a kung fu battle), you would have to either weep profusely and justify that it was for the best, or take a huge penalty.

I believe City of Mist has a similar mechanic in its condition tags (You can call on your Tags to help you, opponents can call on your tags to hinder you or help them), but I do not own it, and thus have not read in detail how it works. City of Mist is basically Changeling with the serial numbers filed off and tucked into a Fate-esque PBtA shell, so I think it's worth investigating.

Edit: I'm also really interested in how Genesys would play out in a less pulpy/actioney backdrop with a focus on more social and mental consequences. The dice there are... really interesting, but I'm not super sure how it handles social conflict beyond typical task resolution, I'd have to dig it out...