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A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

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[X] Snowfire

On another note, I didn't want to call people out in this thread as all words has been spoken these last couple of days, but this past few pages had been a huge disaster that I need this aired out.

How could you? Like really! I trusted you @Tomcost! Now you have some explaining to do!

 
Crake said:
@DragonParadox To really hammer this home, why do you not treat social combat like regular combat? You spitfire those without spinning layers and layers of atmosphere during the fight, just describing the effects and the actions of the characters fluffed up, yet social combat has inherently comparable ramifications in terms of characters maneuvering around each other, and you can even lean away from fluffing what the people are doing (though you can do plenty of that to actually spending more time describing the environment, which can sort of fade into the fore or background at times).
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That's a very fair argument. I should do more of that. I think a lot of the simplification can be placed on the shoulders of the fact that speaking has inherent meaning which is provided by the vote whereas combat needs more thought to turn the raw mechanics into something that flows properly. In short the answer is: 'I got complacent'. I will do my best to redress that.
 
I only point it out because perhaps, just maybe, saying that simply 'talking' when the people involved just have so much weight behind their motivations and actions, saying that combat deserves granularity because it is a matter of life and death and that it takes more thought to try to translate those actions into something that actually stands as a component to the story, not simply just dross or standard action sequences that blend into one another.

And yet depriving social votes of the same granularity, as you said, might make not just the writer complacent, but the voters. Why put too much thought behind the vote, if you can just drone on and on about what you want the other person to do like a puppet on strings?

By the same token, one of the key crutches you lean on for other characters is them cherry picking part of the vote to cut in on and try to take it on in isolation of everything else we are saying, turning it into a completely different discussion, yet continuing to use the majority of the rest of the voted on plan, despite it making no sense and making Viserys come off as incompetent when even the average person, even just about anyone in the thread knows that human beings will drop a train of thought completely if someone else insists on trying to tear you down on a single point.

Most of what Danelle could say to us, addressed in isolation, doesn't come across as eye-opening or world-shattering, it's puerile naivete, yet she gets taken seriously because, you know, the original vote gives the person we're speaking to the courtesy of being taken seriously.

This is another reoccurring feature in several social encounters, and it manifests in different ways, dragging down the narrative by trying to make sure we continually have to work to convince anyone of anything or to achieve an ancillary objective (convincing a crowd of something while aruging with an opponent, etc.)

Does granular social combat favor us inherently? Yes, but you should reward players for thinking on their feet. It can't always be both ways. If an opponent actually manages to make us go "oh shit, he really has a point", that's interesting, but if an opponent decides to take advantage of the credibility we are gifting to them by robotically parroting a vote that thought they would argue with us in good faith, we should immediately identify what they are doing and point it out.

I don't know exactly where I'm going with this. I mean the whole OOC impetus behind trying to change things up a little was trying to get across the idea to others that "you can't have it both ways", and yet on an OOC level, the standards have changed and yet the mechanical gimping hasn't.

TL;DR N/PCs cannot have depth and breadth if we aren't allowed to express the same breadth and depth in motive and action. Viserys will give you a chance from the outset of any conversation and take you seriously, grant you that credibility you desire. But he's also seriously taken some shit in the past, on numerous occasions. He would have learned by now when someone was all bluster, or just operating on faulty assumptions, and needed either a reality check, or a dozen holes poked in their sails.
 
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That is a very good point @Crake, though it has to be said that too much granularity in social combat as in actual combat could drag down the pacing. I think the fairest way to address that while maintaining player agency is to give you guys control over the level of granularity. For instance do you want to just get a feel for their characters (roll initial sense motive) or do you want to push though one argument or two? Of course that would also come with some judgement on my part when you something comes up you guys could not have anticipated.

Does this sound fair
 
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DragonParadox said:
That is a very good point @Crake, though it has to be said that too much granularity in social combat as in actual combat could drag down the pacing. I think the fairest way to address that while maintaining player agency is to give you guys control over the level of granularity. For instance o you want to just get a feel for their characters (roll initial sense motive) or do you want to push though one argument or two? Of course that would also come with some judgement on my part when you something comes up you guys could not have anticipated.

Does this sound fair
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Often the best way to determine the level of granularity--besides trying to guess their general state of mind and their concerns before voting on any in-depth plan, is when a character reacts extremely negatively, or says something that directly undercuts everything else about your plan, operating on a malus because "maybe they just misunderstood me, I'm sure they are not just emotional/manipulative/impulsive/a liar, and trying to argue with me from the same direction that I am coming from" is actively knee-capping the story on multiple levels.

I'm not saying social votes shouldn't fail. I'm saying if we roll a severe failure that makes someone say something logically would make someone think "I really need to address this point directly before it festers and undercuts whatever else I hope to say here", we should vote again. It's really that simple, and doesn't actually require any formal structure to account for.
 
Crake said:
Often the best way to determine the level of granularity--besides trying to guess their general state of mind and their concerns before voting on any in-depth plan, is when a character reacts extremely negatively, or says something that directly undercuts everything else about your plan, operating on a malus because "maybe they just misunderstood me, I'm sure they are not just emotional/manipulative/impulsive/a liar, and trying to argue with me from the same direction that I am coming from" is actively knee-capping the story on multiple levels.

I'm not saying social votes shouldn't fail. I'm saying if we roll a severe failure that makes someone say something logically would make someone think "I really need to address this point directly before it festers and undercuts whatever else I hope to say here", we should vote again. It's really that simple, and doesn't actually require any formal structure to account for.
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That goes without saying, the last Danelle discussion was just bad and I'm glad to consign it to oblivion.I was adressing more borderline circumstances, not ones where I actively dropped the ball so far it hit the center of the earth.
 
DragonParadox said:
That goes without saying, the last Danelle discussion was just bad and I'm glad to consign it to oblivion.I was adressing more borderline circumstances, not ones where I actively dropped the ball so far it hit the center of the earth.
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The borderline can be handled simply by encouraging us to have a strategy for a discussion, but not be married to it to the point that we dump it all in one vote. In some cases, if both sides don't trust each other, maybe it will take at least two updates for both to feel sufficiently reassured that the other person is trust-worthy enough to be heard out?

Or maybe it takes one update to figure out that the person we are talking to is so manipulative that they never really wanted to make some kind of compromise with us, but instead hoped to springboard our discussion to convince someone else of something?

Opportunities to react are fairly sparse in this quest under those circumstances, as in sometimes nearly non-existent. At times Viserys almost seems like he has too much faith in people's good intentions, which clashes directly with how jaded he is.
 
Crake said:
The borderline can be handled simply by encouraging us to have a strategy for a discussion, but not be married to it to the point that we dump it all in one vote. In some cases, if both sides don't trust each other, maybe it will take at least two updates for both to feel sufficiently reassured that the other person is trust-worthy enough to be heard out?

Or maybe it takes one update to figure out that the person we are talking to is so manipulative that they never really wanted to make some kind of compromise with us, but instead hoped to springboard our discussion to convince someone else of something?

Opportunities to react are fairly sparse in this quest under those circumstances, as in sometimes nearly non-existent. At times Viserys almost seems like he has too much faith in people's good intentions, which clashes directly with how jaded he is.
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  1. Very good advice
  2. Hmm... I had not noticed the part about him not being suspicious enough. I'll have to be on the lookout for that. If/when next you spot such a instance don't hesitate to point it out so I can see where I'm mis-characterising.
 
@Crake, I'm honestly not sure how your points would be addressed in practice.

Well. Except taking back a lot of characterization power to the DM to enable more nuanced presentation. Then again, Viserys did get a bit... flat over the years. And disjointed.

Maybe it's worth stepping back from direct speech votes entirely, as I personally think a bullet point as @Snowfires plzn includes to talk about Baelor is inherently easier to weave organically into the narrative.

Making @Goldfish style conditional combat trees for social votes is a bit impossible without boxing the NPC into a few stock responses. Frankly, many of our past social votes kinda power-emoted the NPC into a track...

So... vote on speech goals instead of content? Unless it's holding an actual speech with no one who could react anyway.

/rambling
 
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Azel said:
@Crake, I'm honestly not sure how youd points would be addressed in practice.

Well. Except taking back a lot of characterization power to the DM to enable more nuanced presentation. Then again, Viserys dud get a bit... flat over the years. And disjointed.

Maybe it's worth stepping back from direct speech votes entirely, as I personally think a bullet point as @Snowfires plzn includes to talk about Baelor is inherently easier to weave organically into the narrative.

Making @Goldfish style conditional combat trees for social votes is a bit impossible without boxing the NPC into a few stock responses. Frankly, many of our past social votes kinda power-emoted the NPC into a track...

So... vote on speech goals instead of content? Unless it's holding an actual speech with no one who could rract anyway.

/rambling
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Most of my suggestions to DP did not specify trying to actually draw out mechanics or hard and fast rules for this, simply trying to convince ourselves that what we are all doing, QM and player, is not working, or not desired, and that hammering buttons to try to teach players something about themselves is about as interesting to read about as watching a drunk fratboy pissing into the wind.
 
Azel said:
@Crake, I'm honestly not sure how your points would be addressed in practice.

Well. Except taking back a lot of characterization power to the DM to enable more nuanced presentation. Then again, Viserys did get a bit... flat over the years. And disjointed.

Maybe it's worth stepping back from direct speech votes entirely, as I personally think a bullet point as @Snowfires plzn includes to talk about Baelor is inherently easier to weave organically into the narrative.

Making @Goldfish style conditional combat trees for social votes is a bit impossible without boxing the NPC into a few stock responses. Frankly, many of our past social votes kinda power-emoted the NPC into a track...

So... vote on speech goals instead of content? Unless it's holding an actual speech with no one who could react anyway.

/rambling
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Unless we have something particularly inspired I would prefer this.
 
Crake said:
Most of my suggestions to DP did not specify trying to actually draw out mechanics or hard and fast rules for this, simply trying to convince ourselves that what we are all doing, QM and player, is not working, or not desired, and that hammering buttons to try to teach players something about themselves is about as interesting to read about as watching a drunk fratboy pissing into the wind.
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Fair enough. There is a reason I personally advised retconning the whole arc. Thing's were bungled on multiple levels, though I still think the direction itself was good, just the implementation flawed.

There's a reason I had rejected DPs proposal to become Co-DM multiple times. I will therefore now be smug about correctly predicting that I would fuck things up. :V
 
...on one hand, my clinging nature and difficulty to let go of established things holds me back...

But on the other hand, its not like I was participating in social votes anywhat much before.
Having a re-do of the entire way we vote wouldn't be something I will oppose.

I'm not sure just how well that will translate into text though
We (DP included) wouldn't ever let an important/difficult combat encounter run without player's decisions for more than a few rounds.
Wouldn't such broad "speak about X"-plans naturally gravitate towards just that kind of thing, with us not getting a chance to write up a rebuttal, where it would otherwise naturally be?

Honestly, to me it feels like a whole bunch of short, 3-5 hundred-words-long updates, with us getting decisions on what to say at the end of each, would work best for important social encounters.
But that runs into the fact that applying that in practice is all but impossible :/
 
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Azel said:
@Crake, I'm honestly not sure how your points would be addressed in practice.

Well. Except taking back a lot of characterization power to the DM to enable more nuanced presentation. Then again, Viserys did get a bit... flat over the years. And disjointed.

Maybe it's worth stepping back from direct speech votes entirely, as I personally think a bullet point as @Snowfires plzn includes to talk about Baelor is inherently easier to weave organically into the narrative.

Making @Goldfish style conditional combat trees for social votes is a bit impossible without boxing the NPC into a few stock responses. Frankly, many of our past social votes kinda power-emoted the NPC into a track...

So... vote on speech goals instead of content? Unless it's holding an actual speech with no one who could react anyway.

/rambling
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Very fair point, though I do kind of enjoy the speeches too, so maybe some kind of hybrid could be worked out where the first few lines are delivered verbatim and then it's bullet points with the odd expression sprinkled in. Eh we'll work it out. Like @Crake said above, the important part is to talk to each other to iron things out.
 
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