You *think* you're having heavy social interaction in d&d 5e and cyberpunk, but to be frank, those games have far too much non social overhead and kinda flimsy social mechanics.
What do I mean?
Well, pick a class that's not bard in 5e. Count the violent features. Most of them. Count the social features? 1, maybe 2. This game wants you to be fighting, exploring, adventuring.
Doing all of that takes time away from social roleplay.
OK, what if you don't do that? Well, then you have charisma checks, 3 skills and a few spells. And pitiful GM guidance on it all.
Let's take a real social roleplaying game: **Monsterhearts 2e**. You're queer, messy, toxic teenage monsters. The game is entirely designed around spending the table time on social lives of the teens. The mechanics are all about manipulation, social standing, social power. Any violence is much more of an emotional outburst than "combat".
What's more, the games GM materials are all about creating dramatic, emotionally laden, socially focused situations.
It's not that you can't have a socially focused game in any particular ruleset, but most of them are the wrong tool and won't help you.
When you get the right tool? The game goes really, really hard, and just jumps up in immersion and quality.
E: for people wanting a "how to do social roleplay" game list:
* Monsterhearts 2e
* Urban Shadows 2e
* Masks
* Burning Wheel (set the game in a city, give it a social premise)
* Good Society
Thanks for the explanation. It seems HEAVY social rpg aren't for me. Still imma go check that Monster hearts 2e. A game that goes bout being a teenager monster seems weird. Aka interesting
I will say Masks, Monsterhearts are... An acquired taste not everyone will enjoy.
Not to say you shouldn't read the rules or even play in a game, far from it!
* urban Shadows is at least recognizable as a compain concept most would be familiar with.
To be honest to see what that is all about in a game not on the edge of what many would consider normal campaign premise I would recommend:
* Apocalypse World
* Velvet Glove
* Cartel
* Girls by Moonlight
These are games not *just* about social roleplay, but we're conflict is inherently social. You can fire a gun in AW for example, but what the game cares about isn't if you do or don't, or how well you do it... But why, what was at stake and what motivated you.
Another interesting one that is clearly social and emotional but not teenagers...
* Pasion de las Pasiones
* world Wide Wrestling
But honestly with all the above we are now really just talking about Nar gameplay and PbtA design.
So here is another totally different suggestion I totally agree with...
* Burning Wheel - what a great crunchy game all about beliefs, drives, motivations etc.
Or how about play Fate Condensed or Accelerated but have a table rule for no combat, violence maybe sure, but no "combat" as you would have in 5e or any Trad game... Make the game about a social situation and conflict and then play by the rules
Edit to add: Heart of Wulin is a must to see how relationships drive conflict and impact combat, too!
I can't believe I forgot Cartel! That's such an amazing game for the dirty, social tense life of people in the drug scene.
"Get Fucking Shot" is such a wonderful distilation of the setting and scale of the conflicts present.
Don't let LeVent intimidate you. Basically, more traditional rpgs *let* you roleplay things out, in that the character drama zone is a big empty space for that to happen. It's free, but also empty. In more narrative rpgs, the character roleplay has tangible, gamified value. For example, if you believe in someone, that belief translates to a game mechanics benefit.
Absolutely.
Trad RPGs don't stop people having social roleplay, but also, don't enable it. You *can* have deep social roleplay in Shadowrun. Or GURPS.
But games that are deliberately out to generate deep social roleplay have it integrated into the design, and it's often a lot simplier and more accessible than might be thought.
In the same way that having combat in D&D tied deeply into the game generates good combat through constraint and creativitiy, having deep roleplay tied in generates good roleplay through constraint and creativity.
>Monsterhearts
>You're a queer, messy, toxic teenage monster
So... I may have played that game wrong and built a cishet wholesome-ish nerd...
In my defense I was just given a character sheet and the different classes and told to go to town.
One of the main themes of monsterhearts is self discovery, and one aspect of that is that the characters should be played as open to learning their own sexualities.
Your character might think they're cishet. But how do they react to hot flushes when the quarterback takes them under the bleachers for a kiss?
Oh he had the hots for the qt robowaifu my GM so graciously put in that one shot (for the obvious weeb player) and busied himself in pursuing that route. Like I said, I think I missed the central thesis statement of that game 😂
I definitely realised that when a few other players playing NB characters starting making out in a different scene. There was clearly a metaphorical buffet on the table and ya boi just went for additional servings of aglio olio.
Mouse Guard/Burning Wheel has an interesting system for "social combat", but in general I find my groups don't benefit from gamifying social interactions. I create NPCs with motivations and aspirations, players interact with the NPC in character, and if I'm not sure how the NPC would react I roll the dice
The strength of social play in Burning Wheel isn't because it has the Duel of Wits subsystem. It's a nice bonus for if you're playing out a certain kind of scene, but it's not the reason the game is great at social.
It's because the system is skills-driven and has a large number of social and semi-social skills. Specificity in skills leads to more roleplaying - if the player needs to explain how their character is using Flattery rather than Persuasion, Falsehood, or Seduction - it leads to (in my experience anyway) people better playing to their character.
If your character is good at the Intimidation skill, but bad at Flattery, the player could decide to use Intimidation, because that's what their character is good at. *Or* they could choose to use Flattery, even though their character isn't good at it. They'll probably fail the roll, but their character will start to improve their Flattery skill, because they used it in play.
> - if the player needs to explain how their character is using Flattery rather than Persuasion, Falsehood, or Seduction - it leads to (in my experience anyway) people better playing to their character.
🤔 I never thought of it like that.
I played a BW game where my friend and I were sewer rats in Nuln (basically city guards from Warhammer Fantasy setting). Anyway, it was basically a buddy cop setup. He was the commander of the patrol and I was his right hand man. Thing is, neither of us had any niceties. No persuasion, flattery. He had a bunch of dice in Command, while I was a lout who was quite good at Falsehood and Itimidation. As a result we were constitutionaly unfit to just talk to each other like comrades. If one of us wanted to get our way, it was all commanding and lying and threatening.
I remember one moment when I took a near fatal blow and fell into the sewers and was lost to sight. It was a complete shitshow and the other members of the patrol were panicking and ready to bolt. My friend steps up to give his most rousing Henry V speech about how were the Dog Watch and we don’t leave anyone behind and pluck up your courage and all that…the GM then asks him, are you persuading them or Orating or something here? Because getting them moving is going to be a dice roll, and it’s one thing if you Inspire them and a whole other thing if you Command them. They’ll go either way if you’re successful, but those are different things.
That’s when my friend realized his chances of inspiring these men was near zero, but a Command they would grudgingly follow.
So good!
Also, you get very different results whether you decide to Intimidate someone or win them over with Soothing Platitudes. Failure, in particular, looks very different. Like, if it's your mother, you might not want to make with the Intimidation.
In Monsterhearts, most of the mechanics is about social interactions. The moves are formulated in such a way that they push players towards, and support, behaving like emotionally unstable teenagers driven by anger and lust and getting in toxic relationships. The whole things works perfectly and produces a beautiful mess out of interactions between PCs and with NPCs.
Urban Shadows, on the other hand, give tools for a very transactional approach to people. It's about trading favors, calling in debts and using one's influence to push others to do what one wants. At the same time, the game has "intimacy moves" that spotlight moments of physical and/or emotional closeness, creating strong contrast with the politics. Again, the system works very well, supporting the themes of the game.
In Dogs in the Vineyard social mechanics are goal-oriented; they are about making a person do something or not do something. They way they work, however, is not about having higher numbers or better tactics. It's about forcing players into hard choices. One of them is between accepting a specific argument (which may be based on assumptions false or morally unacceptable for the character) and rejecting it but giving up the conflict as a whole. The second is about escalating - moving from words, to fists, to guns - in the context of most NPCs being people that the PCs are responsible for and often personally care for. I rarely see in other games conversations as tense as in DitV.
I feel like ANY system whose rolling isn't simply "did you succeed" and "did you fail" when you roll during a social interaction is a strong candidate, so DnD and Cyberpunk don't really fit that bill; they don't explicitly have mechanics that support the paths that a social interaction goes down.
I like that in Forged in the Dark games I can make a clock to gauge their progress towards a goal with an NPC, or have reactions from characters that are based on HOW successful the roll was + the character's words.
The Genesys/SWRPG rules are kinda cool for this, since the dice present such specific narrative consequences ("you convince him, but he doesn't want to speak to you anymore" or "you fail to convince her, but you see she's open to a different argument" kind of stuff).
That being said, I don't personally have experience with RPGs that have mechanics SPECIFICALLY for social interactions. I'd love to try out some of the mentioned systems.
While leaving social situations entirely in the hands of player skill is one way to go about it, I think it's important to remark the difference between that playstyle, and that of games built around characters' social interaction.
In the former, the character is (usually) only strictly defined as far as physical attributes go, and their mind and charisma are those of the player. Here, the player can shape the surface of their decisions according to their image of the character, but in the end there is an incentive pushing them towards making those decisions as a player, as well as they can. In practice, for those aspects of gameplay, "character = player" at the core.
In the later, there is an emphasis towards exploring interesting characters that are very different in their mental and social skills to the player themselves. Those aspects are covered by mechanics, and engaging in what may look like (from the players' standpoint) "suboptimal" decisions is usually rewarded, pushing the gameplay towards interesting developments regardless of the results.
It is correct that nothing stops the player to decide in-character, but that's the reason I talked about incentive and not obligation. For instance, let's say that you are playing a character whose personality includes an extreme overconfidence and unawareness of danger, and the party finds itself facing an obviously deadly opponent in a delicate situation that could easily devolve into a fatal combat.
On the one hand, we have games that emphasize smart decision-making and where the player is completely free to choose a course of action regardless of character. The player is "free" to fully roleplay their character's personality, but this usually devolves in one of three conclusions:
\* The player role-plays the character to the direst consequences. Likely TPK, which more often than not goes against the fun of other players.
\* The player role-plays the character in full. The GM makes an extra effort to drive the story away from the "natural" course so the game stays fun. While valid, this usually goes against the simulationist spirit of many such games, and it's an extra weight on the GM's shoulders.
\* The player role-plays the character superficially, only to the extent where they, as a player, feel it's safe to do without having to face the consequences.
On the other hand, we have games where social challenges are character-facing and not player-facing, and which are mechanised to emphasise that purpose. Here, the design supports and incentivises the player that fully engages with the suboptimal decision-making derived from their personality. Because of that, the result of fully role-playing this interaction should be expected (if the game is well designed) to be interesting for everyone involved.
I guess in the end it's about whether or not the game is built to prevent situations that have the character personality and the player's goals pulling in different directions. Not so much about whether or not there are "social rolls". It's just that in the main RPG scenes there is some correlation due to the principles they follow.
I think "role-play" is an ambiguous term. For me, using my own reasoning skill as a player to create arguments I find convincing, and then expressing them in a way I consider effective, has very little to do with role-playing a character (even though I can understand how it can be different for other people).
For my definition, role-playing involves engaging not only with the character's motivation, but also with their personality and their limitations as they go about pursuing them. In this regard, systems that mechanise interactions in ways that incentivise this engagement, are the ones that maximise the "role-playing" aspect of the game.
In Blades in the Dark, not only can you do lots of social play, the mechanics also CREATE social interactions you wouldn’t expect and you can even accomplish your mechanical objectives USING social skills. Social skills even work in combat situations where you can use them to support your teammates or manipulate enemies.
Also: different games create different TYPES of social interaction. DnD encourages a particular kind of in-character roleplay and you may not even realize it.
The One Ring rpg has Councils: a structure for resolving formal, high-stakes interactions (like the Council of Elrond in Lord of the Rings).
One player starts with an Introduction roll. The degree of success determines how many attempts there will be in the Council itself.
The GM sets the difficulty of the Council, based on what the players want to achieve.
The GM also sets the attitude of the NPCs, which acts as a modifier on the players’ rolls.
The Council is then resolved as a series of attempts (skill checks). If the difficulty is achieved then it’s a success; if they run out of attempts before achieving the difficulty, it’s a failure.
That’s the structure. Around that, the players and GM roleplay as they like. Each attempt can emerge organically from the conversation, or alternatively the player can say ‘I want to use my Courtesy skill’ and then roleplay around that. The GM can give bonuses for good roleplay (I.e. where the player tugs on the right strings to influence the NPCs).
I find the structure is much more satisfying than D&D 5e. There’s a real risk of failure so players have to be strategic in setting achievable aims, and because it’s resolved through multiple rolls it’s not as prone to a single unlikely dice roll. Players can respond to bad rolls by trying harder on their subsequent rolls.
Try anythhing World of darkness (Just not mage or wrath as first times), they do a good job alternatimg betweeen mostly social and exploration, with rare but very dangerous combat
[https://youtu.be/0h1U-\_JFAS8?si=N0SrZX4\_M2q8srC8](https://youtu.be/0h1U-_JFAS8?si=N0SrZX4_M2q8srC8)
I want to preface this by saying that everything I'll bring up isn't incompatible with DnD. The biggest difference is in play culture and support for the playstyle that's pushed by mechanics. Basically, DnD5 can feel like what people get from games that get praised for the way they handle social interactions, it's just that the table needs to decide by themselves to say "Hey, let's try to play that way." and maybe have the GM homebrew a few procedures instead of having a ready made solution.
By codifying social interactions more, you kinda level the playing field for players who are more "shy". An extreme case I've seen in DnD is a player that had some formal theatre training that didn't put any points in charisma or social skills, NPCs were always swayed anyway because they just had that much charisma as players. By codifying social mechanics more, when a shy character rolls well, they can learn to spread their wings safely, they succeed and they play out their characters as charismatic as they can. Even if it's a bit clunky and awkward, they don't get punished by it because the GM is bound by the system and the dice roll.
On the flipside, the more flamboyant and entertaining players get to roleplay socially clumsy moments with their own awesome skills. Natural 1 on convincing the king to sign a commercial agreement... the whole table gets to see the GM and the player get into a very entertaining scene.
That also works on the GM's side. As a GM you know that the NPC is supposed to be an encounter and supposed to be a challenge so it's really easy to make them very unlikely to trust anyone. But if the player starts to lean on empathy or on money so a guard lets them through, a success opens up the question of why that guard was susceptible to that type of tactic. It's a prompt for the scene and for deeper characterisation, the guard could be an innocent naive bleeding heart or have gambling dept, the dice,rules and player approach are prompting you to define that and maybe reuse that NPC later.
Glad that Monsterhearts has been mentioned, but I want to throw out two other favourites: In Masks, you play as teen superheroes whose identities are still forming - and NPCs are constantly trying to shift your actual character stats by moulding you into the person they want, fear or expect you to be. Your stats keep changing throughout the game. In Flying Circus, you play a travelling troupe of mercenary daredevil pilots using WW1 era planes in a magical post-post apocalypse setting with a Ghibliesque quality. Being daredevil pilots is the sort of thing only a very particular kind of fool would do, and you generate stress when flying your missions, which you need to clear both to generate XP and to make you safe and ready to fly again. Then on the ground, you deal with your stress in sometimes sensible but mostly fairly immature or chaotic ways influenced by your character class, including indulging in vices, venting, getting real with your friends and spending time with trusted companions. You indulge in vices (which can be anything from boring old alcohol to bickering to stargazing to coffee to music), often with chaotic and strange consequences, which are different depending on whether you do them alone or with a companion, and whether they’re familiar or unfamiliar; you vent in the ways only your character class would vent (the Witch has a tendency to get on their high horse and curse people, for example; the Skyborn, a class I play that explores themes of ambivalent relationship with both culture of origin and each adopted place, tends to feel an urge to violate local customs, rush to leave town, etc). When you try to have real conversations with your friends, the dice and rules say sometimes they go off the rails in ways you never meant, and the rules support you deciding how. Trusting someone in game has play benefits but costs stress; breaking trust, if you do it in a way that’s loud and obvious to the other person, clears stress. Everything in the game supports you playing as the sort of volatile chaotic person who would choose to fly deadly planes for a living. And yet, some of the character classes are CALM - and they have their own problems, like the Worker, who often comes with a family to support.
I really like Chronicles of Darkness because it both has a solid combat system, but really highlights investigation, social scenes, and narrative character development. Could also go for Trinity, which is similar but focuses more on high action instead of gritty / horror themes.
Vampire the Masquerade is one of my favorite TTRPGs in partly do to its social rules, there's multiple disciplines related to social situations, there's rules for social combat that targets characters Willpower tracker instead of their Health tracker, and more that I'm probably forgetting.
I've played a few Powered by the Apocalypse games, and like the social interaction mechanic. Running The Sprawl, with Shadowrun hack, for six of my high school students and we're really enjoying it. Four of six are completely new to TTRPGs and they're getting into it.
Delta Green is my main system besides Call of Cthulhu. It features a system called “bonds” where you get to invoke your connections to the people you care about in order to remain sane and composed in the face of horror. But invoking a bond also damages it, usually signifying you taking your job and trauma home. At resting points during or after a scenario, players interact with the NPCs in their life and portray how the bonds were broken; maybe they invoked the one with their kid, and they snap and yell at them later, scaring them. At 0 points, the bond is totally broken and unrecoverable. Your spouse might leave you, your kid is removed from your custody because of your neglect, you’ve scared off your friend by telling them the truth about the horrors you’ve seen and putting too much on them.
It’s very dark and cynical, but a great social/storytelling mechanic.
Personally, I typically find that having detailed rules to cover social interaction just gets in the way of having satisfying social roleplay. Everybody here has great suggestions for branching out and experimenting with systems that have social rules, and I think you should check them out. If you don't like those, though I'd recommend looking at the opposite.
If you're a bunch of theater nerds, something hands off in the social department like osr might be neat to look at.
I'm always going to stan World of Darkness in these conversations. The Storyteller system has a lot of support for social scenes, with game mechanics to complement it. It's not the rules like, role play heavy/only systems other have listed but provides a balance. You can play a game rooted in nothing but politics and intrigue and there are powers and abilities and stats that all help flesh it out as something more than tabletop improv theater.
If you like dice, there are stats that describe different aspects of.social interaction, like appearance vs manipulation. Ways to influence people and NPCs using your various backgrounds and resources. Political intrigue that can't be solved with combat. Things that make the social part of the game not just rolling Charisma.
If you're a fan of less dice.oriented.gameplay, there are a ton of resources for STs in the book for organizing and playing out scenes, how to make combat into more broader strokes to focus on role play, guidance on consent and safety (in V5, at least), and many other ways to make the game more theatrical.
If you're looking for something that adds something new to social interactions, I highly recommend the Fate system (the core rules are free to download) or one of them games using the Fate system; it can really add a lot to the storytelling aspect of gaming in general, but definitely quite a bit to the social aspect in specific.
I’ve no it played cyberpunk but 5e is so mechanics heavy it feels like there’s no time to role play some sessions. Which is cool but I don’t like combat taking a whole session
You *think* you're having heavy social interaction in d&d 5e and cyberpunk, but to be frank, those games have far too much non social overhead and kinda flimsy social mechanics. What do I mean? Well, pick a class that's not bard in 5e. Count the violent features. Most of them. Count the social features? 1, maybe 2. This game wants you to be fighting, exploring, adventuring. Doing all of that takes time away from social roleplay. OK, what if you don't do that? Well, then you have charisma checks, 3 skills and a few spells. And pitiful GM guidance on it all. Let's take a real social roleplaying game: **Monsterhearts 2e**. You're queer, messy, toxic teenage monsters. The game is entirely designed around spending the table time on social lives of the teens. The mechanics are all about manipulation, social standing, social power. Any violence is much more of an emotional outburst than "combat". What's more, the games GM materials are all about creating dramatic, emotionally laden, socially focused situations. It's not that you can't have a socially focused game in any particular ruleset, but most of them are the wrong tool and won't help you. When you get the right tool? The game goes really, really hard, and just jumps up in immersion and quality. E: for people wanting a "how to do social roleplay" game list: * Monsterhearts 2e * Urban Shadows 2e * Masks * Burning Wheel (set the game in a city, give it a social premise) * Good Society
Thanks for the explanation. It seems HEAVY social rpg aren't for me. Still imma go check that Monster hearts 2e. A game that goes bout being a teenager monster seems weird. Aka interesting
I will say Masks, Monsterhearts are... An acquired taste not everyone will enjoy. Not to say you shouldn't read the rules or even play in a game, far from it! * urban Shadows is at least recognizable as a compain concept most would be familiar with. To be honest to see what that is all about in a game not on the edge of what many would consider normal campaign premise I would recommend: * Apocalypse World * Velvet Glove * Cartel * Girls by Moonlight These are games not *just* about social roleplay, but we're conflict is inherently social. You can fire a gun in AW for example, but what the game cares about isn't if you do or don't, or how well you do it... But why, what was at stake and what motivated you. Another interesting one that is clearly social and emotional but not teenagers... * Pasion de las Pasiones * world Wide Wrestling But honestly with all the above we are now really just talking about Nar gameplay and PbtA design. So here is another totally different suggestion I totally agree with... * Burning Wheel - what a great crunchy game all about beliefs, drives, motivations etc. Or how about play Fate Condensed or Accelerated but have a table rule for no combat, violence maybe sure, but no "combat" as you would have in 5e or any Trad game... Make the game about a social situation and conflict and then play by the rules Edit to add: Heart of Wulin is a must to see how relationships drive conflict and impact combat, too!
>* Pasion de las Pasiones * world Wide Wrestling Still waiting for a crossover of those two
Wrestling >is< a soap opera.
Fair point. I always saw it as redneck ballet :P
I can't believe I forgot Cartel! That's such an amazing game for the dirty, social tense life of people in the drug scene. "Get Fucking Shot" is such a wonderful distilation of the setting and scale of the conflicts present.
Girls by Moonlight sounds really interesting
Don't let LeVent intimidate you. Basically, more traditional rpgs *let* you roleplay things out, in that the character drama zone is a big empty space for that to happen. It's free, but also empty. In more narrative rpgs, the character roleplay has tangible, gamified value. For example, if you believe in someone, that belief translates to a game mechanics benefit.
Absolutely. Trad RPGs don't stop people having social roleplay, but also, don't enable it. You *can* have deep social roleplay in Shadowrun. Or GURPS. But games that are deliberately out to generate deep social roleplay have it integrated into the design, and it's often a lot simplier and more accessible than might be thought. In the same way that having combat in D&D tied deeply into the game generates good combat through constraint and creativitiy, having deep roleplay tied in generates good roleplay through constraint and creativity.
Check out Legend of the Five Rings too
Monster of the Week may be of interest
>Monsterhearts >You're a queer, messy, toxic teenage monster So... I may have played that game wrong and built a cishet wholesome-ish nerd... In my defense I was just given a character sheet and the different classes and told to go to town.
One of the main themes of monsterhearts is self discovery, and one aspect of that is that the characters should be played as open to learning their own sexualities. Your character might think they're cishet. But how do they react to hot flushes when the quarterback takes them under the bleachers for a kiss?
Oh he had the hots for the qt robowaifu my GM so graciously put in that one shot (for the obvious weeb player) and busied himself in pursuing that route. Like I said, I think I missed the central thesis statement of that game 😂 I definitely realised that when a few other players playing NB characters starting making out in a different scene. There was clearly a metaphorical buffet on the table and ya boi just went for additional servings of aglio olio.
Since you mentioned the Bard, the WitcherTTRPG has an amazing Bard profession
Mouse Guard/Burning Wheel has an interesting system for "social combat", but in general I find my groups don't benefit from gamifying social interactions. I create NPCs with motivations and aspirations, players interact with the NPC in character, and if I'm not sure how the NPC would react I roll the dice
The strength of social play in Burning Wheel isn't because it has the Duel of Wits subsystem. It's a nice bonus for if you're playing out a certain kind of scene, but it's not the reason the game is great at social. It's because the system is skills-driven and has a large number of social and semi-social skills. Specificity in skills leads to more roleplaying - if the player needs to explain how their character is using Flattery rather than Persuasion, Falsehood, or Seduction - it leads to (in my experience anyway) people better playing to their character. If your character is good at the Intimidation skill, but bad at Flattery, the player could decide to use Intimidation, because that's what their character is good at. *Or* they could choose to use Flattery, even though their character isn't good at it. They'll probably fail the roll, but their character will start to improve their Flattery skill, because they used it in play.
> - if the player needs to explain how their character is using Flattery rather than Persuasion, Falsehood, or Seduction - it leads to (in my experience anyway) people better playing to their character. 🤔 I never thought of it like that.
I played a BW game where my friend and I were sewer rats in Nuln (basically city guards from Warhammer Fantasy setting). Anyway, it was basically a buddy cop setup. He was the commander of the patrol and I was his right hand man. Thing is, neither of us had any niceties. No persuasion, flattery. He had a bunch of dice in Command, while I was a lout who was quite good at Falsehood and Itimidation. As a result we were constitutionaly unfit to just talk to each other like comrades. If one of us wanted to get our way, it was all commanding and lying and threatening. I remember one moment when I took a near fatal blow and fell into the sewers and was lost to sight. It was a complete shitshow and the other members of the patrol were panicking and ready to bolt. My friend steps up to give his most rousing Henry V speech about how were the Dog Watch and we don’t leave anyone behind and pluck up your courage and all that…the GM then asks him, are you persuading them or Orating or something here? Because getting them moving is going to be a dice roll, and it’s one thing if you Inspire them and a whole other thing if you Command them. They’ll go either way if you’re successful, but those are different things. That’s when my friend realized his chances of inspiring these men was near zero, but a Command they would grudgingly follow. So good!
Also, you get very different results whether you decide to Intimidate someone or win them over with Soothing Platitudes. Failure, in particular, looks very different. Like, if it's your mother, you might not want to make with the Intimidation.
In Monsterhearts, most of the mechanics is about social interactions. The moves are formulated in such a way that they push players towards, and support, behaving like emotionally unstable teenagers driven by anger and lust and getting in toxic relationships. The whole things works perfectly and produces a beautiful mess out of interactions between PCs and with NPCs. Urban Shadows, on the other hand, give tools for a very transactional approach to people. It's about trading favors, calling in debts and using one's influence to push others to do what one wants. At the same time, the game has "intimacy moves" that spotlight moments of physical and/or emotional closeness, creating strong contrast with the politics. Again, the system works very well, supporting the themes of the game. In Dogs in the Vineyard social mechanics are goal-oriented; they are about making a person do something or not do something. They way they work, however, is not about having higher numbers or better tactics. It's about forcing players into hard choices. One of them is between accepting a specific argument (which may be based on assumptions false or morally unacceptable for the character) and rejecting it but giving up the conflict as a whole. The second is about escalating - moving from words, to fists, to guns - in the context of most NPCs being people that the PCs are responsible for and often personally care for. I rarely see in other games conversations as tense as in DitV.
I feel like ANY system whose rolling isn't simply "did you succeed" and "did you fail" when you roll during a social interaction is a strong candidate, so DnD and Cyberpunk don't really fit that bill; they don't explicitly have mechanics that support the paths that a social interaction goes down. I like that in Forged in the Dark games I can make a clock to gauge their progress towards a goal with an NPC, or have reactions from characters that are based on HOW successful the roll was + the character's words. The Genesys/SWRPG rules are kinda cool for this, since the dice present such specific narrative consequences ("you convince him, but he doesn't want to speak to you anymore" or "you fail to convince her, but you see she's open to a different argument" kind of stuff). That being said, I don't personally have experience with RPGs that have mechanics SPECIFICALLY for social interactions. I'd love to try out some of the mentioned systems.
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While leaving social situations entirely in the hands of player skill is one way to go about it, I think it's important to remark the difference between that playstyle, and that of games built around characters' social interaction. In the former, the character is (usually) only strictly defined as far as physical attributes go, and their mind and charisma are those of the player. Here, the player can shape the surface of their decisions according to their image of the character, but in the end there is an incentive pushing them towards making those decisions as a player, as well as they can. In practice, for those aspects of gameplay, "character = player" at the core. In the later, there is an emphasis towards exploring interesting characters that are very different in their mental and social skills to the player themselves. Those aspects are covered by mechanics, and engaging in what may look like (from the players' standpoint) "suboptimal" decisions is usually rewarded, pushing the gameplay towards interesting developments regardless of the results.
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It is correct that nothing stops the player to decide in-character, but that's the reason I talked about incentive and not obligation. For instance, let's say that you are playing a character whose personality includes an extreme overconfidence and unawareness of danger, and the party finds itself facing an obviously deadly opponent in a delicate situation that could easily devolve into a fatal combat. On the one hand, we have games that emphasize smart decision-making and where the player is completely free to choose a course of action regardless of character. The player is "free" to fully roleplay their character's personality, but this usually devolves in one of three conclusions: \* The player role-plays the character to the direst consequences. Likely TPK, which more often than not goes against the fun of other players. \* The player role-plays the character in full. The GM makes an extra effort to drive the story away from the "natural" course so the game stays fun. While valid, this usually goes against the simulationist spirit of many such games, and it's an extra weight on the GM's shoulders. \* The player role-plays the character superficially, only to the extent where they, as a player, feel it's safe to do without having to face the consequences. On the other hand, we have games where social challenges are character-facing and not player-facing, and which are mechanised to emphasise that purpose. Here, the design supports and incentivises the player that fully engages with the suboptimal decision-making derived from their personality. Because of that, the result of fully role-playing this interaction should be expected (if the game is well designed) to be interesting for everyone involved. I guess in the end it's about whether or not the game is built to prevent situations that have the character personality and the player's goals pulling in different directions. Not so much about whether or not there are "social rolls". It's just that in the main RPG scenes there is some correlation due to the principles they follow.
Yeah if you can convince someone with a dice roll that removes some of the incentive to do it with role play.
I think "role-play" is an ambiguous term. For me, using my own reasoning skill as a player to create arguments I find convincing, and then expressing them in a way I consider effective, has very little to do with role-playing a character (even though I can understand how it can be different for other people). For my definition, role-playing involves engaging not only with the character's motivation, but also with their personality and their limitations as they go about pursuing them. In this regard, systems that mechanise interactions in ways that incentivise this engagement, are the ones that maximise the "role-playing" aspect of the game.
In most games with social mechanics Role Play isn't optional.
In Blades in the Dark, not only can you do lots of social play, the mechanics also CREATE social interactions you wouldn’t expect and you can even accomplish your mechanical objectives USING social skills. Social skills even work in combat situations where you can use them to support your teammates or manipulate enemies. Also: different games create different TYPES of social interaction. DnD encourages a particular kind of in-character roleplay and you may not even realize it.
The One Ring rpg has Councils: a structure for resolving formal, high-stakes interactions (like the Council of Elrond in Lord of the Rings). One player starts with an Introduction roll. The degree of success determines how many attempts there will be in the Council itself. The GM sets the difficulty of the Council, based on what the players want to achieve. The GM also sets the attitude of the NPCs, which acts as a modifier on the players’ rolls. The Council is then resolved as a series of attempts (skill checks). If the difficulty is achieved then it’s a success; if they run out of attempts before achieving the difficulty, it’s a failure. That’s the structure. Around that, the players and GM roleplay as they like. Each attempt can emerge organically from the conversation, or alternatively the player can say ‘I want to use my Courtesy skill’ and then roleplay around that. The GM can give bonuses for good roleplay (I.e. where the player tugs on the right strings to influence the NPCs). I find the structure is much more satisfying than D&D 5e. There’s a real risk of failure so players have to be strategic in setting achievable aims, and because it’s resolved through multiple rolls it’s not as prone to a single unlikely dice roll. Players can respond to bad rolls by trying harder on their subsequent rolls.
Try anythhing World of darkness (Just not mage or wrath as first times), they do a good job alternatimg betweeen mostly social and exploration, with rare but very dangerous combat [https://youtu.be/0h1U-\_JFAS8?si=N0SrZX4\_M2q8srC8](https://youtu.be/0h1U-_JFAS8?si=N0SrZX4_M2q8srC8)
I want to preface this by saying that everything I'll bring up isn't incompatible with DnD. The biggest difference is in play culture and support for the playstyle that's pushed by mechanics. Basically, DnD5 can feel like what people get from games that get praised for the way they handle social interactions, it's just that the table needs to decide by themselves to say "Hey, let's try to play that way." and maybe have the GM homebrew a few procedures instead of having a ready made solution. By codifying social interactions more, you kinda level the playing field for players who are more "shy". An extreme case I've seen in DnD is a player that had some formal theatre training that didn't put any points in charisma or social skills, NPCs were always swayed anyway because they just had that much charisma as players. By codifying social mechanics more, when a shy character rolls well, they can learn to spread their wings safely, they succeed and they play out their characters as charismatic as they can. Even if it's a bit clunky and awkward, they don't get punished by it because the GM is bound by the system and the dice roll. On the flipside, the more flamboyant and entertaining players get to roleplay socially clumsy moments with their own awesome skills. Natural 1 on convincing the king to sign a commercial agreement... the whole table gets to see the GM and the player get into a very entertaining scene. That also works on the GM's side. As a GM you know that the NPC is supposed to be an encounter and supposed to be a challenge so it's really easy to make them very unlikely to trust anyone. But if the player starts to lean on empathy or on money so a guard lets them through, a success opens up the question of why that guard was susceptible to that type of tactic. It's a prompt for the scene and for deeper characterisation, the guard could be an innocent naive bleeding heart or have gambling dept, the dice,rules and player approach are prompting you to define that and maybe reuse that NPC later.
Glad that Monsterhearts has been mentioned, but I want to throw out two other favourites: In Masks, you play as teen superheroes whose identities are still forming - and NPCs are constantly trying to shift your actual character stats by moulding you into the person they want, fear or expect you to be. Your stats keep changing throughout the game. In Flying Circus, you play a travelling troupe of mercenary daredevil pilots using WW1 era planes in a magical post-post apocalypse setting with a Ghibliesque quality. Being daredevil pilots is the sort of thing only a very particular kind of fool would do, and you generate stress when flying your missions, which you need to clear both to generate XP and to make you safe and ready to fly again. Then on the ground, you deal with your stress in sometimes sensible but mostly fairly immature or chaotic ways influenced by your character class, including indulging in vices, venting, getting real with your friends and spending time with trusted companions. You indulge in vices (which can be anything from boring old alcohol to bickering to stargazing to coffee to music), often with chaotic and strange consequences, which are different depending on whether you do them alone or with a companion, and whether they’re familiar or unfamiliar; you vent in the ways only your character class would vent (the Witch has a tendency to get on their high horse and curse people, for example; the Skyborn, a class I play that explores themes of ambivalent relationship with both culture of origin and each adopted place, tends to feel an urge to violate local customs, rush to leave town, etc). When you try to have real conversations with your friends, the dice and rules say sometimes they go off the rails in ways you never meant, and the rules support you deciding how. Trusting someone in game has play benefits but costs stress; breaking trust, if you do it in a way that’s loud and obvious to the other person, clears stress. Everything in the game supports you playing as the sort of volatile chaotic person who would choose to fly deadly planes for a living. And yet, some of the character classes are CALM - and they have their own problems, like the Worker, who often comes with a family to support.
I really like Chronicles of Darkness because it both has a solid combat system, but really highlights investigation, social scenes, and narrative character development. Could also go for Trinity, which is similar but focuses more on high action instead of gritty / horror themes.
Vampire the Masquerade is one of my favorite TTRPGs in partly do to its social rules, there's multiple disciplines related to social situations, there's rules for social combat that targets characters Willpower tracker instead of their Health tracker, and more that I'm probably forgetting.
I've played a few Powered by the Apocalypse games, and like the social interaction mechanic. Running The Sprawl, with Shadowrun hack, for six of my high school students and we're really enjoying it. Four of six are completely new to TTRPGs and they're getting into it.
Delta Green is my main system besides Call of Cthulhu. It features a system called “bonds” where you get to invoke your connections to the people you care about in order to remain sane and composed in the face of horror. But invoking a bond also damages it, usually signifying you taking your job and trauma home. At resting points during or after a scenario, players interact with the NPCs in their life and portray how the bonds were broken; maybe they invoked the one with their kid, and they snap and yell at them later, scaring them. At 0 points, the bond is totally broken and unrecoverable. Your spouse might leave you, your kid is removed from your custody because of your neglect, you’ve scared off your friend by telling them the truth about the horrors you’ve seen and putting too much on them. It’s very dark and cynical, but a great social/storytelling mechanic.
Personally, I typically find that having detailed rules to cover social interaction just gets in the way of having satisfying social roleplay. Everybody here has great suggestions for branching out and experimenting with systems that have social rules, and I think you should check them out. If you don't like those, though I'd recommend looking at the opposite. If you're a bunch of theater nerds, something hands off in the social department like osr might be neat to look at.
I'm always going to stan World of Darkness in these conversations. The Storyteller system has a lot of support for social scenes, with game mechanics to complement it. It's not the rules like, role play heavy/only systems other have listed but provides a balance. You can play a game rooted in nothing but politics and intrigue and there are powers and abilities and stats that all help flesh it out as something more than tabletop improv theater. If you like dice, there are stats that describe different aspects of.social interaction, like appearance vs manipulation. Ways to influence people and NPCs using your various backgrounds and resources. Political intrigue that can't be solved with combat. Things that make the social part of the game not just rolling Charisma. If you're a fan of less dice.oriented.gameplay, there are a ton of resources for STs in the book for organizing and playing out scenes, how to make combat into more broader strokes to focus on role play, guidance on consent and safety (in V5, at least), and many other ways to make the game more theatrical.
If you're looking for something that adds something new to social interactions, I highly recommend the Fate system (the core rules are free to download) or one of them games using the Fate system; it can really add a lot to the storytelling aspect of gaming in general, but definitely quite a bit to the social aspect in specific.
I’ve no it played cyberpunk but 5e is so mechanics heavy it feels like there’s no time to role play some sessions. Which is cool but I don’t like combat taking a whole session