Social mechanics in D&D

This was originally written as a response post to the Angry GM’s blogpost on Social Encounters. I’d hit the character limit for the comment section and thus had to truncate a lot of what I meant to say. Below is the full post of my thoughts about the subject.

I know that in many tables, social encounters is considered the weird portion of the game. This is not because people don’t like it or are not good at it; it’s more because it seems to be something completely separate from the “game” part of D&D.

I find that many people call this a “problem” because the “mechanics” of social interaction is very different from what we expect from a game: managing resources and causing change in some variable.

Sure, in reality, this would be ridiculous – people can’t be persuaded by filling up some disposition meter, but in-game, because so many things are abstracted and there is an expectation of some progression, I think it’s fair that some people would like to seek some mechanics to help bridge that gap.

It might also be an issue of role-playing: If I want to roleplay a stuttering mess, but am generally quite sociable in real-life, I would struggle to find the “right” way to play that character. Players who are experienced in role-playing or acting may have an easier time, but I don’t think it’s fair then to ask players who aren’t as good to just slog through until they git gud.

Having played a lot of Fallen London, and having read your “Whatever Stat” post, I think an interesting way to provide a little bit of structure to social encounters is through a “social inventory”. In essence, over the course of the game, players can collect social resources as though they were items: information, secrets, jokes, poems, songs, rhetorics, etc. They then spend them in social encounters to affect the course of a conversation.

The resources would be quite vague, such that they can fit into different situations, so any time a player gets some social resource, it may go under a small number of categories, like “Secrets”, “Lore”, “Stories”, “Rhetoric”.

For the DM, it offers a lever for them to adjust and affect the game: How many stories will the Humming Bard want in exchange for a treasure map? How many Lies must you layer on a Scheming Diplomat in order to convince him to not attack the outpost? DMs can even be flexible, just because you gave the right amount of information does not mean that they’ll acquiesce to the players or a good outcome will occur. It only guarantees that a goal or an end-point has been reached. DMs can even force some resources to be spent. Maybe players have collected inaccurate info (falsities as another resource) that the DM can force the players to spend, which leads to different outcomes.

Usual role-play would not be affected very much, players and DM can still have that social interaction per normal; just that there is now some metric to somewhat gauge the likelihood of success.

Collecting these things would be no different from generating items in a dungeon. Roll a history check to understand what was written in a dusty tome, success means you collect some Lore, failure means you collected fewer lore; maybe you even misunderstood and collected “Falsities”.

I think this helps social encounters to feel like a distinct and different way to play against combat. I don’t know if groups might find this troublesome or extra work, but I thought this system was interesting to consider.