Social Interaction: Working Solutions
Because politics is the continuation of war by other means.
A while back, I did a series of articles identifying issues in how social interaction tends to be modelled in TTRPGs. Since then, I have developed, playtested, and iterated a set of adjustments to the ACKS II ruleset to expand the scope of social interaction to be, if not quite comparable to combat, rich enough to anchor gameplay around it (e.g. having a session of intrigue around negotiating a treaty, marriage, surrender, etc.) and mechanically deep enough to be robust in handling nonmechanical actions (e.g. a player trying to enrage a lord). These rules could be used with some modification in any sort of B/X game; I don’t claim deep knowledge of AD&D but I expect they wouldn’t be hard to adapt there either.
That’s not to say that I expect anyone to spend a session making reaction rolls and giving florid speeches! Rather, such gameplay might involve researching different lords’ personalities to determine the best approach to ally them to your growing kingdom, investigating their goals by divination to frame your own arguments, and creating opportunities to get them alone so that you can flatter and seduce one, bribe another, and kidnap the last’s family members to coerce and threaten him. And because of the expanded set of options, while a “face” character will be broadly able to interact effectively with anyone, there is room as well for less specialized characters to connect strongly within smaller niches.
I made three major classes of changes in doing this: first, I differentiated attempts to modify a relationship, and attempts to persuade someone to perform a favor, so that long-term and short-term interactions can be handled separately. Second, I expanded the available approaches to more holistically cover potential modes of interaction, and tied them to character traits so that the effectiveness of a given approach depends on the target. Third, I expanded and generalized the list of applicable modifiers to interaction. This is a moderate increase in complexity over the standard form used in ACKS II, but I was able to largely eliminate the tables of individual modifiers by approach in favor of widely applicable modifiers plus brief special rules to distinguish each approach, which in my experience make it much easier to engrain and memorize. Even so, these are still in playtesting, and I hope further revision can tighten the framework and trim unnecessary components, but given that this post is already coming out very much later than I had hoped I felt the need to move ahead with it. Apologies for the delay, but I do think the extra couple months have refined it a lot.
As ever, if you enjoy this, let me know! And if you have feedback, likewise, these rules are still in playtesting and still being iterated on, and input from those fresh to the ideas is valuable.
