[Joe]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Yeah, I saw people proposing that sort of thing, but I find the whole idea alien. The structure of combat mechanics makes a fair amount of sense to me as a stylization of the process of combat; but I find it hard to imagine why anyone would think that the process of social interaction and persuasion could be stylized in the same way.

I have a lot of sympathy for this view - stylizing some social interactions as tactical minigames can feel oddly abstract. (I should also reiterate how much I enjoy GURPS Social Engineering for other reasons.)

Originally Posted by AchyuthC

Yep, I agree with you Joe! Combat is awesome and exciting of course, but I love the idea of exploring other areas of the game to see what can be made mechanically interesting about those as well.

You say this better than I did. I would put it like this: collective storytelling is great fun, but can also be hard work to sustain all the time. Having good rules for tactical combat - which we really do in GURPS - is great in part because it offers you a time in which the game mechanics do a lot of the work of storytelling for you: they automatically create little micro-situations in which the players have to make meaningful choices, there is a lot of dice rolling and thus the chance of surprising and unexpected things happening; the stakes are usually quite high - and so on. Thus combat really works well in a roleplaying setting, and most campaigns see a lot of it.

I'd love to have some GURPS mechanics that would do the same thing for social interactions - that way, I could run a campaign that emphasized social stuff rather than fighting, but was still tactically dense, with the game mechanics doing a lot of the storytelling work for us, as above.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I think a social conflict minigame that doesn't resemble combat mechanics might be as or more satisfying. But combat engines come easily to the RPG designer's hand, so...

I think this is probably right. The idea of doing "rolling to hit", doing "damage" etc seems odd in this context. Some of the systems I've sen have used metaphors of positioning rather than destruction, but none have really cracked it, in my view. Fun challenge, though.