Social Engineering at the highest levels

[Joseph Paul]

How do the additional materials in SE perform when applied to heads of state, cabinet ministers, etc? Truman, Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam - how does it play out GURPS-wise with SE?

[Refplace]

It does not really add new material so much as clarify and expand on what is there. It does go into more on propaganda and getting elected and status.

[Ulzgoroth]

How does what play out, exactly?

If you're asking about a three-sided treaty negotiation, frankly, it doesn't systematize that.

[Joseph Paul]

Ulzgoroth - does the system encompass the interactions between world leaders with out breaking down or running up against arbitrary limits? Does it capture the uniqueness of dealing with that level of political power or is there basically no difference between heads of state deciding the fate of millions in occupied zones and green grocers colluding on prices?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Ulzgoroth - does the system encompass the interactions between world leaders with out breaking down or running up against arbitrary limits? Does it capture the uniqueness of dealing with that level of political power or is there basically no difference between heads of state deciding the fate of millions in occupied zones and green grocers colluding on prices?

I genuinely have no idea what 'uniqueness' or indeed 'limits' you're trying to find out about, but I suspect you'd find neither.

[Anaraxes]

Is there in fact a difference in the interpersonal social interactions between heads of state deciding the fate of millions in occupied zones and green grocers colluding on prices? If so, what differences are those that you'd expect to find?

[munin]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Ulzgoroth - does the system encompass the interactions between world leaders with out breaking down or running up against arbitrary limits? Does it capture the uniqueness of dealing with that level of political power …

The answer is "no". The most it can do is tell you who won the negotiation. The details of what a win looks like (what the actually achieved) is up to role-playing.

It might be interesting to develop a Tactical-Grappling form of negotiation. You go into a negotiation with a number of issues you want to achieve results in, make "attacks" to gain negotiating advantages (control points) on each issue, occasionally concede one issue to bargain for another issue (move control points from one issue to another), etc. Eventually either you overwhelm your opponent on all issues, or you both agree that further "wrestling" over issues isn't productive.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by munin

The answer is "no". The most it can do is tell you who won the negotiation. The details of what a win looks like (what the actually achieved) is up to role-playing.

It might be interesting to develop a Tactical-Grappling form of negotiation. You go into a negotiation with a number of issues you want to achieve results in, make "attacks" to gain negotiating advantages (control points) on each issue, occasionally concede one issue to bargain for another issue (move control points from one issue to another), etc. Eventually either you overwhelm your opponent on all issues, or you both agree that further "wrestling" over issues isn't productive.

Actually, no, there's a little more to it than that. See Alliances and Diplomacy, pp. 65-66, for discussion of (a) two parties competing to offer an alliance to a third, and offering concessions that result in some number of favorable arrangements, and (b) use of Law as an Influence skill to form lasting alliances.

I saw people discussing the idea of adapting some form of the combat rules to treat negotiation as combat. But I just flatly rejected that, for two reasons:

(1) GURPS already had a substantial body of different rules, the reaction roll and Influence rules, and I wanted to build on them and see how much could be done with them as a base;

(2) Combat and persuasion are profoundly different activities, and trying to use the same rules for both, with those rules being the combat rules, seems to me to deny the whole nature of persuasion.

Let me amplify that second point. Influence rolls cover a spectrum of situations. There is outright coercion or duress, embodied in Intimidation rolls. There is fraud or undue influence, embodied in Fast-Talk rolls. There are forms of undue influence that depend on producing an emotional reaction: Sex Appeal, Savoir-Faire, and Streetwise can all be that. There is genuine voluntary consent based on making an overall good impression, which those last three can also cover. And then there is actual reasoned negotiation, represented by Diplomacy.

But in every one of those cases, you have some process of (a) one person representing an option and (b) the other person choosing to accept the option. If you didn't care about choice, you wouldn't, for example, make threats; you'd just physically overpower the other person (assuming you could). But if you say, instead, "I could beat you to a pulp/cut your throat/bomb your cities to rubble, and if you don't cooperate/submit, I will," you're getting the other person to choose to do as you say. The coercive aspect comes from one of the options being that you make them worse off. At the other end, with Diplomacy, you're offering to make them better off, and if they don't accept, they go back to their reaction roll; your offer doesn't prejudice them against you.

Anyway, I don't think this is readily assimilated to "I make well targeted moves and reduce their capacity to negotiate." That could work for an adversarial model of influence/persuasion/negotiation. But not all social interaction is adversarial! Even at Yalta, if Roosevelt and Churchill didn't go along with him, Stalin couldn't actually hurt them! He wasn't in a position to attack their forces, he certainly couldn't change sides and ally with Hitler, and he was hardly going to say, "Well, give me X, or I'll order my forces to stop resisting the Germans." What he had to do was either offer quid pro quo or convince them that the action he wanted to take would help their goals as well as his. And that has a strong aspect of Diplomacy, even if Stalin applied duress whenever he could.

I'd also say that reduce "negotiation" to the quantitative measure of "how many control points do I have" eliminates the whole roleplaying element, where you have to figure out what the other person wants and how to offer it to them and how much they're willing to give up to get it.

[GM Joe]

As an aside, it would be great if you could expand that into a Designer's Notes article for Medium, as SJ Games has doing lately.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by GM Joe

As an aside, it would be great if you could expand that into a Designer's Notes article for Medium, as SJ Games has offering doing lately.

Can you point me at that? Currently I'm focused on my (behind schedule) current book, but I might be able to come up with suitable content once that's done; at any rate, it can't hurt to see the offer.