Steve Jackson Games Forums - GURPS Social Engineering

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty (Post 1303553)

Honestly, I have yet to play through a "social combat" that felt at all natural -- every time, the surrealism of it pulls me out of the verisimilitude. The craziest must've been a few months ago, in Exalted, when we had to convince a mayor to sleep with a call girl (long story), and I experienced the "Mass Social Combat rules." It was really weird to feel like I was being yanked out of the RPG and into a wargame, especially when the whole idea is that it's a form of social interaction (which usually leads to more immersion, not less).

Some of this may well be that we're already used, as role-players, to shifting partly or fully from "telling a story by consensus" mode into "tactical wargame" mode when fists, swords and bullets start flying. Something like HeroQuest tries, I think, to make an explicit distinction between the two modes, but to my mind that just makes the transition more jarring.

I imagine that the reason for this is the long shadow of D&D, the wargames rules that grew a bare minimum carapace of extra material to support the non-wargaming style of play. Almost every game since has treated combat as the uniquely complex thing, and the ones that didn't have started with a combat system and expanded its use to cover other sorts of conflict.

But because we're used to throwing numbers around where combat's concerned, we've got used to what they might mean - if I trade off a penalty to my attack against more damage if I hit, I have some idea of what I'm talking about (perhaps I'm waiting for a chance to hit a vital spot). What would the equivalent be in a fast-talk attempt, or an attempt to embarrass the Countess at her ball? One can come up with explanations, but they don't leap to mind the way they do with fighting.