GURPS Social Engineering
 

Make you buy the book?
Oh no, I could not do that!
That is the book's job.

— Some hack

Wow, GURPS Social Engineering has only been available from e23 for a few hours and already my announcement has been scooped a couple of times. Such is the the power of word of mouth, memes, propaganda, and plain old advertising. Which are, of course, but a few of the topics that Bill Stoddard explores in his latest work.

Ever felt that the rules should give "face time" the same loving detail as face-punching, or preferred deception and manipulation to picking locks and planting bombs, or simply wanted more out of your PC's points in social skills? If so, this one's for you! From little white lies to getting elected (wait . . .), from sugary-sweet romance to starting fights, Social Engineering organizes and rationalizes everything ever written for social interactions in GURPS, adds tons of new options, and demonstrates how to use it all in play. Topics include social advantages (like Rank and Status), disadvantages (such as Odious Personal Habits), and skills; their applications, both expected and extraordinary; and how to square it all with GM intent and player approach. In true GURPS tradition, the advice crosses genre boundaries, and even pushes past the human factor to account for the superhuman and the nonhuman. If people actually talk in your games, you need this book.

That isn't hyperbole, either. This is an 88-page monster. Everything is here. If you don't believe me, then take a look at the preview. Why yes, that index does have entries for economic monopolies, truth drugs, and taunting . . .

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

I might have to put this second from the top of my wish list, behind only the aforementioned face-punching book.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

The most important thing I can say about Social Engineering is that it's more than a supplement -- it's essentially an upgrade for GURPS. Much like Powers upgraded GURPS' exotic and supernatural advantages, and Martial Arts upgraded the combat system, Social Engineering takes the existing GURPS social rules and expands them with amazing detail and guidance.

A GURPS game that uses Social Engineering will have an easier time offering rich, deep, and exciting social interactions than one that doesn't. It's not just an add-on -- it's one of the rare supplements that mixes with the Basic Set to bring GURPS to a new level.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

It could be a hardcover by the sounds of it.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Kromm already pretty much said no which is what I expected based on previous postings.
It is about half the size they want for a hardback, but if sales do really well then it could get a softcover which would be awesome.
Probably have to sell about 600 PDF based on what he said, maybe as low as 500 but needs to do at least as well as Tactical shooting which is at 597 sales on E23.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

143 in the first day.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Tactical Shooting sold 92 on release Day, and 167 by the following day. 287 after 8 days, 385 after 31 days, and at 600 now, it's only 14 behind Gun-Fu which has sold 614 in a little over 2 years, where as TS has been out a little under 9 months! (GF sold 467 in it's first year)

Gun Fu has not had the SC treatment (yet has more sales than TS), so it isn't just about the numbers! GF is smaller, but is bigger than each of DF1-4 whic got the SC treatment -but there were probably other factors in the decision to SC those.

It's tricky to tell for us really, but first day sales of 143 is an excellent start, lets see if it can make over 200 today, and over 300 by next Friday!

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Low-Tech sold 267 on the first day.
Tactical Shooting sold 92 on the first day.

I guess opening day numbers measure "anticipation" more than future sales. We'll see.

Ts

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Well said. That is why I've been speaking of SE as a core GURPS book.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

And that's why I would buy it in hardcover -- to round out my core GURPS library (I have also recently bought duplicates of the four core books in pdf for convenience). That said, if they were to start thinking about it, I would suggest considering some additional material to fill it out a bit.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Months of "When Social Engineering comes out, it will cover X in greater detail", and when it finally comes out, it doesn't even rate a mention on the DI? or even Twitter? Wait! I know! They released it with a Tactical Shooting cover! Happy Hallowe'en!!

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

There's a routine for this. I think it goes something like this: when a new book is released, Steven posts about it more or less immediately on the e23 forum, Kromm posts about it by the end of the day on the GURPS forum, there's a DI post on the following Monday, and that post is echoed on Twitter and Facebook at some point that day. That appears to hold for pretty much every book no matter how hotly anticipated it may or may not be. However, there may be incidental mentions by individual staffers; frex, Steven mentioned SE last night on his own twitter feed.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

For as long as I can remember, the DI announcement for new e23 items has been the Monday after release. As far as I know, that's still the plan this time.

We tend not to do much same-day plugging of e23 items via Twitter, although I'll probably do a mention later today. (I'm still doing research into exactly how well Social Engineering did its first day.)

I heard rumors that Bill Stoddard was planning on going door-to-door to every residency on Earth, making sure the word got out... but those plans might have been tweaked as being somewhat impractical. :-)

EDIT: NINJA'D!!!

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Now I will have to give it a good reading and then figure out how to add epic feats of mass manipulation to my GURPS Exalted conversion...

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Social Engineering is as much a core GURPS release as the other "rules tool kits": Martial Arts, Powers, Thaumatology, etc. However, what determines hardcover eligibility is page count, not core status. For instance, we consider Psionic Powers to be as important as Magic, but we can't justify releasing it in hardback – it's too short. At 88 pages, Social Engineering has 55% of the necessary page count for consideration. We would need to double the interior (non-endpapers) content, not merely add "some additional material to fill it out a bit"! Needless to say, that isn't in the cards.

As I said in another post, it is about the numbers, but there are lots of numbers. A set of values among which no one figure is especially unremarkable can put the kibosh on a print release. On the other hand, small print runs for convention sales fall outside the math I did (in effect, we're our own distributor and retailer there, and have been known to ship the books in staff luggage!). Deliberate marketing efforts are another exception; marketing money is hardly a huge slush fund, but there is some cash for marketing GURPS, and it's often better spent printing a high-profile product that we can sell than on, say, ads.

That is correct. They're important to our morale, but we don't start making plans around anything less than first-month or first-quarter sales.

Our feeds and blogs are mostly queued in advance. As it happens, the Social Engineering release date was moved up from November 3 to October 27 on . . . October 25. So it jumped the queue to be the week's e23 release, which is fine, but that doesn't let it jump the news queues. I suspect that its news spotlight is a week away, as originally planned. Which is fine by us. As I said, we look at first-month and first-quarter figures, so release-day sales aren't the be-all, end-all, and two kicks (release-day hype and release-announcement hype) are better than one.

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I wonder if people are conflating hard cover with hard copy. Those terms might seem very similar to someone outside publishing, but to someone in it, it's the difference between the flesh and the spirit.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

That's possible! What we call a "hardback," "hardcover," or "hardbound" book is a printed work with a rigid cardboard cover; the minimum length fluctuates between 160 and 176 pages, depending on (highly commoditized) print prices. What we call a "softback," "softcover," or "paperback" book means a printed work with a flexible cover of heavy paper or light cardboard; the minimum length is in the neighborhood of 80 pages. Both are "hard copies," but the latter term is one that bookkeepers, lawyers, and spies use more often than publishers. Our preferred collective term is "printed book" or "printed product."

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

That's mostly a matter of how Psionic Powers got published, though, not due to it not having enough content. Psionic Powers + Psionic Campaigns + Psis + Psi-Tech easily fits within the 'hardback size range' (it comes to over 200 pages when you include everything in the PDFs, which should come out to around 180 after removing the extra covers, introductions, etc).

I don't expect you to release Psionic Powers in hardback, but if you had an infinite amount of money to spend on bashing the different Psionic Powers books together you could certainly still meet your length-criteria for hardback release.

Sadly, you can't quite do the same with Gun Fu/Tactical Shooting. You'd need about one more supplement to make it hardback-sized. Adding in something like the Firearms chapter from High-Tech (or just expanding the ones already in TS), or adding in the ever-wanted 'Gun Design System' might flesh out that 'potential hardback'.

You would need to find a lot more stuff to add to Social Engineering to justify it as a hardback. Not sure what you could add. Maybe something like a City Stats take on organizations in general, though that'd be, what, 10 pages at most? May be best fit as a Pyramid article. Social Engineer templates could be nice, or maybe Social Styles. Eh.

Anyways, my point was that if you had infinite funds you could bash some things together in order to expand book-length into full-on hardcover-size, so it's not entirely a matter of content. It's also that the PDF model means you're selling things that might have been hardbacks 'back in the day' in bite-sized chunks. And hey, I'm happy with that! I like my PDFs, and I've been gobbling them up. If this 'bite-sized chunk' model means you release more cool stuff, I'm all for it, even if it means fewer hardbacks (and I have doubts that it does).

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

OK, I mean't 'it's not just about the PDF sales numbers' - which is the only 'number' we really have available to base such speculations on!

Out of curiosty, what sort of range does (Books printed) ,for a 'reasonable' first print run, have these days for GURPS?

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The book is nice. I'm already going to use the expanded reaction tables, especially for pre- and peri- combat reaction rolls. :)

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You know, when I first read this, I thought he was talking about rules for using Twitter in GURPS. Which would be in line with the book, though really doesn't need any special rules.

As an aside, a roll against Games (Online Roleplaying) (each one is a familiarity; one point is usually World of Warcraft and either another combat one or Second Life) and some money (say, $20) let you design an avatar well enough to count as having an Attractive Appearance. Just throwing that out there, since I have seen folks react well to a well-designed avatar on a virtual world with no other interaction.

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I think I mean 'cover', the kind that go *knock knock knock* when you rap them with your knuckles.

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SE does have rules for virtual Avatars!

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Yes, it does, but it deliberately sidesteps Avatar Appearance.

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One thing I'd like to see (if someone can give me a page reference, if it IS in there...) is cultural styles. We already have Cultural Familiarity, so something to fit into a non-native culture.

We have styles for martial arts (unarmed and various pre-firearm weapons), for firearms, for magic... How about culture, or other social interactions...?

(Dumb idea? Well, it's just off the top of my head. :-P)

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

I mentioned the same idea up the thread a bit.

Social Styles would neatly fit into the other FNORD Styles ideas, but I'm not sure how it'd work. I mean, give one example of a 'Social Style'. The closest I can think of would be something like:

High-Born Nobility [3]
Skills: Savior-Faire (High Society); Dancing.

And that'd about be it. Not sure what the Style Perk would grant, either. These things aren't usually formally taught.

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That's because extreme physical beauty as such is effectively free on the Internet. It's not even a 1-point perk to have a gorgeous avatar; it's a feature.

Do you know the expression "Hollywood ugly"? It's the other side of the same coin, I think.

Bill Stoddard

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Go on Second Life sometime with a default avatar, then go on some other time with one on which someone spent time and money. There is a difference in reactions, believe me.

Much of Hollywood beauty is due to Contact (Makeup artist; Makeup-18; 15 or less; Usually Reliable), which one could indeed take as the other side of the same coin. It's astonishing just how unappealling many stars are without their makeup, even in natural lighting (where the photographs will turn out OK without it). Granted, even then, there aren't many with below Average Appearance, but there are many with Average.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

"Spent time and money" is represented mainly as Fashion Sense (Digital), and is discussed at some length. Though you could use a variant of Artist as a complementary skill to your online interaction skill, I suppose.

Bill Stoddard

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

I know about Fashion Sense (Digital), though I tend to think of something innate for Fashion Sense rather than showing off mad skills with an online medium, which is in effect what is going on here, much like Hollywood stars and the Makeup skill. Tomay-to, tomah-to, in the end, since you'd probably dump about the same number of points either way.

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Heh, I like this detail - the bonus is based on how much your skill exceeds your current job's minimum, not on how much it exceeds your new job's minimum. Further, you apparently don't need to meet the minimum requirements for your new job!

The Peter Principle, embodied in GURPS rules.

Suffice to say, I don't see anything at all unrealistic about this rule:)

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Today I realised that the natural human reluctance to hire people smarter than oneself explains both the Peter Principle and its stronger version, the Dilbert Principle.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Huh. Thinking about my group, there are at least two who I hired explicitly because they're probably smarter than me. The third I promoted to a grade higher than myself, 'cause he's just that good.

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You're doing it right. What sort of business are you in?

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I manage the clean room development for a major hard-disc-drive company. Group of about ten; seven engineers and three techs. Five PhDs, one MS, one BS.

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First rate people hire first rate people. Second rate people hire third rate people. Forget who that's a quote from.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Sounds good. I formed the theory after a long time dealing with UK branches of US software companies. When those are formed from scratch, rather than by buying an existing company, the people sent from the USA to set up tend to be salesmen. They hire more salesmen, become established as the head of the operation, and then need to hire more technical staff. And they don't like to hire ones who know more than them about the technical stuff. In a hierarchical, competitive organisation, there's motivation not to hire people who will out-compete you.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Right, and that's covered -- a sufficiently attractive avatar may be worth as much as +1 to reactions. But it would be a mistake to transpose the whole range of Appearance to digital avatars. As Bill says, when it comes to avatars, the difference between "default" and "attractive custom job" is far greater than that between "attractive custom job" and "amazingly beautiful custom job." In the latter case, people looking at both are impressed with the artistic work that went into the avatar, but they won't react to a transcendentally beautiful avatar the same as they would to a transcendentally beautiful person -- just like they wouldn't react to (e.g.) a minotaur avatar the same as they would to a living minotaur walking down the street. It's hard to be anything but blase about online avatars, hence capping the reaction bonus at +1.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

I looked, and it is not covered other than Fashion Sense, which I already acknowledged; my analogy is closer to Makeup. I guess I put an Advantage on my personal character sheet instead of my super skill. (And there's some roll to not look like a noob on WoW or SL for the first time, but that's more Acting. Experienced folks on the virtual worlds can spot the noobs.) I don't see anyone trying to transpose the Appearance range at all, so I don't understand why you said this.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Perhaps because in your reply to my comment to you, you said, Yes, it does, but it deliberately sidesteps Avatar Appearance. Including using the capital A.

Bill Stoddard

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

So far, it looks useful indeed. I had to chuckle when reading the section on complementary skills, because all I could think of was Randolph Churchill's comment about Winston: "My father spent the best years of his life writing his extemporaneous speeches."

EDIT: I might add that I dearly wanted to be on the playtest for this one -- social engineering is essentially my professional stock in trade -- but knew I wouldn't have sufficient time. I'm glad to see it turned out so well.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Is there a reason making a good custom avatar and generally not acting newbish can't be represented by making a skill roll to get a reaction bonus? Like say... admin to get a bonus with a red tape monkey?

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

That is a sensible point. The playtest involved a good dose of personal involvement, time and effort —at least for the active members.

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I've found one odd thing:

You round the average of the Reputations towards ten? That seems a bit... odd, considering the fact that Reputation normally can't be higher than 4. Why not just say 'round up'? Or did you intend to mean 'rounded towards neutrality', which would be 'rounded towards zero'?

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

As a more positive and hopefully less controversial aside, this book has a good index. I know it's minor, but if you want every use of, say, the Politics skill, you can find it in back easily. I assume kudos are for RPK.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

The latter. Please submit this as an erratum!

Bill Stoddard

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Done. Happily enough, that was the only error that I've noticed so far.

I would have liked some more Variant Reputation examples to clear some things up, but I'm going to make another thread about that.

EDIT: Check that, there are some minor errors in the bookmarks. For example, Chapter 4's bookmark reads "The Organization• Man". No idea why. It happens on three chapter headings (Chapter 1, Chapter 4, and Chapter 6). If I go to rename the bookmark, the • disappears and turns into an extra space instead. Weird.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Actually, Nikki Vrtis usually does the index for e23 supplements -- including this one.

Thanks for the kind words; I'll be sure to pass along the compliment.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

GURPS indexes are almost always good. My players have already commented on that and the logical structure of the books. Now to find out if they actually like the frickin' rules...

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Please pass along mine as well. Indexes are really important and often overlooked or given shortshrift by other companies. I really appreciate the hard work an attention to detail of a good index.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

There is no • in my bookmarks, though there is a double space in chapter 3 and chapter 6.

I have seen too many books without an index. Books that have become nearly useless because of it. And though I haven’t looked at this index yet, I have had great use of indexes in other GURPS books. So please pass my thanks for her good work along too.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Eh, decided that my question fits here better than the thread I just made.

Bill, can you give a bit more of a description of what 'Dominant/Unique' and 'Legitimate' mean in regards to Variant Reputation?

Would a massive corporation that absolutely dominates its industry (say, Microsoft ten years ago) qualify as being Dominant/Unique? What if it has some significant competition, but is still massively powerful (say, Coca-Cola/Pepsi)?

Would Legitimacy only apply to Governmental-type organizations, or ones created by Governments? Could a Corporation ever have 'Legitimacy'? What about religious institutions? I could see an argument for having the Catholic Church be 'Legitimate', but not Protestantism in some eras and locations, or Scientology being not-Legitimate in much of the modern world today.

I'm guessing the 'Benefits of Rank' treat organizations as being certain qualities of Patron not because the organization itself might actually be that size, but because that's about the amount of aid that organization can give to an individual. For example, Rank in the CIA might only give benefits at the x100,000 level even if the CIA really has assets at the x1,000,000 level or more. This is similar to how it's described in Action, I believe.

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In some layout programs that is a symbol used for formatting a space.
Its probably a carry over from what was used to create the book that is not being interpreted correctly by your reader.
Try looking at MS Word with the format codes visible sometime. Ugly.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Odd that the • would show up on Adobe Acrobat but not other readers, seeing as Adobe Acrobat is the reference reader for PDFs.

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Massively powerful would not be enough for this. You could have two massively powerful organizations, or several. No one of them would be in a position to make decisions and not concern itself with what its competitors did.

Religious organizations may offer a better set of examples. Have you seen international statistics on religious diversity? The United States, for example, has a very high religious diversity score; our single biggest church, the Catholic, has only about 25% of the population. On the other hand, there are countries where not just a majority, but a massive majority of the population is Catholic, or Lutheran, or Orthodox. I wouldn't take a simple majority as enough for "dominance," but if basically everyone assumes that the other people they know will automatically be Lutheran—if "Protestant or Catholic" isn't even a question most people think of, for example—then you have dominance, even if there's a small percentage Jewish, or atheistic, or Baptist, or what have you.

I'm not sure if I'd call Microsoft an example of dominance, because "PC or Mac?" was always a meaningful question. But that's a factually debatable point and one a GM could judge for their own campaign.

I wouldn't say it's only for governmental organizations; nor, on the other hand, that it's automatically for governmentally created organizations, because all through the 19th century corporations had to be chartered by state legislatures, and thus were created by governments, but I don't see them as having had legitimacy in that sense. Governmental sanction is the normal way in which an organization acquires legitimacy in many societies. But I would not want to rule out the possibility that in a tribal or anarchistic setup, there might be some nongovernmental organization that people in general regarded as acting in the service of society as a whole rather than of some private interest group: perhaps a religious body, or a wide-ranging society of bards and heralds, or a wilderness preservation organization or ecological organization.

I suppose when you come down to it, "legitimacy" more or less amounts to "of course you have to cooperate with them/do what they ask: they're from the government/the Inquisition/the college of ollamhs."

And, of course, a government can come to be seen as acting in the service of private interest groups at the expense of the society as a whole, and can even cease to be legitimate. See for example the French Revolution. You might even imagine a society where the enforcers were all seen as agents of private interests, and only some sort of judges or negotiators were seen as legitimate. See for example early Iceland or perhaps premonarchic Israel.

Bill Stoddard

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Thanks for the excellent reply, Bill. That's pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

The 'PC or Mac' question was meaningful, sure, but Microsoft Windows only recently dropped below 90% market share. That's hugely dominant, in most uses of the term. Further, most (non-Mac users) would usually just assume that everyone else was also using Windows; most of the time, that was a good assumption. I'm not sure how it's 'factually debatable' as to whether Microsoft dominated the market, unless I'm still not entirely clear on what you mean by 'dominate'. Would 'Able to completely ignore competition' be a good qualification?

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Point in fact, Microsoft couldn't completely ignore the competition. Several years back Microsoft attempt to bundle internet explorer with their base OS. Macintosh complained to the government and the government slapped Microsoft down with a big 'ol pimp hand, letting them know they couldn't act with impunity (and violate monopoly laws).

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Microsoft would never be a good example of an organization able to completely ignore competition as they found it necessary to pursue aggressive measures against their rival publishers at pretty much all times.

The debatability of their market domination would involve defining "the market"; there are numerous market segments within the software industry, and sorting them out objectively involved years of court proceedings for some standards of "objective".

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

To be clearer, I wasn't suggesting that Microsoft could ignore its competitors. I was saying that, since the standard meaning of 'dominate' doesn't entirely apply or is simply too subjective, whether 'capability to ignore competitors' would be a better qualification.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Well, I should note that I have never bought a computer made by anyone but Apple, so my perspective on this may not be typical.

As to dominating the market, though, you specifically cite "Microsoft ten years ago," which implies that Microsoft did not have that solid a lock on its line of business, as it lost it fairly quickly. I would hesitate to call that "dominance." It's not like Catholicism in Catholic countries, which tend to stay Catholic generation after generation. Being the most successful firm in an industry, even the overwhelmingly most successful, may or may not be "dominance": it depends on whether you actually control the industry in such a way as to exclude potential rivals, or you just have the top position because your customers willingly give it to you. See William Baumol's work on the theory of contestable markets.

I think I would call this a GM judgment call, though, and I would say it reflects your personal model, as GM, of how the economy works in your campaign setting.

Bill Stoddard

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

I mentioned ten years ago mainly due to the emergence of an entire new market (smartphones, tablets) happened a bit after that, which 'eroded' Microsoft's market share from greater than 90% to about 89.5%, as of February of this year. I wouldn't call that 'lost if fairly quickly' - it was simply more clearly in a dominating position ten years ago, while Apple was still futzing around and hadn't quite got its legs back under itself.

Alright, that's a good enough definition of 'dominance' for me to use, now. Just wanted to be clear what qualified or not - seems like corporations will only rarely be able to claim Dominance, just like they can only rarely claim Legitimacy.

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FYI: 236 on e23 for Thursday and Friday, and that's without any help from the Daily Illuminator.

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I'm planning very soon to run a TL3 fantasy game with more than a little politicking, specifically the PCs will be (possibly) gathering internal and external support for and subsequently leading a rebellion. Although knowing my players, they may be just as likely to turn in the plotters for a fat reward.

Now, I had two questions about Social Engineering for those who have had a chance to flip through it:

1) How much help will SE be for a game like this?
2) Should I postpone character creation a couple of weeks until I can get SE?

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

Lots.

No. SE may lead you to add some nuance to a number of traits, but it's less about genuinely new traits and modifiers thereto, and more about detailed ways of handling existing skills and rules.

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Quite a bit. Possibly; it doesn't radically revise the skills you need for this kind of campaign, but it does add some new uses for skills which can affect which ones you might expect to use, and it has some new techniques and perks. But mostly it's a book of "this is the right way to do X" advice.

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You might want to allow character adjustments after you have a chance to read it, just in case you spot something that you want to recommend to one of the players. But it won't call for major changes.

Bill Stoddard

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I agree. It will be very helpful, but it shouldn't have a large effect on character creation.

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I was curious because preview included some examination and reworking of Rank. If other social traits were similarly treated, it might make adopting during play, or even just between character creation and play, a little bumpy for such a social game.

I tend to allow alterations to character sheets through the first few sessions, anyway, but I do really want to read this before getting into play, at least. It may be serious scrounging time.

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Social Engineering hit 300 already :)
Making it in the top 100 GURPS books for E23 and in the Top 20 for the year.
Not bad for a book that's been out less then a week

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

And it's got a good chance of making the Top 100 (of any books) on e23 within the week!

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Will this book help me play Humphrey Appleby?

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I intend to make my contribution to the Top 100 goal next Monday my time (Sunday in the States).

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I'll note that Yes, Minister made the bibliography.

What surprised me about that is that during the playtest, it came up that Bill hadn't seen it before. I'd have thought that would have been a long-time favorite of his.

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It was a television program. My exposure to television is pretty sporadic. I'm really mainly print oriented.

Bill Stoddard

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

It exists in book form, in the form of Hacker's diaries.

Edit: Amazon has it.

Among the praise for the book:

'Its closely observed portrayal of what goes on in the

corridors of power has given me hours of pure joy'

- Rt Hon. Margaret Thatcher MP

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

A very late bump, because this doesn't really fit elsewhere...

On the GURPS products update page the blurb says they specifically did not want to make Social Engineering into a "social combat system". This struck me as noteworthy, because I wondered why that would ever be an expectation in the first place.

Then I heard that DnD apparently put out a set of rules that basically were exactly that: combat, but with reputation instead of physical attributes.

Here's a summary, on a different forum, to aid in comparison. Makes for interesting reading - it appears this was an article supplement to 4th ed. rather than a core rule.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

I get what your mean here. Personally, I prefer the GURPS Social Engineering approach.

Defining the book literally as a "social combat system", with mechanics substituting Hit Points/Health for Rank/Status (for instance) would have been . . . unsuitable —for saying the least.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

I'm still working my way through Social Engineering, and I like the content. I also think it's interesting to see what other, more abstract, mechanics are out there, especially as RPGs have usually under played social interactions for simple combat.

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

SG: Pretty much. In many ways, Social Engineering is the GURPS equivalent of "a social combat book," inasmuch as that means anything in GURPS -- but after what systems like d20 and Exalted did to redefine that term, it was important to ensure that no one thought we were implementing a "take the standard combat system, but just redefine everything social terms" approach.

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).

Re: GURPS Social Engineering
 

That was how the rules for HeroQuest struck me: There was exactly the same abstract skeleton of contestation for combat, diplomacy, and every other sort of opposed action, and the idea was that you played out the skeleton, determined the outcome, and only then made up the narrative to explain it. I found that I had no interest in running a campaign under those rules, and I was at pains to avoid anything like them in GURPS Social Engineering. What I wanted was the reverse sequence: You narrate the action, and then you decide what game mechanic represents it, and then you determine the outcome. Which, if you think about it, is the way GURPS handles most things.

I suppose you could do a "mass social engineering" system, along the lines of Mass Combat, and maybe even attached to it ("I want to propagandize the enemy city's populace into opening the gates"). It might even be interesting. But that's not what you see characters in a story or film doing, most of the time. You see Rorschach breaking the fingers of a bar patron who mouthed off to him while he asks the crowd questions. . . .

Bill Stoddard