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Old 10-08-2016, 08:31 AM   #5
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: The Mechanics of Toppling an Interplanetary Empire

Quote:
Originally Posted by Seneschal View Post
Hmm, I always figured Social Engineering was more like a Tactical Shooting for reaction rolls. Instead, it seems to have quite a bit about organizations and hierarchies.
On one hand, the "tactical" part of social interaction is there, in Chapter 3, which is the longest chapter of SE. On the other hand, it may not be exactly what you're envisioning.

Some people, at least, seem to envision social interaction as very much like combat, with analogs of parries and blocks and dodges and hit points—or perhaps the Technical Grappling system, with its Control Points, would be an even closer analog. But that's not at all how the Basic Set rules for social interaction work. And it's not how I envision social interaction, so I didn't attempt to come up with a different basic mechanic. Instead, I elaborated on the mechanics of reaction rolls and Influence rolls. And that actually gave me a fairly rich game mechanical vocabulary that was entirely different from combat.

The key point is that social interaction is an attempt to get someone to choose to cooperate with you. It's not mind control, and it's not the equivalent of physically moving them around like a puppet through grappling or telekinesis. What you're doing is providing the other person with reasons, or incentives, or emotional reactions that make them want to cooperate, or at least reluctant to oppose you. Those incentives may be coercive or deceptive! But in the last analysis, they're Dirty Harry saying, "Do you feel lucky, punk?" rather than his shooting the criminal.

And when you get to the chapter on large-scale social interaction, a big part of it is the reaction rolls, and Influence rolls, and Loyalty scores for an entire population.
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