Social Engineering

[Rotwang]

Here are a few things on my wish list.

Social Traits
Obviously guidelines on social traits that influence reaction rolls should be given (which Advantages give bonuses to social skills, how they stack with other Advantages/skill bonuses etc.). But it would also be useful to have some advice of creating realistic v. cinematic socially powerful characters. For example it can be difficult to get a sense of a character’s power based on CPs when most of the points are in social traits. Generally what I do (when creating a Patron for the PCs or something) is to make a character at some reasonable point level excluding all social traits, then add in Rank, Status, Wealth, etc. afterwards. Some advice and guidance along those lines could be useful to the topic of personal interactions.

NPC Relationships
This might be a little off topic, but I’d love to see it in this book or another: as someone mentioned it is a pain to generate and keep track of all the public/private relations of NPCs which are needed as the background landscape for any game highlighting social interaction. Tables, charts, graphs etc. (think GUPRS Space planetary design) and corresponding advice would be awesome!

Cross Class Relations
Discussion of interaction across social classes would be useful. Say, my noble needs to hire a couple of thugs to “take care of” a political rival; what are his penalties to social skills rolled at because he has Savior-Faire (High Society) and the assassins have Streetwise? Should he be rolling Streetwise even if it’s at default? Should he have remembered to spend some points on Streetwise if he had planned to have some shady dealings? Etc...

[Zed]

Originally Posted by Gizensha

Although I'd love to see negotiation (Preferably that would be able to be applied equally well to haggling over the price of an antique as negotiating a peace treaty) be given as in depth a mechanical coverage as, say, the Combat Lite rules?

It will be interesting for sure. I like what GURPS has done with social mechanics so far. So a detailed treatment will be awesome.

The difference between combat and social interaction is that social interaction is not zero-sum. Debating in politics aside, head to head interactions are only considered successful if both sides feel like they 'won'. It gets interesting when you think about competing for lucrative deals against others where you are trying to impress the buyer, not your opponents.

Will there be: GURPS: Social Engineering - Level 1 Tech-support?
Talk about social combat!

[Gizensha]

Originally Posted by Zed

It will be interesting for sure. I like what GURPS has done with social mechanics so far. So a detailed treatment will be awesome.

The difference between combat and social interaction is that social interaction is not zero-sum. Debating in politics aside, head to head interactions are only considered successful if both sides feel like they 'won'.

Oh, absolutely. And if both sides subjectively think they got the better (or even just good) deal, then things are great.

However - And this might just be me mistakenly conflating how much a focus a game session has on a single event and the drama of that event (Although - Combat tends to be more dramatic than contests of skills which tend to be more dramatic than quick contests), I can't help but worry that if I'm ever basing an adventure around peace negotiations to avoid a civil war, things might be a bit of an anticlimax compared to if the adventure was based around, or at least concluded with, a fight scene, simply due to the seeming more soft-focus of the social subsystem GURPS has even compared to the basic combat system (and, I feel, the combat lite system)

Does that make sense?

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Take a look at GURPS City Stats for a first step in that direction.

Bill Stoddard

Thanks kind sir.

[Daigoro]

My suggestions for such a book-

1) Discussion of Contacts, and how to make them worth the points, and perhaps a handful of new enhancements for them (such as Network or Authority). See these threads for details-
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=46715
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=53308

2) Patrons, Enemies and Allies could also get some expansion, but I have no suggestions for how. Perhaps some discussion on what differentiates Contacts and Allies? Combining Enemy and Ally/Dependent in the same person (younger brother who'll help you out, but then rat you in to to dad and get you in trouble)? Kromm had some ideas on fiddling with Frequency of Appearance for Allies up recently.

3) Organisations- This thread has some ideas which might be regarded as social, but might be outside the purvue of the book-
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=49258

4) And a thread on Propaganda skill-
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=68867

[Infornific]

Any chance this could include some kind of meta-system for Advantages/Disadvantages and Meta-traits affecting reaction rolls. That's implied in GURPS Basic but it would be interesting to make it explicit. For instance, the overall rule seems to be 5 points per +1 reaction roll, regardless of how generated, with modifications applied. E.g.:

Attractive: +1 Reaction (Appearance Based -20%): 4 pts

Or (extrapolating)

Beautiful +2 Reaction (Appearance Based -20%): 8pts and
+2 Reaction (Appearance Based -20%, Only those attracted to your sex -20%, Distinctive Features -10%, May drawn unwanted attention -10%): 4 pts, total 12 pts.

The extra modifiers for Beautiful aren't listed but are implied - "Affects only those attracted to your sex" is roughly equivalent to "Affects women only" or "Affects men only" and so should be -20%.

Status: +1 Reaction (Includes social perks +20%, Not personal -20%): 5 pts. Again this is not stated but implied.

I just think such a system could be useful.

[Jürgen Hubert]

I'm very interested in this book.

Ever since I GMed Exalted, I've been interested in RPG rules for large-scale social manipulation. If this book also allows for cinematic and over-the-top social engineering, I will be very happy indeed...

[Daeglan]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

I'm very interested in this book.

Ever since I GMed Exalted, I've been interested in RPG rules for large-scale social manipulation. If this book also allows for cinematic and over-the-top social engineering, I will be very happy indeed...

Things like how to do scenes like Hitlers speeches at the Reichstags Where he sways thousands with his speeches.

Yes I know he was a bastard. He still had impressive speech making ability.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Daeglan

Things like how to do scenes like Hitlers speeches at the Reichstags Where he sways thousands with his speeches.

Yes I know he was a bastard. He still had impressive speech making ability.

Originally Posted by Victor Klemperer

I have never been able to understand how Hitler was capable, with his unmelodious and raucous voice, with his crude, often un-Germanically constructed sentences, and with a conspicuous rhetoric entirely at odds with the character of the German language, of winning over the masses with his speeches, of holding their attention and subjugating them for such appalling lengths of time.

Klemperer is the polar opposite of Hitler: an educated Prussian Lutheran of Jewish birth opposed to the Austro-Bavarian Catholic redneck Hitler, so his confusion is perhaps understandable. (He was also Col. Klink's uncle.)

Originally Posted by Walter C. Langer

The only other real contact the overwhelming majority of people have had with Hitler is through his voice. He was a tireless speaker and before he came to power would sometimes give as many as three or four speeches on the same day, often in different cities. Even his greatest opponents concede that he is the greatest orator that Germany has ever known. This is a great concession in view of the fact that the qualities of his voice are far from pleasant - many, in fact, find it distinctly unpleasant. It has a rasping-quality which often breaks into a shrill falsetto when he becomes aroused. Nor is it his diction which makes him a great orator. In the early days this was particularly bad. It was a conglomeration of high German with an Austrian dialect which Tschuppik (517) describes as a "knödlige Sprache". Nor was it the structure of his speeches which made him a great orator. On the whole, his speeches were sinfully long, badly structured and very repetitious. Some of them are positively painful to read but nevertheless, when he delivered them they had an extraordinary effect upon his audiences.

...

Before coming to power almost all of his speeches centered around the following three themes: (1) the treason of the November criminals; (2) the rule of the Marxists must be broken; and (3) the world domination of the Jews. No matter what topic was advertised for a given speech he almost invariably would wind up on one or more of these three themes. And yet people liked it and would attend one meeting after another to hear him speak. It was not, therefore, so much what he said that appealed to his audiences as how he said it.

Even in the early days Hitler was a showman with a great sense of the dramatic. Not only did he schedule his speeches late in the evening when his audience would be tired and their resistance lowered through natural causes, but he would always send an assistant ahead of time to make a short speech and warm the audience up. Storm-troopers always played an important role at these meetings and would line the aisle through which he would pass. At the psychological moment, Hitler would appear in the door in the back of the hall. Then with a small group behind him, he would march through the rows of S.A. men to reach the speaker's table. He never glanced to the right or to the left as he came down the aisle and became greatly annoyed if anyone tried to accost him or hampered his progress. Whenever possible he would have a band present and they would strike up a lively military march as he came down the aisle.

(The bolding is mine.)

In short, there are ways to give yourself bonuses to Public Speaking outside of your voice, your speech or even the content of your speech.

[Daigoro]

I think the other obvious thing for a GURPS Social Engineering book, if it hasn't been mentioned upthread, is just how to make an adventure centered on social interaction- much as Mysteries does for mystery adventures.

How many NPCs should you have?
How many factions with competing goals?
How many subplots is enough or too many?
How do you include dramatic tension without resorting to the threat of violence?
What dramatic niches should NPCs have, and how much information can each give the party?

Basically stuff you might find in a novel-writing textbook, but focussed on GMing.