GURPS Social Engineering

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

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).

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