Social PVP Mechanics in RPGs

A review of social PVP mechanisms

 Given my intro, I now set out to establish what the ‘broad strokes’ of the game were – the beats and points of interest that would make it an engaging roleplaying experience for the type of person who might like playing it. (I’ll write more later about what I mean when I say ‘the type of person who might like playing it’ – that’s for a different devlog).

I knew that I wanted to have an intense ‘roleplaying’ based dramatic element to the game – far too many of my games devolve in to ‘action adventure’ – despite my best intentions. Even when I try to do a masquerade ball in Victorian London, it’s going to end with characters running around with a bomb (my players know this one all too well). So a key design element here is a way to restrain myself as well.

So back to my constraints for myself – no combat, but heavy social PVP. I had to enforce this as a way to steer myself away from the fact that in so many games, when the talking gets tough, violence proves to be the answer.

Solve for Social PVP

So, how do we allow agency (to a point) and avoid just random head-to-head dice rolling stuff that is so boring and shallow?

I see across a vast number of RPGs that there are a handful of meta patterns for handling the oft-considered ‘soft’ side of Roleplaying – the actual Roleplaying bits where you talk and be someone else and stuff. I figured I’d need to assess these against my needs to see what worked and what didn’t. 

There is no critique at all for any of these methods! They are just my review of what works FOR ME on THIS GAME. 

I welcome polite discourse on this but please note – it is not an academic paper I am writing, but rather getting my head around the patterns which exist in RPGs for handling social/political activities and gameplay. I may have excluded your favourite game, but that’s not the point. If I have a meta pattern misunderstood or incorrect, I welcome open and positive feedback.

 Meta Pattern 1 – Hard Rolls

This is the simplest and (in my opinion) stupidest way to do things. The gross trope of ‘I roll to seduce the dragon, oh look Nat 20’ exists for a reason. That problem is exacerbated in PVP, where the person on the receiving end of your ‘Nat 20’ may not want to go along with it (after all, games like D&D have primed people to believe that their character is sacrosanct and nothing ever can or should take away their ‘agency’ in all things).

Meta Pattern 2 – Nothing at all

Games which sort of go “if you wanna roleplay, that’s on you buddy”. There is a whole class of person who agrees with this too and that’s fine – after all, roleplaying is just improv / playacting and this works. But it doesn’t become a ‘game’ driver in any way, as it has no scaffolding back into the rules or the other parts of the game.

Meta Pattern 3 – Additive / Reinforcing Systems

This is where I put things like Masks and Apocalypse World – though I’m a little vague on how to categorise them. This is also possibly an extension of Meta Pattern 1. Instead of just a roll and an outcome, this pattern then links into additional game features (such as +1 Forward, Mark Experience, or other things that are optional and contingent based on how the players execute the result of the social interaction).

Meta Pattern 4 – Social Combat

This is where Fate and Genesys (the Star Wars system) live. Social stuff works like combat, where you ‘attack’ and ‘defend’ and wear each other down to earn concessions from each other.

Meta Pattern 5 – Assumed Position

Stuff like Vincent Baker’s ‘The King is Dead’ is explicitly a party game for deciding who wears the crown after a ruler has died. It’s a one-shot ‘party game’ experience.  It is assumed that all players in the game want to wear the crown and as such will compete in the activities designed to test them and earn them points towards winning the game.

Likewise the wonderful Fiasco – the whole game is about earning results which are tallied at the end to see the fate of the character. Characters don’t really have the choice to be ‘sensible, boring, nobodies’ – they are the sort of people that get their own chaotic films.

Meta Pattern 6 – Non-Random Choice

Non-random choice has become a cool thing in the last 15 years or so unless there are earlier examples I’ve missed. The whole ‘No Dice, No Masters’ or ‘Belonging Outside Belonging’ thing I think is where I saw this come up first, though I’m no RPG historian.

Non-Random choice is now a key part of many great games, including Hillfolk, Dream Apart/Dream Askew, and Good Society to name a few.

To affect the narrative and 'get your way' you either bid, pay, burn, or otherwise exchange tokens or meta-currency with the other players and GM (note to self for future Devlog - decide if this game has a GM or is GM-less) which then recirculates through the game economy to achieve other ends.

Meta Pattern 7 – External Decision

I don’t know if I have any examples off the top of my head for this, but social deduction games like Mafia / Werewolf use voting to determine the outcomes of persuasive arguments.

A little bit of player voting happens at the end of each episode in a Hillfolk game.

What the hell does that mean?

I can cross off my list Patterns 1, 2, 5, and 7. I’ll also cross out 4 – as much as I love Fate, I don’t want to go down that ‘social combat’ path. That leaves me with 3 – Additive/Reinforcing System, and 6 – Non-Random choice as my starting point for developing the social system that I want for this political game.

I’m looking for something non-random or arbitrary and am very attached to the way Hillfolk does it. BUT I don’t think the link between the way Drama tokens are generated in Dramatic scenes and their… absence… in procedural scenes. Or that they don’t really *do* anything interesting once you have them, except get used for Dramatic scene forces.  I still *like* procedural scenes, I just don’t want them to be frequent / overpowering when compared with Dramatic scenes. I’ll need to explore this a bit more. I think I have an ace up my sleeve here (no pun intended? I think…).

I like the way that PbtA games apply this additive / reinforcing model where once the dramatic scene is resolved, the players/characters receive a benefit if they fit to the result in their future play, or a penalty if they don’t. This helps drive behaviour and ‘gamifies’ the result a little more for me.

So I end up with this state looking a bit like Belonging Outside Belonging – spend to get effects. But I need to put a bit of Drama System in there, as it is more a PVP situation, so using the way that Drama Tokens are exchanged in that.

Next things

I’ve come up with a couple of twists for the above social mechanics though – first is the ‘milieu’ which I’ll address in a future devlog, as my thinking on it is critical to how I see the game working. Second is the balance, which I’m currently calling ‘Public Perception in Rome’ but will think of something more catchy later. These concepts provide (with milieu) the grounding for the scene mechanics, and (with Public Perception) a more concrete consequence and variability (at a macro scale) to the results of play.