Spinning off from Bren's Violence and fading to black thread, I'm interested in if or how people spotlight things other than combat.

Yes, we can all role-play without the need for rules. But the name of the hobby is a role-playing game and sometimes we want to emphasise that bit of the fun at the table.

Some systems like GURPS give you lots of tools for adding mechanical heft to non-combat scenarios, but not much guidance on how to use that capability until you get into supplements like Social Engineering which has a fantastic break down of different social scenarios and what skills might apply. Other games like Fate allow you to apply mechanical resolution to any endeavour using the Fate fractal and there are some really useful worked examples like the Fire Fighting game in Fate: Worlds on Fire. So this is not a case of trad versus modern or narrative games.

I love shifting the focus away from combat without having to go completely free-form or one-roll-resolution about it, but very few games address this well in my experience. There are some standouts to me like Social Engineering or Fate and the chase rules from Top Secret get a lot of love. I thought the Skill Challenge rules in 4e were a step in the right direction but they copped a lot of flack.

How do you do it in your game of choice? Have you developed your own procedures that you fall back on? What games do it well out of the box in your opinion?

Currently I am running Beyond the Wall and Other Adventurs and for task resolution use a simple d20 vs Attribute, roll under for success. The task difficulty gives a bonus or penalty to the roll and having an appropriate skill gives a bonus.

I have played dice pool games where a given number of successes were required to be accumulated to complete a complex task. Either through one character making repeted rolls or several characters rolling and pooling their results. This often turns into "roll the dice until you succeed" and doesn't add much drama to game play.

Neither approach deals well with the time aspect of non-combat tasks. There is often a point at which you can tell if the task is going to fail well before the time to finish it. But it usually doesn't have more than a narrative effect to say "you spend X time and realize you have to start over". If time is an important part of the task, unlock the door before the guards catch you, bake a cake in two hours, then some means of tracking how much time is spent for each die roll is needed. Otherwise a single roll success/failure resolution is all that is needed.

I wonder if some of it is that in an RPG round by round combat is usually more exciting than round by round cake baking. Having also watched the Great British Bakeoff cake baking can certainly be made exciting.

I do think my players might be disappointed if I went to a single roll victory/defeat combat system.

This, really, REALLY depends on the type of game you're running and playing. To use your example of baking from your other thread..

The vast majority of players don't have an interest in complicated, intricate, detailed baking rules. They just don't. Baking isn't going to come up as a major plot point in 99% of Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire, Shadowrun, and Deadlands games...

For those very few times it shows up as important, you can default to your system of choice's extended action rules...

Now if you're playing a game where cooking is the actual focus, or a major part of typical roleplay (Like maybe an Anime Highschool game where you're expected to bake for your love interest) then sure, you might need some dedicated baking rules...but in almost every game, you probably never will.

Now to speak more generally, many games also have "Social Combat" rules. Exalted 2nd ed did, Nwod does, and A Song of Ice and Fire does...

For awhile I actually liked these...I thought detailed social combat and intricate rules and abilities that just affected social actions made things more "Interesting".... and then I realized that was crap.... all complicated social rules did was remove the "role" playing from the game.... So I went back to simple rolls to help influence an NPC's reaction combined with actual in character RP to handle that...

It all depends on your setting and how you expect sessions to go. Shadowrun has dedicated Hacking and Chase rules because those are important aspects and elements of their setting outside of just normal combat...

Most of the time though, you don't need complicated intricate rules for every situation, you more need general rules which can be easily applied and modified by a GM to cover any situation that arises.

I actually went to less detailed hacking rules in one Cyberpunk game. Yes, that's right Cyberpunk, the genre that is all about 'Netrunning with less detailed hacking rules. The reason? All but one of my players were sitting around bored for extended periods of time with nothing to do while the Netrunner played out a detailed hack of corporate security systems, usually supposedly in parallel time with their break in. The problem was actions that took under a minute in game time were taking an hour of table time to resolve.

So, as an entire group, including the Netrunner we went to a faster and less detailed system for cyberhacking.

Now, if everyone had been involved in hacking or if hacking had taken place on a similar time scale (and play time) to the rest of the action I probably would have stuck with the detailed systems.

If I were playing Great British Bakeoff the RPG I would want the most detailed cooking rules I could get, as that is rater the point of the whole thing and every character is involved in baking. Similarly for an anime bake for your sweetheart game.

Detailed rules need an activity that is a central focus of the game, to be exciting and engaging to play, and perhaps most importantly to involve the majority of players at the table in the action at the same time.

I think baking is a red herring.

How about disabling a nuclear warhead, painting a picture to impress the queen, debating the senate, building a makeshift aircraft, improvising a gadget or any of the other myriad of tasks that could be made into interesting challenges that you don't want to wing or resolve with a single dice roll?

Quote from: dbm;853677I think baking is a red herring.

How about disabling a nuclear warhead, painting a picture to impress the queen, debating the senate, building a makeshift aircraft, improvising a gadget or any of the other myriad of tasks that could be made into interesting challenges that you don't want to wing or resolve with a single dice roll?

Those are called "Extended Tasks" and have rules in many roleplaying games already, from Storyteller to Savage Worlds, Roll&Keep and many others.

Quote from: Orphan81;853561For awhile I actually liked these...I thought detailed social combat and intricate rules and abilities that just affected social actions made things more "Interesting".... and then I realized that was crap.... all complicated social rules did was remove the "role" playing from the game.... So I went back to simple rolls to help influence an NPC's reaction combined with actual in character RP to handle that...

That's been my take on it. We play out most all the social stuff in-character... if there's a specific influence that someone is aiming for it's probably a Diplomacy roll or something similar in addition to actually talking it out.

I was reading about Houses of the Blooded earlier today, in relation to playing out Game of Thrones-style political intrigue... but, while it sounded interesting, maybe a cool boardgame, it didn't sound like the sort of thing I want out of an RPG.

Quote from: dbm;853677I think baking is a red herring.

How about disabling a nuclear warhead, painting a picture to impress the queen, debating the senate, building a makeshift aircraft, improvising a gadget or any of the other myriad of tasks that could be made into interesting challenges that you don't want to wing or resolve with a single dice roll?

I stand by what I said "Detailed rules need an activity that is a central focus of the game, to be exciting and engaging to play, and perhaps most importantly to involve the majority of players at the table in the action at the same time."

Quote from: Orphan81;853707Those are called "Extended Tasks" and have rules in many roleplaying games already, from Storyteller to Savage Worlds, Roll&Keep and many others.

But they are, in my experience, almost universally rubbish, flimsy and flavourless. Which one do you think does it well and what does it do that is good?

Quote from: DavetheLost;853730I stand by what I said "Detailed rules need an activity that is a central focus of the game, to be exciting and engaging to play, and perhaps most importantly to involve the majority of players at the table in the action at the same time."

Few games are quite so laser focussed in my opinion. Take Star Wars as an example. Yes, you will have straightforward combats where everyone is simply trying to kill the opposition.

But you will also have scenes much like you describe in a cyberpunk scenario - maybe half the group are holding off the storm troopers whilst other try to jury rig the ship and prep for take off. That is hardly the focus of the game but it is a common enough premise for it, or something like it, to be something you would want to both work well and give each player choices. The combatants are making tactical decisions every round, what decisions are the non-combatants making, other than 'I roll my mechanics skill'?

In GURPS Social Engineering they break down a wide range of social interactions into the types of skills you might employ (more than just one in most cases) and gambits that you might use (again, multiple options most of the time). You can get an interesting mechanical element into these interactions without resorting to social combat mechanics.

Quote from: dbm;853677I think baking is a red herring.

How about disabling a nuclear warhead, painting a picture to impress the queen, debating the senate, building a makeshift aircraft, improvising a gadget or any of the other myriad of tasks that could be made into interesting challenges that you don't want to wing or resolve with a single dice roll?

One option I sometimes use is for the GM or Player to divide the task into parts.
 
   Nuclear warhead: recognize the warhead, remove the cover, disable systems A, B, and C.
   Paint a picture to impress the Queen: figure out a subject (who or what) or treatment (realistic, allegorical e.g. momento mori, impressionistic) would be likely to impress, sketch the picture, paint several elements: face, clothing, setting.
   Debate the Senate: if it's an oration than a debate: select several key points (3 tends to be a nice number) to be made, for each point try to persuade the audience; if it is a debate treat it like an oration but add in the need to rebut opposing arguments, then add in a series of steps for the opponent's debate points, figure out how successful the opponent was (which sets the difficulty for PC counter arguments) and try to counter the opponent's key points.
   Scoring: Score each point successfully carried as 1, each Critical success (or really apt point with a great argument) as 2 each Critical Failure counts as -1. If the speech is a debate rather than an oration, subtract the opponent's score.
   Scores
4+ = Major success,
3= Solid Success,
2=Success,
1=Limited or Partial Success,
0=Failure,
-1 or less=Major Failure.
   Gadget creation is covered in some detail in H+I so I won't go into it here. But methods similar to the above would also work.

I find that when it comes to psychology and social interactions, the kind of number-crunching that can often be worthwhile in assessing physical activities is usually not just needless but a great distraction from what's really fun and interesting.

Something like Pendragon 's Traits and Passions can be handy, but I'd say it shouldn't come up much. Likewise C&S Influence calculations, and Reaction and Loyalty rolls in various rules sets.

The more our characters have character, relationships, desires, fears, the less we need to treat them as ciphers whose behavior is randomly generated.

Bren's examples are things I see no reason not to treat as we can treat them in reality and describe in natural language. With that, the actual questions that are uncertain naturally present themselves, usually along with a sense of appropriate odds.

One way to avoid nit-picking over an imponderable precision is to have a set scale on which one picks whatever seems closest: e.g., is it 2, 3, 4 or 6 to 1?

I guess one big thing to me is that I find interminable randomization boring compared with decision making. I have no interest in Roulette, Faro, Pachinko, Snakes & Ladders, etc.

Quote from: Orphan81;853561This, really, REALLY depends on the type of game you're running and playing. To use your example of baking from your other thread..

The vast majority of players don't have an interest in complicated, intricate, detailed baking rules. They just don't. Baking isn't going to come up as a major plot point in 99% of Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire, Shadowrun, and Deadlands games...

Exactly. It's just nutty to show up for Boot Hill expecting to spend the session making horseshoes. What part of "Dungeons & Dragons" or "Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes" do people not understand? We spend a lot of time on what interests us, and often the name of the game should be fair warning.

QuoteFor those very few times it shows up as important, you can default to your system of choice's extended action rules...

That might be just getting stuck in a rut.

People of a certain age might recall games such as Battleship, Operation, Lunar Lander, Triplanetary, Burger Time, Tapper, and Paradroid (or Quazatron). How about Origins of the Second World War, Up Front, Red Empire, Credo? Stratego, Cluedo,Twixt, Mastermind, Black Box, Jenga ...

Heck, the jousting rules in Chainmail!

There are lots of ways to play a game, and something other than tossing dice may often be a more flavorful model for a given situation.

QuoteNow if you're playing a game where cooking is the actual focus, or a major part of typical roleplay (Like maybe an Anime Highschool game where you're expected to bake for your love interest) then sure, you might need some dedicated baking rules...but in almost every game, you probably never will.

Now to speak more generally, many games also have "Social Combat" rules. Exalted 2nd ed did, Nwod does, and A Song of Ice and Fire does...

For awhile I actually liked these...I thought detailed social combat and intricate rules and abilities that just affected social actions made things more "Interesting".... and then I realized that was crap.... all complicated social rules did was remove the "role" playing from the game.... So I went back to simple rolls to help influence an NPC's reaction combined with actual in character RP to handle that...

It all depends on your setting and how you expect sessions to go. Shadowrun has dedicated Hacking and Chase rules because those are important aspects and elements of their setting outside of just normal combat...

Most of the time though, you don't need complicated intricate rules for every situation, you more need general rules which can be easily applied and modified by a GM to cover any situation that arises.