Social Skills

You saw that title, huh? Yeah. Don't worry, I'm scared too. I figure I'm not going to win many friends for this one, but with all the arguments I've had over social skills, I figure it's time to put all my opinions and advice out there. People can read it, agree or disagree, and yell at me accordingly. Today we're discussing the black sheep of the skill list, the social skills. In D20 it's Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate. In Shadowrun, it's Negotiation and Etiquette. Deadlands adds Overawe, important for gun duels as much as it is for social situations. Whatever game you're talking about, the problems are universal. If you haven't already heard horror stories of people mistreating social skills, reddit or 1d4chan will have an overabundance of cringe horror stories for you. Just don't read too many, or else you'll lose a piece of yourself that you can't get back. I'm sure some of us have horror stories of our own too: These little skills make a giant impact on nearly every game, and it's all because people have really funny ideas of what they can do, all the way down to some people treating them as a mind control ray.

So before we get going I need to say two things. The first is that these skills almost always have some sort of mechanical worth to them, such as Overawe being necessary in a gun duel, Etiquette rolls being Shadowrun's primary method of gear acquisition, or bluff being used to feint. I am not talking about these uses. A "non-social" mechanical effect should not be argued in any way, even when used on a fellow player like bluff to feint or intimidate to cause the shaken effect. Basically, every skill is a small collection of things you can do, and social skills are unique in that some of these things are inarguable, and others are heavily open to interpretation.

There's something else you need to know. I've spent time trying to 'break down' the idea of the GM of a game being the Almighty Lord and Master of Games, and I'm sorry to say I've got to take another tiny whack at that mentality. It's obvious that there are things you're allowed to do that the players aren't: You can fudge rolls to avoid total disaster or keep someone having fun. You can alter the game world, you can insert unexpected challenges and control the flow of the game. However, there are things the player is allowed to do that you are not. It's weird to think about, but there are areas you shouldn't touch. The first is that the PC ought to have sovereignty over their own character: They should control how the character grows. They should control their levels and personality(even if you might have to point out how their actions affect their alignment...) and they should control their own destiny and decisions.

So that's our first piece of advice: Social skills are for a PC to roll to affect the mood of an NPC. I'm guessing you expected me to say 'period' but this rule does have a few twists. One of those is lying. Anyone should be able to lie to anyone else, and the GM has two general guidelines they can use to handle this: Either the subject asks for a Sense Motive check, or the liar does. Either way, you should make sure everyone knows about this beforehand. I prefer the subject asking for the roll, because it can open up for the GM to nudge in and ask for one if they think it's especially important. It also means a good liar can 'get away' with some real world skill at lying and not have to tip their hand and cause inadvertent metagaming. However, beyond lying, social skills are not for rolling against PCs. If you(either the GM or another player) want to convince a PC of something, you have to try and convince them. At no point should you try and throw dice at someone to get them to do what you want: That is something for the player to do to an NPC.

Why? Like I said, there's some things the GM isn't allowed to do, and one of those things is affect the player's decision process. Social skills are many things: they can speed up actions or add tension to a scene, but they are not a mind control ray. The players will, in the course of an average game, deal with many skill challenges: Traps, high walls, ancient writing in cryptic languages, and...belligerent NPCs. That is why they're 'allowed' to roll against your NPCs: A pissy, argumentative or angry NPC is a skill challenge in the same way that a deadly poison trap or a rope strung across a chasm is. However, it's one that you aren't always aware you're placing there, which makes it unique against the other common skill challenges. This makes it easy for people to get upset that the PC has a capability that they "don't". So, be more aware of when and where you're placing a skill challenge. Skill challenges are important, though, and not everyone is nice. That's why I'm not saying your NPCs have to all be nice: The world isn't like that. However, even if you think the world is wall to wall selfish assholes, you can't simply throw challenge after challenge at the PCs: the rolling and exasperation will absolutely slow your game to a crawl. Like I said in one of my first blogs, you've got to 'bottom-line' it and keep from hurting your own cause.

So, we also need to address when, exactly, you call for a social skill roll. Bluff style skills are the easiest: If you're lying, you've got to roll it. In this instance, remember to judge their believability, and give them a proper bonus for it: in D20, this is even a stock rule. Diplomacy and other 'convincing' skills are much hairier on when you should call for a roll because of their nature. I feel a good rule of thumb is that the more important a situation is, AND the longer the scene's gone on, the less likely it should be that you call for a roll. The reasoning is simple: not only does it suck to pour your heart into a scene for an hour and then flub the roll, but it's not very good for the GM either. I had a few GMs who'd call for a roll every time and while on the surface that's fine, in operation, what happens is that a failure is a disaster: The PCs are put back to square one and forced to either come up with a new plan(which can take HOURS depending on your group) or continue to throw dice at the NPC's face until one of them works. Either way, there's bound to be a lot of sitting around and wrecked pacing.

A special addendum to this is to never place a "gatekeeper" skill check unless it's something that can be retried or bypassed some other way. A "Gatekeeper" check is something that MUST BE DONE for the plot to move forward, and there is no other way. You should be sparing with these in general, but you're going to end up doing them a lot as a matter of course, like placing a locked door in between the PCs and something they need, or handing them a book that must be translated via decipher script. I mention this because social skill checks are the biggest source of unintended gatekeeper checks: It's natural to want to ask for a social skill check whenever there's an important social interaction. Simply ask yourself what the PCs are going to do if they fail, and if you can't think of anything immediately, reconsider placing a social skill challenge there. See social skills, in a way, like Climb, or Swim, or Disable Device: Not every interaction with something needs a check.

However, not asking for a check every time devalues the skill. I'm not even being sarcastic, it kind of does. The slick con-artist Bard and the paste-eating murder machine Barbarian being on even footing in important social scenes is a little bit really wrong. So, how do we avoid that? One way is to give players "slack" during the scene based on their total bonus, like extra time to think or hints. Another would be to roll for social information, like the "bard" is using their intuition. Finally, even with all of this aside, the social character has an unparalleled ability to speed up more minor interactions, open opportunities, and gather resources with their skills. Be sure to let them.

We have one last topic. I really, really try to keep this blog to general advice and not use it as a sounding board to bitch about particular people. That would be awful of me to put down exactly the habits of a particular person and then go "This is an awful way to act." without just talking to them privately. However, I ran into a particular bad habit that, while only a small number of people have it, it's bad enough that I want to talk about it. So, if you think I'm talking about you...sorry. It's really nothing personal.

There's a bad habit I've mentally dubbed Passfailing, and "intimidation" style skills can be particularly prone to this. Passfailing is a GM trying to turn a successful roll into a bad thing, usually through circumstances that would prove ridiculous if you really thought about them. Intimidate and its kind(like Overawe) are unusually prone to this because it's easy to think "higher roll means more scared" and "more scared" is rarely what someone rolling intimidate actually wants. Let me be very clear about this: You're just being an asshole. It's the GM's job to make the game challenging, but doing so by trying to remove a player's success or "punishing" them for a high bonus in something is ridiculous. There are a million ways to challenge the PCs, do not choose one that makes them feel like you're stepping on them or taking a success away. Even if they don't say anything, they're upset. I promise you.

Really, I think the take-away from this is that you should see a difficult person in the same light as a pit trap in a dungeon. Too few traps and it can feel monotonous, too many and the PCs feel overloaded with challenge and roadblocks. Social skills are not a mind control ray and shouldn't ever be used to bluntly make a PC do what you want them to do, whether you're another PC or the GM. Oh, and don't act like an asshole, or else you might find nobody wants to play your games.