Social Penalties in TTRPGs

 There is nothing more bitter than an opportunist who miscalculates. 

Social skills in general and Shadowrun's social skill penalties are on the table today. No other aspect of tabletop gaming varies so wildly from game to game than social skills, not even combat. Philosophies on gameplay style, character design, and whether or not social skills should even be included at all combine to create a rat-king of surprisingly common problems with them.  

I've often said that when a game designer can't think of an appropriate drawback or penalty, they make it a social one. Sometimes it's appropriate and provides rich gameplay opportunity like the Nosferatu clan drawback, but most of the time these sorts of penalties feel thrown-in and poorly thought out. 

Before we go any further, there's something I need to explain about flaws. It can be very easy to 'check out' of a concept when building your character. We all do it on some level when we decide on the strengths of our build. The natural drawback is (of course) being bad at that particular thing and often covering your weakness with another character. That's teamwork. 

This can become problematic in two ways. The first is when that particular concept is one that will never present itself outside of the player proactively creating the situation. It's fine to be comically bad at something when you won't ever have to do it. Some things just seldom come up on their own, like social skill rolls or stealth. Others carry their own natural penalties for a deficiency, like ranged combat. 

The other problem is the depth of the deficiency you can create via flaws or character choices. When you've already decided you won't be participating in a particular challenge, it doesn't matter how large the penalty is that you're taking. Games with a lot of different penalty sources for one thing can create tilted character building scenarios that are often toxic. The feeling is often that if you take one social flaw, you may as well take them all. 

Here's what I mean by toxic. Is checking out of a whole concept bad? Well, yeah. Most of the time. The most fun you can have at a table is being able to participate as often as possible. The way you do that in a healthy game is having more than one way to contribute. Tanking or dump-statting something narrows the character's usefulness. Social skills in particular are a one-two punch of a skill that's often proactive, and can often be handled by a single person. It's ripe for discarding to fluff your numbers somewhere else. 


Mentions of narrow usefulness bring us to the Shadowrun portion of our discussion. Cyberware in SR causes a large variety of social penalties: +1 per 2 essence lost or portion thereof, +1 for "particularly lurid" cyberware, and even more for certain items like the balance tail, kid stealth legs or my favorite, the cyberskull. A sammy, even one that didn't take the million, can easily be taking +4 to social skills with penalties that the book states outright should apply in "most situations". 

I have a lot of problems with this. A lot. We'll go through them in no order. 

One. Applying enormous penalties on the sammy is yet another thing included "LoGiCaLlY" that tilts the game's bias toward magically active characters. It's one of the worst offenders, because not only do they not take any kind of penalties like this, but also physads can take bonus dice in social skills. 

Two. Shadowrun is already a game where a player can end up sitting and waiting while someone else does something. This is by design and this strange "Ocean's 11" playstyle is part of its charm. Because of this, it absolutely does not need players being less capable. 

Three. A flat, "most of the time" penalty just for having visible cyberware doesn't make sense within the world's internal logic. While it's expensive and rare, cyberware is constantly advertised and displayed in media. The world's most popular athletes all have cyberware. Depicting runners is an extremely popular subgenre of action sims and movies. Would you sometimes run into a situation where you're taking a penalty? Absolutely. Cyberware and visible body mods don't fit into the corporate omniculture of conformity. Would it be "most of the time"? No. Would it be so heavy handed? Absolutely not. 

Four. Transhumanism, punk fashion and culture, and body modification are a core part of the genre as well as Shadowrun's world. Trying to shuffle players away from one of the most interesting ways you can express yourself in a TTRPG with hefty penalties is cruel. It's called Cyberpunk, not Cyberconformist. 

Five. Setting the penalty based on Essence is wildly deceptive. The section even has to tell you that non-visible cyberware shouldn't count. Re-calculating your penalty based on the essence costs of your visible cyberware is pointless busywork.

Six. Surely penalties might be in mind for etiquette, negotiation and leadership. However, try as I might, I can't think of why interrogation, intimidation or instruction would take penalty from visible cyberware. Really, I'm being nice saying negotiation might take a penalty, because I don't think lying to someone(which is covered by negotiation) would be affected much.

You know, there's probably more but I think I've made my point. Social penalty rules are often misguided and poorly placed, and this section is no different. A better rule would be to say that visible cyberware or body modification can mean social penalties in some situations, primarily when dealing with corporate employees. The penalty, even when counting wild cyberware like cyberskulls, articulate arms and kid stealth legs(which I maintain aren't even that fucking weird) should, at no point, rise higher than +3. 

Everyone knows I have appearance-related emotional baggage, and over the years it's made me treasure expression of self and appearance in TTRPGs. I also love the gameplay style of cyberware. It sucks that SR3 wants to penalize you for trying to place those two things together, and I'm glad that most people seem to agree that this section of the book is particularly heavy-handed. 

Oh, and not for nothing: this section in the SR3 core book is right next to a really stupid rule for rolling racist biases randomly that implies half of all people are racist in some way. That's fucking bleak.