Monday, June 23, 2008

Winning Friends and Influencing People... with Use Rope!

Yeah, I'll just let you ponder that for a while, huh?

Mr. Kornelson continues to impress with his Amagi Games project. His latest is on using usually non-social skills in social situations. I find this paragraph especially intriguing:

The somewhat more intense version of this idea is to dispense with standard social skills altogether, and use everything else as social skills. This isn’t as odd as it sounds. For groups that prefer to roleplay out social interactions, only resorting to the dice when there’s a factor that’s hard to play through involved, many of those skills are secondary appendages, a cruft that can be done without; the value is in acting it out, and the ‘normal’ die rolls are a factor that doesn’t actually deserve to be weighed into the equation. By restacking the social elements that are actually useful to this style into other skills, the excess can be done away with.

This is actually the way I've been running social challenges in my D&D games for years. I'll probably use similar ideas in my Moldvay/Cook/Labyrinth Lord hack.

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