Prismatic Wasteland proposed the idea of social interaction rules that are a 4e-style combat from a complexity perspective. These are my musings on that idea using a dice pool system of d6s.

Why Not Just Combat?

In my estimation a system of complex social interactions must have a reason for the complexity. I presuppose that this could be based on arbitrary social hierarchy or rank.

Character Abilities

Each character has the following social verbs:

• Beguile: the ability to inspire admiration
• Observe: the ability to notice the significant
• Instigate: the ability to provoke an action or reaction

Each character also has a social rank that denotes status. This is set in each interaction in lieu of “initiative”. In all cases, higher is better.

Overview

When an opportunity for social conflict occurs, each interaction goes through three stages: Greet, Converse, and Quip.

• Greet: the initial opening volley of interaction that sets the relative rank of each character in the conflict. Set by each player rolling a d6, higher being better.
• Converse: Opportunity to gather information
• Quip: The ending blow that completes the encounter.

Greet

Opposed d6 roll that establishes the relative rank rolls of the social encounter. Higher roll goes first.

Converse

In the converse stage, the player has three potential abilities to improve their dice pool for the final encounter.

• Beguile: Take 2d6 from the opponent’s pool. The opponent chooses from which verb(s). Opposed roll against the opponent’s Beguile stat, highest single die result takes it.
• Observe: Gather information, add 2d6.
• Demean: Lower the opponent’s dice pool by 2d6. Opposed roll again the opponent’s Instigate stat.

Note: each round of Converse a player decides to do lowers Rank (aka the extra number of d6 that can be added to the pool).

Quip

The final blow. Each player rolls their entire dice pool, adding their social rank to the total. The highest total establishes the winner of the encounter.

Strategy

A player can choose to Converse more than once, but it runs the risk of the other player calling the Quip roll before they are ready. This can be risky but allows for more rank rolls.

An Illustration

Hilda (B:1 O:2 I: 3) enters into Strife with Leo (B:2 O:3 I:1). They Greet, rolling opposed d6 and they end up with the following stats:

• Hilda (B:1 O:2 I:3 R:4)
• Leo (B:2 O:3 I:1 R:2).

Leo goes first and begins to Converse, lowering his Rank by 1. Leo chooses to Demean, sparking an opposed Instigate roll. Hilda rolls 12 to Leo’s 5, blocking the move. Hilda then lowers her rank by 1 and rolls to Observe, rolling 9 to Leo’s 8. She adds two dice to her pool.

Leo then chooses to Quip, rolling 7d6 (25) against Hilda’s 11d6 (32). Hilda wins the social encounter.

Thoughts on This

To be clear, this was a fun thought experiment but definitely not how I play tabletop games. However, I really enjoyed imagining social interactions as polite war.