Nonviolence
This is a travesty of justice! How the crap is it that Brutus the Hedgehog and Sorcerer have never been in a comic together? I seriously need to put them in the same place at the same time and see what catches fire.
As fun as that would be, however, we’re not here to talk about forest fires. We’re returning to Druid Court today to talk about another very serious issue. And that’s the ways we approach our non-combat sessions.
“The courtroom drama” is one such trope, and in my experience it can go one of two ways. In the positive version, everyone is super-invested. Players are arguing passionately to clear their names, trying to exonerate a beloved NPC, or making sure a slippery villain faces justice. The stakes are clear, the evidence is tricky, and the judge might decide either way. The negative version of the trope features your barbarian and your fighter making dice towers while the bard plays a solo session with the GM.
You see, dungeons work because everyone can contribute. They offer concrete challenges to overcome, and every member of the party has access to mechanical tools that help to solve those problems. When you step away from the format of the dungeon and into a courtroom (or a mystery; or an intrigue; or a baking competition) you need some new framework to replace the familiar activity of dungeon delving.
All too often this new framework amounts to “roll simple skill checks until the problem goes away.” And if your sole contribution to a scene is, “I have a negative modifier so I won’t participate for fear of screwing up,” then you’re in for a bad time.
Therefore, I propose we spend today’s discussion talking about “the talky sessions.” How do you make sure that everyone can contribute? Is there a better subsystem than, “Watch the guy with the high Diplomancy modifier do everything?” And what is the single best talky session you’ve been a part of? Sound off with your favorite non-violent conflict resolution systems down in the comments!
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aren’t fighting sessions also „simple skill checks till the problem goes away“?
it doesn’t get much simpler than „hit it with [insert weapon/spell of your choice]“
Positioning, battlefield control effects, initiative, hit points, death saving throws, healing… These elements add a depth and complexity beyond, “Try to hit DC 15.”
Applying similar structures to social scenarios feels cramped and artificial though, taking away from the simple pleasures of in-character improv.
But even beyond the mechanical difference, I find myself wondering what “the social dungeon” looks like? Or is “dungeon” a bad metaphor for it?
And here you get into the primary problem with most RPGs, namely that combat is the ONLY mechanically-rich part of the system. In part because combat tends to be the one activity in which in-character improvisation is considered completely irrelevant; the fact that the Wizard’s player practices HEMA (and therefore can choreograph a fight in detail) doesn’t let them own NPCs in quarterstaff duels without rolling. This is where systems like Burning Wheel, which have a more unified system that can be applied to more activities than fighting come into play.
A rich mechanical framework for social interactions need not feel cramped and artificial. But it needs player buy-in, and players tend to be okay with “the orc has beaten your bard to death with a club, because the dice said so” but not with “the orc convinces your bard that they’re not holding the people you’re looking for and that you should leave, because the dice said so.” There has be an effort to bring them along.
I’ve made more mechanically-rich social interactions work in my games because they tend to be proceeded by the characters researching the NPCs they’re going to be dealing with in order to understand what tactics they’ll need to use and what they can do to stack the odds in their favor. It’s more of a low-stakes puzzle, rather than just a crapshoot.
Dungeon is a poor fit as a metaphor. Using the setting of a trial as an example, the point into to wander from point to point defeating individual arguments. It’s more about crafting a competing theory of the series of events that lead up to the trial itself. And that allows for more interaction from the other player characters, as there are always support activities that they can engage in.
@Claire Stricklin
“taking away from the simple pleasures of in-character improv.”
For those that enjoy that. When I first started roleplaying, I hated those “simple pleasures” because I was terrible at it, which is why when I found a more mechanically “complete” system (GURPS), I dumped D&D to the curb.
@Aaron
“And here you get into the primary problem with most RPGs,”
Saying ‘most’ is doing the vast number of systems a disservice. Most systems give the same number of mechanics to physical combat as they do to social or mental combat, it’s D&D*† that really gives far too much weight to combat, but that’s because combat is it’s bread and butter.
* By which I mean all flavors of D&D, WotC, Piazo, and the huge swath of OSR clones.
† Unfortunately GURPS as well. There are splats that expand social and mental skill checks out to have some of the mechanical crunchiness of physical combat, but not to the same depth.
But, at the end of the day, I’d rather people were LARPing their social and investigative scenes than their physical combat scenes.
I mean, unless it’s an actual LARP, but then, most LARPS also have more ‘mechanical’ crunch to their combat rules than their social rules.
“Most systems give the same number of mechanics to physical combat as they do to social or mental combat, […]”
I’m going to heartily disagree with you there. Across the history of the hobby, games like Burning Wheel, or some flavors of Powered by the Apocalypse et cetera, in which there is a level of equality are in a clear minority. Although they have become much more popular of late, it’s not just D&D and D&D-adjacent games that tend to skimp on the rules for social interactions (I dislike the term “social combat” because not all conflicts are combative in nature).
Well, the first rule would be that if we’re playing a campaign where social stuff is expected to be a significant component, then characters should have social skills. Admittedly, that’s somewhat system-dependent… e.g. in D&D 5e, the charisma modify tends to dominate over skill, and isn’t really something you can invest in cheaply. Other systems make it easier for everyone to at least have a useful baseline in skills that aren’t their main focus.
Second, we’re very fond of the “skill challenge” format. If we’re doing that courtroom scene, sure, the bard is likely to be doing most of the talking… maybe backed up by a paladin or rogue or someone else with social skills. The wizard probably shouldn’t talk because he has a condescending attitude that rubs people the wrong way, but his brains are certainly useful in helping form a coherent argument, or for finding flaws in that of the opposition. Similarly, the monk or cleric or druid might not be a big talker, but their wisdom scores mean they’re often good at reading people. I admit I’m having trouble finding a role for the the stereotypical “good at hitting people” types in this particular scenario… but there are many non-combat scenarios where their athleticism or niche knowledge can be helpful.
Also, don’t disregard the possible contribution of a character with a low skill/ability. Sure, the bard with a +5 to all social skills is *probably* going to do better than the barbarian with a -1. But D20 is a very swingy system, and the barbarian only needs to roll a few points above average and the bard a few below average, and the barbarian comes out on top…
I wonder if Dwuid talks like that to her boyfwiend when he’s in fluffy wuffy mode.
The good news is that the myconid was able to appeal. The bad news is that the appellate judge was a eucalyptus tree and ruled in favor of more fires.
As for the question of how to get more stuff-hitting-oriented characters to participate in the talky bits, one option is to simply have too much for one person to cover. Sure, the bard or rogue can be the face of the defense team, but there’s only two days until the trial and we need everyone to pull their weight! Have the wizard research obscure legal loopholes (It’s not quite magical arcana, but it’s disturbingly close.) Have the fighter provide expert testimony. (As you can see, Your Honor, these slashes were clearly caused by a broadsword, not a longsword.) Have the barbarian put those Survival ranks they forgot about to work and run forensics. (The tracks lead… towards Castle Clearlyevil?)
A few DM suggestions can held prod folks into contributing, but hopefully just letting folks know that they need to do something, and not necessarily a die roll, will help get some gears turning.
Well… if the bard is out there lawyering it up, where are they getting their evidence? Who is making sure the witnesses say what they’re supposed to say? Who is out there making sure that inconvenient detail can’t be found? There’s an immense amount of fun to be had if the party looks at the problem from the right perspective.
One of the sillier adventures I ran had a princess who contacted the party for help. Her dad was a well-intentioned and traditional but slightly dim man who wanted the best for his daughter, so he arranged a series of challenges to find the best husband. The challenges were structured like a fairytale in nature, with moving the 20 ton boulder, winning a horse race, and completing an exhaustive trivia exam to find the smartest, swiftest, and strongest husband for his daughter. Said daughter loved her father but thought this was very old fashioned and hired the party to ensure her boyfriend, a peasant with no bonuses or training whatsoever, won.
I told the party the only rules were don’t kill anyone (to avoid a diplomatic incident) and to get cracking, which they absolutely did. By the end of the three day period, the druid had set a new land speed record as an extremely caffeinated horse, the trivia answer key had been mangled beyond recognition, and the 20 ton boulder had been reduced to gravel through the collective efforts of the party. The boyfriend broke both his legs and was dyed blue for the next two years, but technically he won. Although it was strange that his opponent, a paladin, started screaming about snakes and fled the contest halfway through.
My point is, never run a scene that is predetermined where only one character build can participate. Don’t say “this the court scene, will the highest intelligence and charisma party members please step forward”. Instead, say “the trial happens tomorrow. They have your friend dead to rights. Here’s the list of evidence, prosecutors, and witnesses. Get to it.” The lawyer-y types get there moment, while the rest of the party causes strategic mayhem and gets to witness the fruits of their labor.
My solution is, while not perfect, pretty simple. The talky person rolls the dice, and everybody else gets to be Statler and Waldorf. They’re D&D players, theyre already professional hecklers.
Our last campaign, the DM had an entire courtroom drama preplanned for our bard (the person with the highest charisma stats), a tiefling who’s family devil deal was being put on trial for breach of contract.
It was an almost entire campaign spanning side quest that had various points of aid from everyone in the party and a few npcs, led to her familiar becoming a beloved if creepy member of the party (an imp originally sent to her to spy on both herself and our group for the devil trying to frame her) and the courtroom end of it all felt like something out of Phoenix Wright with all the ridiculous drama and shock that a fake courtroom scene should have in a literal infernal trial of the century.
In the end, we won with overwhelming evidence that the original deal made was shady and unlawful (and devils, tho evil, REALLY like their legal documents to be lawful), and our tiefling bard freed her own soul, the souls of her living family, and the souls of all those that had died before her in her extremely extended family tree from hell!
It was a very satisfying conclusion to the side tale we were all very invested in by the end and then we went and finished the main campaign on the high of a major victory!
Honestly my perspective on ‘talky sessions’ is…..probably rather one sided considering the only game i’ve played in the last few years was a solo campaign. i like talky sessions!!! i am a plot invested player. i like having reasons to go hit things with weapons and magic. most of the time its roleplay first and rules second in this case of talky sesh in our house. maybe things like sense motive or other perception style things might be asked for but generally a diplo/other skill roll is saved for stuff like me the player having trouble articulating what i want in character and seeing if my character is better than me at it, or if whomever im speaking to can’t be won over easily. sometimes its also a ‘cover’ for ‘you flubbed your speech lets see how good/bad others took it’.
feeling like my human skill and charisma at speech can cover for a lack of it on my sheet is nice for fighty fighty types who haven’t the skills or stats to spare, but investing heavily into cha and social skills is also fun for turning things from “i am persuasive” to “i am an angel on earth and people trip over themselves to help me”. i feel like it’s easier for the whole table to contribute to conversational sessions because everyone is likely to at least have an opinion or idea. easier than, say, a stealth mission where the clanky fighter really and truly may have to sit out. the folks who invest into social characters and never get to use those skills know the feeling too.
my favourite non-violent sessions from my last campaign were rather creative in execution. ok maybe a *teeny* bit of violence but like. trust me. not normal kind.
early on in my magus’s adventure she was given a mysterious journal by a traveling peddler-woman (who i found out MUCH MUCH LATER was a goddess in fact). At home, alone in bed after the first adventure of the campaign, opened up the book and *wham* sucked into a pocket dimension. inside was a pretty garden and a cottage with a rather strange old couple in it. some bad ideas on my part in an effort to be a polite guest and one sip of soup later I get polymorphed into a mouse!
the next few sessions I was an unarmed mouse, unable to cast my magic, and alone without my other friends, and finding other transfigured mice living here and starting a little mousey rebellion to get our forms back. hubby took out our Mice and Mystics game we had bought and used maps/rules from that instead! We did have a run-in with the cat, which was also clearly something more malevolent that just LOOKED like a cat (the old couple were also disguised gods…..) but for the most part it was cunning and guile and puzzle-solving skills that won the day when martial skill was removed from the equation. of course one of the ‘mice’ i saved from said pocket dimension ended up being my next party member, a new wizard friend!
there was also the one session of walking into drow court and finding out my party rogue was aaaaactually a runaway prince and betrothed to the drow queen and he and i went on a nighttime sneak to find out all their bad news they were hiding and it got violent one day later……but the first day! the first day we were playing a dangerous court game and veeeeeery outnumbered.
Yeah –as to the question of the day– I got nothin. Aside from the “Let the Diplomacy person handle it,” I try to loop in the other players with Perception or Insight rolls to tell if the accused is sweating or being evasive, Investigation checks to snare that telling bit of evidence, or Intimidation checks from the back of the courtroom. (My favorite recent moment DMing involved a Drow wizard who was about as intimidating as dry toast and had failed his Intimidation roll. The party barbarian indicated that he would step up behind the wizard and flex– successful Stealth check vs. the wizard’s back, NATURAL 20 on intimidate vs. the NPCs– when the opponents quailed at the sight, the wizard’s player RP’d right along with it, “Yeah! (I knew I had ’em.)”
In my son’s Curse of Strahd campaign, the PCs needed to acquire something from a certain house but had been barred from entering the town in question. The party members all used different means of trying to get into the town: two turned invisible, some tried to scale the wall, others tried to Bluff their way through. Ultimately, all but the two invisibles wound up having the (above-mentioned) protracted Diplomacy contest with the town guards. The two invisibles used hand signals into each other’s palms to communicate “Hey, wouldn’t this make a great distraction while we just steal the macguffin.”
So they did.
Later, having Stealthily stolen the macguffin and looted the house, they sent a *message* spell to tell the rest of the party to “give up empty-handed,” since they already had the thing they had been trying to get.
Always depends on how the group wants to take it. If they aren’t in the mood for talky/talky, then it devolves into dice rolls. If they grab an scene and decide to dive into it, then I’ll go with the flow and let their actions/words decide the outcome with as few dice rolls as I can get away with.
Of course this causes things like the mage going into a full blown soliloquy to keep the rest of the party from killing the obviously beat down/starving group of goblins and coming to their rescue. They ended up giving the goblins all their copper and a wand of wonder to go back and take over the tribe and change their marauding ways.
Name a character Ars,. Then his son is named Arson.
I definitely feel the dice towers thing—I recently retrained my level 5 fighter into a fighter 1 / warlock 4 (dnd 5e) because the campaign was a lot lighter on combat encounters than I expected going in. Luckily my DM was happy to work with me, and I even got to move some stats around to make it work (magical dream sequences where you steal magic from demigodlike beings will change you!)
Part of the way I solve this kind of thing in my games is by 1) rolling dice less often and/or 2) rolling group checks. Rolling dice less often means that if something is executed well enough, you don’t have to roll for it; that rule that you should only be rolling if there’s time pressure, chance to fail, and consequences for failure. Rolling group checks means that everyone who contributes to something gets to roll, and if half pass then you succeed. It’s a little more satisfying than letting the face roll with advantage from a help action, the low charisma characters still might roll high, and I might give them a boost to their modifier if they do something like give exceptionally compelling speeches (regardless of their charisma score)
“How do you make sure that everyone can contribute?”
I don;t. I tell my Players “social and mental scenes will exist, in close numbers to how many purely physical scenes exist, be prepared to either help in them, or sit idle while the experts take center stage.”
And then I run my game. Of course I run GURPS, so it makes it simple to have some social and mental skills to help in those situations, and if some one makes a Pure Combat Monster that has no capacity to do anything in social/mental scenes other than stand around and breathe menacingly, then that’s their choice.
Just like when someone (usually me in other’s games) makes a pure social/mental type who quakes and hides behind others in combat.
It’s a trade-off. As long as people aren’t griping when the game had them out of their element, it’s all good.
Also, I don’t put groups into situations that puts them hugely out of their depths, that’s terrible and annoying, so no court-room scenes unless they are the defendants (surprisingly uncommon despite the number of murder hobos) or all somehow in the law/lawyer/cop/inveswtigator/etc profession.
so there I was running a pre-made ap for pathfinder (i’ll keep the name hidden for spoilers reasons) first part was a blast with intrigue, fighting and all kinds of different groups staged for and against the group – fun times all around.
that cleared i set up to prepare the next part when i realize it’s a railroad train wreck set about forcing the party to be a part of a staged performance that the author wrote (probably since he thinks everyone want to role-play his character role-play..) in order to infiltrate a specific location and raid a secret place there.
knowing my players and their very unorthodox approach to solving problems i was sure that:
A- at least 2 or more would try and burniate this thing to save time (which was an issue, but apparently the characters had time to set up a play?) and in order to ‘surprise’ me.
B- Not one of my players would actually like to be forced to play a different role of what they are set up to play. they are all strong minded people who want to be able to decide how they characters act on their own. so no way in hell are they going to let someone else decide how that they have to ACT in a specific way.
long story short, i brought this up to the players and we all decided to trash the stage act and work on an ‘ocean 11’ plan to infiltrate the target’s base and get into the guarded place covertly instead of the adventure path’s way.
they set out gathering information about the place, guards etc. and planned a very long and celebrate way for each to gain entry while avoiding the guards,traps and such.
it went GREAT!
(in fact the guy playing the bard, who was the most pleased at NOT having to act on a script, hummed the ‘mission impossible’ tune the whole time…)
The single best talky session that I’ve been a part of, I didn’t actually need to do a single thing as GM.
They’d just gotten through fighting the ogre bosses and clearing out the fortress. It was a hard battle. Multiple people had gone unconscious. The witch held the line against a charging ogre barbarian because despite her 1 hp remaining she’d actually had the best odds of tanking an attack from him (25% miss chance due to a displacement type effect). The party ran downstairs, the witch teleported to the dungeon where their ranger ally was watching their prisoner, sent the ranger to help the others, and sent a summoned celestial up after her. It was an epic fight. Lots of dramatic holding the line from the party’s paladin and barbarian. They just barely made it through.
Meanwhile, down in the dungeons, the witch decided to give their prisoner a second chance, and freed him. This is what led to the roleplay.
Cue talky session! Four hours of roleplay between the player characters about how the witch had gone behind the party’s back to free the guy who’d betrayed them, how she was the best equipped to track him, with her scrying spell, but was refusing to, how she’d ultimately done this with the paladin in mind, because she knew that he was a “Redeem if possible” kind of guy, but his goddess considered betrayal among comrades to be one of the most serious sins, and would have demanded execution for the prisoner, leaving no opportunity to redeem him.
So she’d gone behind the paladin’s back and gave the guy that opportunity for redemption herself, because she wasn’t bound by his oaths.
There was lots of roleplay of anger, discussions of morality, the other two PCs acting as go-betweens between the paladin and witch who weren’t talking to each other, and ultimately the paladin coming to the conclusion that his goddess says to trust your comrades, so he would trust the witch’s judgment here, but please not to go behind his back again, ESPECIALLY not to make a decision that was supposedly in his own best interests.
I welcomed the group to the table and started the session, and four hours later, I called time. That was it. I basically didn’t have to do a single thing as GM that day except sit and listen, and it was honestly pretty great!
Despite all that D&D 5e talks about having exploration and roleplaying as pillars equivalent to combat, it really only provides support for the combat part. Exploration? That’s the DM’s job to figure out. Roleplaying? The players are on their own. Combat? Have several rulebooks full of guidelines for every aspect of combat! And Pathfinder inherited that focus from earlier editions of D&D, though it dodges the awkward “No, combat isn’t the primary focus of the game!” nonsense.
In my experience, it’s impossible to make sure everyone contributes to a talky or planny scene. That requires everyone to have confidence in both their ideas and their ability to communicate them; this is rarely true in the groups I’m in. There’s definitely a sampling bias in there, since every gaming group I’ve ever joined has had me in it, but I feel confident saying that social anxiety, autism, and so forth are both more common than people generally realize and disproportionately common in TTRPG groups. And of course, you don’t need to be neurodivergent to be nervous.
Solutions…either encourage the quiet players to speak up and do stuff, or force the party into a situation where everyone has to do things. Combat is a decent template. The way D&Derivatives structure their combat, everyone gets exactly one turn to do their things, and barring unusual choices like fireballing a gaggle of goblins mobbing the fighter, the worst you can do is miss or waste some of your personal resources.
So see if you can think of a situation where everyone can be mandated to speak in turn, and mediocre ideas aren’t going to ruin everything.
I’ve got an idea kocking around for an adventure where he PCs are put on trial in a kangaroo court in the lower planes (possibly Woeful Escrand in the Abyss) where the judge keeps changing the mode of trial if if looks like the PCs are going to win. So it starts with a modern talky trial, but if the PCs get far enough it’s changed to a trial by ordeal and they’re dumped into a trap and hazard filled death maze, and finally when they’re about to solve the maze it’s changed again to trial by combat and one of them has to duel the prosecutor or the plaintiff to the death. If they win this last trial they’re grudgingly set free due to there not being a prosecutor anymore to press the case against them
An important thing to understand aboot properly DMing social rolls is that the argument sets the DC. My Paladin routinely out-persuaded a Bard because I knew how to structure an argument, while she just pushed X at them and hoped her modifier would act as mind control because she learned the game through terrible memes.
For how to make the whole table contribute, have everyone discuss what arguments the social characters might make.
I guess my strategy for getting through them without boring people is to just make them as fast and brief as possible, so that it doesn’t take away from the session and we can get back to the good parts.
When I started playing games online a few years ago, I developed a bad habit to just alt tab and do something else whenever the talky bits happened (unless nobody else liked talking either in which case I tried to speedrun the conversations). When I started GMing online, I had to break that habit fast.
Ultimate Intrigue does have an ‘Influence’ system, where NPCs have certain skills that if the PCs were to succeed a check on would have the NPCs be more friendly toward them. And these Influence checks don’t have to be strictly charisma-based in nature (one example being a profession (Merchant) check), so you could have skills that non talky PCs could perform to help the Diplomancers. For example, let’s say the princess has a thing for muscles. The bard may have a silver tongue but also noodle arms, so it’s up to the brawny barbarian to impress her with their STR-checks.
I motion that a toadstool has no standing.
One of my parties actually got sued in Hell Court (for merely breaking into someone’s house, beating them up, and then executing them after they were incapacitated!). There was a session or two where the players really got into this, coming up with all sorts of arguments and evidence and had a really good time. (I don’t recall if any dice were actually rolled.)
The group has had a lot of “talky” sessions over the years. Mostly, we just leave the dice out of it. I let even the player of the “dumb” PCs put forth ideas and arguments, on the assumption that other characters “actually” said it.