I would like for my homebrew game to have granular "social offense" skills...

I would like for my homebrew game to have granular "social offense" skills. (Do not worry; skill purchases are heavily siloed in this game.) I am having trouble coming up with a fair and balanced list for "social offense" outside of anything deception-related. Could Veeky Forums lend a hand?

So far, I have a simple list of five, again excluding deception:
Charm: Anything to do with getting people to like, respect, love, or even lust over you.
Intimidation: Scaring and browbeating people.
Logic: Purely logical arguments.
Negativity: Instilling guilt, anger, shame, and other negative emotions and making appeals based on that, but nothing Intimidation would cover.
Positivity: Calming people, inspiring people, and appealing to positive emotions, but nothing that Charm would cover.

However, I am worried about Logic being too non-granular. I have four types of emotional appeals as four separate skills, but "Logic" is just a single monolithic skill. Should I split this Logic skill up, or is this actually fine?

If I should split it up, what would be an intuitive split? "Deductive" and "Inductive" would be hard to figure out at a table.

This game is supposed to center around high-powered, high-magic, high fantasy adventuring with some courtly debates, but very few formal debates.

Colette, you're doing this for several fucking years already. Exact same goddamn question, over and over and over again.

Just accept that other players aren't asocial potatoes like you and don't need social combat system.

There is no social combat involved.

Also, "Negativity" should probably be renamed "Provocation." I am struggling to think of a better name for "Positivity" that would encapsulate calming, encouraging, inspiring, and entertaining people, but nothing comes to mind.

Logic's a bad idea because it simply allows the players to roll it on themselves to figure out the logical course of action.
Which they will do, constantly, and then ignore it.

Point is you are giving them a way to have you make their own cases.

I suppose it is a poor name, then, because it was supposed to be for *making* the arguments in a logical fashion. Having knowledge of the subject matter falls outside of these "social offense" skills.

I will be renaming "Logic" either way, but should I keep it as is or split it up? Currently, I think that with four "emotional method" skills and one "logical method" skill, the logic avenue should be split up a bit more... unless it is normal for pure logic to be a relatively narrow option in typical situations?

even then lets take a stupid arguemet like
Jeff wants to rape a baby. Not any baby, this specific baby. No one knows why and Jeff refuses to say.

Jeff rolls "Logical Conjecture", jeff has a 5% chance to have a perfectly rational ironclad arguement about how he HAS to rape this baby and stopping him would place you in a objectively worse position, even though his arguement is stupid.

It's better to have them actually argue themselves, unless its a video game where you cant just react to any options.

Trying to convince someone through reason is "dialectic"

My social skill subsystem is actually diceless. The subsystem causes your skills grant you "clues" on how to best apply a certain skill upon a certain NPC in a given scenario, and sometimes checks for "thresholds" in conversations based on raw skill level. There are also "teamwork" actions wherein characters team up to create a pool of points (whose formula actually rewards multiple PCs having "redundant" skill investments) which they can then use to create powerful effects.

There are only three possible ratings for skills, so while the skills themselves are supposed to be granularity, skill ratings themselves are not.

I digress, however. Right now, what I am worried about is not mechanisms of skills themselves, but how precisely I should go about splitting up skills, a "logical argument" skill especially.

A good name indeed, and I thank you for it. But should this be split up or preserved as a single skill, considering that I already have four emotion-based "social offense" skills?

Both Positivity and Negativity are not necessarily wholly emotional arguments. You could easily state the positive outcomes of a course of action and gloss over the negative for a wholly logical action, and vice versa embellish negative consequences of an action to dissuade someone from the benefits of that action.

Given that, if you switch Logic out with dialectic (simply putting forth complicated arguments in your favour) then you would have a more even blend of emotional or logical bases to use.

Fuck off, I just want to kill shit.

I would just outright not play a game with this level of skill granularity. Like, even the notion of explaining this to my players and why we would should want it sounds like a nightmare.

It seems that a more even spread would be:

• Assuage: Calming people down and assuring them that all will be well, whether soothing an angry or depressed person or explaining to a group that your proposal is not as mad as it might seem.
• Charm: Using your charms, eloquence, looks, and perhaps even qualifications to get people to like, respect, or love you.
• Inspire: Building up positive emotions in people and getting them to act on that.
• Reason: Applying pure logic without any emotional appeals to present facts and consequences.
• Threaten: Leveraging fear and worry to get someone to do or not do something, whether overtly threatening a person or warning them of the consequences of what they are planning.

Assuage, Charm, Inspire, and Threaten can employ a mix of emotional and logical methods, but Reason requires pure logic without any emotional appeals.

Is this a better spread?

The non-social skills are actually less granular than the social skills. I simply want to "zoom in" on the social skills by siloing off points to be spent on them and making them more granular.

An idea, based on something I considered for a homebrew I worked on once -

Use the "traditional" division of types of rhetoric - Logos, Pathos, and Ethos - as your "persuasion/argument" skills.

Logos covers persuasion through pure reason and logic.
Pathos covers persuasion through emotional appeals (both overt and subtle).
Ethos covers persuasion based on ethical grounds.

>multiple granular "social offense" skills
>There is no social combat involved.

That's not exactly what "ethos" means in this context. Rhetorical ethos is any kind of appeal to the authority of the speaker. You use ethos to start a Bavarian Fire Drill.

Or you could just talk to people like a functional human being.

Oh, and a sixth:

Provoke: Belittling, insulting, taunting, coaxing, or presenting facts so as to incite a negative reaction in others and get them to act on it, whether shaming someone into action or denigrating a third party.

Does this make for a good spread?

I have shades of this in the spread I currently have, but I think it would be better to try to base methods off overall "tactics" like assuaging people, threatening people, and so on, which can include a mix of logic and emotion.

There is no social combat, but "social offense" refers to actively applied social tools, as opposed to more perception-based empathetic abilities. Deception-related skills are tricky to classify, because they are both offense and defense.

Allow me to rephrase:

>multiple granular social skills
>There is no social combat involved.

There are social rules, but there is no social combat.

As I explain in , my social skill subsystem is diceless. The subsystem causes your skills grant you "clues" on how to best apply a certain skill upon a certain NPC in a given scenario, and sometimes checks for "thresholds" in conversations based on raw skill level. There are also "teamwork" actions wherein characters team up to create a pool of points (whose formula actually rewards multiple PCs having "redundant" skill investments) which they can then use to create powerful effects.

PCs have social skills and non-social skills siloed, so that all characters are good at social skills, just in different ways. This is because I would like for the game to "zoom in" on social interactions and make them more granular than other, not-particularly-socially-oriented skills.

Sounds a lot like a social combat system to me.

There is no formalized subsystem of initiative, turns, attacking, and defending in a social situation, so there is no social combat.

If you want to split up social situations, try thinking it in the context of opportunities. You have skills related to revealing or setting up opportunities, with the time aspect essentially determining if it comes from preparation (connections/reputation) or active appeal (what most social systems end up implementing). You probably also need skills that utilize those opportunities.

The key is to remember that it's all about creating bridges between people. Debate is rarely the answer to that - it's just a tool and it's pretty much never about who you're debating against (but rather who's witnessing your debate).

Honestly most systems offload this to standard roleplaying because these are also skills in active use at the table. There's also player agency, which basically revolves around "a player can make their PC say specific words" and conflicts with "but these words can't be said because they don't match the PC's skill in x". And even as a hint system, you're going to run into the issue of how opportunities work - specific factors usually end up being the determining factor as to who is the fastest at reaching an opportunity. That requires system flexibility for spontaneously generated specificity whilst still requiring legitimacy/fairness from the players' perspective. Even if you're able to achieve this, you run into the next issue - fortune in real life sucks because the rate of success is much lower than what you want for a heroic story, even for the wildly successful people in the world.

Point is, I'd just throw out emulating social situations and work from a narrative standpoint because ultimately you're going to get disappointed at real life if you achieve what you're after.

Could you please give examples of "skills related to revealing or setting up opportunities"?

>Point is, I'd just throw out emulating social situations and work from a narrative standpoint because ultimately you're going to get disappointed at real life if you achieve what you're after.

This effectively amounts to "the characters are only as socially skilled as the players," which is extremely problematic for its own reasons.

Is there EVER any point in having social skills in an RPG, ever?

>with the time aspect

Also, what is this about a "time aspect"?