Social checks

What are some RPGs with interesting, well-made or unorthodox social check systems? What mechanics do they use for social?

Pic ever so slightly related.

A Dirty World has an interesting one. No character can make another character do anything they haven't agreed to, instead if you lose an opposed check one of your stats or skills takes damage and is lowered, so conflicts (of any kind) consist of the two players making a series of opposed rolls and damaging each other's stats until someone doesn't want to risk it any further and agrees to what their opponent wants to do.

Huh, that's pretty interesting, thanks. What happens with the stats, though? Do they reset at the end of the day or something like that?

>well-made
I like the one Adventurer Conqueror King has. I find it simple, versatile, and elegant. I think it's definitely worth looking at if you want to write a social mechanic.

The central mechanic is the 'reaction roll'; a 2d6 roll, modified by charisma and other stuff, compared to a small table. The result gives the GM a solid idea of how an NPC should react or feel about the players, and the exact details are left to the situation. It has a lot of applications, including recruiting NPC party members, random encounter disposition, NPCs' first impression of players, purchasing items (better reaction rolls yield a discount), and loyalty rolls.

It's main flaw is that the numbers are a bit small, so it's simple for a munchkin to stack up proficiency modifiers and make himself basically irresistible. I've seen variants using 3d6 instead to mitigate this.

Of course, like any rule under the OSR philosophy, what makes it really shine is the fact that the GM is meant to only use it when it makes sense for a random element to decide things. That is to say, when the GM is uncertain how an NPC should feel or act. You don't need dice to decide how a father feels when the players hurl his son's head at his feet. The discipline to only roll when necessary makes any set of game-rules run much more smoothly, pre-empting many lore-unfriendly rules antics.

Oy, thanks for the recommendation.

I like the version from the Weapons of the Gods/Legends of the Wulin systems. Social rolls don't give you the ability to control someone's actions, they let you apply buffs or debuffs to someone attached to certain conditions.

Say you're playing a Courtier (which you might well be doing, if you're about to make a social roll), and you're about to attend court. Bad news, everyone in the party is coming, and that includes Iron Fox: brute force brawler, repentant bandit queen, and proud owner of exactly one set of clothes. If you tell her to change into something more appropriate for a lady at court, she'll say no. So instead, you make a roll to set up a social Condition for her. You encourage her ("you'd be prettier than half the court if you wore silk instead of linen") and give her a bonus if she does what you want, or you discourage her ("you do realise you look like a beggar, don't you?") and impose a penalty if she doesn't do what you want. Her player still chooses what the character actually does, you just provide an incentive for that to be what you want her to do.

Do you mean social checks or a full fledged social system?

Dogs in the Vineyard has four potential phases of any confrontation:

>thinking
>talking
>physical
>fighting
>guns out

They are not called this obviously, but that’s essentially the idea. You basically start at the point that makes sense and each escalation to the next area means everyone gets more dice based on their stats. Traits and items are also worth adding dice when you use them.

People raise on their turn with two dice and name anyone that is involved with their action, then those involved must see the raise with one or more of their dice. Any time you use more than two dice to see you end up suffering fallout.

The stakes of the encounter are drawn up front and you can give them up at any point, and basically it’s a risk vs. reward on what happens until the encounter is over. The goal is to force the GM to run out of dice for the encounter before you end up with a lot of fallout.

It’s flexibility means that any social encounter including your own impure thoughts are on the table, and when people start fighting or shooting the fallout racks up quick so most of the game is just social interaction with your words chosen around your dice.

The huge flaw is that the conversation is just a few sentences at a time, so an encounter might be a speech a villain gives to a crowd with stakes of “the speaker convinces you his way aligns with your faith” and it might take 2 hours to decide he’s full of shit, create a distraction for the armed thugs the speaker employs, and shoot him dead or even just get a hecklers’ veto going.

>four phases
>lists 5 stuff

there are ways of regaining them, basically, every stat has an 'at the end of each scene if [thing] happened to your character increase by one' condition