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[Willfor]

Alignment grew from a simple Law vs Chaos paradigm in early RPing into something slightly more complex. It took influence from fantasy works I think, and then cross pollination formed it into what we see today. And like Max White said, it's not so much a problem with the system as it is a problem with a certain kind of player. However, this certain kind of player is often the loudest player at the table, and often the most intractable.

They also seem to congregate on the Giant in the Playground forums sometimes.

[GlyphGryph]

Alignment grew from a simple Law vs Chaos paradigm in early RPing into something slightly more complex.

Any examples other than D&D?

[Max White]

Do Space marines Vs. Chaos marines count? I know it is sort of straw clutchy...

[Willfor]

Alignment grew from a simple Law vs Chaos paradigm in early RPing into something slightly more complex.

Any examples other than D&D?

D&D is the source. It also features in Castles and Crusades apparently. I recall that Moorcock had a large influence on it, so anything he's been a part of probably has it too.

[Kadzar]

Speaking of GitS forum and not alignment anymore, here's an interesting ongoing discussion about social systems. The discussion at page 3, especially, made me consider how, in many system where social skills are something that you take at the detriment of fighting skills or any other skills, you'll end up with parties where one character acts as the "Face", and all the others will avoid social contact, deferring to the Face character as if he were a rogue disarming a trap. They brought up the idea that specializing in socialization should give you extra things you can do, rather than making it more likely that you'll succeed at the check. For example, one idea was Spin, from 7th Sea, which apparently allows someone to control the attitude of a community at large with a single check instead of making several individual checks. It's not something everybody needs, but it's good to have. Also, the idea of binary checks for socialization is kind of stupid. You should really have varying degrees of success, so you have a measure of how much you impressed the NPC's. That way, being able to converse with them in their native language is a nice thing to be able to do, but not essential.

[Max White]

What? No! I fucking love playing 'The face' as you put it! It is my chance to sas the DM and these here dice say I can get away with it!

[GlyphGryph]

Heh... that last post made me break down the skills and spent points for my party. I found:

Character 1, the party fighter and friendmaker:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Social (4 levels total):
Conversation,  Intimidate
Combat (7 levels total):
Melee, Tactics
Other (13 levels total):
Telekinesis, Notice, Rowing, Problem solving, Medic!, Endurance, Telekinesis

Character 2, The Party Con Artist and Brawler, party's moral center:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Social (5 levels total):
Persuasion, Bluff, Gambling
Combat (12 levels total):
Melee, Throwing, Tactics
Other (6 levels total):
Athletics, Agility, Sleight Of Hand, Problem Solving

Character 3, The Party thief and temptress:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Social (7 levels total):
Conversation, Seduction
Combat (2 levels total):
Melee
Other (10 levels total):
Escape, Stealthy movement, Pickpocket, Agility, Notice

Character 4, the party leader and master of unforseen power:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Social(9 levels total):
Bluff, Persuasion, Investigation
Combat (4 levels total):
Melee
Other (9 levels total):
Stealth, Notice, Rowing, Agility, Endurance, First Aid

Even with the game being fairly combat heavy, I've not had much difficulty convincing my players to diversify and pick up social skills. I attribute this to two things:

Combat is dangerous, and healing is slow. Everyone wants some fighting skill, but everyone also works off the assumption that getting into a fight IS going to end badly for them, even if they win, so those combat skills are mainly a fall back.

And even the two combat focused characters have more to their personality and want to be able to participate and help in non-combat sections, aided by the fact that the systems encourages cooperation - successfull skill checks allow you to pass bonuses on to another player for their own skill check, perhaps against a more difficult task. So even someone with only a point or two in a social skill can still help - say, by distracting the second guard with some idle conversation while the skilled socializer zeroes in on the first. I think that's important - just like everyone can contribute to combat in D&D by knocking a few hp off the enemy, allow everyone to contribute to social successes.

And finally, I frequently split the group, meaning a certain amount of diversity in skill set for each individual is desired, since they're "face" might go missing for part of an adventure.

Also, the idea of binary checks for socialization is kind of stupid. You should really have varying degrees of success, so you have a measure of how much you impressed the NPC's.

This part I think is pretty important too. Again, make socializing almost feel like combat - stretch it out over several rolls, have partial successes, allow everyone to contribute, let the players develop social tactics and strategies. Simultaneously, make combat shorter and quicker, the way many social situations are handled in other systems, with simple straightforward checks and limited tactical depth.

[MaximumZero]

Posting to watch. Maybe I can kickstart my game back up with the two weeks left of my winter break after the holiday madness is through.

[Kadzar]

Random idea: you should have assists to seduction checks give wingman modifiers.

[Frajic]

Random idea: you should have assists to seduction checks give wingman modifiers.

I can imagine how that would be used/abused. Dear lord

[Darvi]

I despise any alignment system that doesn't allow Chaotic Stupid as a valid choice. Chaotic Neutral is an okay substitue, but it's just not the same...

[hermano]

My group of friends has been working on a system that fits us for more than a decade. We tried lots of different things so there are quite some ideas considering non combat interaction.

But first, in the end we decided to not have an intricate sytem for social interactions. Because it is the one thing we can do best without many rules. We are not going to hit each other to find out who will win a swordfight, but we can argue pretty well when playing out social interactions. If the character you play does lack social skill you'll come up with something inept or outright stupid which is just as much fun as setting up a fine argument. If there will be fights or not will depend on the setting a lot. When you need to get rid of a dictator and lack the weapons and skills to do it by force you will automatically have to look for allies, for weaknesses in his life or lifestyle, for weaknesses in the personalty and lifestyle of his lackeys and allies - and exploit those. Setting up a revolution can take many evenings with plannings, talking to lots of different people, solving many smaller problems, and be lots of fun without involving a single fight.

But now to ideas for rules to strenghten the social interactions in the game.
One thing you can do is discourage fighting. Let fights be bloody and bad. Describe how people suffer when they lose a friend or family member - have it clear that the players made them suffer. Have limbs flying around. Do not have simple healing for your players, if they get a cut they could very well die of infection, if they lose a limb they're done. People usually do not want to get injured or die, let the people in the game world be like real people. Enemies and players might rather just give up a fight instead of dieing. If somebody does make a stand till the end do not be kind, describe how he is hacked to pieces, how much pain is involved, and let him see in the end what a wonderful day it actually is and that he might just have sat with his family or some girl and enjoyed his life instead of dieing for some stupid cause. That might discourage the player to try to solve everything by force the next time. Try to give them PTSD.

Another thing is to flesh out the rules for social interactions. The rules for fighting are very intricate in most games. You have lots of stats and different skills, you will have to think quick and come up with solutions for game situations, you will also have many little successes in the fights to keep you going. And then there is all the nerdy optimizing of numbers to get the perfect fighter or whatever, which too can be fun. Have a similar system for arguments. Don't just have the skill 'Talk'. Have defensive and offensive social skills, have willpower points that act like hitpoints, you might have to grind somebody down by argueing with them, threatening them or flirting with them. Have attacks and counterstrikes with words and arguments, have reasoning and diatribes. There are many different ways to interact with people, more than there are weaponskills.

But in the end it is really up to the story you play out and the mood of the players. If they really want to play a fight it is stupid to force them to not play it, they will not have fun and everybody will just waste their time. To play a nonviolent story takes a lot of effort for the gamemaster. It is not enough to write down ten orcs with attack +10, you will have to come up with lots of different people, their interests, their standing towards other people in the world. There will have to be a path or several paths for the players to follow to achieve their goals, even if they will do something completely different in the end. Then the gamemaster will have to be quick and improvise things which will still have to make sense and fit to the overall story, situations and characters. This will not always work out, so throwing some orcs or gang members at them might give you the time to come up with a good idea.

----
We played again a few days ago, everybody being back in town for christmas. And the story somewhat fits the theme. I will elaborate, but this might get a little bit long.

The setting is the close future, some country in south america. Our guys were working for a mid level security firm, doing simple guard jobs after failing to succeed in the military or police.
But we got our big chance, a bodyguard job for some important guy from a huge corporation. His bodyguard got ill, nobody was around and we were chosen to guard him when he went to a big party with lots of important figures of the country. But our guys were inexperienced, so we let no do them everything perfectly. While the client was in a backroom with a whore we had some drinks that were brought to us and got drugged. Somebody killed the client and made it look like we did it. The guards of the building went after us. Before we reached our car they shot at us, we shot back and hit one guy. He ended up dieing, this was going to haunt us later.
We lost our jobs and had the police after us. However one of us had a camera running and we got the face of the assassin. After quite some detective work, which filled most of that play session, we found her. She just gave up, agreed to go to the police with us if we left everybody else alone. That was good enough for us. She also tried to influence us, while the group she was part of had fucked us, they were fighting an important cause. Several corporations and part of the elite of the country were planning a coup. Work camps and cheap labor for the corporations would be the result.
After delivering her to the police we expected things to calm down. We were arguing what to do now, being without a job and knowing of the big conspiracy. Then somebody called us, we had done good work finding the assassin. They needed those kind of guys, there was a whole terrorist network that had to be uncovered. In regard to the money they offered we agreed to work for them.
Soon the other side contacted us, we really had to stop going after them and help them instead. We ended up deciding to be double agents, feeding the conspirators with false data, while also sacrificing some people to make our information look real enough. We would fuck other people over, just like we had been.
While we were working on the fake information and one guy was doing some errants unexpected things started to happen. The guy running errants was run over by a truck, then shot. Soon later some guys with masks and guns showed up at our place, good thing we had a security system and some cameras running. We torched the appartment complex and got away in the ensuing chaos. After some more investigations and visiting our guy at the hospital we found out that those guys were members of the security firm that guarded the party our client had been killed at. We had killed their friend and they were a close knit group. Now they were going to kill us. One of us argued that we had more important things to work on. We had to get rid of the guys, fast. They would not leave us alone, in the end it meant them or us. As they were more experienced, had better equipment and were twice as many guys an open confrontation was out of the question. In the end we decided to set off an I.E.D. It was lots of detective work again to find out who the guys were, where they would be at and how we could get all of them to one location at one time without anybody else being involved.
We ended up building an impovised bomb made of a mobile, a toy car motor and battery and some old russian grenades. However we were no specialists in building bombs, they heard the motor, the click of the grenades being unlocked and started moving before it went off. Some of those guys stumpled out of the building, horribly burnt and maimed by grenade fragments. We decided to go after them and killing them for good. But one of them was still unharmed. And he was better than us, being faster, with better aim and being better at taking cover he shot us several times before his revolver was empty. His lack of ammunition was the only reason we got him in the end. Then we still had to murder the horribly burnt guys. We knew they had family, it was gruesome. A horrible situation.
We had to get away, shot, heavily bleeding. We had not planned to be in a firefight, we had no doctor. Going to a hospital meant going to jail. We ended up at a veterinarian, forcing him at gunpoint to stitch us up. But he insisted this would not be enough, we had internal bleeding, bullet fragments in the wounds, we wouldn't last hours without going to a hospital.
There we were, some pale shocked guys in an old dirty van full of blood phoning frantically to get hold of some doctor who would not talk to the police. We ended up getting somebody, one of us had a friend who owed him a lot, that guy knew a doctor involved in drugs who could be coerced to be quite about the whole thing.
Even with the help of the doctor we were going to be out of the loop for weaks. Things will progress, the rest of the world will not wait for us. Stopping the coup will get much harder the longer we wait. We had fucked up, killing those guys had been a horrible idea, trying to talk them out of killing us or just hiding would have been a much better approach.
But roleplaying is like df, it is more fun if you fuck up and have !!fun!!.

[Frajic]

My group of friends has been working on a system that fits us for more than a decade. We tried lots of different things so there are quite some ideas considering non combat interaction.

But first, in the end we decided to not have an intricate sytem for social interactions. Because it is the one thing we can do best without many rules. We are not going to hit each other to find out who will win a swordfight, but we can argue pretty well when playing out social interactions. If the character you play does lack social skill you'll come up with something inept or outright stupid which is just as much fun as setting up a fine argument. If there will be fights or not will depend on the setting a lot. When you need to get rid of a dictator and lack the weapons and skills to do it by force you will automatically have to look for allies, for weaknesses in his life or lifestyle, for weaknesses in the personalty and lifestyle of his lackeys and allies - and exploit those. Setting up a revolution can take many evenings with plannings, talking to lots of different people, solving many smaller problems, and be lots of fun without involving a single fight.

But now to ideas for rules to strenghten the social interactions in the game.
One thing you can do is discourage fighting. Let fights be bloody and bad. Describe how people suffer when they lose a friend or family member - have it clear that the players made them suffer. Have limbs flying around. Do not have simple healing for your players, if they get a cut they could very well die of infection, if they lose a limb they're done. People usually do not want to get injured or die, let the people in the game world be like real people. Enemies and players might rather just give up a fight instead of dieing. If somebody does make a stand till the end do not be kind, describe how he is hacked to pieces, how much pain is involved, and let him see in the end what a wonderful day it actually is and that he might just have sat with his family or some girl and enjoyed his life instead of dieing for some stupid cause. That might discourage the player to try to solve everything by force the next time. Try to give them PTSD.

Another thing is to flesh out the rules for social interactions. The rules for fighting are very intricate in most games. You have lots of stats and different skills, you will have to think quick and come up with solutions for game situations, you will also have many little successes in the fights to keep you going. And then there is all the nerdy optimizing of numbers to get the perfect fighter or whatever, which too can be fun. Have a similar system for arguments. Don't just have the skill 'Talk'. Have defensive and offensive social skills, have willpower points that act like hitpoints, you might have to grind somebody down by argueing with them, threatening them or flirting with them. Have attacks and counterstrikes with words and arguments, have reasoning and diatribes. There are many different ways to interact with people, more than there are weaponskills.

But in the end it is really up to the story you play out and the mood of the players. If they really want to play a fight it is stupid to force them to not play it, they will not have fun and everybody will just waste their time. To play a nonviolent story takes a lot of effort for the gamemaster. It is not enough to write down ten orcs with attack +10, you will have to come up with lots of different people, their interests, their standing towards other people in the world. There will have to be a path or several paths for the players to follow to achieve their goals, even if they will do something completely different in the end. Then the gamemaster will have to be quick and improvise things which will still have to make sense and fit to the overall story, situations and characters. This will not always work out, so throwing some orcs or gang menbers at them might give you the time to come up with a good idea.

A lot hinges on the GM, yeah.  As for social mechanics, I've at the very least got multiple skills planned - lying, seduction, intimidation, persuasion, charm, and whatever other facets of conversation that should be managed. And I was going to put an idea out about how fear would work, but that post... didn't happen, I guess? I'll explain it in really short terms...

Each character has a set of fears that may be one of three degrees: intimidating, [whatever it's called inbetween] and terrifying. If you don't have a reason to confront one of your fears, you can't do it. Every time you confront one of them, you have to do a fear check, which is modified by willpower. Also, on willpower checks: if you have a strong reason to do something(your sister is about to be murdered/you have another fear driving you), you receive a bonus to willpower. So if you've got a boulder chasing you, it is impossible for you to fail a fear check when you have to make a jump over a bottomless pit, unless your character is a complete pussy.

[Frajic]

(please be kind and disregard the fact I'm double posting)

I've finally begun working on this thing again. What have I got? Skill groups.

Listed alphabetically:
Art - Your skill at creative pursuits, be they visual, literal or musical(the last two are affected by your Language and Music skills).
Athletics - Your ability to perform at physical activites, such as sprinting, climbing, or sports.
Computers - Your knowledge and experience with digital systems, and how well you're able to use these.
Construction - Your ability to plan and create anything large, such as engineering or architecture, or specific things under these.
Crafts - Your skill at working with smaller things that qualify as "crafts", such as metalworking, fletching or even knitting.
Guns - Your skill at utulizing firearms efficiently.
Knowledge - Your ability to pull forth information on a given subject from memory. The more obscure the information you're looking for is, the higher the difficulty.
Language - Your ability to perform basic(or advanced) communication, and overcoming language barriers.
Melee combat - Your skill at fighting in close quarters, either armed or unarmed.
Music - Your skill at playing and understanding music and musical instruments.
Social - Your ability to converse and manipulate people verbally.
Thief(if someone knows some other place to stuff sneaking, pickpocketing and lockpicking, that would be fantastic) - Your skill in the trades of a criminal.
Vehicles - Your skill at operating any type of vehicle.

You may also have talent in any one of these groups, giving you a bonus to all rolls under that group while leaving your skill levels alone(as to simulate someone who learns faster).

I may or may not have missed some fields here, so if you know of any, that's why I made this thread. Feedback.

[Max White]

I was trying to play as a pure 'hipster' as the art and music skills were through the fucking roof, but then the need to put songs on my IPod came up and I needed the levels in 'nerd' to improve my computer skill.