Defusing Violent Situations

[clarence]

I have been looking into a more systematic way for characters to avoid violence in scenarios for a while now. The social conflict rules in BRP Space goes a long way (or generic ones as in Revolution d100), but I wanted to give the characters some concrete tools to go from violence to diplomacy. 

Here's what I've got so far. All comments welcome. 

 

1. Choose a strategy:

Combine forces. With the right words the character succeeds in calming the opponents, perhaps pointing to a common goal, enemy or predicament. 

Threaten. The character finds a way to tell (or show) the opponent that trouble lies ahead if s/he is attacked. It can be a threat of extra-ordinary power, later punishments, the anger of the gods or maybe showcase massive support from superiors or sheer numbers. Equally effective is threatening to reveal a secret, and it can be used stealthily even in very low-key situations. 

Trade/Bribe. A simple bargain: Leave the characters alone and the opponent will receive some kind of bounty. Money is often used, but offers of help with a problem or providing valuable information might also work. 

Uncertainty. Is the opponent really sure about this violent move? Has s/he judged the consequences of the violent act carefully enough? Often combined with a threat of some kind, or a hint of other potential conflicts spawning as a consequence. 

Inner conflict. If the character has been in a situation to study (or in some other way gain information about) the opponent's group, a delicate hint at an unresolved group conflict may be attemted. It can be a gang member being accused of conspiring for leadership, keeping bounty for him-/herself or mixing with the enemy. 

 

2. Choose a skill & define a conflict pool:

Skills: Persuade, Bargain, Oratory, Perform, Deceit, Psychology.

To show off might or aptness, another skill roll may be needed (magic roll to cast spell, weapon skill for some intimidating trick, and so on). 

Conflict pool: CHA, INT and/or POW (for more on my use of conflict pools, see BRP Starships in the download section).

The opponent's conflict pool can be estimated from the following: 

6. Weak leader, non-professionals*, outnumbered or minions. Communication skill maximum: 30%

11. Normal. Communication skill maximum: 50%

16. Strong leader, strong conviction, stronger in apparent force or numbers, or professionals*. Communication skill maximum: 75%

Depending on the situation, either treat the opponent's pool as a static obstacle that must be overcome with enough successful rolls (similar to breaking down a door), or make it a dynamic conflict. In the latter case, the one with the conflict pool not reaching zero first, will decide what course to take next regarding violence. (Optional: If the winning side, regardless of which, decides to go for a violent solution after the social conflict, it will gain an advantage the first 1d6 rounds thanks to its greater self confidence. All skill rolls are at Easy (+20%). 

 

3. Additional bonuses & penalties:

The initial skill roll when a character is trying to defuse a situation can be strengthened by decisive and symbolic actions, normally +20%, but up to +50%, if ingenious ways to communicate a message is used (showing a VeryBigGun™, magic show-off, and so on). If the initial roll is failed, the fight is started as usual. The threat or offer made by the character has been deemed irrelevant, too small, laughed off, etcetera. A new diplomatic approach must be found by the character (or someone else), at the earliest in the second combat round (a fresh bonus is applicable if a new splendid way to communicate is found). 

Penalties can be applied for certain situations. In a very noisy or rowdy environment (crowds, bars, heavy traffic, etcetera) a penalty of -20% to -50% is used. Similar penalties can be used in other situations where speech is not easily heard, temperaments has already ran hot, the characters have stumbled into the opponent's core territory (where they feel very sure of themselves and can expect the crowd to support them) and so on. Showing off can in these situations be necessary to grab everyones attention (and to minimize penalties).

 

* = "Professionals" are here meant as people used to violence.

[RosenMcStern]

You see, this is exactly what I was trying to avoid with the generic conflict rules: a different subsystem for each particular case.

Here you are analysing a typical "social pre-combat situation". Which is important, but nevertheless only one of a myriad possible social interactions.

There is nothing in this subsystem that is not covered in the generic conflict rules of RD100. The only difference here is that you are assigning a significance to strategies, bonuses and rolls before setting up the conflict, i.e. you are confident that you have found a categorization/taxonomy for all possible approaches to this situation. In other words, that your categorization of possible events is as detailed as the categorization of events that may take place in combat, where things are not left to narration but determined on the ground of commonly acknowledged factors (firepower, strength, armour, etc.).

Are you sure that this categorization is so accurate? For combat, you have a very simple way of making a reality check about such accuracy: go to a re-enactment group and check whether it works that way. Did you make a similar check of objective factors and possible results for this kind of situation? Social interaction can be tricky, it is far less deterministic than swinging weapons, and it is extremely difficult to determine if the details you are integrating in the rules are the correct ones or whether you are modeling neglectable factors and leaving out the important ones.

In my opinion, a "use a generic core and ret-con the result to a plausible description of the outcome" is a more effective approach in this case.

[clarence]

I would say both yes and no to most of the above. The ideas above I view not so much as a rules system, but a help for characters needing some guidance on how to start using their social skills. You can easily skip all the rules and just use the strategies as a cheat sheet for the players. How cool isn't it to talk yourself out of a deadly situation? In movies this is happening all the time. A quick witted player will do this by him-/herself, but for the rest a few cliché techniques might come in handy.

And yes, a generic approach is very valuable and the RD100 rules are very good. Using them for all types of conflicts works very well. But you do have a system of plugins for situations you want to cover in a more detailed way too. Will you add a plugin for social conflicts or is various combat rules getting all the attention? If a 100 page book allocates 50 pages to combat and 2 pages to social interaction it sends a clear message to the players (including the GM) what the scenarios will be about.

Do I cover all possible situations above? Probably not, but they are generic enough to spark an idea with the players and adding more is partly why I posted it here.

Is social interaction complex? Yes, it is. On the other hand most players have first hand experience with it, something most does not have with physical combat. Should we avoid making guides/rules about social interaction just because it is complex? Did complexity ever stop anyone from making (not very realistic) rules about combat or mass combat?

I realize looking at my first post that the rules may appear too much of a specialized sub-system. But on the other hand I believe that specifically detailing the way players can avoid violence is top priority for any game. Violence is the biggest sinker for the entire RPG culture - to grow up it really needs to be much more varied. How do we best get there?

 

[Sean_RDP]

One of the things that was a big deal in a lot of Indie game design talk was the idea that there shouldn't be separate rules for combat and non combat situations. Such an idea is difficult to implement with a system like d100 where the tradition is one that depends heavily on combat and conflict, but all the essentials are there. You could redesign the whole system to de-emphasie combat and instead play up conflicts of all kinds. OR you can use the tools that already exist. Especially since social interaction can be so messy from a RP point of view. Often times it is chaos, with less interested players reading comics (old school) or eating your cheese dip or more likely playing on their mobile device.

So I suggest using the rules as they are, with sight tweaks:

-Three ruffians come down the road. The group drops into rounds, and on the character's SR (base, no weapon add) they can talk, converse, move, use a skill. Depending on the success of skill and counter skill things may turn violent or not

-The party walks into a bar. Two characters want to gather information, one wants to visit her favorite barmaid, the others just want to drink. Again on their normal SR or using social SR based on INT or POW or APP/CHA/PER, the characters use relevant skills to actually make something that could be chaotic and putting some order to it.

These are just ideas.

Before any change in mechanics will work however, the paradigm of the session/campaign/game system has to change as well. These need to reward non violent conflict resolution. Adventure design needs to be on board as well. 

[RosenMcStern]

1 hour ago, clarence said:

You can easily skip all the rules and just use the strategies as a cheat sheet for the players. How cool isn't it to talk yourself out of a deadly situation? In movies this is happening all the time. A quick witted player will do this by him-/herself, but for the rest a few cliché techniques might come in handy.

And in fact these are best left as strategic guidelines for interpreting the result of the skill rolls, not rules.

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And yes, a generic approach is very valuable and the RD100 rules are very good. Using them for all types of conflicts works very well. But you do have a system of plugins for situations you want to cover in a more detailed way too. Will you add a plugin for social conflicts or is various combat rules getting all the attention? If a 100 page book allocates 50 pages to combat and 2 pages to social interaction it sends a clear message to the players (including the GM) what the scenarios will be about.

As I have stated before, the problem here is not violence but measurability. If you can easily check in reality whether a mechanic produces a plausible (or adequate to the fiction for fantasy) result 90% of the time, it may be worth creating specific rules for that situation. Otherwise, you are just telling the players how you would eyeball that situation instead of letting the GM eyeball it on his or her own. In my experience, in the domain of social interactions gamers tend to become very whiny if you tell them how to handle the scene and what to roll. This makes the addition of rules for specific social systems (remember: your rule here is only for pre-combat, in order to accurately model every possible social situation you need to have a book as complex as GURPS social engineering) rather unlikely to be used as written. In the end, you risk to encourage players to freeform (i.e. whoever persuades the GM wins) any social encounters if you put in that many detail.

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Is social interaction complex? Yes, it is. On the other hand most players have first hand experience with it, something most does not have with physical combat. Should we avoid making guides/rules about social interaction just because it is complex?

Complexity is not the problem, either. It is whether the rules produce a plausible result without too much handwaiving, or not. In the case of combat, or chases, or crafting/repairing things or other phisical activities, it is easy to check this. For social interactions there are so many factors that are not represented by in-game variables that any attempt at being precise becomes futile in 90% of cases. For instance, this ruleset could work properly if _all_ characters, including NPC, in the world had Passions/Motivations defined, each with a score, exactly like they have Hit Points or Fatigue or Sanity or whatever. Unlike combat that works on very detailed, measurable variables (initiative, weapon length, rate of fire, armour, cover...) here you are working on the same variable set that you would use for an improvised conflict (generic CHA, and skills), but you demand a higher level of precision. That the tools you are using are not up to the task is quite evident: complicating the procedure used and adding guidelines does not compensate for the absence of more detailed variables that describe what the characters experience and how the situation is evolving.

To make my point clearer: I found myself facing the same problem when designing a plausible armour system. No matter how much I elaborated on the subject, any result that used only one number for armour was insatisfactory from the POV of realism, and it became clearly evident to me that there was a disproportion between the variables that describe an armour piece (AP) and the multiple variables that describe a weapon (size, reach, damage, type, etc...). If I wanted realism, the best way was to increase the number of variables: inventing new ways to "handle" that single variable produce only a hidden increase in "GM fiat", not simulative detail.

 

[Mankcam]

I tend to resolve most situations either by simple or opposed rolls. Sometimes a situation will require several opposed rolls - typically with the loser of each of those rolls accumulating a cumulative difficulty level disadvantage until they now longer have the compacity to continue the contest. 

I use the above method for dramatic social interactions, and also apply modifiers for good/bad roleplaying. I even use it for simple combat (like 'Mooks' rules), and tend to use the more structured combat rules for when dramatic combat is the focus of a scene; usually only once a session, occasionally twice.

This has worked reasonably well for my troupe, and its not much bookkeeping on the fly for a GM. I think having broad generic rules is the way to go these days, it makes it easier for the GM and players to follow. You also don't want a social conflict system to get in the way of roleplaying either, so nothing too simulationist I feel is the best path.

I also like the way RD100 looks like handling dramatic non-combat scenes, and I might possibly use these rules at some stage, depending on the genre I am running at the time.

Edited December 9, 2015 by Mankcam

[clarence]

Just to be clear: Most of the concepts in my first post are taken straight from the generic social conflict rules in BRP Space (which in turn are quite similar to the rules in RD100). It's actually only the first point that brings anything "specialized" to the table - and those are suggestions rather than rules. 

While I do agree to some of Paolo's points, I still wonder how to promote non-violent play. A generic system for conflict resolution is a good start, but where do we go from there? Some suggestions:

- Rewarding non-violent behaviour. BRP already does this pretty well, but could be further developed. 

- Penalties for unnecessary violence (or all violence, if you want to). This is what I do in my new book Odd Soot. 

- Scenarios providing alternate non-violent solutions. 

- And, as I provided earlier, specific guidelines or rules for players on how to defuse violent situations. 

- Creating believable NPCs and rich communities to interact with. Why do NPCs have hit points but not passions/motivations/inspirations?