(This is the Social Combat chapter from the Diaspora RPG. @bradjmurray@dice.camp's most recent take on those rules: social combat in diaspora.)
Social combat can be used to handle complicated social and personal situations. It adds a clear objective, so you can avoid spending a lot of energy talking fruitlessly in character when no real strategies for resolution present themselves. It gives the same opportunities to make interesting narration as the regular combat system, wrapped up in a tactical challenge.
To begin, set the stakes: establish clearly what happens if the characters win and what happens if they lose. Stakes might be “We get the location of the secret base” or “We get to make a Science roll to determine how much about the base we get to narrate” or “I get the girl” or something entirely different. Losing could simply indicate failure to achieve these things, but the referee should be creative in establishing real (but interesting) losses—failure perhaps earns the enmity of the girl’s family or gets your license to practice medicine revoked.
Once the stakes are established, establish victory conditions, which depend on the map.
The only stress track that gets action in social combat (and it doesn’t need to) is the Composure stress track on individual characters. In some cases it might make sense to place the Wealth stress track at risk instead or as well, but this is at the discretion of the referee when designing the conflict.
Social combat takes place on a zone map much as it does with personal combat. Instead of representing some physical geography, the map represents the social space of the encounter. Because of the kinds of options available to characters involved in social combat, certain kinds of map shapes have certain kinds of effects on behaviour and can be used to represent specific issues.
In general, concentric circles imply intimacy. Zone shapes with many borders, and therefore many avenues of escape or access, better represent socially open places like chatting about the weather at a party. Intimate zones are often objectives (you want to get someone to reveal valuable information, and so you want to maneuver them into intimate, trusting conversation).
To begin with, moving between zones has no additional cost—there is no initial use of “borders” as there is in personal combat. Characters in the same zone can be said to be engaging each other socially—they are conversing about interesting, relevant things that they care about. The further apart characters are, the more social distance is in their conversation. Range has a deep impact on effectiveness and so one must usually close the range before one can do anything useful, such as move the conversation to a more intimate space.
Zones represent in the first instance a degree of intimacy in the social context. This will sometimes correspond to a spatial dimension too, with a separate zone corresponding to a small balcony where a conversation might occur, but more often it represents something much more nebulous. It is often a good idea for the table to design the map of the social combat as a group. Optionally, once the map is created, each player may choose to put a single free-taggable Aspect on a zone or a single pass value of 2 on a border, to reflect the personal contours of the social situation.
For each zone on the map, create one time box to represent available time to resolve. If you need to know exactly how long something took, the table should determine what the maximum amount of time something (even the best party will disperse by morning). If a victory condition is achieved before the time boxes run out, the maximum time can be downgraded a number of shifts on the Time Track (Dealing With Time, Chapter 2) equal to the number of unchecked boxes. Often, table consensus will determine a very similar result in any case.
One of the biggest conceptual hurdles in adopting this system for resolving social interactions is recognizing that not every person in a scene needs to be represented on the map. Part of this is embodied within the zones themselves. Aspects on the zones can indicate the other people involved.
This can in fact be made even more abstract, when you want to make a situation tactical that has become mired or unproductive in regular role-play. By making some of the actors on the map ideas instead of explicit people, you can conduct a scientific investigation or any other information-revealing multi-step endeavour. Make the opposition the Fact and, maybe, an Attractive Falsehood and you can do science. Add in people with conflicting goals (a young whipper-snapper who wants to be primary author on the publication of your discovery!) and the abstract can engage the concrete in both directions.
Victory conditions should relate to map position. Usually the objective will be to get a certain person or persons into a specific zone before the timer runs out. This can be more complex, however, to achieve different goals: if you want to model persuading a crowd, you could score participants by how many crowd members are in their target zone when the timer runs out. Feel free to push the system around and find other victory conditions.
A party has a lot of accessible conversation space—everyone is there to chit-chat after all—and probably at least one intimate space. It is well represented by a central shape with several attached shapes. Inside one attached space, add a couple of concentric circles for intimacy. An objective in the party might be to hook up with a powerful businessman and get him to brag about his company’s secret operation on the dark side of the moon: you win if you can get him, yourself, and the science officer into the center of the intimate zone before the timer runs out.
The party map doesn’t need to be complicated—the simpler it is the faster things will go. The important thing is to make it take a few steps to get to the target zone and be complex enough to imply story with every move. The map above is about the minimum complexity you would want from a social combat map. It might be close to the maximum also!
A seduction might be well modeled with a deep set of concentric circles—say five or six—with the objective of getting both characters in the bull’s-eye. Such an engagement could have multiple suitors and possibly require removing some or all from the map through Composure damage.
Suitors might be PCs or they might be NPCs or in some cases they might just be “pawns”—if there is a concept you want to be relevant to the goal but that doesn’t necessarily need to have free will in the fight, just give it a marker and no statistics. Players can move it around towards or away from goals (voters in an election or observers at a debate!) but it doesn’t do anything on its own.
This could also be done with a simple linear track of, say, seven zones Mark the first zone LOVERS and the last zone JUST FRIENDS. Start the seducer on or near LOVERS and the objective on or near JUST FRIENDS. Start other competitive suitors anywhere that seems fun or scary.
If the objective and anyone else are together on the LOVERS zone, it has fallen for that suitot. If the objective and anyone else are together on the JUST FRIENDS zone, whoever has joined the objective there is removed from play.
A debate can be modeled with two sets of concentric circles representing opposing perspectives. The objective would be to move the opponent into your own central circle or moving the majority of audience members into your zone. Note that because of the steep drop-off in effectiveness at range, it will be necessary to move towards your opponent in order to engage him and pull him back to see your point (answering his specific arguments, showing sympathy and understanding).
Combat occurs according to a strict sequence of events, just as with the other combat systems. In order to run the Sequence, one player should be named the caller (usually the referee, but this is not essential). The duty of the caller is to run the Sequence: he ensures that each phase is given sufficient time and that there is a smooth pace as phases proceed. The caller should have the Sequence sheet in front of him during the game.
To begin with, the caller will establish the order in which players will be polled for their actions. The best possible way to do this is the simplest way the table can all agree on: a random order proceeding clockwise, starting with the highest Charm and then clockwise, or descending order Charm (or whatever social Skill is most relevant). Then, for each player, the caller will ask for an action. Actions can be one of the following:
If the player is running multiple characters (as might well be the case if he is the referee), each of these characters should declare and resolve their actions separately as though run by different players.
Once the player declares his character’s action and target, the caller will ask the table for compels. A compel can involve any of the acting character’s Aspects, any Aspect on his equipment, any Aspect on the zone he is in, or any Aspect on the scene. Anyone wanting to compel should hold up a fate point token and name the Aspect being compelled. The caller will verify that it is a legitimate Aspect for a compel and the acting player can either accept the fate point (and thus the compel) or pay the compelling player’s character a fate point and deny the compel.
If a compel is accepted by the player, go to the next character (possibly one run by the same player).
Next the caller will ask the player to make his free move. The player may then move his character a single zone if he wants to.
The caller will then ask the player what Skill will be used for his action.
**Rule**. Characters in social combat may not use the same Skill twice in a row.
Each action requires a 4dF + Skill roll to resolve. Once the dice are on the table, Aspects may be invoked or tagged by all participating players as appropriate. The usual rules for tagging Aspects apply: you may tag only one of each category of Aspect except for free-taggable Aspects, of which you may tag as many as are available. A tagged or invoked Aspect adds 2 to the roll or allows a re-roll.
During the Aspect tagging, the caller will offer all players any spin that’s on the table in order to improve their rolls. It can be spent to add one to a roll.
Once all negotiable dice modifications are complete, the caller announces the resolution of the roll (who won) and directs the appropriate player to narrate the result. The authority to narrate depends upon the action declared—see below for details.
When all players have had a turn, the caller then checks a box on the timer and determines whether the victory conditions have been met. If there is a victory, he announces it and hands control to the referee. If there is no victory, he begins the next turn.
For a move action, the player rolls 4dF + Skill, then modify by any Aspects tagged or invoked. He may then move his character this many zones, expending movement points as needed to erode any pass values that might be on borders between his character and his goal.
The move action represents the character aligning himself with his interests (moving towards a target zone) or feigning alignment with another in order to be more effective (moving closer to another in order to reduce range modifiers).
A Composure attack is an effort to remove a character from play altogether by attacking his Composure stress track until he is Taken Out. To begin, the acting player names the target of the attack. The attacker names his attacking Skill and the target names the Skill he will use to defend. Both will narrate their efforts or otherwise justify the Skill selection.
Both players then roll 4dF + Skill and modify through Aspect tags, invokes, and spin. Count the attacker’s shifts and then reduce the shifts by the range between characters. The defender may reduce these shifts using Consequences. He may reduce the shifts by one by taking a mild Consequence, reduce by two by taking a moderate Consequence, or reduce by four by taking a severe Consequence. He may apply more than one Consequence if necessary. Each Consequence becomes a free-taggable Aspect on the character.
The remaining shifts are then used to mark the defender’s Composure stress track: one box on the track is marked at the rank according to the shifts and all open boxes below it (one shift marks the first box, three shifts marks the first, second, and third box, and so on). If the highest box to be marked has already been filled, then the next highest available box is filled. If the box to be filled is past the end of the character’s Composure stress track, then the character is Taken Out. The two players should negotiate what this means, mediated by the referee.
If the attacker fails his roll by three or more (gets three or more negative shifts), the defender gets spin.
The Composure attack represents an attempt to remove a character from play by making her ineffective. It might be an embarrassing anecdote designed to shame the character into removing herself from the scene, or a stinging insult that makes her too angry to act with the social subtlety necessary to participate in this kind of combat. Or something else.
The player obstructing begins by identifying the zone that will be obstructed. He then rolls 4dF + Skill - Range, modified by any Aspects tagged or invoked. If he obtains a positive result, he may apply the number of shifts as pass values on any borders in the zone. The total of all pass values added cannot exceed the number of shifts. So, if a player generated four shifts he could create a single pass value of four on one border, or a pass value of three on one border and one on another, or any other combination of pass values adding up to no more than four.
The obstruct action represents efforts to pin a character into his current mind-set or deflect him from ideas that would be contrary to the acting character’s interests. This might be attempts at levity in order to block off a more sober zone, awkward geek behaviour in order to make it harder to get into an intimate zone, or similar.
The player maneuvering begins by identifying the target of the maneuver. This target is typically a zone, but may be a character or the entire scene. He then announces the Aspect he intends to put on the target and narrates the effort. He then rolls 4dF + Skill, modified by any Aspects tagged or invoked. If he obtains a positive result, the target acquires an Aspect described by the acting player. This Aspect is free-taggable once by any ally. Putting an Aspect of “Long-winded anecdote” on a zone will give other players a reason to avoid that zone, lest they be mired in a boring conversation, and unable to escape.
Permanent Aspects are Aspects that affect the person or zone directly. This includes things like “Liar,” “Out of cruditées,” and so on. Transient Aspects are Aspects that derive from the continuous action of an individual. “Making socially unacceptable small talk,” “Spitting,” and so on. Transient Aspects last only until the placing character acts again, though he may use the Aspect in this last turn of its existence.
The caller determines whether an Aspect is permanent or transient.
The move another action is an attempt to force another character to move along the social map in a direction desired by the attacker. To begin, the acting player names the target of the attack. The attacker names his attacking Skill and the target names the Skill he will use to defend. Both will narrate their efforts to justify the Skill selection.
Both players then roll 4dF + Skill and modify through Aspect tags, invokes, and spin. Count the attacker’s shifts and then reduce the shifts by the range between characters. These shifts are then used to move the defending player: one zone or pass value per shift, exactly as a move action.
If the attacker fails by three or more shifts, the defender is awarded a spin token.
The move another action is a careful effort to persuade. It represents effective rhetoric, brilliant argument, seduction, and like forms of persuasion. The acting character is trying to manipulate the target character directly.
Stress box hits are not real damage, but they can lead to Consequences. All stress box hits are removed after a few days of relaxing stress-free downtime. As with personal combat, the table should rule when enough time has passed or whether the downtime was sufficiently relaxing. Generally speaking it should be trivial.
A mild Consequence can be self-medicated with a bottle and some time alone once the scene is over. No roll is required and it is cleared as soon as the social combat scene is over.
A moderate Consequence remains until the end of the session in which it was incurred.
A severe Consequence must be carried through one complete session in which the associated stress track is never marked. If it is incurred during session one, it is gone no sooner than the end of session two, and if the associated stress track takes hit in a fight during that session, you’ll need to hold the Consequence through yet another one.
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