Patreon and Pseudobot: More Reaction Tables

I added some of the Social Engineering tables to Pseudobot, so you can roll against a buncha tables without pulling out the books. When rolling against one of those tables, I hide the actual reaction result to hopefully make it more difficult to reverse engineer the tables, but if you absolutely must have the reaction and the result, feel free to roll on the normal reaction table and then look it up for yourself.
In terms of Patreon, I am getting closer to the possibility of getting some web hosting for Pseudobot. I've been tinkering with some C# -> Javascript "Compilers" to see if I could get Pseudobot to run natively in Roll20 which doesn't allow AJAX or SOAP services, but the one big annoyance is that the index database and the GCS files would be inaccessible anyway, and that's one of the killer apps of Pseudobot. Maybe I can think about getting those features integrated into GURPS Calculator if I can't easily get some web hosting for a web version of Pseudobot.
The GURPS game I'm running is taking a lot of cycles, but we are close to the end of "Chapter 1" so to speak in that campaign, so we will take a hiatus for some more casual RPGs and board games for a bit, at which point, I might be able to make some final strides to a releasable Mass Combat Calculator alpha.

Social Engineering: How to Negotiate Long Term Relationships

You win, we flip a coin, I win, we play
guess the closest number.

The rules for negotiation are scattered all about the many books and not easily found all in one place, so what I will try to do today is make a reference to a bunch of sections of the book. Note, negotiation is, like all other social obstacles, a roleplaying experience, so the idea isn't to boil a complex game playing experience down to nothing but dice rolls, but to more easily put yourself into an objective space when role playing to understand whether or not the negotiation is a success. It is a tool, and not a surrogate for subjective judgement.

Mechanics: How to Build a Resistance Group

This is probably today's star

I have players that are interested in building a resistance group to fight against an evil empire. This requires a lot of skills and resources that adventurers in RPGs usually don't have in abundance. I think Boardroom and Curia and Social Engineering already have most of the rules and mechanics to facilitate a large amount of what they need, so I feel like this post will largely be referencing relevant sections of those two books, but at least this way I can put them in a sensible order and limit required reading to only a few sections instead of just throwing the PDFs at the group and saying, "figure it out, it's in there."

Review: Pyramid #3/86 - Organizations

Pyramid has color cover art
even though it isn't in
print.

This is an issue that I seem to have to constantly recommend to people because they are always asking, "how do I build a base?" This issue covers that among other things, so let's take a look at what it gives us then.

Editorial: Dungeon Fantasy Negotiations With Neutral Parties

Intimidating at first blush, but quite
friendly indeed.

This is a slightly weird niche that I don't see addressed specifically by a lot of Dungeon Fantasy negotiation posts, and that is how to handle a confrontation with... a non-confrontational subject. I feel like negotiation skills are something that I am a bit swingy on, either a) turning players into deities because it is too effective, or b) turning them useless because I make everyone invulnerable to negotiation because I'm afraid of turning them into deities. So I says to myself, maybe if I do a little brainstorm of all the things that might be important to consider in a negotiation with a creature who's sole raison d'etre is to eat guys that get close enough, it might help me also consider the more dangerous and nervous situations.

Mechanics: Social Combat Via The Regular Contest

It is also a band apparently.

I have had situations in the past where the resolution of an argument PC versus NPC summed up as one quick contest of Diplomacy versus Will seemed to end in a weird series of attempts at fishing for a way to work around the adjudication as if it were a videogame... one even suggested coming back the next day and trying again as if the character would somehow forget in 24 hours. So today, after a random statement on a message board, I quickly cobbled together some rules using regular contests and the standard slew of social skills for dealing with an issue, let's see how that goes.

Mechanics: Leading Monsters

Maybe like this,
but not like this.
Really good Discworld
installment though.

So, there is a little bit of an interesting aside in Dungeon Fantasy 2 for Knights on p. 30 that talks about how one creative use of the Leadership skill might be to organize hordes of weak but friendly monsters. I really like this idea, and enjoy lateral solutions to problems that are difficult to solve if approached head on. Additionally, Leadership is a skill that kinda sounds real useful in name, but it's objective functionality is hard to quantify often times. This idea of leading monsters to help with other problems is, in my opinion a very compelling reason to try to come up with a way to apply some objective functionality to the Leadership skill.

Character Build: Negotiation

I don't even know

Besides combat, social interaction seems like one of the most common role play situations. For new players there can be a few stumbling blocks that need to be overcome to being effective at negotiation. Like combat, work, survival, and anything else, GURPS needs a character to have some competency in social skills before they can use them. Let's take a look at that today.

Character Build: Make a (socially) Interesting Character

Well, you don't have to go this far.

So, you might say there is kind of a spectrum of GMing styles ranging from "I want my players to experience an awesome story", or more pejoratively, "railroad," and at the other end, you have, "I want to give my player all the tools and freedom they need to enjoy themselves however they want" or more pejoratively, "sandbox."
I kinda start closer to the sandbox end to flush out what my players are looking for, and when they hone in on it, I start filling in the details around the point of interest they choose. This means I react to what the players want to do by accommodating the things they work towards. In a pseudo-meta way, if the world shapes itself to what it looks like my players want.
Therefore, the only way something just "happens" to a player is:

• It is the natural consequence of something the player has done
• The player has spent points on something that catalyzes an interaction, (advantages with an appearance roll, or an enemy disadvantage)

So, let's dissect the second bullet point further, and see how we can have NPCs find a player character interesting enough to just go out of their way and talk to them.

Review: Social Engineering

Title Page

The social aspect of role playing games can be a contentious issue. You can argue about whether or not they should be purely role-played, handled by repeatable applications of system mechanics, or a combination of both. What if we give bonuses for someone that gave a really good speech? Is that fair to the guy who's trying to come out of his shell using RPGs as a vessel towards that ends? What if we reduce all high stakes debates and trials to a single roll of the dice because talking is just fluff and Jane Doe doesn't know that much about 17th century law and doesn't want to embarrass herself while fumbling through some awkward role play? Is that fair for the other players who have really found themselves emotionally invested and in that sweet zone of the suspension of disbelief to be shaken out of it by just saying, "Lawyer bad guy rolled 10, Lawyer Jane rolled 10, Jane has more skill, so she just barely persuaded the jury on behalf of her client?"

Where am I going with this? I dunno. I think that it should be self evident that both of those opposite poles taken to the maximum extreme are destructive; all mechanics, and you have an RPG without the RP; no mechanics, and you have an RPG without the G. GURPS comes standard with pretty simple socialization and negotiation rules, but entire engaging epics exist that don't have a single moment of violence, and consist solely of the complex fabrics woven of the interlinking threads of relationships. Social Engineering is the toolbox to help better enable this.

Review: Social Engineering: Pulling Rank

Cover

Rank is a nebulous advantage. It has a meaning, sure, but it is hard to nail down a specific set of mechanical effects to prescribe to it. This means two GMs running two very similar campaigns can have wildly different expectations of what Rank 1 versus Rank 4 provides. Social Engineering, while covering other things, tries to address this as well as other loosely defined social advantages so that a player might know exactly what he or she is getting into when they choose to take or forego rank.

Review: Dungeon Fantasy 17 Guilds

Title Page

This week, a new Dungeon Fantasy supplement came out: Guilds. It is a systematic approach to infusing social traits and advantages into Dungeon Fantasy. It describes ways to create large organizations in a typical sword and sorcery Dungeon Fantasy setting, the impacts they might have on world building, how a player can hope to benefit by interacting with them. It also provides several useful executions of the rules to create several organizations 90% ready for drop-in to a campaign.