In this latest Player Tips article, we discuss the various ways we can engage in social encounters, mix up the way we roleplay our characters, and succeed more in being persuasive.
How often do you find yourself having to persuade an NPC in your TTRPGs? If the games that you’re playing are made up of combat, social, and exploration encounters, then social encounters will almost certainly need you to convince someone to do or believe something, just as assuredly as combat encounters require you to convince creature’s heads to forcibly leave their shoulders.
And yet we never really see much variance in how social encounters plays out. Most games have a ‘persuasion’ skill whether that’s Guile, Persuasion, Sway, etc, that does most of the heavy lifting, in a similar fashion to the Attack, Weapon Skill, Skirmish abilities in combat encounters. You roll the dice to see if you succeed or not. The act itself can be accompanied by a little narrative flourish, depending on the player. In social encounters you may get an in-character monologue (unconsciously designed to override the test with a show of effort), a series of questions (unconsciously designed to put the ball back in the court of the GM), or an admittance of apathy (an unconscious bluff call to the GM) to accompany the roll.
Those parentheses might reveal my true feelings on the state of social encounters, but it’s not from bitterness. I simply posit that as players we can always do better, and the room to grow in this aspect of the game is rather large. And perhaps as a happy addition we can give some variety to those poor GMs everywhere who have to play the bad and the questionable and the fallible characters in these encounters, and are used to being treated the same each time.
As a GM, you experience what it’s like playing characters who are almost always in the wrong, and you learn from it. Maybe even enjoy it. Logically, they are baddies. But these characters believe that they’re doing the right or the somehow justifiable thing. They’ve been given orders by someone they respect or admire or fear, or they are acting based on strong emotional impulses planted by their past. Social encounters can be very repetitive and often one-sided, as these flawed but real characters come head to head with a team of untouchable, morally superior superheroes. We call them Player Characters.
How often has this happened in your games:
NPC: I have summoned you here because it has reached my ears that you were spotted aiding and abetting orcs within the castle walls. Do you care to explain yourselves?
PCs: Well why don't you tell us, dear King, why there were orcs in the city to begin with? Is it possible that someone else is working with orcs? It looks to us that we were simply seen walking around town. Is that now a crime? We are here to save your town and have done so several times, perhaps it is you who should protect your lands, or maybe your power doesn't reach as far as you think? Throw us in prison now if you want to, but you'll regret it.
Now this isn’t a wrong way to play necessarily, but in Player Tips we’re all about advanced techniques and being even better players. So what can we see here? We have some traits that seem a bit lazy like the undeserved higher-than-thou attitude (assuming the PC really isn’t a lawful-good saint), the laissez-faire of someone who is playing a game and knows the game will continue regardless of their actions, and the machine-gunning of questions to force the NPC (really the GM) to answer difficult questions instead. I’m here to tell you there are other ways to play out social encounters, and not simply do the above, ad nauseam.
Aristotle (Athenian Galaxy Brain of Philosophy) understood that there were three ways to persuade another person: Ethos, logos, and pathos. Roughly translated into good old Queen’s English: character, reason and emotion. With the above example, we can see one dominates – an aggressive dolloping of logos, with some sprinkles of ethos. This is the default for the strong adventurer, “Here are the facts why I’m right, and I’m right because…I am. Prove that I’m not.”
If your GM is anything like me, this is tiring and quite boring to deal with over and over. I try to encourage encounters where characters are not sarcastic and bullish, but show a bit of themselves and what they care about. This is the pathos that our boy Aristotle was talking about, the emotion. We all loved Tyrion Lannister for his savage, clinical takedowns of Joffrey and others in various courts, but eventually he reached a point he couldn’t sass his way out of, and people he cared about betrayed him. Besides, if you already have a Tyrion in your party (first dibs on the sass-pot), maybe you should be the empathetic one who appeals to people in a different way, or the one who holds themselves to a code that gives them (authentic) moral superiority.
How much more interesting would it be, if instead of berating the NPC as above, the player spoke about the suffering of the people and also the orcs under their tyrannical rule? Not as a ‘gotcha’ to defeat them in the marketplace of ideas, but to appeal to their humanity. “We wouldn’t have had to do the things that we may have done, if things were better.” This isn’t as watertight as the logistical barrage, but as a GM we’re not there to beat players, we’re there to facilitate an interesting story – and this is the kind of interaction that can be interesting to play and watch. Will we change the heart of this character, rather than just beating them senseless with our blue-tick fists? Unfortunately, as I wrote about in my Looking for Trouble article, people often would feel uncomfortable with this level of vulnerability. Acting out emotion is, like, real acting and open to ridicule and failure (psst: it isn’t).
Taking the ethos approach, the player could lean more into their reputation, as they mention briefly that they have saved the town several times. If their reputation should proceed them in such a way, instead of a ‘how dare you’ to an authority figure which doesn’t make much sense, maybe the character appeals to their own trustworthiness:
"Sire, have we ever given you reason to doubt our presence here? Bring forth [NPC] who will tell you we have no business working with the orcs and against the town's safety. Truly, I swear by my gods on this."
The interesting thing about the above is that the player is being…genuine, and more persuasive because of it. We should know that this makes people want to trust us, rather than trying to catch them out. There’s a bit of logic in there (trust me for these steadfast reasons) and a bit of emotion (you feel that I am right because you trust me), combined to give the NPC no reason or desire to doubt. The player also doesn’t need to be a paragon to be persuasive with their ethos, and they don’t have to have a bleeding heart to leverage pathos.
Which brings us to another way of still playing those chaotic-neutral rapscallions without the brash rudeness or beating the GM into submission. Think about characters that get their own way, despite being villainous (in fact, most good baddies are very persuasive without being overt). From characters created throughout time like Iago, Machiavelli, Uriah Heap and Wormtongue, to even cartoonish villains like Gaston, they are all sinister in their ability to get their own way through trickery, manipulation or subtlety. Why not take a leaf out of their (literal) books, and leverage the anger of the mob like Gaston (pathos), or humbly avoid blame like Uriah Heap by maintaining a reputation as powerless (ethos).
Ultimately, using the knowledge above I think we can start playing out social encounters as something as dynamic as combat encounters where we use different strategies depending on our character’s strengths and personalities. But these need to be built in near the start of the campaign! I’ve noticed players have a preferred method that is homogenous across different characters, but social encounters are a great way to show off what is unique and cool about your character. Pick them in tandem with your combat prowess: “I am Ulgu, a human barbarian. I wield a two-handed axe in combat, and I use my status as a Jarl’s bodyguard to prove to others that I am trustworthy.”
Dicey Encounters 