Favorites and alternative social moves?

#1

Hi everyone!

I’m working on my first PBTA game, built to handle stories like Twin Peaks, Life is Strange, and Riverdale (Monsterhearts can kind of do this, but my game is focused on regular people and their strange small town). These sorts of small town, intricately connected stories really rely on social interactions of various sorts, and I’m trying to figure out the best way to handle those.

My main problem is whether I should break the generic “social move” into various components, like Persuade, Insult, Charm/Flatter, Emotionally Connect, etc. Does that make things too complicated and take away the players ability to freely talk, or does it encourage really knotty and fun character interaction? Any thoughts?

What are your favorite examples of mechanized social interaction in PBTA games? Are there approaches you’d like to see more or less of?

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#2

I would tend to think a generic move is better unless there is a really specific thing you want to happen in the game for tone reasons. So one of my favourite social moves is Monsterhearts “Turn someone on”. I like it because it immediately creates interesting future potential story and drama and because even though it is super specific it is core to the tone of teenagers and their messy relationships.

Also it is really easy to get into Move bloat in PBTAs where you end up trying to make a Move for everything that someone might possible want to do. Whereas I think the PBTA games that work best have a couple of really specific moves that capture the feel of the genre and then maybe a bigger more catch all move if you find in playtesting that people are constantly coming up against a particular THING they keep wanting to do and can’t.

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#3

I think it’s important to look at outcome more than method here. So in the examples you gave above, I read Persuade as trying to get someone to do something, and Emotionally Connect and Insult as making someone feel something. Charm/Flatter could potentially be either. How moves are triggered in the fiction is very important to a PbtA game, but you don’t want to be doubling up on a load of moves that ultimately do exactly the same thing. Are trying to get people to do something, and affecting their emotions, two things you think are important to how your game will play? Then yeah, you might want a move for each of those.Or is feeling a certain way just one of the things you can try and Get People To Do?

I’d echo Becky saying you probably want to err on the side of stripping back. Also the Turn Someone On move is great. And Strings are such a good piece of tech in Monsterhearts. The streamline so much of the social interaction in MH.

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#4

On the flip side, having 3ish distinct different basic moves for social interaction (Turn Someone On, Shut Someone Down, Manipulate an NPC, plus Strings) serves Monsterhearts really well. I think the key is making them distinct from each other (both in trigger and effect) and reducing the number of other basic moves in play at any given time.

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#5

What social interactions are actually worth highlighting? Like, what ones are actually tropes?

There should be a few at most and I would only design for those. When you do, don’t go for a generic move to cover them all, just go for an easy trigger and try to recreate the experience of the social interaction & how it plays out rather than a script or simulation of it. Don’t interrogate what happens, interrogate how it makes the characters feel (hopefully you can get them to feel enough to do something).

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#6

I’d also caveat that everything is kinda social. Try to avoid move bloat by narrowing analysis paralysis during the different situations that your game highlights. If a given situation only presents a few relevant moves, that’s easy to deal with.

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#7

The MH trinity of social moves is a good template. I like the idea of the move triggers and outcomes being the basis of the split. I tend to think in terms of Sweet-Talk (convincing by generally positive elements, including bribes), Fast-Talk (bullshitting someone into doing something), and Intimidation (overt or implied threats).

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#8

I think it depends what the focus of your game is.

  • Is social stuff a major focus? If so, perhaps the specific subtleties of what you’re trying to do or how you’re trying to do it ought to change the mechanical outcome. Choose categories that reflect what your game is about: insult would be good for a game where honour is a major factor, for instance.
  • Is it important but not central? Then perhaps you should limit it to one move - if nothing else, that will make more cognitive space for whatever your game is really about.
  • Is it actually kind of irrelevant? Then maybe don’t have a basic social move at all: leave it to the MC to react according to their principles and/or bake it into playbooks for the more social character types.

You can always create a single move with implied types of action. Like this:
When you do your social thing, roll +Hot. On a 10+ choose two, on a 7-9 choose one:
- You get them to do what you want
- You make them look foolish
- They like you
- You make them feel an emotion (your choice)

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#9

One approach you might try is to have just (or maybe two) very general social moves and then have playbook moves that affect those moves. E.g. in DW, there’s the Parley move, but a Fighter can take a move that lets them use STR to Parley instead of CHA, but only when they use threats or violence to do so.

Doesn’t have to just be a stat swap, either. If your core move has picks from a list, you could add to the choices. Any move could get an “also” rider on a 7+ Etc.

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#10

As far as I can tell, in the sort of genres I’m trying to emulate, social interactions boil down to:

-Questioning/interrogating/clue-gathering
-Emotionally connecting, sharing secrets, intimacy
-Persuasion, whether through threats, seduction, reason, or deal-making.

In the same way that Monsterhearts has moves to Acquire Social Leverage and then one/two (depending on the edition) to Utilize Social Leverage.

At the moment I’m trying to bundle in the first move I mentioned with the Gather Info about a Mystery roll, which might leave with me two more.

Monsterhearts uses Strings, which might work here too, but I’d like the game to have the option for both antagonistic and prosocial interactions, whereas Monsterhearts is just built to be antagonistic.

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#11

In my experience, a move that can result in “a person does what you want” is too broad and often leads to anti-climaxes. I like moves that make you do significant work first to get to a character doing what you want, or that can lead to small advantages or interesting moments but not give you what you want directly.

For questioning/interrogating I might design something like this:

Roll +whatever. On a 10+ choose one:
*Their body language or a slip of the tongue accidentally reveal something they didn’t want you to know
*They tell you something true and interesting, but you didn’t ask about
*They tell you something obviously false, but which yields an insight
*They tell you a hard truth

On a 7-9: As above, but it happens in a bizarre or uncanny way. Mark (whatever your uncanny mechanic is)

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#12

I never quite ‘got’ strings in MH. Were they modified at all for MH2?

#13

Honestly it’s been so long since I read the first edition I can’t remember how they worked then :sweat_smile: In MH2 you can spend a string on someone to give you a +1 to a roll against them, to offer them an XP to do something you want, or to impose a condition on them. (I feel like there’s a fourth thing but it’s slipping my mind at the minute). So it’s nice and versatile, but simple, and covers most social interactions.

#14

Oh, to add +1 harm when you deal harm to them

#15

Thanks - looking at MH1 it seems that is pretty much the same.

While looking I found the thing which confused me a little about them was in the ‘turn someone on’ move, where the results include the following - where 10+ looks like a much less interesting result. Unless ‘getting a string on them’ was absolutely my aim, a 7-9 result seems much more interesting for both the player and the target!

When you turn someone on, roll with hot. On a 10 up, take a String against them. • On a 7-9, they choose one: give themselves to you, promise something they think you want, give you a String against them.

#16

Some of my favorite social PbtA moves come from Pasion de las Pasiones. which is all about over-the-top relational drama and plot twists, so most of the moves are essentially social. The nice thing about all of them is that they use situational questions rather than stats so they’d be fairly easy to slot into any other PbtA game (although the game uses Leverage differently than most PbtA games, except maybe Monsterhearts’ Strings).

My favorite move is “Accuse someone of lying” with the situational questions (each yes gives you +1) “Do you have an audience?” “Do you have evidence?” This is a classic trope of telanovela melodrama, where mechanically, the accusation roll can result in the accusation being correct, even if the ‘liar’ never knew they had lied before that moment.

Then there’s “Demand what you deserve” with situational questions “Are you offering something of value in return?” and “Do they love you in this moment?”

Of course, there’s also “Express your love passionately” with situational questions “Are you dressed to impress?” and “Do they believe you are single?”

I love how these moves so unflinchingly focus on affecting the reality of both the actor and the target of the move, rather than just the actor’s best attempt.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/227009/Pasion-de-las-Pasiones-Ashcan-Edition

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#17

For examples, I’m going to use two(three) moves from Apocalypse World 2e - Go Aggro, and Seduce/Manipulate. The question is why is Go Aggro and Seduce two moves, but Seduce and Manipulate are one?

There are three important parts to consider when you want to have one move or two. The first is the Fictional Input - What the character does to activate the move.

When you manipulate someone, and when you physically threaten someone feel like they shouldn’t be the same move because they hit different contexts of play. One is a threat of violence, the other is an offer, they feel different in play. That’s the idea of fictional input differentiating moves. Compare seduce and manipulate. One feels kind of similar to the other in play. This is a problem in some games where you ask “wait so are we triggering X or Y move?” That often comes up because the fictional triggers are too close. This happens A LOT in Monster of the Week because of it’s volume of more specific moves.

The second point-of-difference is Mechanical Input: Roll+HARD for Go Aggro would not work with Manipulate, which is +HOT. So they need to be different moves for the interaction between the action and the mechanics to feel right. Pasion de las Pasiones (as mentioned above) is a great example for this! Accuse Someone of Lying’s “Do you have evidence” as a question just…doesn’t fit “Demand what you Deserve”. “Are you Offering something of value in return?” isn’t the right fit for Express Your Love Passionately. So they have to be different moves so they we can break out how the mechanics interact.

The third is Outputs. Both fictional and mechanical, because they overlap a lot in PbtA. Using our AW2e examples: Go Aggro’s results offer a lot of escalation to violence, inherent to the threat of violence. It also specifically gives the leverage to the actor of the move, and the choice to the acted-upon party. Seduce/Manipulate gives the leverage to the acted-upon, and the choice to the actor. Also, barricading themselves in and backing off calmly and inherent to violence, they don’t fit with seduce/manipulate. Also, marking experience for going along with violence isn’t right either, so the moves NEED to be broken out into two separate ones. This comes up a lot in Dungeon World, in my experience. A character will dive in front of the wizard, swinging their sword at the approaching tendrils, and the question comes up: Is this Hack and Slash, or Defend? The outputs, the stakes of the two moves are usually the deciding factor: Are you trying to deal damage, or would you prefer to redirect the attack? Are the stakes “Do you kill the tendrils when you strike out?” or are the stakes “Do you stop the wizard from getting grabbed?” The triggers are similar, and +STR vs +CON is usually only a small difference (plus dungeon world’s stats are bad for fictional relevance don’t @ me).

So here’s my point: Think about your moves, break them out into those three segments, and see where they’d overlap. My guess is that if you’re talking about gooey sticky human relationships, you’re going to need more than one move, but you’re not going to need six. Monsterhearts is a great example where Turn Someone On and Shut Someone Down have to be separate from each other, but all the subtle ways that teens do both of each didn’t have to be individual moves.

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