Why are social skills so hard to succeed at?

Burning Wheel Subsystem Advice and Guidance
20

I’d take what you said and boil it down to something subtly different. I’m also going to feed it back to the core question being asked, because otherwise I’d be considering opening a new thread for it.

In Burning Wheel, a standard test is a form of Conflict Resolution, not Task Resolution. The system does not only adjudicate whether you accomplish your task, but importantly whether you accomplish your Intent. I am going to pretend that the actual Conflict Systems are beyond the scope of this discussion, they are Conflict Resolution mechanics and the tests inside them are basically Task Resolution or sometimes they’re a piece of the whole Conflict Resolution Mechanic.

The unenumerated factor theory is one way of saying the same thing, but it’s something particular and different, as it only looks at what failure means, and it takes a rigid view, because failure in Burning Wheel doesn’t always mean you succeed the task and fail the Intent because of an unenumerated factor.

In many RPGs, and I’m going to use D&D as a shorthand here, a roll is always task resolution. You don’t have Let It Ride or Intent and Task because your roll to pick a lock, sneak up, or convince someone you’re a polymorphed lammusu is just a roll to do that. In D&D if you roll to Persuade someone to kill the King, then success means that they want to try. In Burning Wheel if you say “I want to have the king killed by persuading this guy” and you are given a roll, success means that the King is dead. Long Live The King.

Unenumerated factors are one way of describing this process, but your goalposts are moving a little. The roll is to determine what the resolution of a conflict is: whether you accomplish your Task and get your Intent, and what the price to pay for it is.

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21

Thanks for the excellent discussion. I have things to say but as you say it isn’t for this topic.

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22

I think this write up is why I personally take out of the philosophy of the Burning Wheel roll. I think that approach to me is much more useful than any other because it opens other possibilities. Because of how you can interpret failure in Burning Wheel much more broadly. Going back to the bolder example it does not have to be a simple yes/no that Gnosego presented we can imagine the same roll with other consequences like you do get out but the kings guard are waiting or whatever else. It opens up the imagination space. In fact if I rember correctly on the advice page it states that you should try to avoid a flat negative result but instead complicate the characters life which this method I think helps with.

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23

A new thread?

I’d almost argue it only adjudicates the intent, you can succeed on the task, but fail on the intent. You pick a lock, you fail the roll, but the intent was to sneak into somewhere; so you pick the lock, but get spotted on your way in.

Yeah I agree with you here. It’s a useful system, because an Ob4 boulder might just be too heavy; however, for an Ob1 power test which is failed, it doesn’t feel right to say the light object is too heavy, instead it makes more sense to bring in a secondary factor (or have the task complete, but the intent not achieved).

Which to bring things back round to social tests, a failed test can just be that the npc asks for something more, maybe because the pc wasn’t convincing enough, maybe because of a secondary factor (eg they can’t give the pc their intent alone).

To me BW tests are to affect the narrative, the PC wants to achieve an ends which is too difficult to say yes to (this is why I give pc’s info on npcs being shifty/trustworthy without tests), you then find an appropriate task and make a roll. Pass/fail only tells you if the intent was successful, the DM’s job is to interpret this in relation to the task.

24

Kinda related to my previous post. Firstly, if you want to play a game where lying is either just be more generous with bonus dice, or have a ‘failure’ mean the npc believes you but asks for something.

Secondly, you might be approaching DOW wrong (which is fine you can play however you like). My players used to hate DOW because it didn’t feel ‘realistic’, but now love it because it moves the narrative of the game forward. Often DOW doesn’t convince someone to change their mind, instead it’s a narrative mechanic to get characters to agree to course of action. For a real world analogue, you have a big group, you’re deciding where you want to eat, you want pizza, someone else wants pasta. You both lay out your arguments, and someone ‘wins’, eg a restaurant is decided, you both might still prefer your initial choice, but you agree to a course of action for the sake of the group. For this reason I don’t tend to call for DOW when only two characters are present (but I let me players call for it if they want). Instead I call for it mainly when two PCs have conflicting ideas of what the party should do next, or when an NPC is unsure of what path to take (having them either be the audience or devils advocate).

Weirdly this has lead to way less DOWs between PCs, because they tend to try and find a compromise without a DOW. I think this is because DOW is higher risk, they might get smashed and get less of a compromise than they could otherwise. Though we still use DOW when we feel the characters wouldn’t be open to simply agreeing to a compromise, eg they have to be ‘forced’ into certain actions by social pressures. DOW is great for this because it narratively concludes a social conflict, and leaves the PCs with a choice, accept the outcome, or seriously escalate the situation.

25

"If the successes equal or exceed the obstacle, the character has succeeded in his goal – he achieved his intent and completed the task.

“This is important enough to say again: Characters who are successful complete actions in the manner described by the player. A successful roll is sacrosanct in Burning Wheel and neither the GM nor other players can change the fact that the act was successful. The GM may only embellish or reinforce a successful ability test.”

BWGR, Page 30; emphasis mine.

Seperating Intent and Task is a technique the GM can use to arbitrate failure. The GM doesn’t get to touch my successful fucking roll other than to say how cool it is.

Me: My intent is to prevent him from interfering with my friend completing the ritual. My task is to grab him in a choke hold, wrestle him to the ground, and subdue him.

GM: Great. A vs Power test.

The Dice: You win, Quincy.

The GM: Cool, so you guys wrestle a bit, and it’s clear that you’ve got the upper hand. He breaks away and runs into the night, leaving your friend to complete the ritual.

Me: No he fucking doesn’t.

No he fucking doesn’t.

My charcater performs the action as I describe; he completes his task. The guy is subdued; he can’t get away. It doesn’t matter that the GM is technically giving me my intent; they can’t undermine the success of my roll and take my successful task away from me.

Testing is about failure being interesting, not the task being hard. Ob 1 tests can have wonderful failure results, so you test against Ob 1 sometimes. Sometimes things that are incredibly difficult just don’t have meanigful consequences if failed; you just say yes and move on.

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26

This raised an interesting thought in my head, would you be ok if the GM denied this intent? What if he said: “well, it’s unclear if you can subdue him or if he will escape after you grapple him, so for now let’s establish your intent as ‘I’ll tackle him long enough for the ritual to be complete’”?

27

If I were GMing, I would hope that I could explain why, in the fiction, this task was not suitable to the Intent. Is the guy the player wants to subdue across the room and a telelpath that can knock out the ritualist with a thought? Why wouldn’t physically subduing him accomplish the task? If I can answer that credibly as a GM, then I don’t have a problem with blocking the Intent/Task.

I – uh… I would probably say something snarky like, “I would love to find out if I can subdue him.” Rattles dice. Again, I’d want to know why it isn’t credible for my character to subdue this guy with my bare hands. Is he a smoke elemental? Is he a flesh-shifting abomination? What’s going on?

I might feel like the GM is nervous about letting tests do too much. I personally feel like they’d be driving the weight of tests down too far for my taste. I might arm-chair analyse them as being too afraid of letting “too much” happen in the game, of letting the game move too far forward. :person_shrugging: We’re mostly talking about me and my tastes/style rather than the rules. :sweat_smile:

I might ask, “What if I set my Intent to physically subdue him? Wouldn’t that emergently prevent him from interfering? If not, how not?”

I’ll say that in my original example, there’s nothing stopping the guy from getting away from me, so long as he tries something other than wrestling his way out (Let it Ride). He could try to persuade me to let him go, for instance, or intimidate me; maybe slip a dagger free (Agility test, maybe, or Sleight of Hand) and stab me (Knives). And then, once the situation legitimately and meaningfully changes, he can try to wrestle himself out (Let it Ride expires). So, play around this character doesn’t stop; it just shifts.

But… Also… What makes the game more interesting? An enemy getting thwarted and then disappearing into the night, or a player needing to figure out what to do with this enemy they’ve got at their mercy who himself is close enough to drip poison in the player’s ear?

28

It’s more about the “he escapes after you grapple him” part, not about you not being able to grab him. You said you would tell the GM that your enemy doesn’t escape after the ritual because your intent and task was to:

Would you then be against the GM negotiating that the intent doesn’t cover what happens after the ritual is complete? If you had your intent to be “I want to knock him out until tomorrow morning”, would you not like if the GM said “until tomorrow morning is too much, what about until midnight”?

I guess this is a bit of a rhetorical question, I suppose the answer is “it’s up to preference”.

29

I’m okay with the GM negotiating, but I would be against this particular negotiation; I think it’s bad play. Shunting subduel into the Intent, I think, is better than diminishing the weight of the roll. (It should also help clarify the consequences of the roll, which is nice.)

The duration of his unconsciousness is not something my character can credibly influence. Whether he gets away from me is something my character can meaningfully influence.

Put another way, let’s say that we went ahead and I agreed with, “I want to tackle him long enough for the ritual is complete.” Now the ritual is complete and you say,

“He breaks your grasp and runs away.”

Then I say, “I want to stop him from getting away! I tighten my grip so that he can’t break free, and throw him to the ground.”

Now we’re in a position where we’re making the same test, so Let it Ride kicks in and I win.

Or maybe you’ll say, “No, he already broke free, so if you want to catch him, it’s a Speed test!” In which case, you’ve basically just Said Yes to him breaking free of me, which is… At least unsporting. Certainly my successfully tackling him until the ritual is complete does not preclude me from a chance at subduing him as we’re still going at it post ritual, no? And Let it Ride says I succeed at that chance.

And so we’re basically shunted back up to my original proposition – the guy is subdued until circumstances legitimately and drastically change, or until he can get away from me using a different means, like persuasion or underhanded knifing.

I don’t know, I feel like shaving down the player’s Intent-Task declaration is kind of a sketchy way of trying to subvert Let it Ride here. :thinking:

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30

It’s not entirely up to preference. Let It Ride means that the foe is subdued until the situation has really moved on. If the scene is still going, that’s probably until the brawler lets go or does something else with him. Otherwise, it’s until the moment of, “What happens to that foe?” has come up, in which case you find out based on the new situation; I’d just ask the wrestling player what they intend to do with their prisoner.

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31

Yeah no 100%, I should have made this distinction. Pass you get what you want in the manner you describe, failure is more open to DM interpretation.

Yeah this is definitely an interesting balance, I tend to not call for tests if the PC’s can easily get say 3x the Ob in dice, unless I know they have a low skill exponent and are looking for tests (eg they’ll risk failure).

Huh, this is interesting, can you expand on this? So something hard but doable, and no interesting failure, you say yes?

32

I’d definitely say let it ride that he’s subdued. Maybe if a further conflict is interesting then afterwards he could try and get the knife out etc (as Gnosego said). I’d probably ask what the PC’s wanted to do with him after the ritual, and their subduing might not ride if they wanted to do something else with the npc (though I’d try to make this a different kind of test).

Yeah I would do this, and if the intent is too distant from the original one I’d call for some other test. I probably would have the npc subdued until the PCs change the situation significantly. If it’s a PC being subdued I would probably allow for more agency in making other tests. Though again, if the intent is to subdue until after the ritual, and the roll is successful, then the player gets their intent.

33

Yeah, this makes total sense, and it’s how I would personally do it as well. So either your enemy has some other tool to escape or he can’t do it until some other thing change.

I suppose the intent (preventing the interruption of the ritual) would happen even if this enemy has some other form of escaping, right? In the case he could convince you with Persuasion, the ritual would still happen, but he could to convince you to free him after the ritual is done. You get your intent, but there is no Let it Ride if your enemy tries a different approach, is that right?

34

I tend to think of doable as qualitative, not quantitative – the game doesn’t expect me to track how many dice a player can concievably put into their pool, and any dice pool can potentially succeed with a Fate point. I’m not sure if those were terms you were thinking on, but it seemed worth bringing it up. I think it’s especially worth bringing up because it leads to the logical conclusion of not considering a player’s dice pool when calling for tests.

To go more toward your question, anytime a player says they have their character do something and I feel like calling for a test, I ask myself what the consequence of failure is. If I find that I’m thinking too hard, I say yes. Too hard can fluctuate based on if there’s a player’s BIT involved, or part of the setting/big picture I care about, or (in the other direction) if I feel like there’s better stuff coming up and failure would cause us to drag (better for everyone at the table, that is).

To give an example… The Questing Knights of the Grail have finally done it. The GM (that’s me!) says, “The old tome closes with a satisfying thud. Beren, you know the grail to be in the old Grathian temple – once opulent, now shrouded in mystery – at Black Garden, the city of the dead.”

“Fuck yeah!” calls Beren’s player, everyone else joins him. “Alright, boys, let’s mount the hell up, and ride!” Everyone emphatically agrees.

“Great,” I say. “Long forgotten Black Garden is only a week or so away, past the rolling hills of the Danov and --” I know what you’re thinking… As we all know, the Riding to Travel rules on page 533 of BWGR list a set of Riding obstacles for just such a trip:

Base Ob 1, +1 for a moderate journey, +2 for hilly terrain, +1 for riding Warhorses. That’s a total of Ob 5; I think you’ll agree that qualifies as hard in most cases?

And so now the GM (hi again) has to decide whether to call for a test or say yes. And the question to ask, as always, is, ‘What happens if they fail?" The GM thinks. And thinks some more. Then he thinks, "I’m thinking about this a lot. Does anyone have a Belief about this journey in particular? Or about their horse or being a good rider? No? Are the hills of Danov something I care about enough to require a test to cross? No? Do I want to get to my cool fucking undead city and my ruined temple to a dead god? Yes! I’m probably thinking about this too hard.’ And he says,

“-- and you guys pass all that, perhaps in a heady blur, so focused on the target of your quest. And now, before you stands doom citadel of ash and iron!”

If there was a Belief to engage (You love your horse? Well, if you fail, your horse is gonna get sick from you riding it so hard for so long), or if that part of my setting was something I felt demanded contending with (Oh, don’t worry, if you fail, you’ll just have to stop and camp out for a night… In troll country!), or if mundane challenges were tonally important to me (If you fail, you’ll arrive at my cool undead city ass-chafed and saddle sore! Buy some riding horses, ya cheap fucking scallywags!), then I might feel a test was called for – and probably I wouldn’t have to think too hard on the moment for a cool failure condition.

Some of this stuff is discussed on pages 72 and 73 of BWGR.

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35

Reading this example, I read it as:
“Intent: Stop him from disrupting the ritual AND Subdue him Task: Wrestling”
But part of that intent is buried in the task.

There is not anything, strictly, wrong with this rules wise. The codex on pages 111 goes through a scenario where a player’s task modifies his intent (although within the context of a negotiation to make his task make fictional sense to the GM, rather than initial statement), however I am not sure I feel this is best practice.

Best case scenario: I understand exactly what you mean, I am listening attentively and processing what you are saying correctly, I maybe ask some questions to clarify or asses difficulty. “Sounds good, vs power test.”, “Wrestling him to the ground might disrupt the magic circle, there’s an obstacle penalty to avoid that”, “This sounds like two different intents to me, how about a linked test, first power to stop him from disrupting the ritual, then brawling to pin him down”

Less than best case scenario: I’m not at my best, I had a bad day, didn’t get enough sleep, two other players are competing for my attention, whatever. I hear you state your intent, make sure I understand that. Then I shorthand your task description as “wrestling”. Then we have this conversation:

The rules say you are correct. And there is a lot of blame on me for not listening to you fully attentively, but we can’t always be at 100% in our communication. If I was the player in question, I might feel like the GM is trying to cheat me out of what the rules say I should have (my intent and task), if I was the GM in question, I might be frustrated that the additional effect of being subdued wasn’t explicitly stated, that it got by me by not being enumerated in the intent.

But being more explicit in our intents avoids this issue fairly cleanly, and makes it more clear to the whole table what happens when you win your die roll. Even if the GM DOESN’T fully understand the rules on page 30 like in your example, explicitly stating your full intent avoids that too.

Not trying to say not to go about with evocative descriptions but make sure everyone at the table knows what exactly you expect to have happen as a result of that

In the case that you explicitly KNEW you wanted to subdue him.
“My intent is to subdue him and let my friend complete the ritual. My task is to grab him in a choke hold, wrestle him to the ground, and subdue him.”
And the case where you just wanted your initial intent but the subduing came about just from how you explained your task, just ask to clarify before you roll the dice.
“My intent is to prevent him from interfering with my friend completing the ritual. My task is to grab him in a choke hold, wrestle him to the ground, and subdue him. He’d be pretty well restrained right?”

36

Hey all. Interesting discussion, though I worry we may be drifting a bit far from Marcos’s original topic. It may be worth starting a new thread about intent and task and linking back to this one if we’re going to dig much deeper.

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37

EDIT: Apologies to Thor. I meant to post this in the other split thread!

These examples are rather hypothetical, and thus moving into theoretical territory that rarely comes up in games. Why? Because as a game master, you shouldn’t be parsing intents like you’re playing chess, looking three moves ahead. You should be considering the factors at play in the immediate moment and assessing the player’s intent and task against them.

And…AND…ANNNNND…y’all seem to be skipping a step in the hypothetical reality Quincy has created.

If we have assessed intent/task properly—according to the fictional obstacle blocking Quincy’s character—and rolled the dice to check for the outcome, then…we have created a new fictional position. Quincy the character has subdued The Ritual Interferer. The Ritual Progresses. The game master may now assess additional obstacles from this position—but the RItual Interferer is subdued—held down by power or technique, knee on neck or whatever. If the Ritual Inteferer’s fate was important to the fiction AND the ritual was long and complex then, as game master, I might introduce other stratagems by the Interferer. They might struggle—initiating a vs Forte test to keep them pinned for hours—or they might use some dirty trick they have at their disposal. The important factor here is that any additional obstacles are framed from the position of the Quincy character having subdued the Interferer. We’ve established that through the results of the roll. If we abrogate that fact by whittling at the intent, or just ignoring the outcome, then we’re not playing the game correctly.

We roll the dice to create these fictional nodes—these truths. We link the nodes together to create shared imagery and events, that, in turn, we weave into a narrative.

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38

Sorry to pop in a bit late.

I just wanted to briefly comment how I’d deal with a Falsehood roll to talk past a busy guard or inn keeper or whatever, specially when the victim isn’t fully present or aware of what you’re saying. I’d “tax” their Will and have the resulting obstacle be 1 or 2 points lower, as though they were sustaining a spell.

For more standard social tests, I think the game mostly works alright. I’ve rarely had situations where Falsehood or Persuasion feel useless, and remember the high Obs are also a protection measure for PCs, because rolls work both ways.

39

You just had it dawn on me that wizards become gullible when full of magic. And that…

I want to write entire campaigns on that premise.

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