The Social Game

 

Rolf being "charming."

One of the big things I knew we had to figure out for an adventure set in a school was the social stuff. And There are the dramatic relationships that punctuate a student's life in college or high school, yes, but also the kind social soup that a student ends up in that consists of acquaintances, members of clubs or organizations they belong to, dorm-mates, and so on. If a big chunk of the adventure was going to involve day-to-day student life, then those relationships needed to be engaging. It couldn't be just rolling Persuasion and Insight over and over, and I wanted the DM to have something to fall back on, just in case.

I come from indie-ish games, sorta, where social interactions are often mechanized. For example, in Fate you can threaten someone with Provoke and deal mental stress to them, and that could take a character out of the scene as easily as a sword could. But D&D is a different beast, and usually relegates social interactions to one of a handful of skill checks. I wanted to put more meat on that bone.

So when previews for Strixhaven talked about relationships too, I was really eager to see how the team handled them. I couldn't help feeling that a similar approach would mean I'd done it "right" (that's the imposter syndrome talking), but on the other hand if they'd come up with something totally different that worked, that would've been good too!

First of all, both Strixhaven and Skullkickers have a section that emphasizes the option to not use any of these rules at all. Not everyone likes mechanics in their social pillar, and that's fine. But like I said, if I'd done nothing, it would've felt like the book had a huge hole in it, and clearly the Strixhaven team felt the same. I mean, all rules are optional, really, but sometimes it's nice to think "I don't need this!" and then have the book tell you "BTW, you don't need to use this."

Strixhaven uses a point-based system to track a PC's meaningful relationships with friends and rivals. Friendly interactions increase the PC's relationship point total with an NPC, while rivalrous ones reduce the total. At a certain breakpoint, an NPC can become a Friend or Rival, and important enough to warrant a Bond Boon or Bond Bane for the PC. There's a whole section of pretty detailed NPC students that includes what effects a boon or bane will have. These are generally narrative in nature.

A PC can take their friendship with an NPC further by declaring them their Beloved. You can have more than one Beloved, too. Each one gives you a special brand of Inspiration that automatically refreshes after a long rest, to a certain limit. There's a tracking sheet to record point totals for relationship point totals, Inspiration, and boons/banes. 

The numbers for all of this are low, which is good thinking. Merely having a friendly interaction with an NPC earns you a point. There's also something implicit here about quickly making friends and enemies in college. If that was intended, I like that it's emergent instead of explicit.

Several scenes in the four adventures provided include an opportunity for social interaction in the form of a Relationship Encounter. The text on these is always more or less the same: There's a suggestion of how the PCs might interact with any NPCs present, and instructions to use the rules in Chapter 3 in case they do. Nothing wrong with that; I like clarity, and it presents the social stuff as an additional layer on top of the existing scene rather than its giving it its own focus. 

The funny thing is, Skullkickers worked a lot like that at first! But because it's me, it was a little crunchier. There were multiple degrees of friendship, including Acquaintance and Companion, plus Rivals and Frenemies, with guidance about what that all meant. Several downtime activities would earn you points to spread among your existing relationships, or create new ones. 

In practice, this was a pain. Players would accumulate points and not use them, or forget to record them or how to use them. Even I, as the DM, found myself frequently glossing over the importance of them. So I ditched the points in favor of using an existing D&D mechanic. When I hack or design for a game, I like to use its established structures as much as possible, so a new player only has to learn to apply a thing they know in a new way, rather than learning a whole new thing. In this case, the existing mechanic was Piety, reskinned to Popularity.

The point of Popularity is to give everyone an abstract idea of how well-connected a PC is, and then let the player or DM get specific about it when the story calls for it. A low Popularity total means you're disconnected, for whatever reasons suit you, while a high one is probably a result of Partying rather than Studying. At a certain level, once per semester a player can declare an NPC to be a friend, whether the player creates a new NPC or uses an established one that makes sense in context. This friend sticks with the PC for the duration and does friend-things.  

Those downtime activities I mentioned in the last post are the most common way to change your Popularity score, but they can also net you a rival as a complication. Their mission is simple: to make the PC's life difficult. What that means depends on the rival. As the PC advances in rank, the rival does as well, and earns one of several improvements along the way to keep up with the targeted character. 

To help make NPCs distinct and make their personalities and interests matter, each one has something called passions. Most have two: a thing they Prize, and a thing they Despise. There's a table for determining these randomly with a d20. It's a great way to encapsulate what an NPC is about. A glance at an NPC's passions tells the DM a lot about their personality.

When speaking with an NPC, if the PC brings up one or more of their passions, their ability check (if any) is affected, positively or negatively. They might add a die to the roll, or ending up rolling at disadvantage. Those are the only two options, actually, so it doesn't get too convoluted.

And because this would mean a lot of opposed rolls, which can be annoying en masse, intelligent NPCs also have a Resolve DC. Every applicable NPC statblock has one, there's simple, loose guidance for how to determine it for any NPC statblock not listed in the book.

This may seem a little involved to you (or not). Keep in mind that for the most part, the combat pillar doesn't exist in everyday student life, and yet we are still playing D&D. Giving the social pillar a more robust set of mechanics lets it sub in for combat more easily as "the thing we roll dice for." Now, for some, the highest praise they can give a session of play is "We didn't roll dice at all the whole time!" That's cool! But I don't expect those people to use these rules.

Geez, this ended up being long. Up next... student life, I think. How do Strixhaven's colleges, jobs, and clubs compare to the Academy's cabals? For now, this is a rhetorical question, but in the future, I will provide an answer. Stay tuned!