Social Game

[thedroid]

OK, I commented on kumakami's game, so I'll throw out an idea for others to rip.

My only disclaimer is that I've never really played a "social" game; I just thought of this mechanic for tracking status, and I thought it fit pretty well. I'm sure it strongly resembles something already done.


Social game:

Each player has two stats: cred and popularity. Each starts at 0, because you are a new kid in school, and no one has any opinion of you yet.

Whenever you do something you roll 2d6 and the GM does the same, only twice: once for the popular crowd and once for the unpopular crowd. If you win the roll against the popular crowd, the margin of success is added to your popularity. If you lose, the margin of failure is subtracted from your popularity. The same goes with the unpopular kids, only with cred.

You can track both stats with a couple of pennies on a piece of paper: draw two lines and number them -10 to 10. Label one “popularity” and the other “cred.” Put a penny at zero on each one and move it to track the ups and downs.

Your current popularity or cred is also a die modifier to all rolls when compared to the die rolls for that crowd. So if you have popularity -2 and roll a 10, it counts as an 8 against the roll for the popular crowd. In other words, as you become unpopular, you’re likely to become even less popular, until you reach the bottom value of -10, at which point you can’t win with the popular crowd. Same goes for the unpopular crowd.


Here is the kicker: it makes no difference what action you declare for your character. How the action is perceived, which is determined by the dice, is the only thing that matters. So you can insult the captain of the football team to his face and get beaten down, but if you win the roll, it only makes you more popular: maybe all the popular kids really hated him, especially that one girl he used to date who now thinks you’re cool. But you lost the roll to the unpopular kids, who now dislike you out of jealousy. I think this captures the arbitrariness of social reputation and makes it fun to try to concoct a reason for the two crowds' reactions.

You also have a number of soul points that represents your opinion of yourself. You begin the game with 10: say, a stack of ten pennies. Whenever you do something decent you get a point of soul. Do something bad, lose a point of soul.

Soul points can be sacrificed on purpose to add to your die rolls. So if you have -3 popularity, you could spend 5 soul points and get a +2 on your next roll,but you have to describe what it is you’ve done. To use soul points, it must be something that hurts your pride or self-image but makes you look good to other people. It may simultaneously help you with one crowd and hurt you with the other.

That’s basically it.

[Onix]

[thedroid]

Very good questions.

The stats are like both hit points and attributes in my mind. They're tracking your "health" in addition to modifying your die rolls. I think I'll add some more traditional attributes and have players use them in logical ways, like and "Athletic" attribute for getting on the team or a "Brains" attribute for building a robot in science class. But I also want there to be this popularity/cred roll periodically to see how the group responds and for the result to be arbitrary and often unexpected: You make the team but piss off the most popular guy in school by embarrassing him on the court, so your popularity goes down. You build the robot, and the prettiest girl in school loves robots, which makes your unpopular friends think you were just scheming to ask her out. (I guess social status always seemed random or unpredictable to me.)

I'm imagining a free-wheeling, one-evening-long game instead of a long campaign. The play would be directed by player whim and random encounters instead of any heavy planning by the GM. There might be a certain number of turns per year of school, so that the game has a set end point. And your popularity or cred could be randomly affected over the "summer." Since I want all players to start off even, I might call it "The New Kid," as in, you're the kid new on the first day of high school.

I agree, I either need to get rid of the "death spiral" of having the stat modify the die rolls, or I need to decide what happens when the player has +10 or -10, so that it's not "game over." I'm think that getting to +10 will earn you an enemy, who will attempt to lower your status, and getting to -10 will earn you a friend, who will try to lift you up.

Good point about selling your soul to achieve popularity right off the bat. I could limit the number of souls points that you can spend at once. Of I could let people do it and find out that having a +10 isn't all it's cracked up to be: i.e., you make an enemy of the most popular kid in school, who sets out to make your life miserable.

There probably needs to be a rule for an outside force acting on the stats as well. Like, say, another player can spend some soul points to try and screw you. Or you go head-to-head against a "+10" NPC, which evens your chances of losing again. I might need to tweak the die rolls if everyone ends up on +/-10 within the first three or four. Maybe I'll set the periodic rolls against a standard "target number" and use opposed roll only against an NPC or another player who makes an attack on your popularity or cred.

As far as the goal of the game, I'm imagining that it's up to the individual players whether they want to try to be the most popular, or to have the most cred, or to keep their "soul" intact. I want it to be hard, but maybe not impossible, to do all three. There should be no winning; just an end at graduation.

Overall, I'm picturing a humorous game that doesn't require preparation. I think everyone can imagine what might happen in a high-school setting without going into a lot of alternate-universe building. I mean, you could use your old school for the setting, or Riverdale, or Sweet Valley High. I think I might have the GM bring out his or her old yearbook and refer to it as the "Monster Manual."

[catty_big]