Great job to you guys that wrote this product, first of all. Next, the SHAME mechanic! Brilliant. P. 36 has the shame mechanic, "it is repsrested as face-down insanity cards, in the same way that wounds.."

This is very smart, and exactly what I was hoping to see. As I regularly ridicule my players (uh, and their characters), now I have a mechanic to make it stick!

jh

(My copy was just delivered yesterday)

I feel the same way. As a GM, this is a great mechanic to come out of the supplement. I love it all the more as it makes more use of both an existing deck (Insanity deck) and an existing mechanic (dealing face-down cards as damage). I look forward to putting it to use in the campaign and hope it plays/paces well in practice.

This also gives a nice tool to use as a star result -- entertaining to narrate, bad if it accumulates at the wrong time, but not something terrible in most contexts.

oh man I do this stuff all the time! Now there is a mechanic for it!? Lure of Power for Christmas for me!

I was about to put "insanity mechanic" /corruptiondown as one of my dislikes in the game because there weren't insanity points..but halfway through my post, I ran down to the game store to get my copy of Lure of Power..and viola, there it was!

Now I'm going to have to work in some critical "shame's"

Permanent shame: Lost Dignity - (14) When this shame becomes permanent, you take the Used-Up Camp Follower condition card and place it over one of your reputation talent slots

jh

I, too, am quite impressed with how they chose to handle the new "Shame" mechanic. Rather than add yet another type of card or tracking token, they instead decided to apply the design that they already had in a clever, new way. It's definately indicative of smart design strategy that I hope we see continue with the game.

Emirikol said:

You've given me an idea! It's just half-formed at this point but here's what I'm thinking. Not sure if I want to make it just an additional price of losing a Duel of Wits or if I want to use it as a sort of "Critical Shame":

The target gains the "Demoralized" condition until they have had a night’s rest or the GM otherwise determines that the target has overcome his/her disgrace. If the target’s current Career has Reputation Talent sockets, the condition occupies one of them and the player may not socket other Talents into it until the condition is removed.

Bloody Sun Boy said:

I really like your demoralized as critical concept. Nice!

I... I am so **** happy about this. All this weeks so many people were sitting thinking we aren't getting updates on LoP, all we were thinking was well, this is going to suck monkey bits.

But, oh lordy me, this... this is genuinely amazing. It all sounds brilliant and I can't wait to get my copy.

I really like what Bloody Sun Boy and Emrikol are talking about. I really like the demoralized condition acting as a block on the reputation slot, although I think you could make a case for if effecting the focus slot as well.

I was happily surprised by the rules and can't wait to see how they play out in a game. It seems as though social encounters could go really fast with the addition of the Duel of Wits.

Great stuff FFG

Whoah... I imagine we won't be seeing LoP in Finland in couple of weeks so little preview how does this work? You use social "attacks" and target gains "shame" that can be triggered to insanity?

I don't know how to take this. On the other hand it gives social characters more effect but on the other hand I think it to be a stupid system as it separates the ROLE from the playing. Sure some people might add fortune dices according to how the player makes the "attack" but I would think it is mostly "I use this card" to make the target feel like crap.

Once again I don't have the rules.

I can see the pitfall you point out Doc. I think this might be a problem with players who aren't inclined towards roleplaying situations but who have a tendency to "let the dice speak for them". But, compared to many other kinds of die rolls, it may be easier for a GM to prevent this from happening when speech actions take place: conversation/debate should require the players to open their mouths and enact the action.

But this mechanic will not be for everyone, that's for sure.

When it comes to more formal/educated speech in the Old World, there are some very interesting parallels from our "real" world that can help to get the gist of verbal fencing among the perfumed classes.

The tradition of Classical rhetoric, for instance, lists hundreds of speech "actions" which can be highly specified for certain circumstances and meant to be mastered so that they can be applied without appearing too rehearsed or contrived.

One example of this is the prosphonetikon, the speech of the welcomer which could include just a couple of phrases but it could also be longer; it could list, for instance, some of the notable deeds the ancestors of the visitor and the welcomer have achieved together in the past and thus reinforce a sense of loyalty between the conversing characters who may have never even met before.

This kind of behaviour would have been expected fairly late in medieval European courts, and any of such rhetorical actions could have been modulated to accommodate, for instance, insults within what sounds like praise. So, I'm really looking foward how this mechanic could be applied in this kind of concrete power struggle through wordplay rather than swordplay.

But I don't have the rules yet myself, so this is all just hot air.

By the way, Fantasiapelit claims to have LoP delivered within 1-5 days in Finland.

doc_cthulhu said:

I think this is a matter of hearing half the story.

1. Duel of Wits doesn't handle all social conflict, just situations where you are trying to discredit someone else (comes up a lot in noble circles)

2. DoW is handled by inflicting "Shame" on an opponent, until they are so shamed that no one will listen to them for the rest of the scene. They are too discredited for anyone to take them seriously.

3. Shame is measured by handing out face down insanity cards. Actual insanities also count as shame (much like how critical wounds add to one's wound threshold).

4. There is only one instance where those face-down insanities are flipped over, and that is the card "Twist the knife." That one makes one point of shame into a temporary insanity (it basically makes the target lose their cool). The temp insanity lasts the act (or the episode, or something).

So that's all there is in LoP about inflicting insanity with social actions.

Most of what you may be worried about is people looking to fiddle with the system, not what is presented in LoP. I think that is one of the great things about how they did DoW; it is very hackable.

As far as taking Duel of Wits breaking immersion, it's no different than any other use of action cards for social situations. Instead of using a progress tracker, you count up cards. DoW just sets some guidelines.

So what they've given is some rules to represent how your various conversational shenanigans affect a character. But no set down rules on exactly how you go about applying the shame?

...

Well done FFG.

I can see people going one of two ways when this kind of situation come around. There will be the "role-playa's" who want to actually have the witticism neccessary to shove quips and double entandre's down their opponent's throat till he projectile vomits them all over the scene. Then there will be the "r0ll-pl4yrz" who have arranged their perfect stack of actions and will strategically manage the situation until their opponent is forced to disintegrate into a puddle of sub-par statistics.

Neither is really the wrong way to go about things. I know we have alot of people here that come out in a rash when power gaming is mentioned, but wfrp3 was initially as bent as the back road to Kerry and rewarded alot of power gamers for being selfish, non-roleplaying jerks. It's evened out really well and turned into a game where alot of styles are rewarded.

I wouldn't mind a player who focused on his cards rather than his own voice, because, hey, sometimes people just don't have the confidence to come up with the lines neccessary. Sometimes they aren't confident themselves and an action card might bring them that little bit further out of thier shell. (Of course, in my case, sometimes I'm just an idiot who can't come up with a plan/line/coherent sentence.)

If the GM has a problem with it, then all he needs to really do is call the player up on his artless snub and demand he act it out a little. Maybe he'll throw him a fortune or two if he does it particularly well. I can't say, I don't have it yet, but I think it will turn out pretty well.

Crazy Aido said:

No, shame is applied in DoW whenever an action is taken that "Influences a character," either through a social action card, or through a stunt (i.e. using Charm, Guile, Intimidate, etc without using a specific action).

Again, I realize that everyone doesn't currently have access to LoP, but it may be prudent to hold off on pronouncements of FFG's failure until you've actually read it yourself. Posted descriptions from those of us who have read it don't seem to be clarifying anything.

Thanks! I'm glad you guys like it. While I don't have access to what comments the other playtesters submitted ... I must admit that I had suggested this mechanic, and the name "Shame", to FFG after my group playtested the original concept of social 'combat'. The original design, as I recall, was a bit more vague and generic. Of course, I had used tokens to track shame when I thought it up. FFG added the brilliant idea (IMO) to use the insanity cards like social 'wounds', which works even better.

Yes, social combat such as this won't happen very often. It is pretty much only used between nobles.

Undermound said:

To a degree, but one thing that always bothered me about RPGs is how there are always extensive rules for combat and guns, allowing players to mechanically affect the world through violence far beyond their real world capabilities, but when a player invests into social skills far beyond their own capabilities ("I wanna be a Don Juan or Iago!"), GMs typically make them sweat and run through a gauntlet of roleplaying it out or ELSE:

GM: "I don't care if you invested tons of points into Charm and Intimidation instead of Weaponskill like everyone else. You have to ROLEPLAY it out or else you can't alter the world socially. Sucks to be you."

Yes this is ROLE-PLAYING, but most systems don't FORCE the players to describe in minute detail HOW they're swinging their swords: they just roll the dice and people imagine it out.

I kind of feel that it is a bit of a double standard, to be honest.

Why does combat always get a free pass? GMs never force a player to describe their intricate knowledge of locks if their rogue wants to pick a lock!

To be clear, obviously not EVERYTHING should be completely up to the dice, but I don't think that it is fair to always force player to awkardly explain exactly what they're saying when they're seducing someone.

I agree Necrozius. While role-playing social adds an element of fun (it can with combat too), it would be unfair to rely on a player's knowledge and ability to represent the character's ability. I typically suggest my players describe or explain how they want to argue/speak to the NPC. If they are trying to intimidate, how are they doing it? Threatening physical violence? Play it cool and make subtle threats? Etc. They don't have to act it out, but they need to give me a plan for how they are going about influence the social combat.

Of course, if someone wants to roleplay it, that works too.

I agree that there is a bit of a double standard in most systems, and as a GM, I want to be sure to reward both the players who richly describe their actions (combat, social or anything else) and those players who invest in the mechanics of success (for combat, social encounters, etc.) I really like the way Green Ronin worked up the social "combat" for the Song of Ice and Fire system (AKA Game of Thrones). But here's the problem with systematizing the sub-routines of combat and social encounters: they take time to arbitrate and resolve.

It can often take 30 minutes or more to parse through a combat scene; if you have a mechanical construct to manage social encounters that similarly as dense, do you want to take 30 minutes+ to resolve a conversation? Striking a balance for both can be hard, and that's true with any system and any play group.

But I do err on the side of more formal social mechanics if the rest of the game is similarly crunchy. If you're in a free wheeling narrative style game, then no need. But if players are going to invest xp into buffing social stats and skills, then there needs to be a way to recognize that PCs mastery in the game world.