Leverage & Rapport: A Simple Social Mechanic

The monsters speak
Words kill like poison
Choking one by one
Lies spread by the weak
Human contagion
Don't trust anyone

-Night Club, “Gossip”

 

Persuading, coercing, or deceiving someone involves Leverage and Rapport.

• Generally, if you have none of the two, the task is impossible.
• If you have both, you do not need to roll – it just succeeds.
• If you only have one, the task might involve a roll. A failure means they refuse your offer, disbelieve your lie, react violently to your intimidation attempt, etc.

Leverage is something your interlocutor wants, or the threat of something they don’t want. Money, sex, blackmail, a knife to the throat, a shoulder to cry on, etc. Leverage is highly open-ended and context-dependent.

Rapport is a positive relationship with this person, how much they like and trust you. You have Rapport with your friends, lovers, mentors, loyal compatriots, etc. Its possible for Rapport to be with a faction rather than a specific individual. A man-at-arms of the king might be considered to have Rapport with you if he knows that you were recently knighted. On the other hand, maybe the king’s treasurer hates you. In such a situation, personal Rapport (or lack thereof) always trumps faction Rapport.

If the person owes you a Favor, you can use it as a substitute for either Leverage or Rapport, but not both. If the persuasion attempt succeeds, the Favor is used up.

 

Designer’s Commentary

Social mechanics are one of those notorious bugbears of tabletop RPGs that designers struggle to get right. Approaches to handling persuasion tend to fall into a few broad and overlapping categories:

1.      "Roll for mind control”, ie make a single roll where your character’s mechanical skill is the primary or perhaps even only determinant of whether they can convince an NPC of whatever the player has cooked up, regardless of how ludicrously unbelievable it might be. This approach tends to be pretty common in my experience (and I confess that I myself have indulged in it more than I would like to admit) because it’s simple, straightforward, and slots in easily with the mechanics of most games. Despite being largely reviled by most serious RPG thinkers, it is sometimes defended by people who prioritize character ability over player ability (more on that later).

2.      Handling everything entirely through roleplay. Everyone at the table speaks in character, and the specifics of what is said determines how things play out. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to talk in an accent or use Shakespearian English or add any other such theatrical elements, the content matters more than the delivery (at least in theory). This is often championed as the more enlightened and intellectual method, although its critics say it becomes overly reliant on GM fiat and “mother may I”.

3.      "Social combat”, ie attempting to inject in-game conversation with the same level of abstraction and rules crunch that we typically reserve for tactical combat subsystems. I understand conceptually how you arrive here as a game designer but personally I have always found these systems clunky and awkward, and I’m baffled at the idea of anyone actually playing out an in-game conversation by activating their Witty Retort ability to deal 1d6 points of reputation damage. Yuck!

The obvious “joke” (not really a joke) here is that RPG players struggle with designing social mechanics because the community has historically been composed of nerds and autists with poor social skills and emotional intelligence. This is obviously true, but let’s strive to be a bit more nuanced here.

The question of player ability vs character ability has been discussed extensively with OSR-adjacent circles, so I won’t dive into that except as far as it relates to the topic of social mechanics. Advocates of leaning on dice rolls for persuasion often argue that we don’t expect players to actually be any good at swordfighting, so why should we expect players to be good at conversation?

Because it’s a game that takes place through conversation, dummy!! I obviously reject the character skill argument and will not devote any further time to humoring it. But I do understand those who instead argue that using only in-character roleplay can turn the game into “mother may I” and trying to develop novel ways of manipulating the GM (although isn’t that, in its own way, a sort of social skill?). I also understand that, if you have a character with a high charisma stat, you want that stat to actually be useful. So, taking that all into account, our ideal social mechanic has the following characteristics:

1. Rewards roleplay and player skill above character skill
2. Character skill (charisma stat) matters, but it isn’t the only or most important thing that matters
3. Prioritizes the fiction above abstract rules and numbers
4. Has concrete criteria, doesn’t rely solely on GM fiat

Dungeon World’s Parley move is my favorite social mechanic. It isn’t about convincing someone to see your point of view, it’s about cunningly maneuvering them into a position where they have to acquiesce to your demand. Parley has a very clear and concrete criteria for when you can socially manipulate someone: Leverage. Leverage still has wiggle-room, but not as much as completely mechanic-less roleplay.

While Parley is great, its perhaps slightly too cold and mercenary. I want to reward players for establishing relationships with NPCs and factions, so I need to add another variable, which is where Rapport comes in.

I’m obviously also ripping off taking inspiration from the excellent Time, Gear & Skill by Dice Goblin. Time, Gear, & Skill is largely geared towards physical actions, and I want a version geared towards social interaction. I think we can also pare this down from 3 variables to 2.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with this mechanic. I’ve tried to make it simple, versatile, and highly compatible with the preexisting social mechanics of most trad or OSR games. If you fall into that 1 out of 2 variables middle category, you still get to roll your Charisma or whatever else it might be. Adding Leverage and Rapport helps take the fiction more deeply into account with getting bogged down in modifiers.