underside dev diary #3: antisocial social mechanics (Patreon)

so on my silly little blog a couple days ago i did an impromptu review of an indie game i got in a bundle which was mostly a trojan horse for me to talk about the atomizing and antisocial implications of most games' "social mechanics." chiefly, i hate how instrumentalizing and solipsistic the 'roll over a certain number; if you do, you have Persuaded this person' mechanic used most famously by d&d but also by many other games  ends up being in what it says about social interaction. persuasion is a cudgel--people disagreeing with you present an obstacle, like a raging river or a log blocking your bath, that you must overcome. they are static, nonagentic, and their opinions exist only as a stumbling block for the player characters.

i also talked about some cool games like monsterhearts and thirsty sword lesbians that tackle this fundamental issue by creating reciprocal social systems where characters accumulate Strings on one another and can have push-pull relationships rather than talking being exclusively an avenue to destroying someone's point of view or difference of opinion like it's an enemy goblin.

now here's the thing: underside is not set in a world full of reciprocal, interconnected socialisation. underside is a game about trauma and traumatized people. if you've read worm or watched the boys, you'll be familiar with the types of conversations you'll have in underside -- traumatized people obsessed with counting coup and power plays, treating every conversation as an underhanded power struggle. but that doesn't mean that the nonagentic, one-way model of social mechanics works for underside. instead, i've adapted some of the stuff i like about thirsty sword lesbians to be less about emotional connection and more about leverage and control, while trying to keep the element of being forced to consider other people's viewpoints and desires.

i did this with two mechanics, the first of which is leverage.

leverage works a lot like strings do in the aforementioned games, but it's more concrete and materialist. strings represent emotional influence, and while that goes into leverage, leverage can also represent a simple brute power differential, the cold calculus of violent superhuman interaction. i'm a big fan of rules that give players a delineated but total say over the narrative, and hate rules that require GMs to do complex NPC stat-keeping, so the primary attraction point of leverage is this: if you spend leverage, you can get someone to do a favour for you. for one leverage, they'll do an easy favour: something within their power that doesn't compromise their safety, moral code, or loyalties. no rolls, not for you or for the NPC--if the thing you want is in their power, they do it and it happens.

of course, NPCs can also get leverage on you. the superpowered underground is full of tit-for-tat, unlikely allies, and underhanded deals. the same conditions apply to the favours they can ask of you -- of course, as a player character, you can refuse, at the cost of burning that bridge entirely. if they know you'll let them down when it counts, why should they trust you again?

of course, you can't always rely on your leverage. sometimes you'll want to try to persuade, coerce, or otherwise sway people you don't know well or have no power over. that's where underside's social moves come into play. once again, they're tuned to encourage you to cut deals, compromise on your and other people's morals, and play as a ruthless pragmatist--crucially, you can't do the closest thing the game has to a 'persuasion' move, make an offer, unless you have something to offer the person you're talking to.

there's a very deliberate choice in the framing here. thirsty sword lesbians phrases its entice move as 'when you appeal to someone's physical or emotional sensibilities'. this conveys that the fundamental social stance of tsl is temptation, it's appeal. you know people have desires and simply push them to act on them. in contrast, i've phrased make an offer so what another game might consider emotional appeals are mechanically filtered through the mercenary, cold lens of 'tell them they'll get something they want'. even if you share a genuine common goal, an ideology, even if you're using this move to get someone to help you save the world, the rules text of underside still frames it as a self-interested deal, you get yours and i get mine.

is this the perspective i hold on what social interaction is? of course not. but it's the traumatized, isolated perspective that underside has, and that's what matters. give your games a perspective, people: you'll find that things end up slotting nicely into place.