Social play in TOWR

I tend to run campaigns that are heavy on social interaction. Investigations, politics, and so on. As a result, the skills and systems for social interaction tends to get a workout in whatever system I run. Here are my thoughts on The Old World RPG (TOWR) when it comes to social play.

TOWR has two main social skills, Charm and Leadership, both governed by the Fellowship attribute. This is an interesting distinction, as Charm is generally used when you're trying to ingratiate yourself, and Leadership when you're coming from a position of authority (or intimidation). However, it doesn't really end up being something players specialize in. After a few months, the two of my five players who are speccing into the "face" role have both maxed out both their Fellowship attribute and both social skills.

While that is fine, I feel that I've seen more meaningful diversification when it comes to characters social skills in other settings, for instance some being good at deception and others at negotiation and yet others at intimidation, leading to a bit more interesting takes on social situations. That said, the help mechanic that means that other players can sometimes join in with other skills does create its own fun at the table.

The skills themselves aren't bad in any way, and for a general purpose RPG the social game works well, but for my style of GMing I would have preferred another couple of skills - perhaps adding deception and negotiation to the mix under another attribute, and limiting the role of charm and leadership accordingly.

Scrutinize

I believe at least some of my players are missing an equivalent to the Insight skill of D&D, wanting to roll to see if an NPC is lying or not. For my own part, I like the fact that there is no such thing by default, as it makes it a whole lot more fun to run investigations and political plots. Interrestingly, my players have come to use Gather Information downtime endeavours to double check if NPCs are trustworthy or not. This is fine, I think it creates great gamplay.

I must say I very much dislike the Scrutinize mechanic. In its base form, it seems mostly useless even when I try to be kind about how much information I give out for its questions - the trouble is that what you can ask using it is information that is fairly easy to find out in other ways. 

And when someone goes and takes the "lie detector talent" (as I've come to think of Intense Scrutiny), the situation is turned on its head. Suddenly you have a more or less perfect lie-detector, as its really hard not to generate at least one success even on an opposed test for a character who's specced into it. After a single session of having it in play, I had to start being very cagy with how politically savvy NPCs talk (basically only speaking truth and lying only by omission). Which is okay - but tiresome. It does mean that the talent is superpowered against naive NPCs, and against politicians and masterminds it is still useful to confirm things the characters already suspect enough to force the NPCs into either lying or admitting guilt.

 But even that isn't really fun in my opinion - the PCs then never have to take a chance, the players never have to go with a gut feeling and having the thrill of finding out if their investigation was good enough. It creates some cagy play by both the players and the GM to get the facts and questions straight, but I believe it is taking away from "real investigation" - and cagy wordplay was already a part of the game without this. I would have preferred a straight D&D-style Insight skill to this.

The class divide

To be perfectly honest, I haven't really used the Class Divide rules much, though I do grant or remove dice based on an NPCs disposition towards the characters, I just don't use the codified expectations based on status tiers. It feels a bit too gamey, and I believe I'm playing mostly as the rules are intended, if not strictly by the letter. I like the rule on paper, it feels like a good guideline for new GMs.

Conclusions

While the social gameplay mechanics of TOWR are fine, they leave something to be desired for my style of GMing. In a world without the Intense Scrutiny talent, the lack of a reliable insight-style mechanic combined with the downtime system has led to a very interesting emergent playstyle, but the entire scrutinize-mechanic seems a waste - and borderline problematic with Intense Scrutiny. I'll likely houserule the entire scrutinize system in my next campaign. Finally, the skills themselves aren't quite fine-grained enough, and there is no reason for "Face"-characters to specialize - and no mecanic that forces them to.

But the system also doesn't get in my way (apart from Intense Scrutiny), and plays fast and fluent, and perhaps the best thing is that helping means non-Face characters can often contribute in mechanically meaningful ways in social encounters. That is really good, and leaves my opinion as generally favorable towards TOWR when it comes to social gameplay.