The Relationship-crawl: Part 2, Drafting a procedure

Last time I introduced this idea of the relationship-crawl, or socialcrawl*. The quick summary is that social networks are graphs, and therefore they can be theoretically "crawled" in a fashion very similar to what we do with dungeons and other forms of exploration.

To come up with something that looks more like an actual procedure, we laid out some ideas for worthwhile goals or rewards embedded within the social network, and we discussed some types of challenge that would create interest in the midst of the crawling procedure.

All we need now are a sense of the actual mechanics and constraints we would employ in our hypothetical procedure, and to do that, let me start by identifying some of my goals for what I imagine this procedure to look like at a high level. 

* comments on the last post would seem to indicate that "socialcrawl" is the term readers prefer, so I'm going to run with that for now.

Overview

The goals of this procedure emerge readily from the premise of the socialcrawl:

• NPCs should have meaningful relationships with the players and other NPCs in the community
• Players should be rewarded for deeper engagement with an NPC community over time

Next, let me enumerate some of the information that the socialcrawl will need to track in service of those goals:

• The state of a given NPCs relationship towards the players (e.g. hostile vs. helpful)
• The connections between NPCs and their quality (e.g. X is friends with Y, or X holds a grudge against Y)
• The resources NPCs can offer only to players who have engaged with the socialcrawl

Next, the kinds of activities the socialcrawl procedure will need to regulate by computing the player's actions and the above information to achieve the stated goals:

• Changes in the NPCs relationship to the player
• Guidelines for discovering and "traversing" the connections between NPCs
• Guidelines for withholding and dispersing the deeper benefits NPCs can offer to the players

Finally, let me mention a nice-to-have:

• smooth incorporation with existing mechanics and procedures for engaging with NPCs, and related activities like Downtime procedures

That defined, let's look at an existing crawling procedure as a template to work from.

Examining a crawling procedure

Since I'm a Cairn guy (and Cairn is one of a very few rulesets that is completely online and easy to link to), I'll be using Cairn's procedures for this.

Give Cairn 2e's dungeoncrawl procedure a skim.

At a glance, this procedure incorporates:

• a framing for Turns and Actions (the temporal units of "happening" and the things players can do within those time slices)
• Resource management principles
• a Dungeon Events table (dungeon specific Encounter tables are referenced, but not defined here for obvious reasons)
• guidelines for dungeon-specific Actions

Let's quickly run through each of those points again and look at how they may (or may not) be useful to building our own socialcrawl procedure:

Turns

The importance of a "dungeon turn" or a "wilderness turn" is defining a discrete slice of time in which relevant actions can be taken. Turns are helpful for managing the granularity at which the state of the dungeon (and the players) can update, as well as anchoring the rates at which resources may be expended.

Our procedure will need something like a "turn", if only to keep track of the passage of time and prevent all the content of a socialcrawl from being consumed in a couple of hours of in-game time.

Resource management

Because I envision socialcrawling less as a first class procedure, and more as a meta-framework for tracking NPC relationships and rewarding engagement outside of the dungeon, I don't think it's a good idea to directly attack a party's resources when they're bumming around town.

That said, inasmuch as the socialcrawl is a navigation of an abstract entity, it may be appropriate to incorporate some abstract resource management. Time is always going to be a factor of course, and time can be precious, but perhaps there's some room for leaning on such abstract "resources" as reputation, etc.

Dungeon Events

Broadly, the purpose of a dungeon events table is to keep things dynamic and tense in a dungeoncrawl. While "tense" isn't exactly a feeling I think a socialcrawl should be going for, "dynamic" sounds like a worthy goal.

Looking closer at the sorts of things that are listed in Cairn's Dungeon Events table, I think there's actually some really interesting opportunities here to add color to the socialcrawl:

• Encounters. Dungeon encounters mean the threat of combat, or at least a challenge. Fundamentally, they are an unexpected meeting with the denizens of the dungeon. A socialcrawl might also benefit from unexpected meetings of one form or another.
• Environment. This is even more interesting: inasmuch as NPCs are unique entities, with lives separate from the players, the socialcrawl structure may allow for interesting shifts in the status quo of the social network, outside of the direct influences of the players.
• Exhaustion. The function of this entry in the table seems to be an ongoing risk within the dungeon environment: spend some time or spend a ration, your choice. Perhaps we could do something similar with an NPC unexpectedly demanding your attention--forcing you to either humor them, or hurt your relationship standing with them.
• Sign. My understanding of this event is that it foreshadows things in the dungeon. It's not exactly mechanically significant, but it does add some flavor and life to a dungeon. There is certainly potential to foreshadow social relationships, secrets, and other bits of intrigue when moving around town.
• Loss. I'm just going to plant this seed without comment and come back to it later: what if there was someone in town who hated you, and spent their time bad mouthing you to anyone who would listen?

Dungeon specific Actions

Naturally, dungeoncrawling relies on some actions that are already well defined in other places (combat is a great example). But dungeoncrawling also incorporates other kinds of actions like Searching into its framework of Turns and Events.

The basic unit of socialcrawling is just talking to people, and we don't need to write new rules for doing that. However, inasmuch as we'll be adding new information about NPCs within the context of the socialcrawl itself, the procedure will need to give guidelines for how those parameters are affected by and incorporated into just-talking-to-people.

The Socialcrawl Procedure (rough draft)

At this point, I think I've spent far too much time talking around this procedure. Now, I'm just going to vomit something up. Once again, as Cairn is my system of choice, I will hew to Cairn's style, and refer to Cairn's other rules (with links) where required.

(DISCLAIMER: In case it's not clear, this is a theoretical draft and has not been subjected to any playtesting; if you would like to playtest such a thing and let me know how it goes, that would be peachy.)

The basics

• Alongside their other quirks, descriptors, and personality traits, NPCs also have:
• Status: the sentiment of the NPC towards the players, usually determined by rolling on the Reactions table on first meeting with the NPC. (Possible values: hostile, wary, curious, kind, helpful)
• Connections: the individuals the NPC knows intimately, and the quality of their relationship (of the form: "X is mentored by Y" or "X holds a grudge against Y"). Connections may have a positive, negative, or neutral character that influences how those connections are leveraged.
• Resources: distinct from the Services an NPC offers publicly (e.g. an Innkeeper sells food and board), the unique information, boons, or secret Connections an NPC can offer to those they deem worthy.
• NPCs are either Available, Occupied, or Hidden. 
• Available NPCs are generally essential service providers, often working in a fixed location. These NPCs can generally be contacted without loss of time, or risk to their Status with the players.
• Occupied NPCs can generally only be met through contact with other known NPCs; they may be busy or on the move, taking player time to establish contact or risking offense (and lowered status towards the Party) if they are detained from their business.
• Hidden NPCs can only be met by a private introduction from an Available NPC who holds a favorable Status with the players.
• The Status of an NPC will broadly determine how they are willing to interact with the players:
• Helpful: this NPC will offer their Resources and Connections to the players, even going so far as to make introductions and vouch for the players publicly. This NPC is always Available to the players.
• Friendly: this NPC will share their Connections and even make introductions. They may be persuaded to offer their Resources.
• Curious: this NPC will share knowledge of their Connections on request, but will not make introductions.
• Wary: this NPC may attempt to avoid the players, will not share their Connections with players for free, and will not make introductions. They will offer their public Services, but they might charge you extra.
• Hostile: this NPC will avoid the players, or actively harass and oppose them. (They may even spread their discontent.) They will refuse even their public Services to the players, or charge exorbitant prices, and will not offer Quests unless they're trying to get the players killed. (If most of a Community is Hostile to the players, they may attempt to run them out of town!)
• NPCs are gathered into Communities. A small settlement such as a village might be a single community, and a large settlement like a city might be made up of many communities roughly corresponding to Neighborhoods or Districts. Most NPCs will have Connections only to other NPCs within their Community, unless their social standing or profession would indicate otherwise.
• Players may engage with the Community, or ignore it entirely, engaging only with essential Service providers at a superficial level; the Community continues on anyways, and Community Events may still be rolled at the appropriate intervals.
• As players engage with the Community, the Warden should be forthright in how the players are received, and how NPCs feel about their Connections. Basic inquiries for essential Services should generally be honored; the Community and it's procedures should not generally prevent the players from playing at a basic level.

(editor's note: should I rename this whole thing to a communitycrawl?? It has a nice ring to it... this is what I get for writing blog posts before I've thought through every nook and cranny of an idea.)

A Community Turn

Because this procedure is intended to operate as needed when players interact with members of the Community, the duration of Actions within the Community can be flexible. Generally, interacting with an NPC may take a trivial amount of time, a Watch, or a Downtime action depending on the nature of the interaction. Further guidance is given when discussing Community Actions

Party members may split up to attempt meetings, but while the party is split, players at the who are not involved in an interaction in-game should not be allowed to give input to the interactions, and must wait until the party is united to discuss outcomes--going it alone means the outcome is entirely on you!

Community Events

Communities are lively places, and the social fabric is always changing. When:

• Newcomers come to town (even the party; including returning to town after an absence)...
• A holiday is celebrated...
• A significant event takes place, or a conflict is resolved near the settlement...
• The party lingers in town for a week or more at a time...

Roll on the table below.

1	Encounter	Roll on an Encounter table. A new contact may be met, or a local conflict may burst into the open.
2	Clue	A Connection is directly observed in town, an NPC's virtue or vice is displayed publicly, a secret is poorly obscured, etc.
3	Environment	Connections shift or escalate. Feuds are begun or resolved, new Connections are forged or broken, a blight affects local crops, etc.
4	Adversary	A Hostile NPC in the Community spreads their discontent, risking degradation of the players Status among the NPCs immediate connections.
5	Nag	An NPC demands the players' attention. The players must linger in the neighborhood to resolve the issue (triggering another roll on this table), buy off the NPC in some way to appease them, or WIL save to risk offending the NPC and lowering their Status towards the players.
6	Harmony	The Community continues on at peace in the status quo.

Community Actions

• Additional rules are not usually needed for adjudicating interactions with NPCs within the community; rather, the NPC attributes of the Community procedure may modify the expected outcomes of a routine social encounter. Use the fiction.
• A simple, mutually beneficial interaction with an NPC should not usually change the Status of the NPC towards the players, unless it demonstrates a long-term pattern of interaction in one direction or the other.
• Solving a local problem, fulfilling an NPCs significant personal need, or otherwise serving an NPC in some way may increase an NPCs Status towards the players; likewise, failing to solve a local problem, or harming or taking advantage of an NPC in any way may reduce their Status towards the players. (Extreme harm can turn an entire Community against you!)
• Playing to an NPC's vices is a risky proposition: it may get the players what they want in the short term, but carries the risk of stoking an NPC's resentment towards the players.
• The Strengthening Ties Downtime Action may be used to increase an NPC's Status towards the players

Seek out an NPC

• If the NPC is Available, no additional time is needed to contact them.
• If the NPC is Occupied, spend one Watch for every two degrees of separation from a known, Available NPC asking around and waiting for a break in the NPCs work for them to speak with you. This cost can be reduced by one, but a WIL save may be necessary to prevent a loss of Status with the NPC.
• If the NPC is known but Hidden a minimum of one day is required to make the proper arrangements for a private interaction.
• If an NPC is known and trying to avoid the players, a Die of Fate may be used once a day to determine if the players can pin them down.

Make an introduction

• First impressions are important and require a roll on the Reaction table to set the NPCs Status towards the players. This roll may be modified by relevant circumstances, such as if a known NPC is present to introduce you, if a majority of the NPCs positive Connections hold a favorable Status towards the players.
• One modifying circumstance prevents rolling an opposite extreme (one positive modifier makes a Hostile outcome impossible); two modifying circumstances increases the rolled outcome by one in the appropriate direction (two positive modifiers adjust your rolled outcome up by one category); more modifiers may negate the need for a roll, and  multiple modifiers in opposing directions should simply be cancelled out.
• Available NPCs require no prior knowledge or introduction; other NPCs must first be made known to you by an NPC you are already acquainted with.

NPC Resources

• Resources are not to be confused with an NPC's professional services--a blacksmith's publicly available wares are not their Resource.
• Resources can come in many varieties:
• Rumors are knowledge of events in the local region. An NPC who shares Rumors can tell them about current events of which the players would otherwise be ignorant. Rumors are generally given freely if the NPC has a favorable Status with the players, often relevant to the profession of the NPC, and sometimes unreliable.
• Gossip is knowledge of some part of the social network. An NPC who shares Gossip may be able to tell the players the virtues and vices of other NPCs, another NPC's connections to other NPC's (including the quality of the connection), or the nature of private Resources that another NPC holds. Carousing with an NPC yields a piece of Gossip from them.
• Lore is knowledge of threats and secrets in the region. An NPC who shares Lore provide advantageous knowledge of local monsters or hazards, or the location of hidden things in the region. A player may Research with the NPC to hear their stories and gain this information (the NPC is a Source for the purpose of this Research).
• Special Services are goods or services that are not publicly available. This may entail products of greater quality or potency, willingness to employ unique skills on behalf of the players, or discounted prices for publicly traded goods. A Special Service may require a Downtime action to produce the desired end product.
• Quests are requests for unique efforts or retrieving unique objects--usually things that can be accomplished or acquired in the vicinity of nearby adventure sites. An NPC with a Quest will offer it freely, and completion of that quest may increase the NPC's Status with the players, or yield a Special Service as payment.
• Training is the opportunity for Growth from a skilled NPC. This NPC will serve as a Master for the purpose of conveying their unique talents to a player in Downtime.
• Hidden Connections to other NPCs who are exceedingly private or powerful. People of great significance or embedded within a local Faction.
• An NPC may have more than one Resource to share, or share different Resources at different Status levels.

Commentary

So there you have it, a rough draft of a socialcrawl procedure (communitycrawl?! you tell me).

Let me highlight a few design intentions expressed here that were hard to explain before, or that I haven't gotten the chance to express yet:

• The Community procedure should be mostly invisible to the players; its more of a framework for a game master to determine how NPCs feel about players, and mediate the distribution of special benefits for deeper relationships with those NPCs
• That said, if you're going to implement a socialcrawl, you should probably talk to the players about it the same way you would talk about dungeoncrawling procedures the first time those come up.
• Mechanically disincentivizing murderhobos is tight.
• Something I'm having a hard time evoking: NPC Connections should be characterized by specific verbs and concepts: Halbert secretly loves Greta, Dunny is in debt to Rolph, Wynn is jealous of Finn. The relationship should have a positive, negative, or neutral feel to it, but no more granular than that. These connections should add a whole layer of richness to your NPCs, all on their own, but also be functionally relevant to the activities of the socialcrawl.
• Frankly, I worry my procedure is a bit of a mess. Besides just needing some testing and revising, I'm a Cairn guy, I'm trying to strike the appropriate balance between relying on the Fiction and explaining how things should work. Your taste may be to conclude that it's not intricate enough for your system of choice. 
• The social network should shift and evolve over time; I'm not at all sure how frequently or how dramatically it ought to do that. I was cribbing Cairn vibes really hard when I wrote that Event table section.
• To clarify: a very small settlement like a village is probably a small, densely connected network where basically everyone is Available and everyone knows each other. A little more interesting is a scenario where a City contains many Communities, perhaps one for every Neighborhood in each District, with a series of local connections, and a few interesting connections crossing neighborhoods and opening up other portions of the City to the players.

Conclusion and next steps

I hope this is specified enough to at least (finally) convey what the heck I'm talking about with this whole concept, and enable you to go out and try something like this in your own games and develop this concept into a more refined and broadly useful form. If you want to do that, I'd be very excited to read about your attempts and feedback on the conceptI (Unfortunately, I do not at this moment have the facility to try this out myself; my time is unusually fragmented, and not amenable to much more than my usual spurts of drawing things here and there.)

Also, I initially thought I'd include a dice drop generator in this post to illuminate some dark corners and give a feel for how one might go about building a Community to be crawlable (it was actually the first thing I imagined when I started down this rabbit hole!). This post got long enough, however, that I didn't want to bloat it any further, so that will have to wait for a Part 3.