Do You Use Social Classes?

[Admin Pete]

Do you use social classes in your campaign? If you do, how do you use them? Are they commonly seen in play or mostly off stage? Anything else of interest about this feaure?

[tetramorph]

I plan to use them for judged and juried trials.

No need yet. Players usually bring about a more "frontier" justice before anyone comes to trial!

[DeWitt]

Yes, I do. All my classes have a social position built into their fluff. Like the Dungeoneer class I made, who are tolerated outlaws. It's just an ingrained part of how I DM. So social structure is always very present throughout the game. What I find most entertaining about it, is that the players are boxed in by laws, culture, and moral philosophies. It's been my experience that this box creates fantastically unexpected creativity in players and some of how most memorable moments have come in clever social circumvention.

[Admin Pete]

Nov 12, 2016 0:50:17 GMT -5 DeWitt said:

Yes, I do. All my classes have a social position built into their fluff. Like the Dungeoneer class I made, who are tolerated outlaws. It's just an ingrained part of how I DM. So social structure is always very present throughout the game. What I find most entertaining about it, is that the players are boxed in by laws, culture, and moral philosophies. It's been my experience that this box creates fantastically unexpected creativity in players and some of how most memorable moments have come in clever social circumvention.

Do you have a few stories to share?

[DeWitt]

Nov 12, 2016 7:26:21 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

Nov 12, 2016 0:50:17 GMT -5 DeWitt said:

Yes, I do. All my classes have a social position built into their fluff. Like the Dungeoneer class I made, who are tolerated outlaws. It's just an ingrained part of how I DM. So social structure is always very present throughout the game. What I find most entertaining about it, is that the players are boxed in by laws, culture, and moral philosophies. It's been my experience that this box creates fantastically unexpected creativity in players and some of how most memorable moments have come in clever social circumvention.

Do you have a few stories to share?

Hm. One comes to mind, to illustrate the point, it happened during a game set in Pseudo-Belgium. A fairly straight-forward plot of cultist investigation in the backwoods of a small fief. I have a reputation among my players for being a scary DM. i don't really like this perception but it plays into the crux of the incident. After questioning some, in my mind benign, villagers, the players were waylaid by an ogre of a man in an isolated swamp. one of my players panicked so badly that when he was disarmed by a ill-rolled 1 he began to use a village girl as a weapon. The girl was just a guide npc i made up to answer any questions and drop hints while the party traveled.

After the combat this player was shocked to find out the girl was dead. We all had a good laugh as the reality of his panicky actions sunk into his face. He sheepishly thought that repeatedly swinging a body into another body wouldn't cause much trauma to the girl's health.

Now they faced the problem of the fall out. In a series of brain-storming and lots of bluffing, some of which are hazy to me now, they managed to tie the girl's death to the cult, secretly reimburse the girl's family with credit in the dismantling of the cult and raise their status within the area, but also maneuvered a pardon for any future slayings in the nterest of the king's peace from the fief's ruler.

Nothing spectacular but because of the social consequences i hold my players to we had a running slapstick gag for a long time and another three sessions of adventure to clean up a spur-of-the-moment action that had nothing to do with the mental notes I had. If the adventurers had been above society then the killing of an npc in self-preservation would have ended with the battle. being boxed in though forced a good belly-laugh and hours of tense intriguing adventure.

gwyn can you think of anything else or fill in the gaps bud?

p.s I should add that this was a short-adventure I ran out of a module while the player in question had time before he got married, so I didn't have any plans to bring the social world in. The fallout and clean-up was entirely done via reflex of the players because of my reputation for enforcing game-world law and social etiquette.

[tetramorph]

Wow. That's some pretty dark stuff.

Using a female child as a weapon. Can't see that coming up at my table.

Any other more PG examples?

[DeWitt]

Nov 12, 2016 15:28:17 GMT -5 tetramorph said:

Wow. That's some pretty dark stuff.

Using a female child as a weapon. Can't see that coming up at my table.

Any other more PG examples?

I'm not sure what your saying here. We obviously don't condone infanticide or have it as a refrain in our games. It just illustrates the point that instead of moving on like most npc murder in other games I have been in, the social context of the classes made it so that it had to be resolved. The girl's death wasn't the funny part, it was the visceral reaction the player had toward a fictional scenario.

[Admin Pete]

I cannot recall ever having a case of NPC murder IMC, but I understand fully what you are talking about. I most likely would have been much harder on them myself, but that is just me. I think it is an interesting way to handle it and it is certainly a realistic way for it to be resolved.

[ffilz]

For my Wilderlands campaign, I use the social classes from CSIO. See this page: odd74.proboards.com/thread/8917/rules-procedures for my house rules. There is a small chance of an elevated social class with some starting cash benefit, and guildsmen have a craft. There has been some role playing benefit, though no one has really pushed it.

Interestingly, at one point they had a near TPK fighting giant lizards. All (or all but one) of the replacement PCs wound up as being Noble Pages. I ruled they had been pages at the nearby castle. Again, no one really played up on that.

In Makofan's Traveller campaign that is starting up, I rolled a Social Standing 10 for one character and took her through the Noble career and that is benefiting our PC group.

Frank

[Admin Pete]

Would it be ok to copy/paste that here?

[ffilz]

Nov 15, 2016 10:23:56 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

Would it be ok to copy/paste that here?

Also posted here:

ruinsofmurkhill.proboards.com/thread/97/house-rules-using-wilderlands-game

[Admin Pete]

That is too rich!!

[Necromancer]

I've used it quite often, but never emphazised it a lot. Generally, I've used it to determine background money, and sometimes it's had an impact on social interaction with NPC's, or helped players add some flavour to the charcterization of their PC's.

[gwyn]

Nov 12, 2016 9:17:24 GMT -5 DeWitt said:

gwyn can you think of anything else or fill in the gaps bud?

I totally agree: social structure is always subtly present in your games, often in the background but then at times it's brought to the fore. Farmers don't stand around answering your every question if you're in a rag-tag crew of adventurers, they have stuff to do. Aristocrats generally couldn't care less who you are or what you're doing, unless it impacts them, and what would otherwise be a through-away verbal insult can have ramifications. Unfortunately I can't think of any good examples where class played an important role in an adventure, though there would be some.

I think it's one of the most fundamental features of a "realistic" world, and also one of the most interesting facets of RP for me personally. Social structure defines people's roles, their morality etc, before they possess any individuality at all. To assume the role of a character with various amazing capacities (including simply the freedom to wander, not being tied down to any particular place as in real life), define their individual personality and goals, then face a world that doubly determines the limits of your actions (both natural limits and objective social limits) challenges you to recognise how little or how much can truly be changed through subjective intervention.

~Gwyn

[Deleted]

In response to the thread's inquiry, yes - Yes I do ... Social Hierarchy