As I've written many a time here, most of my friends who play D&D with me are actors, and those who aren't are still in the "theater kid" type (I myself used to act a lot in high school, but gravitated more toward writing once I went to college).
Fantasy TTRPGs in the vein of D&D tend to focus most of their mechanics on combat, and at least the way that we play D&D, that works out for the best most of the time, because when we get into the interactions with NPCs and exploring the world, we largely want to make sure the mechanics get out of the way of the roleplay.
Thus, I was a bit skeptical about Draw Steel's heralded Negotiation system. But let's take it on its own terms and decide on our opinion afterward.
Let's talk about what a Negotiation is, and then how it works.
PCs will interact with NPCs all the time in Draw Steel - the story you're telling might be filled with action set-pieces, but even a movie as action-packed as Mad Max Fury Road still does take its time to slow down on occasion and give the characters time to express themselves outside of violence and derring-do (though one thing that makes that movie so brilliant is how the characters express themselves in what they do when the blades and explosive-spears are flying). Negotiations are not there for every social encounter.
Instead, there's a particular genre trope that Negotiations are meant to simulate:
This is when the party is seeking out aid from someone who may not be inclined to give them what they want, but isn't just a straight-up antagonist.
In the Delian Tomb, the game's first starter adventure, you get a chance to negotiate with a member of a rival adventuring party, trying to get something from them that will help you get deeper into the tomb. That's all well and good, but let me tell you what I think is a much more epic example:
In Return of the King, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas go to the necropolis of Dunharrow, where Aragorn seeks to offer them a release from the curse placed upon them by Isildur if they will aid him in his defense of Gondor against Sauron's forces. The dead have largely been content to remain in their secluded, accursed home, but they are prevented from passing on to the afterlife because of the curse: they deserted from Isildur's side during the war of the Last Alliance, and thus the curse keeps them bound to the mortal plane (and as we see with the Ringwraiths, a human who doesn't die at their natural time gradually transforms into a ghostly spirit in Tolkien's world).
It's a high-stakes mission, and in the movie, at least, failure will mean the dead turn on our three heroes and extinguish them. But, ultimately, Aragorn convinces them that he is the rightful king and Isildur's heir, and that he is capable of lifting the curse. They wind up turning the tide in the battle of the Pelenor fields: a successful negotiation.
In a negotiation, the NPC (or I suppose group of NPCs) with whom the party is negotiating gets certain special stats: Interest and Patience.
Interest is something you could consider a kind of "score." The better their interest at the conclusion of the negotiation, the better the outcome. NPCs who are already inclined to listen to what the party has to say and perhaps already like them (but might still be hesitant to commit to some course of action, thus requiring a negotiation in the first place) will start with a higher interest. This score goes from 0 to 5, and if you hit either extreme, the negotiation ends with a final offer (which will be the best possible outcome at 5 and at 0 interest will see the NPC choose actually to do something harmful to the party - not necessarily fully aggressive, though it could be that - but something that will make the party regret even bringing this up).
Patience is how long an NPC is willing to continue discussing things. Like interest, this can be on a scale of 0-5, but you generally cannot increase patience: the best you can do is not decrease it. At 0 patience, the NPC will make a final offer based on the current interest level.
Now, you don't have to play out a negotiation until the NPC's patience wears out: for one, it will automatically end at 0 or 5 interest, as mentioned above, but also, the party can choose to accept a deal somewhere in the middle if they think that's ok.
Now, how do we affect the NPC's interest? Naturally, we'd love it to hit 5, but what's the best way to do that?
Well, different NPCs have different concerns, and here, we define those concerns through a number of keywords: Motivations and Pitfalls. The game provides several broad categories: Benevolence, Discovery, Freedom, Greed, Higher Authority, Justice, Legacy, Peace, Power, Protection, Revelry, and Vengeance. Each NPC has at least two motivations and one pitfall from that list. For example, the Dunharrow men could be thought to have Freedom and Peace as their motivations. But they might scoff at an offer of Protection, because what protection do the dead require? Thus, Protection might become a pitfall for them.
In a negotiation, the party makes arguments. If they appeal to one of the NPC's motivations, they test (Reason, Intuition, or Presence, depending on the appeal being made, with skills, especially interpersonal ones, often applying). If the Director considers the argument particularly well-founded, they might automatically offer a tier 3 result, but otherwise, you just roll. On a tier 1, the NPC's patience decreases by 1. On a tier 2, the patience decreases by 1 still, but you also increase their interest. On a tier 3, the interest increases while the patience remains the same. However, once a motivation has been appealed to, further hammering home on that motivation will effectively get an automatic tier 1 (again, patience running out doesn't necessarily mean you've screwed up the negotiation, but it cuts off the chance to get that perfect 5-interest result).
Hitting a pitfall, however, will automatically decrease both patience and interest by 1: you really want to avoid these if you can.
If you avoid both motivations and pitfalls (perhaps you've already used their motivations) you can try an argument outside of them. Tier 1 decreases both patience and interest by 1. Tier 2 only reduces their patience, while tier 3 will increase interest by 1 but lower patience by 1 (unless you get a natural 19 or 20, which doesn't reduce the patience).
In other words, if someone is already quite hostile toward you, it's very hard to get those high-interest results, but still technically possible if you roll really well.
Next, we account for Renown and a new stat called Impression. Status can be a valuable tool in negotiation. Aragorn has to convince the Dunharrow men that he's genuinely the rightful king of Gondor. But upon proving that, his renown is clearly far higher. If some random ranger from the north were to talk to the dead men, they'd probably not really give him the time of day.
PCs will gain renown as they level up - not strictly in line with their levels, but generally expected to gain renown every other level or so. High-status NPCs will have a higher Impression score, and the higher that is, the more renown is required to really influence their attitude toward the PC. If the PC's renown is equal to or higher than the NPC's impression score, the PC can get an edge on these argument tests, with different skills coming into play depending on whether you're famous (the NPC has a positive view of you) or infamous (the NPC has a negative view of you). (Skills like Brag, Interrogate, and Intimidate would apply to the infamous version.)
When patience runs out, or when the party decides to take the current offer, you get different things based on the NPC's interest:
5 means "yes, and," where they'll give you what you want and then offer some bonus reward on top of it. Maybe you're seeking some magical treasure, and they've decided they like you so much that they'll send a Retainer NPC to fight alongside you for a time.
4 is simple: they give the party what they asked for. To encourage players to try for a 5-interest conclusion, the NPC might ask if that was all they needed.
3 is "Yes, but," where they'll ultimately do as the party wants, but will require some additional payment or service.
2 is "No, but," where they won't do what the party ultimately wants, but they'll offer some consolation prize: maybe they don't commit their forces to some battle, but they'll offer maps and intelligence.
1 is a flat No, just not doing what the party wants.
0 is "No, and," where not only does the NPC refuse the party, but will take hostile action toward them, potentially attacking them, or perhaps undermining them in some subtler way. If the party doesn't want them as an enemy, they'll need to do something to make amends.
Now, it would be tempting to simply use most of these mechanics "under the hood," without getting into the weeds about it with your players. However, certain class features and other bonuses will interact with this system. Negotiations are serious business, and a successful negotiation can even award Victories.
The idea here is to make these high-stakes social encounters feel as impactful as a combat encounter. But I think there are some keys: don't overuse them being one of them. I think in a given adventure, maybe one big negotiation is appropriate.
I do think it also prompts a bit of your world and adventure design. The target of a negotiation feels like it should be a kind of third party. I have the bare bones of an adventure I've been thinking up (along with a brand-new campaign setting) in which a hostile army invades a once-peaceful region. Within that region, there's a Wode Hag who has for a long time been kind of a blessing and curse, using her magic to aid those who give her payment, but also inflicting suffering and terrors upon those who displease her. At default, the Hag feels safe enough in her wode from the invaders, but the party might try to convince her that she'll be dragged into this fight one way or another, and that this is her fight as well.
In a best-case scenario, she might send her minions to attack one of the invader's footholds, and perhaps also lend some magic to the party (either in the form of treasure, or a temporary retainer: I love the idea of sending some kind of hulking wicker construct to fight along with the party - which would likely require the use of the "Custom Retainer" section in the Monsters book).
The Heroes book actually has a big section in the "For the Director" chapter of sample negotiations that you can just steal easily enough. Most are for humanoid NPCs, though it also has ones for Dragons, Liches, and even Deities. These give you an Impression score and list of Motivations and Pitfalls.
Notably, I think that discovering these motivations and pitfalls can actually be a pretty reasonable use of a Downtime Project. While you might prefer to use these on the crafting of magic treasures, doing the Discover Lore or Go Undercover projects might be a good way for you to learn more about the person you're going to talk to. That said, you might be able to discover this simply by asking them, and if they aren't forthcoming, there's a test you can make to try to determine it, with the potential to reduce their interest if you roll poorly and they don't like you trying to suss them out.
So, what are our thoughts?
For sure, this system does put some crunch into social encounters. It creates more things for a Director to track. And I think if you made an adventure full of negotiations, it would bog things down.
But I respect the effort to create a framework at least gesturing toward the complexity of combat mechanics to make for high-stakes drama without swords drawn.
And, indeed, I think it would be relatively easy to port over some of these concepts to other RPGs.
If you don't overdo it, I actually think leaning into the mechanical workings of this could be fun: making it clear to the players that this is something with clearly-delineated parameters. You won't be able to just re-make the same argument and hope you roll better on your test than you did the last time.
I actually think that patience as a concept is something that might be the secret sauce you need underneath any social encounter - but in most cases, it can be an invisible number just held within the mind of the GM.
I would also say that it'll be important to ensure that there are multiple paths out of a failure state. In combat, weirdly enough, because the failure state is so final (though as I explored before, there are means by which an entire party can recover from a TPK,) it makes things kind of simple. Here, you need to make sure that if you build an adventure around the party successfully getting something from this NPC, you need to allow for that to come in different forms, and it might get harder if the negotiation goes poorly.
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