First, and most immediately:
I plan to update carousing before Sunday's game (most likely Thursday and Friday nights). Get in your plans for wastrelry, and let me know if you need to know how much money you have or whatever?
Second, for general & gradual discussion:
I intend to exercise a great principle of OD&D game design, "appropriate bits from some other game to fill in gaps in this one" (e.g. Chainmail, Outdoor Survival), and lift the idea of moves from Apocalypse World and its D&D hack Dungeon World to handle some of the social interaction bits. Here is an example, in which (for our purposes) "roll+hard" would mean "roll 2d6, adding +1 if you are mighty, +2 if you are exceptionally mighty, -1 or -2 if you are feeble or exceptionally so, and perhaps a situational or class-based +/-1":
When you try to impose your will on your gang,
roll+hard. On a 10+, all 3. On a 7–9, choose 1:
• they do what you want
• they don’t fight back over it
• you don’t have to make an example of one of them
On a miss, someone in your gang makes a dedicated bid to
replace you for gang leader.
With commentary:
Just to lay it right out: on a 7–9, the player’s choices are (1) they
do what you want, after a fight in which they beat the shit out
of you but you make an example of one of them; (2) they don’t
do what you want, but you make an example of one of them
and so they don’t beat the shit out of you; (3) you don’t make
an example of one of them, so they beat the shit out of you and
don’t do what you want.
What I like about this is:
- the system is simple and has a strong similarity to the OD&D 2d6 reaction roll
- the consequences of the roll are spelled out rigorously but mostly deal with world-level events that move the story forward rather than mechanics that can be hard to interpret or scale to different circumstances
- there's a zone in between success and failure in which the player gets to make some choices from a pre-defined range about what aspects they most want to succeed in
- it's easy to invent moves like this on the fly
Are folks interested in using such a system to handle carousing, or do we want to stick with the existing dX-and-saving-throw?
If we wanted to do carousing this way, what we'd do is generate a library of custom moves, like so:
When you try to woo the Gynarch, spend 1d8x150 gold and
roll+inspiring. On a 10+, all 3. On a 7–9, choose 1:
• she makes an assignation to see you in private
• no other NPCs learn that you are wooing her
• you can make a bid for her affections (a separate move)
On a miss, none of the above, and your gifts disappear into the palace.
One advantage of this would be that you could try doing the same thing repeatedly; we could also do an in-between, more D&D-stylee thing where the action of carousing was either mutually developing or me inventing & revealing to you one roll at a time a random events table for each kind of carousing we wanted to invent.
A final option we could do with carousing - probably in combination with a lumpley-derived system of moves for structure - would be to do away with the random element in how much you can spend, and instead focus just on the random success/failure of what you're doing to carouse.