I like the basic idea. Most of your 'weapons' though aren't Social, they're Mental! "A good idea" is a mental concept. A Social weapon would be a popular idea; the more people who get onboard, the more powerful the weapon would become. Obviously this would vary from place to place, but successful use of the 'weapon' would improve it.

I disagree, actually. A mental attack is explicitly something that threatens your core identity, and accepting a deal isn’t it (most of the time). If you’re taken out Socially, you’re being made to accept a deal (which can take many forms, including conceding to losing face). If you’re taken out Mentally, your entire core identity is up for grabs, like Sight trauma rendering you bonkers, cult tactics molding you into a cog in the machine, or a White Court Vampire turning you in a depressed thrall who is incapable of caring that their continued existence is only sustaining a monster. Mental attacks aren’t based on “this idea is cerebral instead of popular”, they’re based on “this thing can threaten your literal you-ness.” Otherwise, teaching would count as a mental attack.

Interestingly, 'social armor' can be literal. Working as a security guard, I was impressed by how much of the work was done by my uniform - many days my job was to move my uniform from place to place and let it do the work.

This would actually be represented as someone you’re dealing with having a different armor rating (whether they’re the type to automatically defer to someone in uniform, reducing their social armor or the type to be belligerent towards them, increasing their social armor) or a weapon rating when you make a deal (that uniform contains within it the implicit assumption that you can make some less pleasant circumstances happen to someone who doesn’t play ball with you). That said, that’s actually a pretty intriguing observation.

I had stumbled on an old thread on the board where there was a conversation about social combat weapon ratings, and recalled an article by the Giant in the Playground (here). Aspects cover some deficit in social combat in FATE versus a lot of other systems, but until I saw the Weapons rating thread, I still felt like there was some fix that the GitP approach could help cover, but didn't know what it was. So, combining these approaches, I have emerged with a possible formalization of social combat that feels "correct", in some sense. I will gladly take criticism, but here is what I have.

The Premise

All social combat is based on the premise of getting someone to accept a deal that you offer them, for a very broad definition of deal. From a business transaction to "leave this room without molesting me further" to an "acquire this artifact or I kill your son", all of these fall under some kind of "deal." So, there are two mechanics to use here, and two social pressures to capture: armor and weapons for the first, and prior relationship and the actual deal for the second. Fortunately, the mechanics and the social pressures seem to line up nicely.

Armor: The prior relationship

Show of hands, how many of us have done something they would rather not just because someone we really like asked us to? Conversely, how many of us have refused to do something to help ourselves because someone we disliked asked us to? This disparity in our ability to be persuaded, under this system of social combat, will be represented by Armor class as follows.

Armor:0 A very close friend or lover, someone whom we trust implicitly. Your loving spouse making puppy dog eyes at you to convince you to do something grants you no armor.

Armor:1 A positive acquaintance, someone we would give more leeway than the average person. A business associate who has helped you in the past and kept his word asking you for another deal grants Armor:1.

Armor:2 A neutral acquaintance. Either someone whom you haven't met before, someone you feel nothing special towards, or someone you are highly conflicted about. Random Joe Schmoe on the street, a random person your friend knows whom you are aware of, or someone whose morals you disparage but whose ends may justify the means to some extent in your book gets Armor:2.

Armor:3 A negative acquaintance. Someone whom you have reason to dislike, but no substantial reason to like. A guy who acts sleazy towards a woman has to face Armor:3 to get that woman to do anything.

Armor:4 A nemesis. Someone whom you loathe without end, and who you may act specifically to spite. A campaign archvillain gets Armor:4 to defend against any social attacks the PCs who foiled him again and again try to make to get him to stand down.

Note: this armor does NOT represent the truth of a relationship, but rather what the person being persuaded believes to be true. So your brother who loves you dearly but whom you secretly wish to usurp from his throne and torture gets Armor:0 on his defense, not Armor:4. Armor values can also change over the course of an interaction, if you do something that especially endears you to the other person or makes them despise you.  So if your brother finds out that you have been plotting to usurp him and have started by attempting to kill his son, his armor class against any deals you try to make with him will skyrocket right quick.

Weapon rating: The deal itself

Politics make strange bedfellows, and a really good deal can make even a powerful hatred move aside for a time. The basis of a deal's weapon rating is the set of consequences that the listener can foresee and cares about, and it works as follows:

Weapon:0  A deal that would be utterly idiotic to take. A demon trying to get you to sell your soul for a piece of cloth gets Weapon:0 to try to make that deal with you.

Weapon:1 A deal with some benefit, but likely to backfire in your face. One of the fae asking you for something that seems innocuous but has a high likelihood of screwing you over down the line has Weapon:1.

Weapon:2 An equal exchange. Convincing you to pay good money for something that is similarly expensive has Weapon:2.

Weapon:3 A concrete advantage to the person being persuaded. A reasonable amount of generosity in a deal has Weapon:3.

Weapon:4 It would be stupid not to take this deal. Either you're in a situation where someone is promising you the world for nothing, or promising to destroy all you hold dear if you don't take the deal (these weapon ratings can come from less fuzzy things too!)

Note: Again, this weapon rating comes from what the person being persuaded thinks is a good deal. Further, it is possible for the person being persuaded to offer a concession if the weapon rating of what you are offering is just barely not enough to take them out by offering to take a deal slightly better in their favor.

Examples:

1. Charlie Wiseman, a well known magical salesman in the Ann Arbor area, approaches an acquaintance in the Ann Arbor Alliance to make a deal. Charlie is part of the A^3, and so the acquaintance, who has reason to believe Charlie will look after her interests, gets Armor:1 against his attempts at making a deal. If Charlie offers an equal exchange to her, he gets Weapon:2 to make that deal, which all in all gives him an additional point of stress for all social attacks he makes to get her to accept that deal. He could even ask for something that causes her a little bit of harm and still have no reduction in shifts (Weapon:1 versus Armor:1); she may not like it, but she's a bit more willing to go a little out of her way to help him, especially if she can cash in later.

2. Dr. X has a mother who is less than benevolent. In fact, he hates her guts on the basis of literally everything she has ever done to him, ever. He automatically gets Armor:4 against all attempts she makes to persuade him to do anything, so even a deal that is favorable to him, with Weapon:3, still loses shifts of stress when she connects a social attack. However, Mommy Dearest can easily level the playing field by threatening one of his closest friends whom she is holding hostage, getting Weapon:4 in her attempts to persuade him to take the deal to do something that seems innocuous in exchange for sparing the friend. With Mommy's high intimidation score and a few choice maneuvers, she can eventually get him to take the deal. However, if the good doctor figures out that his mom intends to screw him over and kill the friend anyway (or if she has a reputation for not keeping her deals), her Weapon rating rapidly goes down.

3. Karrin Murphy is Harry Dresden's closest friend, and has been willing to help him again and again when the chips are down, even being willing to sacrifice her life to save his daughter. Harry automatically gets Armor:0 against attempts she makes to get him to do something. If she's asking him to stop doing something that is clearly moronic, she gets Weapon:3 (or even Weapon:4, depending on how moronic it is), and Harry is more likely than not to back down.

4. Harry does NOT like Mab very much, but recognizes that she fulfills a very important function. Further, he's willing to trust her to be herself, and she's sufficiently reasonable that he feels that he can reach some kind of equilibrium with her. Therefore, he gets Armor:2 against her social attacks. Mab, however, needs him to work with Nicodemus for a time. This deal is terrible to Harry: he does not really value his life as compared to the possibility to working with Nicodemus, so this deal gets Weapon:0 at first, and even Mab's great social skills are insufficient to compensate. However, when Mab lays out the consequences of NOT doing this (the probable destruction of everything he holds dear) versus what she is ACTUALLY asking him to do (play along with Nicodemus until the time comes where Harry can double cross the asshole), the weapon rating jumps to Weapon:4, and Harry falls in line soon after.

Thoughts?

I'm stealing this thread for a second to ask a question of my own:

What level of limitation would you apply to one that does not actually STOP someone from using a power, just radically incentivizes against using it? I'm thinking of a scenario in which someone has powers whose uses end up being too costly for them to use often, which I would mechanically represent by automatically creating an aspect for the GM to tag against the person for free later every time they draw on the power for an exchange.

It's moving one trapping of a skill to another, which is pretty textbook definition of a stunt. I'd allow it in a game.

There’s a WOJ that says Harry doesn’t make money as a Winter Knight because his salary is power, basically. According to Jim, if Harry made a salary salary, it would also require him to be taking shifts on the Winter Court’s schedule as opposed to doing things more his way.

To me the question of whether Mab is mad in Cold Days was a side show circus that added nothing to the story. There has been nothing since PG that leads any credence to the theory Mab was mad and in CD it was made apparent before Mab even asked Harry to kill Maeve that Maeve was the villian of the story. On its face it was used as a reason for Harry to go talk to the other Fae and Rashid, but it would have made sense for him to do that anyway just investigating Maeve and what was going on with Demonreach. Thus, the only real value that particular plot had for JB was to definitively show Mab is not infected - which doesn't make sense given how little evidence there is that she was infected, unless, of course, she is actually infected and the purpose of the plotline was to deceive the reader into believing she isn't.

I don't agree that it added nothing to the story at all: it was a theory that clearly originated from Maeve, and demonstrates an action that Maeve is taking to undermine Mab. Its place in the story isn't a random worry: it's deliberate malfeasance on the part of an enemy.

Perhaps a pizza guy who is the only person sent to deliver to the worst addresses (some with regular old gang violence, some with supernatural baddies) because he’s the only person who exists who has both enough power to survive and is poor enough to have to take it?