Feeling & Thought: Social Checks and the Strawman Introvert

Aight, time to poke this hornet's nest. This is not a post discussing whether social checks and charisma scores are good or bad, both having them and not having them serve different design purposes. This post is about a specific argument used in these conversations, what I dub the Strawman Introvert.

This is a Feeling & Thought. A series where I write about my experiences in the TTRPG hobby. Just like feelings, these thoughts aren't science, they aren't truth, and they definitely aren't reliable. Explore them with a playful attitude and don't take them too seriously. I certainly don't.

So you have a conversation about social checks. Some like em', some hate em'. Eventually someone will say "You can't swing a sword in real life, so why should you need to be charismatic in real life?" and the other side will reply "Because these are social games, where you can use your words." and then someone says "But what about the poor little introvert who has low charisma??? :("

This is not a good argument. Stop using it. (There are other good arguments, use them.)

Introverts do not lack social skills. They are not "low charisma". They might prefer to be alone more than your average person but introversion does not automatically equate to poor social skills (though introverted people may develop them less, or their introversion is correlated to the lack thereof). Further, these are people who willingly enter a ROLEPLAYING GAME, a game that is almost exclusively an hours long complex social situation. Using something else in place of the strawman introvert could be better, you could argue accesibility to people with social anxiety or autistic traits and I'd be more willing to agree with you.

The other argument I don't like is that roleplaying requires charisma. That a social encounter must be roleplayed in character. And that the only two possible ways to resolve a roleplaying scene is to fully act it out or to sidestep it entirely by rolling dice.

What if you treated a roleplaying scene like literally any other scene in an rpg. Where the players can step out of the immediate situation and think about their options, and strategize together. Ask clarifying questions from the GM. And GM, let the party think. If someone has poor social skills this is the way for them to develop them. They can ask about the tone of the NPC, or their body language, or think about their words. Sure they might have trouble reading the room in real life but this is a fictional room and they have infinite time to read it. And they can do it with their fellow party members. This also gives the GM some grace because the GM also likely cannot act the NPC perfectly. 3rd person narration has been a tool in this hobby since it's inception. Use it.

That's it, really. For some reason we've decided social encounters cannot be played like environmental encounters, or even in tightly controlled form like combat encounters for that matter. They absolutely can, and you can slot in charisma checks or not, that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. But please stop treating social encouters like LARPs. Or do, and make them awesome, if that is what you and your players like.