Optional Rule - XP for served food. I strikes me that one diegetic element which serves this softer play in a manner similar to that in which Gold serves standard Old-School play (encouraging ambition, conflict but also lateral thinking and problem solving), is food.
Sharing food with someone, being tolerated in their personal space, talking to them, being invited to share, are all major social milestones.
Kids bloody love food, as any kids series will show (I am also a fan myself). Getting special foods, and especially being *served* special foods, and sharing food and certain drinks, is almost a marker of your integration into local societies and your ability to integrate others.
If the old witch serves you Tea, that’s one point, if you can get her to bake you a cake, that’s another, or provide a feast for the Village, that’s a treasure hoard.
It's kind of percolated into the idea of having a social currency in your campaign/setting world that is different from the hard currency like gold or silver or whatever. Partially as a means to add an interesting dimension to your setting and partially because I think it fits in well with how most player/NPC interaction tends to go where it's transactional.
Or well in most of my games it tends to be transactional. If the NPC has no reason to not tell the players something I tend to just tell them whatever they want to know. As, the more information the players have the better decisions they can make and the more interesting the game is. I tend to not hide information from players.
If the NPC does have a good reason for wanting to withhold information, the players usually have to make some kind of deal with the NPC to get it. In a lot of games this tends to end up as vague favors or deals that they owe the NPC. So in this sense there is already an unintentional sense of social currency, the "favor".
However, I also find that most of the time favors aren't really followed up on and tend to be vague. I think it's much more interesting to define an explicit social currency for your setting.
This could be something simple like food. Where, as mentioned in the False Machine post, each NPC is a simple village person who has a favorite food. Getting to know people's favorite foods and getting them for them goes a long way to getting them to open up and deal with you. Food in this way functions as a social currency and gives the setting a certain theme and aesthetic.
But a social currency doesn't have to be food. It could be something like humiliations. Like if you're setting is a high court full of scheming lords and ladies they might want to have nothing to do with you unless you humiliate a rival lord, the more public the better. The players then have to think up a creative way to humiliate a rival NPC and get away with it. Performing humiliations has a social value in the setting and grants it an interesting theme.
Or if you want to go a more classic route, you could use true names. Where characters or monsters or spirts have a true name. When you discover somethings true name it serves as a bit of a commodity, where you can let others know it in order to gain something you want, perhaps at the risk of betraying the persons whose true name you know.
Another one could be secrets. Where each NPC has a dark secret and if you find it out and tell other NPCs you can gain their trust. Although I find secrets a bit abstract. I think it's better to try to have something with a bit of tangibility to it.
Like maybe signet rings or letters of renown which signify official trust? Or handkerchiefs from maidens who have chosen the party as their champions? Or medals? There are a ton of things in the real world that we use to signify things socially to each other.
Overall by having a defined social currency, maybe even a list of them if it's something like letters of renown, I think can really flavour a campaign and make it interesting. It gives the players something to look out for that they know will give them an edge in social interactions that are transactional in nature.
I think the most important part is having the social currency recognized as being valuable by more than one NPC. It stops the players from having to do a boring favor for one NPC they want something from and then another favor for the next boring NPC to gain their trust. They can come up with their own schemes and ideas on how to get the social currency and drive the adventure that way and then 'spend' the social currency on whomever they want.
