Should you realise you're in a minigame?

When your story rolls into the big dinner scene and you pull out the Influence mechanics, do your players groan about having to roll-play their way through a minigame? Should your players think "we're in a minigame"?

Maybe that's actually not such a bad thing. Hear me out.

A dinner party takes a finite amount of time. Let's say we have a couple of courses, a break with some dancing, then a few more courses, then some people retire to the smoking room, and eventually everyone heads home. The players want to figure out who the movers and shakers are. Who could they try to get on their side? Who's powerful? Who's maybe easier to convince than others?

You can do this all as free-form roleplay, and sometimes that's fine. But we also like stakes and risk in our games. And that often means dice. When the fighter attacks a dragon, we don't decide if she hits based on how well the player narrates her swordplay; we roll to-hit. And it's exciting because she could roll low or high. Same for social minigames: it can be exciting if a bit of luck plays a role.

A bit of luck, not pure luck: the decisions the players make should also factor into it. And here's where being a bit more transparent about the minigame becomes a good thing. Because when the GM lets the players see whether they're succeeding or not, who seems to be a hardcase and who's amenable, then the players get to make interesting choices. Do they focus on the powerful duke, who's going to take a lot of time to convince? Or maybe the countess who might be less powerful, but is also ambitious and more open to opportunities? Mechanically, the players might decide it's a safer bet to go for the countess who needs fewer influence points to persuade than the duke.

So, visible minigames in social events: not always bad.