D&D General "I roll Persuasion."

[EzekielRaiden]

This one is trickier than Perception, because Perception is a solo, "personal" act, something anyone should be able to at least give a general description of. E.g., if you've just entered a room and I tell you there's a bookshelf and a broken table, you ask about the bookshelf and the broken table. "Is there dust? Are there any books left? What does the floor look like? Has the table been broken for a long time, or does it look recent?" Etc. This isn't stuff that requires specialist knowledge or "performing," it's literally just...asking questions about what you're seeing.

Persuasion, on the other hand, is very personal. It depends on the speaker, the subject, the recipient, a bunch of things. It's much easier to describe what you want to do, how you'd like to sound, than it is to actually do that thing or sound that way. Being persuasive is, very simply, a hell of a lot more difficult IRL than looking at, listening to, or otherwise sensing for things.

So, while I still would not accept "I roll persuasion...18. Does he do what I want?", I will accept it if people talk me through what they're trying to do, even if they don't feel confident or capable enough to actually act out the things being said. I 100% get feeling shy and not being sure if you can "live up to" how Cool and Awesome and Smooth and Compelling your character is supposed to be. I know what stage fright feels like. So if you just want to talk it out, rather than belt out a soliloquy on demand? Cool. I'm fine with that.

But we have to actually talk it out. That part isn't negotiable.

 

[Ondath]

This one is trickier than Perception, because Perception is a solo, "personal" act, something anyone should be able to at least give a general description of. E.g., if you've just entered a room and I tell you there's a bookshelf and a broken table, you ask about the bookshelf and the broken table. "Is there dust? Are there any books left? What does the floor look like? Has the table been broken for a long time, or does it look recent?" Etc. This isn't stuff that requires specialist knowledge or "performing," it's literally just...asking questions about what you're seeing.

Persuasion, on the other hand, is very personal. It depends on the speaker, the subject, the recipient, a bunch of things. It's much easier to describe what you want to do, how you'd like to sound, than it is to actually do that thing or sound that way. Being persuasive is, very simply, a hell of a lot more difficult IRL than looking at, listening to, or otherwise sensing for things.

So, while I still would not accept "I roll persuasion...18. Does he do what I want?", I will accept it if people talk me through what they're trying to do, even if they don't feel confident or capable enough to actually act out the things being said. I 100% get feeling shy and not being sure if you can "live up to" how Cool and Awesome and Smooth and Compelling your character is supposed to be. I know what stage fright feels like. So if you just want to talk it out, rather than belt out a soliloquy on demand? Cool. I'm fine with that.

But we have to actually talk it out. That part isn't negotiable.

This I wholeheartedly agree with. While I don't want any abstract mechanics for social encounters, people should be able to go through a social encounter just by stating their character's intentions and giving a general description of how they talk in third person ("I try to persuade the king by following the correct protocol to a T, and trying to show the legitimacy of our request").

 

[MarkB]

I mean heck... we already see the issues noawadays with just things like Intimidation. If @el-remmen was to run one of their polls to ask "If a DM rolled Intimidation against your PC and succeeded, would you go along with the result?" I'm pretty sure we'd see plenty of folks vote No, and reply with that their character's reactions are their own-- the player's decision, the player's choice-- and dice rolls can't and won't force them to behave or react differently. And if that's true, then bothering with an entire social combat system isn't going to make things different.

I have no firm evidence either way, but I wonder if this might be more palatable if the game had a set of social conditions to match the physical ones. Technically, we already have one, the Frightened condition.

While players don't want to be told what their character does, if there were a specific set of conditions that could be imposed which have well defined mechanical effects, that might play out better at the table.

 

[Ondath]

I have no firm evidence either way, but I wonder if this might be more palatable if the game had a set of social conditions to match the physical ones. Technically, we already have one, the Frightened condition.

While players don't want to be told what their character does, if there were a specific set of conditions that could be imposed which have well defined mechanical effects, that might play out better at the table.

If you want to go that way, Charmed could also count as a social status (provided it can be applied through mundane means and not just enchantment spells).

 

[Thommy H-H]

Fantasy RPGs, as a genre, tend to have concrete rules for the following things, almost exclusively:

• Magic powers
• Terrifying monsters
• Murdering people with sharp things who are, at the same time, trying to do the same to you

Why these three things and (for the most part) only these three things? They're all fictional.

Let me clarify: sharp-thing-murdering of course exists in the real world, but the kind of combat, and the sheer quantity of that combat that exists in the fantasy genre is fictitious. No one, even professional soldiers, even athletes who participate in combat sports, spends a third of their life in "combat". Most of us are lucky enough that we will never be involved in a fight to the death. Fights to the death are extraordinarily rare. Even in aberrant social orders that encouraged them - like the Romans with their gladiatorial games - they wouldn't have expected a competitor to have six to eight bouts in a day! The human psyche is not built for that kind of stress!

Historical and modern violence is overwhelmingly one-sided. Most military strategy since antiquity has been about avoiding wherever possible anything that might even look like a fair fight. A fair fight can go either way. A fair fight is random. If you're in a fair fight, you've messed up. But fantasy violence is a fiction about two evenly-matched sides duking it out. In reality, battles were (and are) brief, chaotic, and usually end as soon as someone is willing to stop shooting.

What I'm getting at is that the "social pillar" is what most of us call "all of human existence". Even a hardened warrior will spend only brief, terrifying moments of their life in actual, physical combat. Most of it will be the same things we all do: interacting, living, navigating society. Fantasy games don't model this for the same reason they don't model gravity, going to the toilet, or eating lunch. We already know how those things work, and any gameplay expression of them is going to be necessarily hollow.

Now, you can argue the same applies to fantasy social interaction - none of us know what it's like to talk to an ageless elf, or persuade an undead wizard to let us leave their fortress, or even negotiate with a monarch, which is a real thing. For that, there do tend to be mechanics to manage courtly intrigue and the like. 5E has faction rules in the DMG, and various books expand and iterate on these to support the expected gameplay experience. But you'll never find a satisfactory gameplay framework for all social interaction because it encompasses basically the entirety of human experience.

So, if you need to handle it as a GM, handle it like you have to handle real life: desperately wing it and hope no one notices.

 

[tetrasodium]

I think @Bill Zebub has the right take on this. Unless you have players willingly to play along with the apparent "logical results" of any type of social combat and change their character's opinions or views based upon what the dice said at the conclusion of the combat... you're not going to get effective results.

I mean heck... we already see the issues noawadays with just things like Intimidation. If @el-remmen was to run one of their polls to ask "If a DM rolled Intimidation against your PC and succeeded, would you go along with the result?" I'm pretty sure we'd see plenty of folks vote No, and reply with that their character's reactions are their own-- the player's decision, the player's choice-- and dice rolls can't and won't force them to behave or react differently. And if that's true, then bothering with an entire social combat system isn't going to make things different.

This right here is what's missing from d&d social mechanics to create the 3.x diplomacy or "dunno figure sojnething out" extremes. We know that at least one early proto5e version had those fate style compels in it because Mearls talked about it on a 5 generations of d&d panel years ago but only the vifts portion without the push remained.

I've run (a lot) of fate games though and I'm not certain that kind of social combat is a good fit for d&d even knowing that it's great in fate. The wildly different cores of aspects & fare fractal vrs discrete abilities do not feel like things that could be woven together nicely as the vestigial & bothersome bifts show.

Some kind of lightweight social combat system could work well in d&d but it would be a prime candidate for getting houseruled out & mockery again if like 3.x it was again a one sided chain that only binds the npcs. If it binds the pcs too though it creates all sorts of problems on top of being very difficult for many players to grok. Worse still it becomes game derailing if players try to avoid it Bruce waune/frank castle style absolutely detached but deeply mentally ill in ways we just pretend are normal simply because it's not going to go over well when the gm needs to run Bob's pc's massive collection of illnesses when Bob is expecting (demanding) thst everyone pretend his pc is a normal weoo adjusted person who just happens to have no ties no desires and no concerns beyond a goblinslayer type obsession. GS knows he has massive ptsd & its his driving purpose though so there is no explanation for him to be treated like a normal well adjusted individual akin to the expectations with Bob's pc.

 

[schneeland]

When a police officer threatens you, you'll likely acquiesce. When a doctor is telling you about your physical condition, you'll likely acquiesce. When your boss tells you to do something, you'll likely acquiesce. When your significant other wants something that you really dont, you'll likely acquiesce. Likely being the key term that you wont protest the situation, but there will be points that you just cant let it go.

I feel these examples are actually a good starting point when thinking about a system for social "combat" - all of these people have some sort of leverage over you, be it standing in society, expertise or emotional attachment; and when there is conflict, they can use it to their advantage.
When reading this, I remembered that Dungeon World actually codifies in its rules that you have to have leverage over someone to use the persuasion move. Maybe that's a bit much since the plain old appealing to their reason is something that players typically also do in (my) games, but together with recording the attitude of an NSC towards the group (that's even in the DMG, isn't it?), that might be enough to inform a lightweight, skill challenge-like system for social conflict.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I prefer social combat being similar to the optional finale in 4e's Cairn of the Winter King and not in the way the OP is suggesting.
The looseness of the social pillar is a boon in that as DM I may choose to run a social encounter quite simple and straight-forward, or similar to the said 4e module, create a Skill Challenge around it, incorporate tools such as fail-forward or say yes-but, use personality traits, NPC reactions or plug in a make-shift system from another game or from the top of your head. The creativity allowed depends on my prep-time and mood.
Having a social combat structure I find would be too restrictive and would create its own issues.

By happenstance yesterday evening we ran a 3-hour non combat session and the PCs made one of the social encounters much harder than it had to be by entering without invitation, a secluded misanthrope's private property (twice). They believed she could assist them but no one was answering their door-knocks and calls.
Well once they broke in looking for her, what would have been a Persuasion DC 15 became a DC 20. They knew of her desire for privacy and her reluctance to socialise with people and yet that bit of information was ignored when they decided to barge in.

They fortunately found her, eventually, after their 2ND visit using detect magic which helped them identify her shape-changed form (a cat) amongst her clowder of pet cats. She was a druid. After two failed persuasion checks, each from a different approach in the conversation (which was necessary for the attempt), one of the PCs eventually succeeded with an apology scoring the DC 20.
The misanthrope agreed to provide the information she knew on condition they parted with something they considered valuable (i.e. an item of some value TO THEM, but not coin), in the same way she had lost something valuable, her privacy.
I had ruled, it required a further Persuasion check DC 20 (to convince her of the item's worth) as well as the loss of the item, the latter of which would be an exponential cost should they fail. i.e. Failure would require the original item + an additional item + the Persuasion DC 20.
They succeeded on their first attempt. It cost them a day (going back and forth, and time is sensitive currently) as well as a story-given elven friendship ring which had subsequently been enchanted as a Ring of Intellect.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Personally, I feel it's a bad idea to reduce incentive for players to talk by adding lots of die rolls to the social aspect of the game. There's always been a core to D&D wherein players, even shy ones, find a forum to speak in the guise of their assumed persona, and it wasn't until 3E that the idea of rolling dice for this became a thing.

my experience is that when we let people just roll... the talking and the fun became 'give description when you have a good one and feel comfortable' so we got players who used to avoid playing faces trying to play 1 or 2 over a few years... and then 1 of them ALWAYs play faces today and talk not just in game but in there personal life more then ever...

when you know that saying something dumb wont sink the whole party, you get more brave about trying to... and once you do it a few times you learn and grow.

 

[Reynard]

Obviously, any social system that compels behavior is going to require buy in from the players and include safety tools. I don't think those facts mean the idea is unworkable, though.