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To lie. Well, and to be Distracting in combat. Or any other action that the GM wants to ask for a Bluff check on. But the defined uses are lying and the Distract action. Now you're back to arguing with the evil GM who traumatized you in your youth. Both Intimidate's Coerce check and Impress's...

Hussar, seriously? Are you willfully ignoring what we've written in favor of what you want us to have said? You almost have to be, because we're not saying that. Everytime you bring it up, we keep telling you that that isn't what we're saying. Once again: The PCs made their Bluff check. The...

They'll regret it. Have you seen the maintenance costs for those things? The payroll for the crew? The utilities bills? No, thank you. :)

If you're actually interested, Fred Brooks The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering talks about it.

That came up with the earlier example of "I'm a spy for the baron, let me in!". Since this is a weird event, and the baron kills guard who screw up and then kills their families, even if he believes the players he's quite likely to ask someone else to make the decision. The PCs are more then...

Beats me, you're the one saying that. I'd have the guard call someone to escort you to the meeting room or whatever. You're the one calling "and then..." screwing over the players. In the first, there's likely no reason to consider the guard's reactions, because the Impress or Intimidate check...

It was an exaggeration, but no more then your position that the guard not letting them in on a single Bluff check. Like I said, they succeeded at the Bluff check. The guard believes them. What happens then depends on the circumstances and the lie. Failure means that plan is blown and it's time...

Hussar, are you actually reading the replies? They had a plan for which they did not prepare. The GM engineered NOTHING. The players screwed up. Their failing was not doing proper prep and assuming Bluff works like Dominate. There is no Monkey's Paw here. Frankly, it doesn't make much sense...

I doubt it will matter since you appear to keep ignoring people's replies, but sure. THEY DIDN'T FAIL! The guard believed them. The guard reacted based on that. That he didn't react the way the PCs wanted is the nature of the game. Did they fail at all? - no. Did something unexpected...

You're the only one saying they don't. Again, you assume I or anyone else in the discussion always rules against the players. Obviously you had a lot of traumatic experiences with bad GMs, but you shouldn't use that to assume all GMs are jerks if they don't let the Players run the game...

First, that's not infiltration. Second, Gandalf's not a PC. He's an ersatz angel stuck in the party as a plot device and GM mouthpiece. Third, not all games use artificial tier concepts like name level or paragon or whatever. Not all d20 fantasy games do. Heck, not all versions of D&D do. In...

Well, not exactly. Said guard, without context or anything, would likely be a Standard NPC Man-at-Arms out of the Rouge's Gallery. At 36 XP, at group of them equal to the party's size is a minor threat. He doesn't have much in the way of skills or abilities to resist social skills out of the...

Because that's how guards act when presented with weird things or stuff above their pay grade. If the guard believes that the PCs are the real diplomats, then the real diplomats inside must be infiltrators. So he calls his boss to raise the alarm. If he believes the PCs are actual diplomats...

Electric Cattleprods.

The player is saying that because the guard believes the lie, that the guard will automatically do what the player wants instead of the guard doing what the guard would do when one of the baron's actual spies shows up. In most cases, if it's a mook guard and this is something outside the norm...

This seems rather cruel. Maybe it's because I've played with and GMed for a handful of people with almost crippling social anxiety, and another who was by nature very quiet and shy. It just seems like you'd be rubbing their noses in their problems. Why should they be forced to, essentially, play...

No one's failed their imagination. GM: The guard believes you're a spy with important info for the baron. He's still not letting you past, something about orders from the baron. He does call for a runner, probably to tell someone you're here though.

Then don't use the mook quality. Use standard Standard NPCs. If you want them to go down even more quickly give them low Health values. I've never used the mook quality myself, but then I've never needed hordes of henchmen or whatever for the heroes to mow through. I've found low to mid Health...

Something I was thinking about too, is that FC (like SC2.0 before it) does have a mook quality which makes standard NPCs with it automatically fail their damage saves. Adding on Tough, which makes a standard NPC able to fail more then one damage save, you can easily make a mook that will go down...

It's been a while, but I seem to remember there was a chapter on that in Robert L. Forward's Indistinguishable From Magic. Which is a great book for all sorts of sci-fi tech in world building. It's made of a non-fiction essay on a topic, followed by a short piece of fiction dealing with it.