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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5655480" data-attributes="member: 42582">I wanted to pick up on the comment about &quot;the only real risk&quot; being that the NPCs don't change their minds.I think a social skill challenge can be worked a bit harder than that, by reframing the situation in response to each successful or failed check, so that something more nuanced than &quot;they agree&quot; or &quot;they disagree&quot; comes out of the challenge. I see it as working something like the idea of compromise resulting from a Duel of Wits in BW - and in my own experience, social skill challenges can produce outcomes that neither the players nor the GM anticipated going in (eg the example I gave in the OP; or the time when the players began by negotiating a truce with the Duergar slavers, and ended up agreeing to ransom the slaves for 300 gp to be paid over in a neutral city in a month's time).For me, this goes back to the idea I posted upthread (#13), that a skill challenge - particularly one with a fairly high degree of complexity - by obliging the GM to keep the scene alive, creates a &quot;space&quot; in the fiction that allows for unexpected outcomes to emerge.Looked at in this way, the skill challenge &quot;X before Y&quot; approach is not an artificial constraint on the natural flow of events (as some critics sugget) but a facilitator and mandator of creativity - analogous again, at least in broad terms, to the compromise element of a Duel of Wits.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5655480, member: 42582"] I wanted to pick up on the comment about "the only real risk" being that the NPCs don't change their minds. I think a social skill challenge can be worked a bit harder than that, by reframing the situation in response to each successful or failed check, so that something more nuanced than "they agree" or "they disagree" comes out of the challenge. I see it as working something like the idea of compromise resulting from a Duel of Wits in BW - and in my own experience, social skill challenges can produce outcomes that neither the players nor the GM anticipated going in (eg the example I gave in the OP; or the time when the players began by negotiating a truce with the Duergar slavers, and ended up agreeing to ransom the slaves for 300 gp to be paid over in a neutral city in a month's time). For me, this goes back to the idea I posted upthread (#13), that a skill challenge - particularly one with a fairly high degree of complexity - by obliging the GM to keep the scene alive, creates a "space" in the fiction that allows for unexpected outcomes to emerge. Looked at in this way, the skill challenge "X before Y" approach is not an artificial constraint on the natural flow of events (as some critics sugget) but a facilitator and mandator of creativity - analogous again, at least in broad terms, to the compromise element of a Duel of Wits. [/QUOTE]

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