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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5605003" data-attributes="member: 21169">Talking in character, giving a voice to one's character, whether it's PC to PC, or PC to NPC, is one of my favourite aspects of roleplaying, so I don't want to reduce that to a die roll unless it's minor stuff like talking to shopkeepers.In most of the games I've played over the last five years, we've used a mix of talking in character and die rolling. Usually the speech comes first and it acts as a modifier for the roll. For example in the 4e game I last ran, I would ask for an easy, moderate or hard diplomacy check depending on the likelihood of the dialogue being persuasive and any other pertinent factors. That seems to work okay for us. I don't remember a GM ever flat out banning a social skill roll, saying "That's impossible" or the like. However that's probably because, as players, we act in a pretty reasonable fashion. When we don't, as in the example of John above, our system breaks down a bit.Impossible diplomacy checks could be allowed if the PC has a superhuman level of skill, though I'm not sure how high that would be in 3e. High level PCs can certainly make superhuman leaps, so why not superhuman persuasion? In a game of Silver Age Sentinels d20 (a superhero game) there actually was a PC with this power, I think he had both mind control and a ridiculously high diplomacy check and the way the GM played it, he pretty much could persuade anyone of anything. The other players all ran with this and we allowed the super-diplomacy guy to tell us what to do, which he didn't abuse. However I felt it didn't work terribly well as, even with no abuse, imo it stepped on our agency as players, our freedom to present a unique character's thoughts and actions.</blockquote>

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