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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WyzardWhately" data-source="post: 4036929" data-attributes="member: 33207">This is sort of tangential to the thread, but stay with me.  I think one of the things that most initiated my knee-jerk FIAT reflex was Mearls talking about social encounters.  Essentially, there are rules for resolving them, but the GM sets up what success and failure mean.  I wasn't too fond of that in my initial reading, for a couple reasons.  Firstly, as a player, I want to be able to set the agenda somewhat.  I want to be able to decide my character's goal, and use his skills to accomplish those.  Sometimes I come at a problem sideways.  Secondly, as a GM, I don't want to make adventures and NPCs that run on rails.Fortunately, I thought about it for a while, and realized it's fairly easy to do this exactly the way I've always handled skill checks ever since I ran The Burning Wheel for a while (incidentally, it's a brilliant but very divisive RPG that I highly recommend everyone take a shot at if they ever get a chance.)  Stakes-setting.  The PCs tell you what they want to accomplish. The GM explicitly states the consequences for failure and what the difficulty is going to be.  The player can choose whether or not to pursue that course of action.  It sounds so simple as to be inane, but it's brilliant.  The PCs are encouraged to try and use their abilities in novel ways.  The GM is given a tool for handling it.  The ability to add explicit consequences for failure makes the checks more important, and lets the players make an informed decision (arguably it's metagame knowledge, since the character might not know what's likely to happen, but this has not as of yet been a problem.)  It's eminently tweakable, and I think it's going to be how I'll run 4E social encounters.The players are going to tell me what it is they're going to try and talk an NPC out of.  I'll set up consequences for failure and a relative difficulty by how outrageous the request is, and what else they can bring to the table.  Roll out social combat.  Now, potentially, that's exactly the advice that's going to be in the DMG.  Or near to it.  But the point is that negotiating with the players, while seemingly anathema to the nature of the GM-hat, can really solve a lot of the problems with a system that seems to require too much fiat.</blockquote>

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