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Message: <blockquote data-quote="thanson02" data-source="post: 7312827" data-attributes="member: 6801619">So the Social mechanics that I am playing with was partially inspired by a Robert Schwalb's article in Dragon Magazine titled "Fight!" (It is also in Dragon Magazine Annual on p.75).  The main focus of this article was Arena Combat and one of the things in the article is where he talks about swaying the crowd into your favor to get bonuses on how the arena combat turns out.  He has a skill challenge in the article on this very topic.  One of the key factors in this is shifting their disposition to being friendly towards you and away from your competitor.  It was also partially inspired by a book I read for work called The Eight Essential Steps to Conflict Resolution by Dudley Weeks, PhD.  Dr. Weeks has worked with various countries and international organizations on negotiation methods and resolving conflict in hostile situations.  What he explained in his book was that there are certain things that you do in negotiations (actions) that you do get people on the same page and moving forward in a positive and productive direction.  So what i did was I used the framework from Robert Schwalb's article and the guts of the book on conflict resolution and then I took a page out of 3rd Edition D&D combat actions and made a list of Social Actions that players can do while interacting with NPCs to shift the NPCs disposition to a point where they are helpful or at least agreeable.A major point in this was that there was a discrepancy between what action the players are trying to do and how they are trying to do it.  So in our case, as the player is roleplaying out the scenario, the DM pays attention to what they are doing.  When the DM recognizes a Social Action, they call for an appropriate roll based on what the player is doing and then they respond as the NPC would based on the dice roll.  You can do this while trying to get a lord to fund an operation into the elemental Chaos or interrogating a enemy hostage to give over information about the enemy.  I haven't gotten as far as to make Skill Powers that are available to all players yet that work with these Social Actions, but one of my players (the bard in our group) is excited about the possibilities it has and we have been brain storming what that part would look like.Agreed.  And it is a plug and play mechanic.  It won't drastically effect the rest of the system if you choose to use it.  One thing I like about it is that it blows the door open on what type of race mix a player can have.  The one thing I was not sure about was whether in cases like Tiefling, to have a Hybrid race option with a Fiend of the 9 Hells or to have a racial theme (I thought options like being a vampire, werewolf, or a shade would work well with the idea of themes).Things on my list of stuff to play with.</blockquote>

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