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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jabborwacky" data-source="post: 6855783" data-attributes="member: 98608">The best way to understand how to introduce more social play into D&D may be to understand its roots. At its heart, it is the 5th generation in a legacy birthed by Gary Gygax and the Chainmail miniatures war game. In a game system focused on investigation or social play, there is usually only one skill for social checks. D&D has three due to previously existing combat maneuvers associated with each one. Deception was used for feints, intimidate was used for crowd control, and persuasion was used to bypass combat entirely (or, vaguely, "make it easier"). Adding more encounters where these skills could be useful seems the most obvious choice, but the other issue is that a single roll of the dice isn't the best way to resolve social challenges. Combat is specifically designed to be very predictable in its outcome, with many small die rolls accumulating over multiple rounds, not to mention the strategies players can employ. By relying on a single d20 die roll, social checks are very unreliable by comparison. We can fix this by giving creative players a chance to recoup with additional persuasion/deception/intimidate dice by providing multiple points in the conversation where they can succeed. Another fix is to follow Monte Cooke's advice on what should happen when rolling a natural one. With both those fixes in place, it makes social skill checks more practical. The only other thing I could suggest would be to politely ask WoTC to consider the possibility of viewing combat and social options as different ways to remove an obstacle from play. Ultimately, the enemy in an exchange of words isn't the creature being conversed with, but its animosity towards the player. The traditional magic spells used to assist with these kinds of situations have been designed in 5th edition to have a rebound effect, which greatly limits the players' options.Short Version:My suggestions for adding more social interaction in game are:1. Give the players multiple chances to succeed during a conversation to make success more likely and social skill checks more reliable. 2. Monte Cooke's advice on natural one being a "GM intrusion" kind of deal. Maybe treat it as a 20, but with a drawback. It may not always be possible, but it could help in some places.3. Make sure the players' know your intent ahead of time and drop in-game hints when it becomes an option. They won't choose an option if they don't know it exists.</blockquote>

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