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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dessert Nomad" data-source="post: 7539308" data-attributes="member: 6976536">I suggested using ad hoc rulings in it's place, since as I pointed out the systematic approach you're trying has a ton of holes and doesn't make sense at a very basic level of story. By the time you actually factor in all of the possible backgrounds and history that characters have been through, you're going to have an incredibly complicated system that really amounts to just doing ad hoc rulings in advance. And probably still has a lot of mechanical weirdness because of fact that you have to reveal things that would normally be hidden. And I think a pretty good test of any system of social rules for D&D is to drop a couple of well-known characters with pretty standard backgrounds into it to see if they fit. The fact that it's not clear where to put the hobbits of the shire into social categories for advantage/disadvantage is a pretty big drawback.And as I pointed out before, why would an outlander fighter with next to no experience of even being in a city, much less dealing with a nobleman's guards, get a bonus to bribing a guard while a war mage who's lived his life as a a soldier on campaign or a nobleman who assassinates his enemies in the night get a penalty? Tying this to class simply doesn't work from a narrative perspective, because the classes have extremely diverse social positions.This is even weirder mechanically, and I think you've forgotten the disadvantage part. If there's a nobleman slumming it in disguise as an underclass person, does the rogue PC interacting with him get advantage because he thinks he's dealing with an underclass person, or does he get disadvantage because he's actually dealing with a noble and doesn't know their ways? If there's a cultist disguised as a normal person, does a cleric interacting with him get to roll normally and ignore the disadvantage he'd have if he knew he was dealing with a cultist? It seems rather bizarre that finding out more correct information about someone would make it more difficult to socially interact with them. Also 'socially interacting with people to try to figure out which ones are in a cult and where the cult is operating' is a pretty common type of social interaction in games that I've seen and published modules, this isn't a weird hypothetical that no one would ever encounter.</blockquote>

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