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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5776154" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is a good question, but tricky. It in part goes back to CrazyJerome's observation upthread about D&D being a game of action adventure.I mostly GM rather than play, but the players in my games have wooed lovers, been to parties, attended funerals, etc. But - as befits the action adventure genre - these social events tend to be crashed by monsters that need fighting, or at least attended by enemies and rivals whose machinations must be observed, and thwarted if possible.Rolemaster PCs tend to have skills that are suitable to such occasions in various way (I've GMed many a PC with cooking skill), because the Rolemaster PC-build rules have varius silo-ing devices to preclude a player spending all of his/her PC's points on core combat and magic abilities. But in my own experience of GMing RM, most of the time such skills serve as colour for the PC, rather than actually being invoked for action resolution.4e PC's tend not to, or to have very generic skills (Diplomacy, History, Insight etc). The relevant colour is introduced by free narration.What is the point of this rambling post? To my mind, the key question is not "What sorts of events do my PCs attend?", or even "What sorts of things are my PCs good at?" but rather "What sorts of challenges are my PCs going to confront and overcome?" You can attend as many weddings or host as many parties as you like, but if the real challenge is going to be not the prepration and serving of the hors d'ouevres, but rather dealing with the Orcus cultists who decide to perform a mass sacrifice of all the gifts, then the game doesn't need action resolution mechanics for cooking and serving (although, like RM, it may still want some sort of mechanic for distributing PC colour, rather than leaving it all to free narration as 4e does.)</blockquote>

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