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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AnotherGuy" data-source="post: 8726710" data-attributes="member: 7029930">I prefer social combat being similar to the optional finale in 4e's Cairn of the Winter King and not in the way the OP is suggesting.The looseness of the social pillar is a boon in that as DM I may choose to run a social encounter quite simple and straight-forward, or similar to the said 4e module, <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/any-cool-skill-challenges-youve-run-in-5e.686905/#post-8583499" target="_blank">create a Skill Challenge</a> around it, incorporate tools such as fail-forward or say yes-but, use personality traits, NPC reactions or plug in a make-shift system from another game or from the top of your head. The creativity allowed depends on my prep-time and mood.Having a social combat structure I find would be too restrictive and would create its own issues. By happenstance yesterday evening we ran a 3-hour non combat session and the PCs made one of the social encounters much harder than it had to be by entering without invitation, a secluded misanthrope's private property (twice). They believed she could assist them but no one was answering their door-knocks and calls.Well once they broke in looking for her, what would have been a Persuasion DC 15 became a DC 20. They knew of her desire for privacy and her reluctance to socialise with people and yet that bit of information was ignored when they decided to barge in.They fortunately found her, eventually, after their 2ND visit using detect magic which helped them identify her shape-changed form (a cat) amongst her clowder of pet cats. She was a druid. After two failed persuasion checks, each from a different approach in the conversation (which was necessary for the attempt), one of the PCs eventually succeeded with an apology scoring the DC 20.The misanthrope agreed to provide the information she knew on condition they parted with something they considered valuable (i.e. an item of some value TO THEM, but not coin), in the same way she had lost something valuable, her privacy.I had ruled, it required a further Persuasion check DC 20 (to convince her of the item's worth) as well as the loss of the item, the latter of which would be an exponential cost should they fail. i.e. Failure would require the original item + an additional item + the Persuasion DC 20.They succeeded on their first attempt. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> It cost them a day (going back and forth, and time is sensitive currently) as well as a story-given elven friendship ring which had subsequently been enchanted as a Ring of Intellect.</blockquote>

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