D&D (2024) Influence Action

[DEFCON 1]

Perfectly acceptable baseline foundational rule for a DM who has never or barely ever run a game before and has little to no experience figuring out through improvisation or experimentation how to run negotiation scenes with their players.

But once a person has become more experienced in running their game... they will soon realize that they can make up whatever rules they want for running diplomatic, argumentative, exploitative, or intimidating scenes with NPCs. And this basic rule can and will be ignored then because it will no longer be necessary to have anything this organizationally simplistic for them to use. The DM will have grown out of it. Basically the same as say skill challenges.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I also don't like the static DC. At least provide mods for hitting the NPC's bonds, ideals and flaws.

That's what advantage is for I think. Or the ol floating +/-2 bonus/penalty, the DM's friend. Very few NPC's actually have those though, certainly not Gart the Guard #4.

These are fine for general guidelines.

 

[Tonguez]

I'll probably oppose it with an insight check that carries a 15 DC minimum.

Yeah Insight seems obvious v Influence- they haven't change insight to Int have they?

 

[Charlaquin]

In playtest 8 it said the DM sets the DC for the influence action, and suggested the higher of 15 or the target’s intelligence or wisdom score as a good guideline. I was comfortable with that phrasing because it gave folks who aren’t comfortable setting DCs on the fly a useful benchmark, and left folks who are the freedom to set the DC however they want to. Seems like they took a step backwards from UA8 to print, which is quite disappointing.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Wait, this is an action, as in I can do this in combat?

Folks, I just found out how to turn disaffected minions into a live coup attempt after rolling initiative.

 

[Reynard]

That's what advantage is for I think. Or the ol floating +/-2 bonus/penalty, the DM's friend. Very few NPC's actually have those though, certainly not Gart the Guard #4.

These are fine for general guidelines.

No. You don't present "general guidelines" and then ignore everything else. You present the rules.

 

[Charlaquin]

Wait, this is an action, as in I can do this in combat?

How does that track? Not all actions are combat actions.

 

[I'm A Banana]

How does that track? Not all actions are combat actions.

"Action" heavily implies to me that I can use my "Action" in combat to do it.

Attack, Spellcasting, Dash, Use an Item...I can take these actions outside of combat, too, but if I'm in a combat, I can also use my action to do these things. It'd be a little odd to have exceptions to that.

 

[strawpberry]

Oh man, I was looking forward to seeing them go with the playtest rules (AKA the actual 5e14 rules which are inexplicably sequestered in the DMG) with DCs of 10, 15 and 20 for how much they're willing to give up, taking into account the target's general friendliness to the PC. Ah well! Still every chance that this rule gets overlooked in the same way the original rules did.

I'm at least glad they spelled out the whole "no convincing a king to give up his kingdom" thing. I really would've liked to have seen rules limiting deception checks, because I feel like there are a lot of DMs out there who require a new check for every marginally untrue statement, while I much prefer a single check wherein the totality of the deceptiveness is evaluated... Ah well, what can you do!

 

[TiQuinn]

Set DC 15 across the board on these kind of checks are going to be easy to abuse.

Again, let the DMs DM. Trust them to set the difficulty.