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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 5346899" data-attributes="member: 57112">I should avoid hyperbole in the future.Or just word what I'm saying better.I misspoke; I apologize. Obviously having some mechanical backing to resolve social situations is necessary, even preferable. Instant Friends actually constitutes such mechanical backing. Skills count also. Not every player is particularly glib. The ones that I know, anyway, tend to avoid playing the party face. They still do a fair amount roleplaying besides.Here's what I'm saying. The way that me and my friends play the game, not every social encounter is a skill challenge, and not every important conversation requires skill checks. As such, there are three types of social encounters in our games:A: Skill ChallengesB: Unstructured, undetermined number of skill checksC: Pure RoleplayingI say "pure roleplaying" for lack of a better term; obviously we roleplay during all three scenarios. I'm sorry if that sounds like LARPing to you; to me it sounds like the whole goddamn point of the game. You know what, now that I think about it, I didn't misspeak at all. Social encounters don't need a mechanical method of resolution. They help, and most should have them,but they aren't required in every instance.The way Instant Friends is worded gives me, as the DM, the ability to determine exactly what impact the use of the power has given any number of factors including exactly what kind of encounter it's being used in. As a DM, I like this. I'm glad to see more abilities along these lines being introduced through Essentials. If you don't, don't use them. Not every aspect of the game is going to mesh with every playstyle. Wizards acknowledges this, which is why they encourage the use of houserules. I highly doubt these kind of open-ended powers will ever become so pervasive as to be non-ignorable.Ultimately, this is a complete non-issue. Ugh, and I was done with this thread three pages ago.</blockquote>

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