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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7733928" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION], [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]Picking up on the "tacitcal socialising" aspect - Duel of Wits encourages very tactical socialising. At the table, this is a player who knows how to work the different action declaration options to maximise successes while minimising risks (I have a player who is very good at this). In the fiction, this corresponds to a character who knows when to speak, when to listen, when to push hard, when to pull back a bit, in order to get what s/he wants.And a bit more generally - I posted an example of play where the main focus of the action was a bar and the downstream consequences of a pick-up attempt. It wasn't a "side quest" or "downtime" - the PC heroes encountered three mercenaries trying to steal a piece of equipment from the Smithsonian, and were able to stop them from doing so because one was trapped in ice in the Washington Monument after Bobby Drake took her there for some romantic late-night skating; another was seduced and then abandoned on the top of the Capitol by a (somewhat cruel) Nightcrawler; and the third was, in the end, literally swept off her feet by (again, and who would have thought it) Bobby Drake.I find it hard to envisage that happening in a system with no social resolution mechanics.And it doesn't have to be Cortex+ Heroic. Stuff similar to that has happened in my Rolemaster games (sometimes also involving Seduction attempts), but the social skills in RM are a bit wonkier, and rely more heavily on the GM to adjudicate finality. (In many ways, so does combat in RM - because it is a crit-type system rather than an "ablate to zero" system, often the GM has to decide when injured NPCs surrender.) Robust finality of resolution is definitely a plus in my book, and I think it's something that more contemporary social resolution mechanics offer.</blockquote>

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