Issues with Social Skills: Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate

[Celebrim]

If you shouldn't need to "have" the skill to play a PC with that skill, as it defeats the point.

I agree. You raise all sorts of issues which could take us off in all sorts of directions. I'd like to try to stay on one subject for the moment instead of debating what it means to 'role play' or what the purpose of alignment was or where the understanding of how to play out a personality comes from, or any number of other things which may be interesting but which don't get us any closer to understanding or agreement on this topic.

What this gets down to, is from a mechanical sense, what you as a player actually say has no mechanical support in the rules, except in establishing the intent of your PC.

And again I agree, but there in is also the rub in claim. There are very few rules the game that have mechanical support for when the rule applies. We know that the proposition, 'I climb', is relevent when the object of the climb is established (a tree, a wall, an ogre) and is agreed to exist in the imaginary space. Even then, more information may be required to understand the player's purpose. "I climb the tree" and "I climb the wall" are altogether vague propositions. As the referee, I might understand, "I climb the wall" to mean, "I climb the wall to the top". But, if I apply a similar understanding to, "I climb the tree.", and mechanically respond, "Eventually the tree limbs become to weak to support your weight, and they break and you fall.", then I'm relying on false (and bad) understanding of the player intent. If I don't understand the player's intent, I might prompt the player for more information like, "How far up the tree do you wish to climb?"

So establishing player intent is always important and usually not at all obvious. It sometimes requires several exchanges before I can narrow down what is meant sufficiently to rule on it, and even then there can be disagreement over whether the response I made as a DM is appropriate to the intention of the proposition. You have to be very careful, for example, to know whether a player has entered a room, or whether, "I look at the chest." means merely looking or actively investigating by touch.

The problem with a statement of intent like, "I speak diplomatically to the dwarf.", or even, "I attempt to persuade the dwarf to sell me a hammer." is that the dwarf is much much more complicated than either a wall or a tree, and therefore it is much much more necessary that the intent of the player in interacting with the dwarf be pinned down precisely. While it is possible that I could in many cases exchange clarifications with the player to understand the intent and nature of a social interaction, ultimately this is a very imprecise method and in the case of a social interaction very time consumnig relative to the amount of information that is exhanged.

By far the best solution to the problem in my experience is to have the player declare the content of his social interaction as best as he is able. The style of the delivery doesn't have to match what his player is capable of, but the content needs to be there before I can in anyway respond to it in a way that matches my intention for the NPC to be a fully realized, cinematic character that advances a story.

So, yes:

Essentially, regardless of how eloquent you were, the GM should establish what you want from the NPC and go by the roll of the dice. Because there are no rules to abjudicate your acting ability.

I agree with that, but I don't think agreement with that precludes the need for the player to speak in his character's 'voice'. Yes, I agree that the character might be more or less eloquent than the player, but as a DM I have to know the content of the interaction. "I attempt to persuade the dwarf to sell me a hammer.", tells me the DM so much less about your action than speaking into the shared imaginary space does, that I simply will make no attempt to resolve such an action.

The reason that there is no rules for this is that human social interaction is so fantastically complicated that its virtually impossible to create useful rules for it. The ability to create rules to judge human verbal content would be equivalent to the ability to create a Turing capable conversational AI.

Besides which, interacting in the imaginary space is so much more fun than interacting solely with the rules, that I feel cheated when you don't.

 

[Chrono22]

I can't talk about it too much, but I think 3.5 D&D's skill system (including interaction skills) had too many skills with very specific, limited functions. Part of the problem with roleplaying in tandem with diplomacy, intimidate, bluff, and gather information skills is that
1. You can't predict the outcome of your roll. This means you must either retroactively change your incredibly well versed diplomatic suggestions into dismal failures, or figure out what you say after you make the roll.
2. In a practical conversation, or any form of interaction, the line between diplomacy, intimidation, and bluffing can be very fine. Players shouldn't have to avoid saying "intimidating" things just because of how skill ranks are allocated.
This makes it very hard to get in character, or to rely on natural talents, and it doesn't really provide any support to players who have no real-world ability at interacting with other people.

My solution- use props in the same fashion as miniatures assist combat. I've created a stack of index cards with a personality trait/"alignment"/complex/phobia. During character creation, the players must choose traits. Some traits have requirements (attribute requirements).
During a drawn-out conversation, players can employ theirs and other characters' personality traits to their advantage in conversation. Players can assign ranks to the interaction skill, but it never really counts as much as saying the right thing to the right person at the right time. Unbelievable things are still unbelievable no matter how high your persuasion attempt was- a person who is Cynical and Stubborn is unlikely to fall for your tricks. This system provides a good support to socially awkward players, it's more intuitive, and the interplay of the personality traits is quite interesting.
Normal interaction skill checks occur in non-vital or trivial conversations (talking to a barkeep, purchasing mundane equipment, etc).

 

[Nightson]

For the purposes of this thread, I wonder if the Player Skill advocates would require players who had social phobias, extreme shyness or stuttered to act out scenes before letting them roll their skill check. Because basically that says to the player: "I won't let you imagine yourself to be something you're not." And that goes against the BASIC appeal of the game for me.

I would make an exception for such a player because such players are the exception.

 

[S'mon]

For the purposes of this thread, I wonder if the Player Skill advocates would require players who had social phobias, extreme shyness or stuttered to act out scenes before letting them roll their skill check. Because basically that says to the player: "I won't let you imagine yourself to be something you're not." And that goes against the BASIC appeal of the game for me.

Yes. It can really harm my enjoyment when a horribly charmless* player plays a charming PC. Normally my enjoyment coincides with the ejoyment of my players, and we all have a good time. But I don't do this for money or charity, I do it for fun, and if there's conflict between my fun and the player's fun, my fun takes priority. I'm not going to GM a game I don't enjoy.

*I don't think shyness is an issue, and I've never enountered a stuttering player. But I HAVE encountered players with extremely low CHA IRL, some verging on the mythic 'cat piss man'. If they play the strong, silent type, usually fine. When they play the supposedly charming rogue, it can go into flesh-crawling territory.

 

[S'mon]

Re shyness - the shy person with the guts to sit down at the game table has already overcome the biggest obstacle.

Beyond that, the problem for the shy player is not the GM asking them to talk in character. Shy people are mostly not actually "low CHA" skin-crawling types, they are very often pleasant and engaging when they do have the courage to speak. A decent GM can easily draw them out of their shell and help them enact their fantasy of being the strong, assertive, charming hero - in character.

No, the big problem I see for shy players is OTHER PLAYERS. It's very common for loud, boisterous, thoughtless players to override, ignore and undermine shyer players, especially those with less experience and rules knowledge. My wife is not normally shy, but playing alongside a bunch of very loud young Australian males soured her on D&D to the extent that now she'll only play alongside her brother.

I've seen other shyer players, like ENW's own Randomling, face similar problems. I thought Randomling was a very good player IMC some years back, and perfectly capable of playing a charming Rogue or Sorceress, but I think some of the other players tended to ignore and marginalise her at times. And she didn't always communicate to me what she was looking for in my game as strongly as the more forceful players did.

 

[fuzzlewump]

What you're doing then is saying that because the rogue has lock picks, the barbarian can open the chest with his axe with the same skill. That doesn't make any sense to me. And, yes, there's the face man role in the 4 person party, but yes, bad things happen if you don't let the face man do his job.

Point out to me where I said that because the rogue has lock picks, the barbarian can open the chest with thievery. Otherwise, I'm going to have to completely disagree.

If you're talking about the implication of allowing one character to roll diplomacy for another, there's a reason why I keep saying physical skills and social skills have a profoundly different role and effect at the table. My stance is not to generalize being able to roll skills for another for all skills, or even all the time. It's allowable only in the case where diplomacy is the go-to skill that you must use to "win." Win, in the case of the OP, is to prevent the guards from taking you to jail.

If you make the three social skills more generalized, then each character should have a great opportunity to get at least one of them and be able to hold his own in a social skill challenge. One guy has an aura of likability(diplomacy), the other is able to persuade people with facts and logic(which could be lies, but it's sound: bluff), the other is the guy you don't want to mess with because he has an incredible force of personality that tells you things will go wrong if you do (though not necesarily originating directly from him, as intimidate is described to be in the books: personal threats.) So, any of these skills could be used on the guards to win.

If it's a case of well you have to have diplomacy, or that diplomacy is a vastly superior option (personally threatening a guard and lying are bad ideas, generally, and those are the only way you can use those skills by the books. That's too narrow by my standards) then that means the guy who plays the class with diplomacy as a trained skills speaks and the rest sit back, even if they'd have great fun to speak.

It might sound wrong, but it's my experience that some players will sacrifice their immediate fun for what they see as the 'good' of the group. If that means keeping their mouth shut, then they will. Not every person is so proactive as to say whatever they want whenever if there are hurdles.

I'm glad a good lot of you have groups that ignore these mechanics, but my group doesn't. It's not a question of dumping charisma or not getting diplomacy because it sucks, it's putting a 10-12 in charisma and not being a class that has diplomacy. Hell, even if you put a 14 in charisma as a fighter, you're still much better shutting up and leaving the face to talk (if they can. If you require the whole party to talk at every scenario then it seems like maintaining the importance of the "face" is actually violated since why bother if you know the goblin barbarian will ruin anything you've said when he opens his mouth?)

To return to the first point, saying that having one guy with diplomacy is the same as having one guy with thievery is not saying that a barbarian can unlock locks with thievery. It's saying that social challenges are a group thing. If the guard is friendly with the 'face' then the whole party benefits directly. If the trap is disabled by the thieveryer, then the whole party doesn't have to deal with the trap. Having more than one is unnecesarry.

A much better analogy is knowledge skills. You only need one person with it and the whole group is good. By contrast, if you only have 1 guy with climb and there's a mountain, you have a problem considering skill checks alone.

My point? Requiring only one person to have diplomacy is the same thing is the same of the other skills that really only require one person to have it. The use diplomacy for another is an idea that spawned from two things, which have nothing to do with realism or character creation.

1. Players will go out of character, share their ideas, then go back in character and the diplomat will speak the best idea. By allowing diplomacy stand ins it skips this middle man and the challenge is much more organic.

2. Players will avoid situations where failure would harm the group, if not just themselves. Allowing stand-ins increases the likelihood that they'll speak.

So, at my table, not allowing diplomacy stand-ins just brings me to #1. Players of non-diplomats are still sharing their ideas, and they're still justified in dumping charisma or whatever, because their ideas are still shared. Cutting out this middle man just makes sense in a lot of ways for my table. Also, they'll dump charisma if its not a primary or secondary attribute and won't get diplomacy if it's not a class skill. It has little to nothing to do with how important I make diplomacy. It's a rules thing.

If no one gets a social skill, then yeah, that is lame because, assuming a charisma type character is present, which is likely, they just assumed it wouldn't be important because of my style.

So basically, I'll still put in traps even if no one has thievery. But to require that everyone who wants to be able to bypass a trap get thievery is simply not supported in the rules. The rogue disables it and everyone gets by. Diplomacy can/should work in the same way. You disable the social threat and the entire group gets by.

But the difference here is that no one has special fun from talking about disarming a trap unless maybe I'm playing with engineers or something along those lines. However, all of my players will be interested in human social interaction no matter what they put on their character sheet. So, along with reasons 1, 2, that's why I think there should be a special exception for social skills. That is, again, not saying thievery should be generalized to everyone if one guy has it. But, since social skills speak to such a universal interest in my players, it's okay if they speak even without a class that is skilled in that regard.

Blah, and to clarify I mean "it's okay" to mean they will not feel or will feel very little reason not to speak in character their ideas. If a force each character to have their own check, I think that makes social skills too important and intrusive. Or I force everything they say to be in character. Those aren't good options for me.

 

[Starfox]

I take what @roguerouge is talking about quite seriously and think that's a GM skill. RPGs are about fun. How I handle is is that I try to challenge players according to their ability and tastes. The stuttering player will get a Diplomacy bonus for just managing to state what his character is trying to say. I'd try to engage the non-visualizing rogue player in some other way. But these are not and cannot be rules, these situations have to be handled with empathy more than lawyering.

One problem with this attitude is that I make a pretty louse convention DM in a competition based on overcoming challenges. I can say that one team was good and one bad, but looking at their achievements it would not be nearly as clear cut. A good team and a bad team are likely to get about as far in a challenging scenario, simply because I want both to have fun and thus adapt my gamemastering style to accommodate each group of players.

 

[haakon1]

I make the player either talk in character, or give me the gist of what they want to say/do.

Then I have them roll a Diplomacy / Bluff / Intimidate check as appropriate.

To do the reaction, I mostly roleplay the NPC, but I take the roll into account.

For example, recently the PC's were gathering allies and negotiating with another party. A PC laid their cards on the table and told their goals and why, and offer to help with the NPC's goals in exchange for cooperation. I had a Diplomacy role for that player. It was decent, so I had the NPC party reaction "unemotionally" to the offer by asking for more. The PC's decided to accept the haggling, so deal done.

Then a PC suggested the PC party leader should be the boss of them all in combat, and told about a famous deed (spread around by bards already in the campaign) that the PC party leader had done. The PC rolled a natch 20 on the Diplomacy check (modified 25), so I had the NPC say, "He's that guy?! Sure, he can be in charge."

If they rolled a natch 1, the outcome would be different, for some reason I'd invent when the NPC was angry about the suggestion. If they rolled a 10-15, it would be some hestitation and haggling.

So mostly old school role-play, but dice assisted for an extra element of "fairness", rather than pure DM fiat as to NPC's reactions. That seems fun for us.