Issues with Social Skills: Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate

[Starfox]

Building upon the perspective that Mike Mearls offered in his last Ruling Skill Challenges column, I would classify social skills as follows. Bluff manipulates an NPC's perceptions and expectations, ideally preying on his character weaknesses. Diplomacy appeals to an NPC's motivations and values. Intimidate preys upon an NPC's fears. What matters is not what the PC says but the effect they're trying to achieve.

I like this description of what the skills do and divinding it based upon what aspect of the target's personality you are playing on. In my homebrew, I have two interaction skills, Charm and Impress. Charm works by fattening the listener's ego, playing to his expectations so that he considers you reliable, and projecting a friendly image. It corresponds to Diplomacy and Bluff in DnD. Impress tries to make the listener submit to your superior abilities, and includes what Intimidate does in DnD but also has many leadership uses.

Imagine the SEALs nat oned on their intimidation check. They still have guns. Maybe guns give such a bonus to intimidation that it's essentially auto-success?

A modifier, yes. Auto-success no.

Imagine a bunch of seals busting the door of a high-profile lawyer. The lawyer is unlikely to physically resist, but he will know enough and have enough backbone to not really be intimidated either, perhaps actually making the SEALS uncertain of their right to be there and afraid of the consequences.

Or busting the door of a terrorist nest. Or bank office. Or the lobby where the loyal butler is guarding his mistress' privacy as she entertains her lover in the back room. Or a dissident newspaper office. Or, if they are SS and not SEALS, the French resistance? In these situations, a roll is definitely called for. And the troopers need to be trained to act in in an authoritative manner to impose their will without bloodshed. Whereas the Cha 4 fighter might have to resort to violence, because his shifty eyes, bad posture, and overall uncertainty makes people not take him seriously. He simply does not look confident enough to use his weapon. A person with Insight/Sense Motive might perceive him as a real threat and react based on this, but that is not successful Intimidation. In-world, his consistent failures to impress would have conditioned him to shut up, either becoming a silent killer who just skipped the intimidation phase or the henchman of some higher-charisma boss.

The problem is usually with assertive players with a reasonable RL Charisma used to getting their way in-game by acting out the intimidation, effectively intimidating the other players and GM. This is actually really bad roleplaying.

 

[roguerouge]

Step 1: Your player forgets to role play his character, which is a low charisma, no ranks in diplomacy guy.

Step 2: None of your other players have their characters step in and say, "It's true, officer. Let me tell you what happened..." with charisma and flair.

Step 3: You don't make there be consequences for these two steps.

Step 4: You blame the system, not the game play.

If you roll up a low-charisma character, expect to take the consequences in exactly these kinds of scenarios. If you don't face consequences, none of your players should ever invest a single rank in social skills or take social magic items, because you'll never make them accountable.

All you had to do was have the cops take them back to the station, interrogate them separately, do their own preliminary investigation and then release them for lack of evidence a few hours later. Why didn't you do that?

 

[roguerouge]

Imagine the SEALs nat oned on their intimidation check. They still have guns. Maybe guns give such a bonus to intimidation that it's essentially auto-success?

The PCs now believe the SEALs are idiots with guns, rather than an impressive force that must be obeyed no matter what. They wise-crack, they snark, they look for their opportunity to achieve their own goals by getting free...

 

[roguerouge]

Realism aside, it's no different than just having one person in the party with thievery. Yeah, so one person in the party is the one rolling to unlock all the chests, thus 'encouraging everyone to dump' dexterity?

To take your metaphor seriously, there are no locked chests in your world; anyone can open them if the player is good at describing verbally how to pop a lock. If anyone can open a locked chest, regardless of their skill point allocations, why bother putting any ranks into thievery?

 

[roguerouge]

TBut I can't agree, if the fast-talking con-man and the diplomatic person are so starkly different, how could anyone believe the fast-talking con-man when it's clear he can only use the bluff skill?

Go watch Lost and you'll see this happen with a character named Sawyer. He's a good con-man, but he's terrible at making friends. Conversely, a character named Hurley is great at making friends and influencing people, but very rarely lies, if at all.

A con is about convincing people it's their idea to do something, when it's really your idea. A diplomatic person gets people to work together. A con artist is not only terrible at the latter task, he actually undermines the very possibility of people working together through the distrust that he sows.

 

[roguerouge]

The players skill intelligence can "manipulate" the difficulty of other checks just fine. "Hey, we could each try to climb this wall individually. Or the guy with the highest modifier goes first, and then drops a knotted rope! Changing the DC from 20 to 5 for the rest." The character with this idea could be the guy with INT 6 and no training in Climb.

At some point, we cannot simply ignore our own abilities.

The skill you're describing is actually wisdom. And we can ignore our own abilities to enough a degree to roleplay someone else.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

If you want your character to be convinving, don´t dump charisma. If you want to know what to say in conversation with officials, train diplomacy.

If you want to beeing able to lie, train bluff and if you want to know how to threaten people in a way that makes them really frightened, train intimidate...

IMHO opinion however i would have reduced the skills to two skils:
persuasion (whichincludes bluff, intimidate and a part of diplomacy) and a knowledge skill, which includes ettiquette, heraldry and diplomacy and social rituals... which i would call diplomacy.

 

[LostSoul]

Step 4: You blame the system, not the game play.

The game play is informed by his system (allow OOC metagaming, Bluff as persuasion, etc.).

However, if the rules were clear about how to make skill checks, he wouldn't be experiencing these problems.

So yeah. The system is to blame.

 

[Nebulous]

I ran into a similar problem in my Savage Tide campaign, where the party fighter attempted to command townsfolk to follow a battle plan. I asked for a Diplomacy roll, and he replied, "Forget it."

What I forgot was that he had managed to tweak his character to have a CHA of 4 (I think) in order to build a duel-wielding damage monster (he also took the imperceptive flaw so his Spot and Searches were at -6 or something)...

Now I was kind of stuck... he built the character without any consideration for his other stats. His only concern was damage and hit points. Do I handwave his low CHA? But if I do that, then what was the point of having a CHA stat?

Honestly, I have never figured out a good way to handle this kind of situation.

Wow. This might be slightly off topic but if you DON'T find a way to incorporate his Cha 4 and abysmal social skills the PC is totally abusing the rules, with 100% gain and 0% loss. If it were me, i would actively find ways for his personality, brusque speech, or offensive smell to intrude on just about anything the group comes across.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The skill you're describing is actually wisdom. And we can ignore our own abilities to enough a degree to roleplay someone else.

But I wouldn't want to. If I have the idea with the knotted rope, I don't want to say "Oh, I just have Int 6, Wis5 and Cha9, no way my character would come up with that and tell the others!"

Especially because I might not really conciously think about this, but after saying it out loud already. RPGs often contain "puzzle" elements, and we don't expect to just roll on the get-a-clue skill to figure them out. I am not really a fan of "real" puzzles with "which lever to pull" or "figure out this sphinx riddle", but I very much like the kind of puzzles you might have in a mystery or similar situation. And these are not just resolved by my characters skill checks, but also by my ability to figure out which questions to ask and where to look. At that point, skill checks might still be relevant, but most likely I did not make an Intelligence or Wisdom Check to decide that I maybe I should ask one of the witnesses or follow a suspect secretely.