Mike Mearls, I am calling you out! (Legends & Lore 6/28)

[I'm A Banana]

I'll wait and see how Mearls hashes out your design, then I'll come back to you for clarification!

You could always pay me! I promise roughly equivalent service, two years earlier, with the added bonus of knowing exactly where your money is going! Namely, my next meal, since I am poverty-stricken.

No, I'm saying that the mechanics are too abstract for my tastes.

I don't want an "On Fire" condition that's negated by a FATE point. I want, "You're on fire and taking 1D6 general damage each round until you put it out."

Personally, I'd basically agree with the "too abstract" thing for FATE, but you can ground them a little harder for D&D. Each d20 roll in combat means a specific attack. Each d20 roll in a social interaction could mean a specific argument made to persuade. Like, "I kill him with my sword," you could say, "I try to persuade him with my diplomacy!", and then you could "hit" or "miss" and you'd have "damage" which would tell you how persuasive you were if you hit. Once you reduced your opponent's points to 0, they're persuaded, but it will take more than one diplomatic argument, and more tricks than a few skill checks could give you, in order to keep it interesting over a semi-long-term (say, half an hour or so of actual play time).

Those individual tricks could be similar to the aspects of FATE, but be more related to your character. So Lidda might have a Back-Ally Threats ability to use with her Intimidate that gives enemies a -2 to their Willpower so that future persuasions are more often effective. She has this because she's a rogue, and so can have that special ability.

 

[LostSoul]

FATE is interesting, because how and why a GM compels is huge in terms of what you're doing - why you're playing the game. As is how much the GM lets you get away with when you tag the scene with an aspect.

The group really needs to be on the same page about the currency of the game and how it is brought into play.

 

[ThirdWizard]

If I were going to model this for d20, I'd start with a few questions.

• Is the resource pool you are reducing used for anything else?
• Do you have to make a choice between combat prowess and social prowess?
• How would the adversary's initial reaction to you change things?
• Do PCs have this resource pool for social encounters?
• If they do, what happens when a PC's resource pool is gone?
• Does this open the way toward PC vs. PC social skill use?

Man, I could keep going and going! But, these are questions that would have to be very carefully tread upon. D&D has a certain idiom to it where social interaction is concerned that if changed, many could take severe issue with.