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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 4034763" data-attributes="member: 704">Two Edged Sword?One of the things that is hard to take into account in D&D is that while the PC's can use diplomacy against NPC's with ease, there is no way for an NPC to convince the players to do something they would not really want to do.  While I do not want a 'non magical charm spell' effect, I do want to be able to have NPC's use this system to affect the players.I can think of a few things I would like to be able to do that would be fairly difficult to do under 3rd edition rules. - Have a pre fight monologue where the winner of the exchange gets a +2 morale bonus for the duration of the encounter. - Have a local NPC hit the players with a sob story and force the PC to either help or pay some penalty (lose an action point). - Have a villain trick the players henchmen into betraying him mid fight by convincing the henchmen that the player is the one truly responsible for something.There are a few other things that come to mind but they really boil down to having a fair system for dealing with social encounters that can then have some reasonable mechancial impact on the game.  On the player side of things, while the DM can decide what success means and what failure means, it is often easy for a determined player to force an unexpected social encounter where the result of success would be fairly obvious.  Consider this situation:The DM set us up with a jail break.  He might expect us to try for a stealth approach, or a 'storm the gates and kill em all' approach.  But if I decided to bust out the Disguise, Forgery, Diplomacy, and Bluff skills to simply walk up to the guard and demand that the prisoner is released into my custody, there is a good chance that the DM may not have expected this.  With a social encounter system, it will be much easier for this approach to succeed simply because the DM will be able to 'wing it' in a fair way.  When the DM has some idea of how to adjudicate a situation, he is much more likely to allow the attempt than if he thinks it will be too hard to do right, and just contrives a reason to have it fail.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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