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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 4035166" data-attributes="member: 18549">Stakes agreed to with the GM =/= stakes agreed to with the NPC.  That's a different ball of wax.  You agree with the GM that your character will suffer some penalty, as a stake against successfully convincing the NPC to accede to your demands.  If your roll fails, you might be required to do some task for the NPC in payment for partially agreeing to do what you want, or the NPC's organization may decide it doesn't like you, or some other actual penalty.However, this sort of metagame negotiation is tangential to an in-game negotiation.  If you negotiate that you'll kill the ogres if the mayor will first provide you with some healing potions, then pocket the potions and leave town, there will be consequences.  But those consequences were not part of the negotiation.  The die-rolling in that negotiation was probably two-fold:1. Convincing the mayor that you're not lying if you are at the time of the negotiation. (a bluff check)2. Convincing the mayor that getting rid of the ogres is worth the potions. (a diplomacy check)The resolution of these outcomes is a completely different sort of mechanic than it would be if you were making a stake against the GM.  In that case you'd wager "the mayor gives us potions" against "the mayor figures out we're lying to him about the ogres and smears us around town so no one will give us the time of day" (some kind of persuasion check).  If you really wanted to be narrativist about it, you could wager against "the mayor figures out we're lying to him, and we feel ashamed of ourselves and suffer a penalty on further persuasion checks until we do something that makes up for our duplicity and repairs our collective sense of self-worth."There are, then, two levels of social resolution: in-game, in which the question is, "how convincing are you?", and meta-game, in which the question is, "how much are you willing to risk against getting what you want?"  I read D&D as falling into the former category.edit: You do point out something important, however.  D&D doesn't exactly support the former category very well, due to the design of Diplomacy as attitude-shifting.  If Diplomacy was built to model "salesmanship" instead, it would work a lot better in the role it's been placed.  Rich Burlew's Diplomacy rewrite is actually a good system for that.</blockquote>

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