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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 7290817" data-attributes="member: 2629">I've used essentially the same system for 30 years.  D&D is an RPG - a Role Playing Game.  Characters play a role in a story.  You want to make it a good story.Have you ever tried watching a movie on streaming only to have it buffer ... constantly ... at ... a ... ... ... ...good.... ... ... spot?It really hampers the story to have the flow of a great scene, especially a great conversation, broken up. As such, my key rules are aimed at having the flow of an encounter progress without many, if any, disruptions to roll dice or look up stats during the encounter.  In fact - I don't really 'roll dice', but instead just have a spreadsheet printed out with random numbers from 1 to 20 that I can reveal to myself slowly to generate the 'rolls' to make sure everything moves quickly.Trivial Social Encounters: A trivial encounter is an encounter in which there is communication, but no significant story elements of the game are progressed and the PCs are unlikely to communicate with the NPC often in the future.  For these encounters, I roll nothing.  I know the PCs social skills well enough that I can translate what they're trying to do through the filter of their character's capabilities.  If an eloquent player playing a PC with a -1 Persuasion tries to seduce a guardsman to let them have a look in a store window, I have them describe what they're trying to do and then I ask myself how it would have worked had I tried to pull off the line.  In general, if there is no real impact, it is fine to use passive social skills to determine success and failure.  It makes sure the PCs feel like they have (or do not have) the skills they have (or do not have).NPCs in these situations usually have one dominant characteristic, like most minor characters in books do, but little depth to their personality.  They're caricatures more than characters.These encounters flow smoothly without disruptions for dice and stat checks.  Essentially mechanics of the game set the stage, but we can just move ahead with the story fluidly.Minor Social Encounters: A communication based encounter that has a reasonable possibility to make a meaningful change in the campaign, but not a major one.  Perhaps it is buying a magic item, or trying to persuade a guardsman to let the PCs get away with a minor crime.  For these encounters, I roll one die before the encounter begins and then apply it to their social skills throughout the encounter to determine how effective they will be at communicating.  There are usually flat DCs to determine how hard it'd be to do something as opposed to any opposed skill checks.  These types of NPCs are generally a bit more fleshed out - my trick is to pick a person or character and try to mimic that character.  A shop owner might be based upon Giles from Buffy, or a Silver Dragon might be Maui from Moana.  As the only dice rolled are rolled before combat, it is easy to keep things flowing smoothly here and keep the story going.  When I use the sheet of random numbers and a reference sheet for character ability scores, I can just keep the story going and not break up the storyline with pauses for mechanics. Major Social Encounters: A communication that can change the course of a campaign.  Negotiating with the warband chief to prevent an attack on a city, or navigating through the social hierarchy of a major city at the event of the season to gain access to a King.  Here, I'll generally roll a few dice for each PC, but I'll do so before the situation begins.  One die will reflect the start of their social endeavors.  Another will reflect a middle phase of what they're doing.  The final will reflect the last third of the social endeavor.  Sometimes I will break the social encounter up into only two phases, while others could have four or five.  I determine how many phase there will be by looking for natural breaks in the social situation.  For example, if the PCs are attending a banquet in which they hope to gain access to the King and persude him to do something, the first role might reflect what happens before dinner, the second would address events during dinner, and the last would address after dinner.  Then I'll have 1 or 2 additional dice rolled that I'll reserve for the 1 or 2 key moments where you want to have a dramatic die roll determine success or failure.     I may or may not use them for each PC.  In my banquet example, the PCs might use one of these dice when the PCs try to gain access to the King, and another when they try to persuade the King.  The key players in these encounters are usually based upon a person or character as discussed above for minor social encounters, but I try to pick central characters that have more depth, and I'm not afraid to modify them substantially to suit my needs.  However, there are often a large number of folks involved in these major social events, and non-key players are often caricatures with no real depth.In this model I do break up the encounter a bit for mechanics - but they feel like the right time for a dramatic pause.</blockquote>

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