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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9542959" data-attributes="member: 4937">This wouldn't even work logically in a case of being deceived publicly.  If you are deceived in public, unless everyone in the room is similarly deceived, you will appear foolish and simple if you are deceived.  You get public contempt if you go along with the deception, not if you don't.One of the biggest problems with social rules isn't that there is some sort of means of negotiating whether or not a character is persuasive or deceptive, but that in general real world social interaction is too complex and subtle to handle well with social rules without heavily applying the GMs judgement to handle circumstantial modifiers and outcomes.  Handling social "combat" isn't less complicated than physical combat, it's more complicated.But also, the whole reason for having complex physical combat rules is to make the resolution of combat less abstract and more like a cinematic scene filled with action and drama.  The goal is to make the experience of play more like the real thing.  But the problem with having a very complex set of rules to handle social interaction is that makes it less abstract.  Because in a social situation the thing we fundamentally are trying to simulate is a conversation, and the more complex the rules we have the more abstract we are making that conversation.  I do in fact adjudicate conversations using social skill checks, but also I am always adjudicating a conversation because that is the transcript of play I'm trying to produce and that is the literal player proposition to be judged.  And frequently, how I plan to judge that conversation is complicated - the proud old man is hard to intimidate, unless you threaten to reveal his secret affair with a younger lady at court.  He's not easy to persuade, unless the players present a plan that actually has a reasonable chance of success.  He's not easy to bargain with, unless the players promise to restore his stolen granddaughter, and so forth.</blockquote>

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