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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9569045" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you are right but I think that we don't have to deal in binaries here.  One of my design realizations over the years is that everything that can be a quantity should be a quantity.  So for example, fire elementals in my game don't have immunity to fire, they have fire resistance of 50.  The ur-fire elemental at the heart of the plane of fire, the incarnate idea of fire itself, might have fire resistance 100.  If you can somehow do more than 100 points of fire damage you can burn even a living fire.  That's how my game works.And while all of the above you describe is part of my process of play, it's all quantized.  It's a DC 30 to convince the NPC, but only 20 if the PC's by investigation or intuition have figured out his personality levers and know the right buttons to push.  And this is written down beforehand because it is a puzzle.  In fact, a complex puzzle might involve persuading half of a group of NPCs each of which has their own description and laid out secret motives or levers that can be used to persuade them more easily.  Some might be easily intimidated, especially if you have the key to blackmail them with.  Some might be persuaded if you appeal to their greed, and others by appealing to their honor and pity for the unfortunate.  Some might be persuaded if you appeal to their secret past - "It's what Marie would have wanted."  We role play it out, but we don't concede.  We just reach the point where it feels like a potential change in the fiction as represented by a particular character's attitude might have been earned or if we've reached some natural stopping point in the conversation and then we make a fortune test to see if the desired change or the created change (through that roleplay) actually occurs.  That fortune test has particular rules based on the relationship of the PCs to the target - hostile or friendly, superiors or inferiors, strangers or long relationship, etc.  We don't play it out forever.  While I might allow each PC a shot at influencing the character, I'd not allow a second shot by the same PC in the same scene unless that PC radically changed their approach (and this the skill or difficulty of the check).  And, as the GM I am the arbiter of aesthetics, not only in that I've laid out beforehand secret keys that give an effective bonus to complete the social challenge, but also in that if the player really does a good job of laying out the argument and roleplaying well, I'll reward that with a small bonus of say +1 or +3 bonus on the roll - enough to make it worthwhile to roleplay, but not so much that the dour dwarf fighter with 8 charisma and no points in diplomacy out performs the cleric with maximum ranks in diplomacy.  The idea here is that whatever comes out at the table is translated through the character's own charisma into something either more stirring or more stumbling than what the player themselves said - although I should note I wouldn't penalize the player of the dwarf for being deliberately gruff and halting with his words if the words themselves are well said and on target.  On the contrary, that's even better roleplaying.While I agree with you that the GM is always in the space, kind of interfering with the communication between the player and the game universe, so that the player must rely on the GM's judgment, I feel like that's inevitable in any system where you have a GM who is supposed to pass judgement on the player's propositions regardless of whether they are social propositions or physical ones.  "I'm going to pick up this log and lean it against the wall and use it to climb more easily." also involves a set of assumptions and rulings and relies on the GM's arbitration as well - how much does the log weigh, can it bear the player's weight, is the friction high enough to keep it from sliding down the wall or falling to the side once the player's weight is on it, how rough of a surface is the log and how difficult is it to climb.  Every GM is going to run that slightly differently IME particularly if the system doesn't give you any real guidance.  Social challenges are of the same sort except that that's players mind is more inevitably a part of the fiction than the player's body is, because the player has to be allowed to make choices within the fiction which is an act of their mind in away that a character swinging a sword isn't an act of the player's body.  But the GMs mind is present in both and has to be restrained in some fashion in order to produce fair and neutral arbitration and allow thereby the player to have actual agency.</blockquote>

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