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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8280846" data-attributes="member: 82106">Again, I assert that this is the case for ALL 'resolution mechanics' in D&D (and games with similar structure). Nobody is willing or able to learn sword fighting, so the game has mechanics that measure sword fighting skill, etc. The question then becomes things like "why do you feel that searching is something everyone knows how to do?" I can assure you most people DO NOT know how to do a proper search! They know as much about that as they do about sword fighting (in either case you can imagine doing it to a degree, and actually do some relatively inefficient version of it). The debates around the boundaries of SP then become quite easy to understand, because SP is merely a convention. It is "what Gary did" roughly speaking. Like all human beings he was quirky and did things for a complex variety of reasons which he only partly articulated and which contain historical accident, random chance, as well as some deliberate judgment we can analyze. Nobody is going to completely agree with it, its essentially got a heavy element of arbitrariness to it. Diplomacy doesn't violate SP due to some deep theoretical reason. It is just tradition. Heck, Gary used % dice for it, yet many SP advocates pour scorn on Diplomacy checks without even seeming to see the irony of that!</blockquote>