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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2702904" data-attributes="member: 7240">Thanks. I did re-read the thread more carefully and I do find myself rather less sympathetic to the more extreme positions on my "side." And I am with you in wanting to hear from Don et al what happens to points in these skills.Agreed. Player persuasiveness may inform these checks; it may heavily inform them but I agree with you that it should absolutely not wholly replace them.So what? People with better geometry skills get more flanking bonuses because they know where to position their characters. People with better logic can make more effective use of suggestions spells. Etc. Etc. Not all players are as smart as eachother; not all players are as observant as one another. Does this make D&D unfair? Of course not. I do not understand what is so special about articulateness that it is not treated as just another talent a player can bring to bear in the game.Richard Nixon became President, for God's sake. The idea that one cannot succeed at diplomacy or politics without personal charisma is just bunk. It's not impossible, just harder. It just takes more work.I'm a pretty funny, charismatic guy in many situations. But I suck at comic book dialogue; I have no intuition for it. So, in one of Teflon Billy's superhero games, I used to write down heroic things for my character to say in advance because I lacked the talent to make them up on the fly. It sounds like many people are frustrated by the idea that the personal attributes that make them good at some of D&D don't make them good at all of D&D. In my view, if one wants a good gaming dynamic, one's game should reward the widest rather than narrowest range of real-life skills. The more different kinds of real world skills allow your players to shine, the more diverse and interesting the group you can assemble. DM "whim" determines the stats of every monster you face and the DC of every skill check you make; why would social skills be a special area of corruption?Fair and balanced for whom? How is that "fair and balanced" for people who are bad at game mechanics? Obviously, your idea of fairness is privileging people good at game mechanics over people with all other types of skills. To me that's not especially fair; so I try to make my games a hybrid of the two things that you are placing in opposition. And frankly, on its face, your concluding statement is completely ridiculous. Basically, you are saying that it is unfair to reward role playing in a role playing game. Why are they called "role playing games," then?I stand corrected.But combat is a special case. To argue that because combat can't be informed by real world skills, neither can any other aspect of the game is fallacious. It does not logically follow. As you, yourself point out, figuring out the plot of the game and remembering crucial details is just the opposite: there is such total overlap between character skill and player skill that these things are barely represented in the mechanics at all. RPGs contain a continuum of player vs. character skill overlap with combat on one extreme and memory on the opposite.Well, they are wrong to go to that extreme. But because people carry acting out interactions too far doesn't mean that this kind of play has no place in D&D.</blockquote>

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