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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 8564296" data-attributes="member: 58197">Although I'm wary of "social combat" mechanics, I do think there are key lessons to take away from D&D's combat rules, and one of those is the importance of having intermediate states and fictional positioning between the start of a scenario and its resolution.In other words: Let's take a scene where the PCs burst into the throne room with news of an undead horde marching out of the wasteland. Their goal is to convince the King to respond. The King's goal is to figure out if they're telling the truth. (Note that this situation is not a simple contest of PCs versus King. If the King doesn't believe the PCs, he has not won; he's lost, and the PCs have also lost. Both parties succeed or both fail.)Now, how can each side advance its goals? At this point, the PCs are unknowns. So they could try to establish their credibility by pointing to their past accomplishments, or soliciting testimonials from influential nobles, or demonstrating their skills. If they succeed, they are now better positioned: The King may not yet believe them, but he has at least decided to take them seriously. They have standing, which they previously did not. If they fail, they make fools of themselves and now they have to make their case from the position of being laughable clowns.Now the King might try to discern the PCs' motivations. He can question them about what they were doing in the wasteland, or inquire about their connections to nobles he knows to be disloyal. If he succeeds, he establishes that their motives are good, though they might be mistaken. If he fails, he concludes wrongly that they are compromised. It's still possible they're telling the truth, but he is now looking for the knife in the back, and won't agree until he thinks he's spotted it.As the scenario proceeds, each side establishes (or doesn't) positions to advance its goal. Sometimes they might try to change already-established positions. If the King decides the PCs are compromised, and they realize this, they can try to change his mind, reversing that position. Eventually, the King makes his call and the scene ends.I'm not yet sure how to frame all this in rules--I suspect they would need to be fairly loose guidelines rather than rigid prescriptions. But that would be how I'd attack it. The key is that each position established changes the nature of the scene, opening up new options and closing off old ones.(The actual establishing of a position is probably just a skill check. On a superficial level, it would look like a skill challenge. But my ideal system would add a framework for determining which skills are available,  what the DCs are, what elements of the "environment" can be called into play--sympathetic nobles, physical evidence, etc.--and, most importantly, how these things change as the scene evolves.)</blockquote>

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