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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9290224" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Do you persuade duchesses to lend you their military aid while their scheming or ignorant advisors resist? Arguments in royal court are dramatically different from casual conversations at a table.Do you have to wend your way through the byzantine regulations of a nation's trial court to defend your buddy, who stands accused of a murder you know she didn't commit? There's a very good reason people say things like "the man who represents himself has a fool for a client." Legal proceedings are difficult, complex, challenging tasks that emphatically do not allow the natural, free conversation you and I could engage in.Do you have to wrangle a gaggle of dispossessed children, suffering from fear and sleep deprivation and hunger, in order to keep them stable and together enough to get them out of a warzone?Etc., etc., etc.Real people get into low-stakes, basic, minimal fisticuffs far more often than you might think. It is, in fact, quite natural for humans to put effort into defending themselves when attacked, and to try to retaliate. But you know not to confuse that basic, pretty trivial "combat" with the actual rigors of a real battlefield, where trained warriors are fighting with intent to kill.This same logic applies here. Ordinary, casual, everyday conversation is simply not the same kind of thing as the above serious, complex, difficult, time-sensitive social interaction.I am not--emphatically, absolutely not--saying that ABSOLUTELY EVERY social interaction should suddenly become a drawn-out, complex affair. Instead, consider how you might have a Paladin roll an attack roll to see if he can throw his shield accurately at a distant target. That isn't what attack rolls are really "for," but it's a clear and obvious use of that rule, despite not invoking the whole massive complex affair that a combat would be. Likewise, you can and should still have characters roll skills for basic one-off stuff and relatively casual or basic conversations where there's not that much in the way of stakes nor interesting ways that the situation can dynamically change as players take actions. Instead, when it is appropriate, giving real mechanics with actual weight can be a huge breath of fresh air. It makes the Big Time Serious Stuff actually feel like it matters, like you can't just BS your way out of anything that happens, because order matters, and each success or failure matters, and the overall result matters, as opposed to just...completely winging it from one skill roll to the next until the DM finally decides that enough hurdles have been jumped over (or crashed through).Perhaps one final analogy may help, here. Ordinary people challenge one another to "races" of various kinds all the time, with minimal rules and loosey-goosey structure. But I want you to imagine a world where EVERY official race--I mean genuinely absolutely all of them--was not decided by the obvious thing we do IRL (where we have professional, third-party people there to monitor the race for cheating and to observe who crossed the line first). Instead, every official race is purely decided by a given "Distance Monitor" who observes and records contestant performance...and this Distance Monitor is not required to even pick how long the race needs to be until the moment she announces the winner!Do you think people would still find professional races interesting, if all of them (NASCAR, Tour de France, Olympic track and field, everything) were decided by professional Distance Monitors who independently, and sometimes arbitrarily, decide how long the race should be while it is being run? Because I don't. And the reason it wouldn't be interesting is that we wouldn't have any sense for what qualifies as victory or defeat. We wouldn't have any ability to see, or feel, how successful any given participant was. We wouldn't know just how CLOSE American Pharaoh was to beating Secretariat--beaten by a nose!That sort of thing is only possible when you start adding in some degree of mechanics. That doesn't mean we should flip things to the reverse state, where absolutely every race under the sun has to have a full observer team and official timekeepers and (etc.), but rather that we should try to find ways to make use of both techniques in the places they're most useful.</blockquote>

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