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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9293707" data-attributes="member: 29398">This actually brings up somethng else worth mentioning: with most checks and combats, the "finish line" is fairly obvious: you know when you've succeeded or failed (or, in combat, won or lost).  There's a hard and final resolution point and everyone involved knows what it is and when it occurs.With some social situations that hard and final resolution point might well a) never arrive; and-or b) arrive and pass without the knowledge of one or more participants.  Let's say your party is talking to a Duke, seeking the loan of 40 of his militia to bolster your expedition into the mountains; and let's say the DM has somehow determined ahead of time that the Duke is a very friendly chap, polite to a fault and happy to talk all day with people who interest him (which the PCs very likely will, with their tales of derring-do in the field); but will passive-aggressively do anything he can to avoid having to make a decision.An example of a) above: you talk to the Duke all day; everything is friendly and smooth but in the end all you really agree to do is keep talking, and even that agreement is never formally stated.  And later when things finally get to the point, all you can get from the Duke is a non-committed "maybe" to your request, i.e. neither a hard nor final resolution.An example of b) above: you talk to the Duke all morning, everything is friendly and smooth but no useful conclusions are reached; then he retires to his dining room for lunch as expected but does not reappear in the afternoon and nobody will say (or even knows) why.  The discussion is left hanging and apparently never resolves; what the PCs don't know is that instead of having lunch the Duke bugged out and went hunting, hoping the PCs would go away on their own thus absolving him from any decision-making.Of course, some social situations do have a hard-coded and clear-to-see finish line, the most obvious of which is a court trial: sooner or later a verdict comes down, and on that the trial is over.  But other than these uncommon situations, is there any real need to force finality of resolution on to something that in fact might never resolve or where success or failure might never be known?</blockquote>

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