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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WyzardWhately" data-source="post: 4069896" data-attributes="member: 33207">The essentials:  You roll a pool of D6s, 4+ is a success.  You want to beat some number of successes, often determined by an opposed roll.  The GM and player work out the difficulty and the stakes beforehand, so it's pretty flexible;  you can attempt to get any end result you like, with the difficulty going up by how improbable it is.  I was in this case attempting to discredit and humiliate this enemy noble.  I got some bonus dice from what our investigations had uncovered.There's actually an entire system for Duels of Wits, which is pretty useful for stuff like courtroom dramas, debates, fomenting rebellion, and anything else you want to turn into a dramatic and extended back-and-forth between antagonists.  In this specific case, it was just going to be one speech to get the evidence out there in front of everyone at the dinner table (that is, all the NPCs at the party, not us players), and tell the bad guy how bad we'd screwed him already.  So, the GM just set a number of successes I needed (it was a fairly difficult task, considering our relative social stations), and I happened to roll my socks off.  So, to sum up an answer to your question:  There are specific mechanics for debates, fighting, etc.  You can also turn almost any task into an ad hoc skill check by just working out what the PC is trying to accomplish, the skill to use, and setting a difficulty.  Humiliating the crap out of someone and airing their dirty laundry is a very logical extension of a skill called "Ugly Truth," so in this case the GM let me use it to destroy someone's social standing.[There's a lot of neat little innovations in BW, but this isn't really the place for it.  If you're interested, shoot me a PM, I can point you toward some reviews and so forth.  It's controversial, but easily one of my favorite RPGs ever.]I really personally disagree with the assertion that having social mechanics leads to "roll-playing."  Firstly, that term gets thrown around too much, and is often used as a label to dismiss arguments rather than address them.  Secondly, what I have noticed is that it's mostly the people who like to play social characters who flock to social-fu type mechanics.  Why?  Because they want to have the same kind of in-game power that the combat monkeys have.  If this guy's immense Swordery skill will let him remove your character from the game (by killing you), then it's not too much to ask that the other guy, who spent all his points in Drama Queen should be able to turn your allies against you.  And I think that holds up outside of intra-party conflict, as well.  If you are going to spend your character's resources on different abilities, those abilities should give you at least a comparable amount of power over the course of events in the game world.  And I personally find GM Fiat a much less satisfying solution.That is, the sword guy would find it pretty disappointing if he was told he didn't have the option of whacking an NPC, or if he tried that the guy was invulnerable to weapons for no good reason.  I want to have similar amounts of privilege granted to social skills.  If not, the social skills on my sheet are only as valuable as the GM feels them to be at that time.  And I like having a game system in place so that I don't always have to negotiate that out.Now, clearly not everyone agrees with me, so it's a good thing that WotC is aiming for these mechanics to be ignorable.  But I want to use them because my experience in playing social characters is enhanced by having the same kind of system validation that combat characters already have.</blockquote>

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