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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sparkle_cz" data-source="post: 9275392" data-attributes="member: 7044879">For me it's absolutely understandable that certain NPC's cannot be persuaded at all by some means and about some topics. Especially important NPCs. If every NPC was always "persuadable", that would be way too unrealistic and "easy" for my taste that I wouldn't enjoy the game. So, as a GM, I'm perfectly fine with telling a player that his social action autofailed because that approach can't work on this NPC in this particular situation.However, I try to be as transparent about it as possible. When I know that the action cannot succeed, I don't make them roll for it. I will tell them outright that it autofailed or I give them a chance to "roll to at least mitigate bad consequences".So, in the case above:A player tries to intimidate the NPC girl. I, as GM, know, that the girl will not spill the info this way, it is totally against her character.So I tell the player: oops, this doesn't work on her and was totally counterproductive but you can roll Intimidate to see if you at least managed to not screw it up totally.Then he rolls and: if he rolls badly, she runs away.If he rolls a success, he will still not get the desired info from her but at least he mitigated the "she ran away" effect and she will stay there and be willing to communicate somehow. The successful roll here basically meant "you intimidated her badly but are so good at it that she didn't find it so serious as it really was, and thinks that it was just a joke" or something like that.This is for me a compromise between the desire to give the player agency (he still gets to use his skill and the roll matters) and the desire to have the gaming world and its inhabitants realistic and challenging.Also, there is one more technic that I use for cases like this: long-term projects to convince a NPC. I borrowed this mechanic from FitD and tweaked it a little into my PbtA rules. It goes like this:Any time in the campaign, players can declare that they want to work on some long-term project. Be it renovating a house, inventing a new weapon etc. It is basically like classic FitD long-term projects. They are long and need time to spend but at the end they succeed automatically (the rolls only tell you how long it took).And these projects can also be used for persuading a NPC through long-term convincing and socializing with him.So, let's say that a player wants to extract some info from an uncooperating NPC. I know that it's not very believable at that moment that he succeeded. So, I tell the player : "Look, you barely know this NPC and he dislikes you, so at this moment he will not give you the info by persuasion. But we can create a long term project for it, with length 6, and if you fulfill it, the NPC will open up to you."So my players get what they want in the end, most of the time, but we manage to keep the NPC behave like real people, and that is ideal for me.</blockquote>

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