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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GnomeWorks" data-source="post: 7485959" data-attributes="member: 162">The problem, as I see it, is thus.You have a player who wants to play a wizard. We have rules for magic; that the player is not a magician IRL thus poses no problem.You have a player who wants to play a fighter. We have rules for combat; that the player is not that strong or a fighter IRL thus poses no problem.You have a player who wants to play a crafty woodsman. We have (some) rules for handling woodcraft and exploration; that the player is not a woodsman IRL thus poses minimal problem. The dearth of exploration mechanics in general makes this tricky, but typically there's enough crunch there to make this workable.You have a player who wants to play a charismatic leader or persuasive type. We now have a problem, because the rules for this have pretty much always been garbage, if they exist at all.3e's skill system was abysmal for handling social interactions, because they were essentially binary: you either roll a high enough Diplomacy, or you don't. We can quibble all day about DMs using circumstantial modifiers and trying to take into account the character's Charisma versus that of the player, of focusing on content, providing bonuses for "roleplaying" and all that... but at the end of the day, the systems we've seen in D&D barely qualify as systems.This is not an easy problem - that D&D has failed at it (and it has, mechanically) repeatedly and consistently over its editions is not meant as a dig at D&D, because it is a difficult problem and not easily resolvable. At the end of the day, there are only so many ways to sword at people, and only so many contexts in which that happens. How do you generalize a social interaction system that's supposed to be able to handle, in theory, everything from convincing a peasant to give you an apple, to convincing the king to go to war?My own musing on this problem has led me to the conclusion that focusing on the results, on the specifics of a social exchange, is impossible. We can't mechanically represent individual goals that occur at the table, because they're going to almost literally be unique. It's not feasible to mechanize that. I think instead what might be possible to do is to build a "social combat" (though I detest that phrase) system that's built around some set of intentionally-vague virtues or ethics, split into groups, which would variously oppose or align with one another. A more complex, nuanced version of D&D alignment could yield such a setup, which you could then use as a foundation for a social interaction system that "feels" better than just winging it, or using binary skill checks.Of course, at the same time, you also have a notable portion of the gaming population who feels that this sort of thing is heterodox, that mechanizing what is essentially RP is destructive of, or at least detrimental to, the whole concept of roleplaying. I have an intuition that they're wrong, but implementing a mechanical chassis for social interaction would certainly make such events at the table different compared to how they are done now. I have tried to put some thought into this, as well, and have some loose thoughts regarding some sort of "social currency:" arguments or facts that could be discovered and used in specific social conflicts to garner some kind of advantage (and not strictly the 5e sort of advantage). Of course, the precise implementation of that sort of thing, I feel, might bring us right back to where we started: these things would effectively be unique to any given social encounter, which may very well defeat the purpose of a more generalized social encounter framework.</blockquote>

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