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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8034644" data-attributes="member: 6988941">That's a good question. Think of suggestion as planting a precise course of action in their mind and forcing them to follow it rather than persuading them. Suggestion can do more than a persuasion roll would because it enables one to convince with no argument, logic, or evidence and keep them convinced until the course of action prescribed by the caster is complete with minimal variation. As long as it is a "reasonable" course of action and they fail the save they will pursue it for up to eight hours without fail.Most of these they are basically just convincing someone of something, so trying social skills is almost certainly the better tact. Suggestion only works until the spell ends, at which point the target may feel very different about things. Suggestion is really for when you want a specific course of action, not just for convincing someone of something. Of these examples Suggestion is good for the last where you get the shop keeper to help load all the stuff in your cart to take it someplace safe. Whether or not that is reasonable is definitely going to be a DM call depending on the totality of circumstances (mainly is the NPC at all inclined to trust people, do you have any "evidence", and is this the sort of locale where the story makes sense) but I don't think any deception roll could keep them helping you at length without asking more questions and requiring more successful deception checks, whereas the Suggestion spell commits them to the course of action until it is done. Of course the moment the last item is loaded the spell is broken, but at that point you make a run for it while the angry shopkeeper shakes his fist at you, so you still probably got what you needed. I would, once again, encourage DMs to be generous in construing "reasonable" because you will have more fun usually having the spell work and then having the characters deal with the fallout when it abruptly ends then you will getting hung up on what is reasonable. "Reasonable" is there to force a little creativity and keep this from just being a "give us your money, dance for our amusement, and then kill yourself" sicko murder-hobo spell or just a boring combat spell.</blockquote>

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