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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4803809" data-attributes="member: 58197">I think a big reason RPGs tend not to have such clear-cut mechanics for social interaction is that social interaction has such a wide variety of objectives. Combat is usually pretty straightforward; you want to beat down the other guy, and the other guy wants to beat you down, so you beat on each other until one of you drops. It's relatively simple to make rules for that.In a social interaction, though, each participant has an objective which may or may not be in conflict. To take a simple example: I come up to you with an unlikely tale. My objective is to convince you that my tale is true. Your objective is to determine whether I'm telling the truth. If the tale is false, then we are in competition. If you think I'm telling the truth, I've won and you've lost; if you think I'm lying, the reverse.But if the tale is true, we're in cooperation. If you think I'm telling the truth, we both win; if you think I'm lying, we both lose. Coming up with a single mechanic to handle this situation (it has to be a single mechanic, otherwise you could tell immediately whether I was lying or not by which mechanic was used to resolve the question) is a tricky business.Pondering how one might go about this... it definitely requires a different approach.</blockquote>