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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Siran Dunmorgan" data-source="post: 4806131" data-attributes="member: 39268">It seems odd to me that no one here has mentioned the system that 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons already has for social interaction.The rules regarding artifacts.If one is interacting with a person, organization, or similar entity that can have an opinion of the character, the existing affinity rules provide a perfectly reasonable model for that interaction.If one has, for example, an ongoing romance, is this not—effectively—identical to gaining affinity with an artifact?  Or being rejected by it?  Even the game-mechanical awards for each level of affinity are similar: being romantically associated with a lady of high station, for example, provides bonuses or penalties to skill checks when undertaking skill challenges associated with that lady's society.It's not necessarily a model Dungeon Masters would want to do for every Non-Player Character with whom their players interact, but in the case of specific persons with whom the characters are expected to have ongoing relationships, it can effectively model the relationship, just as it does for artifacts.I have not—yet—combined skill challenges with this system, where the skill challenge represents the initial acquisition of a romantic interest, e.g. success or failure in a skill challenge might indicate that one did or did not acquire a romantic interest at the Queen's Ball; pursuit of that interest is then handled by the affinity rules.The ultimate goal of such a combined system is the playing out of something like the Showtime television series The Tudors, where the principal "artifact" with which the characters are associated is the King himself.In the environment that I have in mind, the various out-of-court activities that alter one's affinity with court personalities are more traditional adventures, i.e. suppressing tribes of kobolds, goblins, or the occasional dragon, or retrieving items of interest. [1]In-court "adventures" would indeed include things like building or beautifying palaces and houses, inviting famous artists to produce portraits of one's paramour, and so on: planting a hedge maze for the amusement of the Queen, for example, might provide a +2 to affinity with her.These activities require expenditure of gold, of course, and may require expenditure of one's affinity with other personalities, i.e. "calling in a favor."  The loss of wealth—which corresponds strongly to effectiveness at higher levels—is compensated by one's affinity with persons or organizations that have access to higher level equipment, e.g. holy weapons or symbols of the Church, famous weapons in the King's Armoury, or implements held in various personal collections.  Note that this is not—from a rules perspective—notably different from acquiring different powers derived from a single artifact.What's marvelous is that all of these rules and the means to adjudicate them already exist within the current rules set.  Just consider—for example—the King and Queen as paragon-tier artifacts and go from there. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />—Siran Dunmorgan[1] This is different from The Tudors, in that out-of-court adventures in that setting generally involve assassinating the King's political opponents, putting restive but otherwise innocent peasants to the sword, locating attractive young women to catch the King's interest, and browbeating or bribing facile clergymen to agree with the King's position on marriage.</blockquote>

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