To much combat and not enough "roleplaying"!

[LostSoul]

But then, WHY did you need to do rolls for social encounter?

Can't you... I don't know... roleplay them?

It's a question of who decides what happens.

There are already rules for this; it's covered by "the players run their character, the DM runs everything else." Therefore, the DM decides what the NPCs do.

Now, if you want to use dice to resolve social conflicts instead of relying on DM judgement, then you'll want rules and rolls for social encounters.

There are some reasons for using them:
-The DM can be impartial.
-The social encounter can be gamed, liked combat.
-The introduction of dice can create outcomes that no one expected going in, and that can be surprising and exciting.
-and more.

The reason it needs to be playtested is that you want the results to be acceptable so that you can use the dice. Just like you don't want a house cat able to kill most 1st level PCs, you don't want a half-witted orc able to talk the king into giving up the throne on an average set of rolls.

 

[The Ubbergeek]

Not against this, actually - was more playing a devil advocate figure a bit.

I like the two ways options, myself - roleplay it or use social enginering rules...

 

[bgaesop]

The only argument I've heard yet that really convinces me that rules for social encounters could be a good thing is that 1) they'd be optional and 2) they'd allow the players to play characters who are more socially capable than themselves. That last part seems like it would be obvious, but to me at least it wasn't. I'm capable of being rather charming and socially capable in real life if I do say so myself, so when I want to play the charismatic rogue character it's not much of a challenge. But when my friend with the perpetual stutter and low self esteem wants to, he's in a bit of a bind: either he doesn't pull it off well enough for him to enjoy his character, or he knows it's just the DM fudging reactions to make it work for him. This would be a great way for him to get the results he wants and know that the DM isn't just going easy on him.

I like the two ways options, myself - roleplay it or use social enginering rules...

On a similar note, I heard somewhere (and I wish I could remember where so I could give credit to whom it's due) a really brilliantly simple way to combine roleplaying and dice-rolling for social encounters in 3.X: have the players roleplay out the part of the encounter that results in a Diplomacy, Bluff, whatever roll, and then have the DM assign a number 1-20 based on how well he thinks they roleplayed it. That's their skill roll, then add their character's bonus to it to get the total result. That way you can't have a 20 charisma bard tell a dragon to "just feck off and give us your hoard you great flying git" and get a decent result despite his god-like skills, while the savvy word-bender player still needs to invest some ranks in order to get the full effects of his manipulations into play.