Aldarc
Legend
I somehow missed this thread. When I saw the title, I was considering posting this same bit from Stonetop - as I also recently re-read this Move and recalled our heated discussion about social skills - only to find that you have beaten me to the punch. Now I have 20+ pages of reading to do in this thread.This topic gets re-hashed a lot, it seems, and in general my stance is that social skills don't 'work' on other PCs.
But I was just reading some of the early materials for Stonetop, a kickstarted PoA game, and came across this:
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I like that a lot. It leaves the target PC fully in control of the player, but also provides a framework for Cha skills to 'work' on other PCs.
I don't have an elegant way to map that to 5e rules, but thought I'd throw it out there as a middle ground between the two sides of the debate.
EDIT: Try again on the attachment....
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Brian Engard, one of the co-authors of Venture City, has his name attached to some high profile and highly regarded supplements for Fate, including Fate Core, Fate System Toolkit, Fate Adversary Toolkit, Bulldogs, Atomic Robo, Uprising: The Dystopian Universe RPG, Dresden Files Accelerated, etc. I'm not sure if such an accusation questioning his understanding of Fate would hold much water.In Venture City, a superhero supplement for Fate (which, overall, is very bad and feels like it was written by someone who barely has any idea how Fate works, but anyway), there's Influence superpower. Or maybe it called something else, I only have Russian translation.
Anyway, it works as a Rapport vs. Will attack. Then, the target can decide whether to take mental damage, or oblige. It works quite well.
Can it be used one PC to another? If so, I feel it suffers the technical flaw of being able to be used unreasonably an XP generator. One could say - don't use the rules unreasonably - but that is no excuse for badly written rules.
Therefore, is Parley solely NPC to PC?
You are welcome to ask Jeremy Strandberg on the Dungeon World Discord. He's quite open to discussing his design decisions and the like, and it's still open to clarification. That said, fishing Parley vs. PCs for failed rolls and -6 XP seems a bit silly because a 6- roll also forces a hard move against the PCs by the GM. If you really want to fish for that XP, then you have to be prepared for hard move after hard move against your characters. Moreover, it's seems like the easy fix is simply to say that XP is not generated in these situations.Yeah, I thought of that as well. I think it is a design flaw, but....I guess I just wouldn't play with people who abused it.
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