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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8290133" data-attributes="member: 18">This is very inside the box thinking and a weird double standard which is highly restrictive to what people can play. Players constantly play characters who can do things that they themselves cannot, and that's not typically treated as replacing "player skill" or roleplaying with a die role. I mean, I can describe how to quite a few things my characters shouldn't be able to, does that mean my characters should be able to do them, simply by me carefully describing th to the DM? And of course the inverse. I have little expertise in picking locks, but have played PCs who were experts - should. I have to be able to describe lockpicking expertly?Social skills are no different. Some people are simply good and experienced talkers and convincing. I play with lawyers, a senior psychiatrist, a journalist and others who talk for a living. Should they be able to consistently ignore the fact that they picked CHA 8 and skipped Persuasion and just "roleplay" their attempts? Equally one of my players for a long time was socially somewhat inept and whilst he could come with good reasoning and explain what his character would do was bad at RPing it, should he never have been allowed to succeed or forced to roll when others were not? I don't think so. That'd be quite a double standard.Equally the claim that using social skills eliminates or replaces RP is a nonsense. It's not even arguable. It's trivially untrue. The only reason we're really discussing this is that D&D, specifically, has had utterly naive and largely unscoped social rules for three editions now.If D&D had well-written guidance on how to adjudicate social skills and their limitations and so on, like say, Dungeon World, and when to roll and when to just RP, this would be a non-conversation.So that's where the real flaw lies here. Not in having or not having social skills, but the naive way D&D implements them, which simultaneously flexible and near useless. This is very clear when you have different DMs adjudicating similar situations. One DM may call for a Persuade roll practically every sentence, but not require much of an argument or RP. Another might basically ignore social skills and simply let the 8 CHA Barbo eloquently talk to the genteel lord, because the Barbo's player is good at that. Another still might require extremely good RP to even permit a roll. I've seen all these in action and more in-between. And that's on D&D. Many other systems have well-defined social skill rules that neither eliminate RP nor allow you to potentially ignore investment in certain stats and abilities. In fact it's commonplace in RPGs with systems designed in the last 5-10 years. That's without bogging down into any "social combat" nonsense note (that's soooooo '00s dahling!!!).D&D just needs to stop treating social skills as identical in value and functionality as say, lockpicking or stealth, and give them more defined rules. What they can and cannot do, what conditions should be true for a roll and so on. It can be done. If necessary you could remove conventional rolling of them entirely and simply make having the skill a certain bonus allow you to assert X fiction but that feels more like a class based ability.Anyway, there's no earthly reason an SF RPG should suffer the same issues as 5E, even if much of the same system were used.</blockquote>

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