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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5951956" data-attributes="member: 42582">I made up a cantrip - Charm Person (roll Arcana in place of Bluff) - and the wizard in my game took it. And used it.The paladin is the other character with access to these sorts of buffs, but he is a CHA-paladin trained in Diplomacy with a Circlet of Authority, and so his Diplomacy and Intimidate are already about as good as he needs them to be.It's not especially new territory for 4e, which had the skill challenge as (among other things, and probably working best as) a complex social resolution mechanic.But skill challenges are something to start from. I'm not sure that designers who can't even write proper guidelines for skill challenge adjudication should be starting on something more ambitious!Anyway, to make any sort of system - skill challenge or Duel of Wits - work, the GM has to have strong advice on how to introduce the complications to which the player must respond in making his/her next check. In a Duel of Wits this is introduced by the opponent's own check; in a skill challenge, by the GM's free narration (which is in some ways closer to the D&D tradition!).The obvious strength of Duel of Wits compared to a skill challenge is its range of actions that increase tactical depth. But the flipside of this is that it can become the notorius "board game" or "dice rolling exercise", as moves are made without any associated fiction being established, and then at the end no one is quite sure what the compromise should involve. Whereas a strength of the skill challenge, if adjudicated in accordance with the rules, is that it can't proceed without the fiction being narrated, because the players can't declare their PC's actions (and their concomitant skill checks) until the GM explains to them what the fictional situation has evolved into.If you drop scripting, you also need to think of some other device for making it impossible for a player to just ascertain and then apply the mechanically optimal strategy. At least to my intuition at the moment, getting the fiction front and centre seems like the best way to do this.Tentative conclusion from these thoughts: draw on the direction D&Dnext is already heading in, of favouring strong GM framing of the circumstances of ability/skill checks (and the somewhat analogous "theatre of the mind" in combat), and try and work up a system which involves (i) at least a modest variety of social tactics (at a minimum the now-traditional "lie", "be pleasant" or "be scary"), but (ii) frames their difficulty in relation to a GM-narrated unfolding situation (which therefore sets up the room for player strategy - "We'll start like this and finish like this" - while making GM narration of the fiction pretty central), and (iii) has some sort of mechanism for bringing things to a close (whether hp-like or skill challenge-like).One big query: can players be forced to have their PCs compromise? In traditional D&D, no. In a skill challenge, no - you can always just fail (there is no analogue to hit points on the players' side of a skill challegne). In a system with active opposition, that wears down the PCs' "social hp", then presumably yes! So while such a system opens up more tactical space (eg "defensive" social manoeuvres, which haven't really been a part of D&D up until now), it would be a pretty big departure from tradition.No argument from me on this. I don't see how else a complex social system is going to work. The key thing is "teeth" - making the engagement with the fiction in the course of resolution matter.If this is going to be true of D&Dnext, then what has happened to "balancing around the 3 pillars"?</blockquote>

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