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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8160357" data-attributes="member: 18">I think the biggest weakness of "social combat" systems has been pretty well-covered - they tend to make things into dull dice-rolling contests, and lack the nuance and engagement of "actual combat", because they're never as well-developed.It doesn't have to be that way. Griftlands, a computer game, has equally developed social and physical conflict, and shows it could be done. But I've never seen a TT RPG do both well, and bolting "social combat" on to one not designed for it is likely to end in tears.I think going with "one persuasion roll" or the like can be extremely bad too, note. D&D 5E uses an extremely random system, where even heavy investment in social stuff can mean it's only 50/50, at best, to persuade someone, and you can spend 15 minutes roleplaying and just to roll a die and you get an 11 when you needed a 12, and that sucks for everyone, even with fail-forward and so on. So I think that's a place where it makes sense to use multiple rolls, like best of 5 or something. It's not a complex/intrusive system but it means that the person who has heavy investment in social actually gets to benefit from it, in a similar way the combat-invested people and so on.Of course the very worst is one I've encountered a bit - where a DM makes you roll after basically every sentence, and takes the approach that any failure is a total failure and conversation over and so on. That's horrific, but not as rare as I'd like to think it was. It's like if in combat, every round was save-or-die or something.I'd agree with powers that change stuff up are pretty cool, and a good approach for D&D. Add that to "best of X" rolling approaches and you have a pretty good way to handle social stuff in D&D without bogging things down, or making things rest on one wildly random roll.</blockquote>

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