Thought of a better way to present it. In melee combat, a legendary fighter takes about thirty second to kill a legendary diplomat and take all his stuff. In order to for social combat to maintain parity with melee combat, a legendary diplomat should to be able to convince a legendary fighter to donate all his stuff to the diplomat and then throw himself off a cliff, and the diplomat should be able to do it in about thirty seconds.Ice9 wrote:A legendary Bard making some random bystanders give him all their stuff for nothing, that's fine. But the legendary Bard doing that to equally legendary but not particularly social people - not good. And even if you do manage to keep it entirely on the RNG, that kind of ability should be rare enough that "nobody gets to talk to the king - all messages have to be filtered through a series of translators that will eliminate any persuasive phrasing" is not a standard precaution.
As for your second point (filter royal interactions throuh babelfish), again compare to legendary fighters and wizards. A nation maintains an entire military and rooms full of hideous monsters to keep legendary fighters out of the king's palace. It builds its palace a hundred feet underground to keep out legendary wizards. Is there any reason it wouldn't maintain a cadre of particularly bad translators to keep out legendary diplomats?
Another idea: would it be possible to turn use this system in combat, with combat modifiers as goals?