sabs wrote:There should be a sort of "pre-meeting" initial attitude.
Merchant X, a secret member of the order of "We Hate Demi-Humans." is 'Unfriendly verging on Hostile' towards demi-humans. So if the party is all demi-humans, they don't start at neutral. Now of course, they show up, and there should be a shift based on a first impression.
No. They should have a modifier to their reaction
roll. Something like "Hates Demi-Humans (-2 if party includes demi-human, -4 if party is all or mostly demi-human)". Before you meet you aren't positive or negative. You aren't even
neutral. You literally have no opinion at all. There can be no "Starting Attitude" before the start. Generating the starting attitude could be based on all kinds of factors - and yes the character's prejudices should have a big effect on them. But the MC assigning a first impression before the PCs have done anything to make one is railroading bullshit. And a blatant violation of cause and effect.
deansrule wrote:What if diplomacy in whatever fashion of roll it was done could only allow one to affect the targets "State" not actions. So you don't have an ability to make a roll to see if you can get the King to hand you his vault keys. There literally is not a roll where that can be done. There isn't a DC 128 check you can make to try it because it's not "hard" it just doesn't work that way. Instead you can roll to make a target "Fond" or "Very Fond" of you or whatever meaning you can get the king to like you, you might even be able to make such an impression that he thinks you're a really cool guy...
I'm going to cut you off there because I don't think you are on the right track. First of all, after a bit of introspection I doubt anyone
really feels that badly about the king giving away half his kingdom to a mighty hero he's really happy with. That's the end of like
every fairytale. Aladdin gets half the kingdom. Hans gets half the kingdom. Fuck, it's the
Standard Hero Reward on TV Tropes for a
reason.
People aren't unhappy with Dipomancy because you can get the kingdom, you're supposed to get the kingdom. People are unhappy with it because it's deterministic and not particularly related to what's going on. If you march in with the head of the dragon, charm the pants off everyone, and throw money around like gold was going out of style, the king probably
should try to pimp his daughters to you and throw the kingdom in as dowry. Seriously, he should do that. People don't like the fact that half elf diplomacers are getting that result while showing up in hobo garb before they've even been told that the dragon exists. Which is the
actual failing of the diplomacy rules.
People should have an initial reaction that is based on their prejudices, your actions, and your diplomacy skill. And people should have their initial reactions moved to create new attitudes by actions - of which diplomatic speeches are simply one.
An ideal system would give you some kind of choice of whether to get an initiative bonus by approaching the encounter weapons drawn or a reaction bonus by approaching the encounter with weapons sheathed. Maybe a sliding scale of stances: aggressive, wary, neutral, friendly, peaceful. NPCs could certainly have one of
those (and yeah, if they are aggressive, they get an initiative bonus and
you get a reaction penalty, ha ha).
-Username17