Let me respond to only the examples I've watched personally
OgreBattle wrote: I cannot remember a single example of a serious combat being resolved by talking before one side loses decisively off the top of my head.
Naruto talked it out with Pain to conclude their conflict even though both of them hadn't exhausted their fighting ability. Nagato even helps reverse some of the damage he's done.
As this was the moment that fucking convinced me to stop reading
Naruto, I'd rather not reproduce it in my games. I won't even go to reread and check whether Pain was out of combat juice by the time Naruto broke through to his true body and whether he tried to fight at that moment at all.
OgreBattle wrote:Gundam Wing: Heero points a gun to Relena's head, she talks him down and they go dancing. I think this happens to every girl Heero interacts with.
That is exactly the situation of using a social system Frank considers normal and Kaelik is mad about, if I understand their arguments correctly. One character strongly considers violence against another character, and pretty much can easily gank her, but is socialized out of it.
OgreBattle wrote:In Dragon Ball, Mr. Satan manages to talk Majin Buu out of destroying everything... but then some guys come by and shoot his dog and fuck it up.
They weren't
fighting. Mr.Satan managed to pacify normal Buu specifically because he had no serious fighting ability and socializing was his only resort.
OgreBattle wrote:In Dragon Ball Super, Goku loses to Beerus, but his fighting spirit and Earth's delicious pudding delays Beerus enough for Beerus to take a nap and forget about destroying earth. So in that case the social (and 'gifting') minigame is a way to avoid a game over condition.
Here the battle (at least in the movie version, have yet to watch Super) is instrumental for the final outcome, by giving Beers a good enough workout to put him in a peaceful mood, but it still fought to the conclusion, until Goku is clearly defeated and incapable to continue.
OgreBattle wrote:Fallout lets you talk the last boss into killing himself
That and fighing him are an either/or proposition.
MGuy wrote:
And of course, to bring up a mentioned example: A fight in Kenshin that is stopped before it is completed by talking, that part toward the beginning when Kaoru has to convince Kenshin to not kill Jinsei? Erased from memory.
Hard to erase from memory what did not happen.
Let me refresh that episdode for you:
-Jin'e hypnotises Kaoru with his weeaboo fightan' magic to make her stop breathing, specifically to draw out Kenshin's killer side.
-Kenshin reverts to Battousai mode and wrecks Jin'e. The fight is over by any conceivabe measure. Jin'e is mauled so badly that seconds later he'll kill himself rather than live as a cripple unable to fight. However, Kenshin still faces the necessity of actually killing him to save Kaoru.
-Seeing her boyfriend's terrifying split personality, Kaoru at this point breaks the hypnosis by sheer willpower, so that he won't need to kill a disabled opponent in cold blood.
MGuy wrote:And you might immediately jump to that other memorable part where Kenshin and Saito stop fighting the very first time they go at it without anything being 'decisive' at all.
Yeah, the part where Saito was always on the same side and only supposed to test how far Kenshin's skills have degraded, and forgot about all that almost as soon as actual fighting began, so if not for the arrival of a figure of authority recognized by both of them, the fight would have ended in death?
MGuy wrote:Well you better cool your jets mister because fights don't stop in any genre unless someone wins according to FatR.
You're certainly not doing a good job proving otherwise. You wouldn't have to bring examples of fights from PotC which end with a decisive victory by one side - what else you can call capturing your opponent? - but leave the loser alive, so that
later he can bullshit his way out of his predicament otherwise.
MGuy wrote:Remember boy's and girls according to these two an incident where someone is being fired upon by an ally cannot be resolved, even by informing the allied party of this, without one side decisively winning. This just has never happened in fiction or real life.
And you would need to erect ridiculous strawmen either, if your position was tenable.
Of course such an accident can be resolved.
It can easily be resolved in any form of vanilla 3.X. Situations where just presenting a crucial piece of information ("we're on the same side!") leads to the outcome you want do not need to involve any social minigame. At all. We need a social minigame in situations where just explaining your case reasonably is insufficient and the outcome depends on such factors as rhetoric ability and personal charisma, particularly because characters might have them in abundance when players do not. Possibly for situations where you can go out and gather information necessary to construct a better case.