[3.X] Diplomacy variant (PL stay out)

[virgil]

Diplomacy (Cha)
Check
You can change the attitudes of others (NPCs) and convince them to engage in services with a successful Diplomacy check. Opposed checks resolve situations when two advocates or diplomats plead opposite cases in a hearing before a third party.
Action
Convincing a nonplayer character to action or changing their attitudes with Diplomacy generally takes at least 1 full minute (10 consecutive full-round actions), but their opinion can only be improved by a single step on the Attitude scale. Improving their opinion beyond that first step requires a greatly increased time frame. A rushed Diplomacy check can be made as a full-round action, with a -10 penalty on the check.
Influencing NPC Attitudes
Use the chart below to determine the DC necessary to improve the attitude of a nonplayer character to the next step.

Initial Attitude	Means	DC to Improve
Enemy	Active dislike, would take risks to harm	20
Distrust	On guard, quick to judge	15
Indifferent	Unremarkable, passive	15
Friendly	Preferential judgement, unthreatened	20
Ally	Feels secure, personal fondness

• Starting Attitude Traditionally, a nonplayer character’s initial attitude toward players is based on the character’s reputation with their faction. This is modified by their Ideology and Ethical Taboo where applicable, separately raising or lowering the initial attitude by one step depending whether the nonplayer character is offended or impressed by what they encounter. Nonplayer characters who are subservient follow the lead of the present authority figure, and situations of conflicting loyalty are handled by DM judgement.

Requests
Asking even a friend to do something for you requires effort, at the very least to tell them what you want. The standard Diplomacy DC is 7 + Target’s HD + Attitude Modifier (Hostile +6, Unfriendly +3, Indifferent +0, Friendly -3, Helpful -6) + 10 if hostile actions have already been made in the encounter (mid-combat generally).

• Parlay With a standard Diplomacy check, you convince the target nonplayer character to forestall action for a minute to discuss matters, allowing for other Diplomacy checks to be made. Once conversations have begun, anything that would break a fascinate effect will end a Parlay, which cannot be called for a second time in the same encounter. It also necessitates that the targeted nonplayer character is the clear leader of their side in the hostilities so that their intention to stop combat for conversation will be followed. Initiating parlay is a full-round action and does not suffer the -10 penalty for rushing.
  Minor Favour You convince the target nonplayer character to engage in a particular action on your behalf. Minor favours can do no more than inconvenience the nonplayer character; provide detailed directions, provide sound advice and counsel, deliver a message across town, loan a single day’s lifestyle worth of money, clandestinely investigate a public venue when off-duty, ignore nonthreatening contraband, etc. Offering a quid pro quo grants a +5 circumstance bonus to the check. Once in debt with a nonplayer character, any further requests for favors are at a cumulative +5 to the DC until they are even.
  Major Favour You convince the nonplayer character to action of more appreciable nature, requiring a check against the standard Diplomacy DC with a -5 penalty. These actions include loaning an item or sum of money equal to a week’s lifestyle, reveal private or dangerous information, spend their free evening in a seedy bar to report on everyone who attended, a guard leaving the backdoor unlocked or even not reporting in, etc. As a general rule, the act cannot do more than mildly offend their ideology or taboo. Offering a quid pro quo grants a +5 circumstance bonus to the check. Once in debt with a nonplayer character, any further requests for favors are at a cumulative +5 to the DC until they are even.
  Entrench Friendship A special action, permitting a player to improve their attitude by more than a single step with a nonplayer character. Once per session, any single nonplayer character that has been subject to a successful Diplomacy check that session may be improved by a step.

Try Again
Optional, but not recommended because retries usually do not work. Even if the initial Diplomacy check succeeds, the other character can be persuaded only so far, and a retry may do more harm than good. If the initial check fails, the other character has probably become more firmly committed to their position, and a retry is futile.

---

Taking a page from After Sundown, every character, nonplayer and player alike, will have Ethical Taboos and an Ideology. For purposes of Diplomacy, convincing someone to violate their taboo raises the DC by 5. If the nonplayer character is being influenced towards or by something that they honor in their personal ideology, the DC is lowered by 3. Contrariwise, if they are being influenced towards or by something they despise, the DC is raised by 3. The modifiers are naturally in reverse if they are being influenced against or to reject things they honor despise. For player characters, these act as roleplaying prompts and can serve as modifiers to save DCs against such effects as suggestion.

[Kaelik]

Problems:

1) You just made a new save or die that is based on Diplomacy. So now all characters have to have max ranks in diplomacy to prevent them from being save or died with diplomacy.

2) It's harder to convince the King to toss you 50gp than it is the peasant.

3) Any character that uses Diplomacy is directly fucking over every other character in the party by making the game always 100% about them turning everyone into their bitch, and getting mad whenever you attack.

4) It's still all magic Tea Party, because none of your attitudes have any real rules.

5) The rules pretty much just contradict each other. Do you roll opposed Diplomacy like the first rules, or against DC 7+HD+Attitude like the second rules?

[virgil]

1) You just made a new save or die that is based on Diplomacy. So now all characters have to have max ranks in diplomacy to prevent them from being save or died with diplomacy.

Two things. First, the opposed check in that first paragraph of the skill was a mistake on my part from an earlier bit of copy-pasta; I have reworded it to fix that contradiction. Second, it is not a 'new' save or die when it explicitly does less than the original Diplomacy skill; especially since it cannot influence the behavior of PCs.

2) It's harder to convince the King to toss you 50gp than it is the peasant.

IFF you look at the comparison of the king's HD to the peasant's. Were anyone to have an extravagant lifestyle, it would be a king, which makes the request a Minor Favour; while that much money is outside the realm of the peasant's entire month's lifestyle, and thus you cannot convince them to do so with any amount of Diplomacy.

3) Any character that uses Diplomacy is directly fucking over every other character in the party by making the game always 100% about them turning everyone into their bitch, and getting mad whenever you attack.

I have modified (clarified?) the rules for parlay to include a major flaw.

4) It's still all magic Tea Party, because none of your attitudes have any real rules.

Attitude explicitly modifies the DC for requests, and serves as a general prompt for their behavior when combined with Ethical Taboos and Ideologies. Unless I include rules for AI, which I don't intend to right now, that's about as much as I think I can do with Attitude. You're welcome to suggest rules around Attitude to show me wrong.

---

I am thinking of including a rule against requesting more than one favour per encounter with any single person, with a penalty if you're already in their debt favour-wise. In addition, I'm tempted to change the Ideology modifier include a severity modifier since it's already got a hierarchical structure of importance; making it 2 to 4 (or 3 to 6) instead of a flat 3.

[Lokey]

I guess 3.x tabletop?

Ok so my 8 cha level 1 evil commoner with no ranks or items needs how many of my friends with aid another actions to no fail convince a 90th level paladin of Tyr to kill all the babies in the city? I.e. badly needs better explaining of what you want the rules to allow to start with, then a raft of assumptions about the rest of your rules to make sure it can't be trivially broken by Noskill McCommoner who actually tries a roll.

Don't like the friendship aspect much. Why put a have to have skill rank and waste the time on the roll to something the DM should be doing anyway (keeping up with how his npcs will react to the PCs)?

I don't think you've gotten to that place between useless and the only skill there is in DnDesque Diplo yet.

[virgil]

I guess 3.x tabletop?

Yes. Apparently it's not clear in context? I have added a tag to the subject line of the OP to fix that.

Ok so my 8 cha level 1 evil commoner with no ranks or items needs how many of my friends with aid another actions to no fail convince a 90th level paladin of Tyr to kill all the babies in the city?

Whut? How the 'ell are you inferring genocide to be an option covered by the rules provided out of the examples given in the favours? Why would you expect aid another to possibly work that way? Do hamlets have one guy put a single skill point in a bunch of knowledges so the community can aid another into total omniscience? Can an arbitrarily large number of commoners get together and throw someone to the cloud giant fortress thanks to Aid Another and Jump?

[Omegonthesane]

I guess 3.x tabletop?

Yes. Apparently it's not clear in context? I have added a tag to the subject line of the OP to fix that.

Ok so my 8 cha level 1 evil commoner with no ranks or items needs how many of my friends with aid another actions to no fail convince a 90th level paladin of Tyr to kill all the babies in the city?

Whut? How the 'ell are you inferring genocide to be an option covered by the rules provided out of the examples given in the favours?

Well, theoretically for a 90th level cleric of Erythnul to kill all the babies within a city containing no one over 5th level and all of the people-not-over-5th-level who tried to stop them would be only a Minor Favour, as it'd inconvenience them and not be in any way morally objectionable to a devout follower of the god of slaughter.

Nothing about the descriptions of Minor Favour or Major Favour strictly rules out genocide against sufficiently weak beings by sufficiently powerful beings.

[Korwin]

Per the Nanobot build, yes you can.

[virgil]

Per the Nanobot build, yes you can.

Having never heard of this 'nanobot build' until you mentioned it, followed by some Google research, am I correct in the feeling that it's on the same rules footing as Pun-pun? My first instinct is to ignore criticisms for my Diplomacy variant when they're founded on the same principles as a peasant-fueled space elevator/launcher.

[RobbyPants]

Per the Nanobot build, yes you can.

Having never heard of this 'nanobot build' until you mentioned it, followed by some Google research, am I correct in the feeling that it's on the same rules footing as Pun-pun? My first instinct is to ignore criticisms for my Diplomacy variant when they're founded on the same principles as a peasant-fueled space elevator/launcher.

Shit-tons of Aid Another stacking to fuck with skill checks.

[Leress]

Aid Another
You can help another character achieve success on his or her skill check by making the same kind of skill check in a cooperative effort. If you roll a 10 or higher on your check, the character you are helping gets a +2 bonus to his or her check, as per the rule for favorable conditions. (You can’t take 10 on a skill check to aid another.) In many cases, a character’s help won’t be beneficial, or only a limited number of characters can help at once.

In cases where the skill restricts who can achieve certain results you can’t aid another to grant a bonus to a task that your character couldn’t achieve alone.

There is no hard limit and it only gives very vague guidelines on how to limit aid another. So you need a way to limit this to close the loophole.

[Schleiermacher]

Well, for example you have to be able to mount a "cooperative effort" on a scale that registers as a meaningful contribution to the main performer of the skill check. So a hive of nanobots, for example, would be making one collective aid attempt at best to aid in any physical task, not one for each individual bot.

[Lokey]

I'll admit that I didn't read the examples carefully enough, it might be covered.

There's plenty of other ways to break DnD, it's just that wish is core and hopelessly broken and accessible somewhat early (at least level 11 by core spells without chance of being atomized, probably much earlier).

Even without Aid Another or artificer item stuff putting checks into the triple digits at level 5 or even earlier, I'm still thinking it's a skill tax for normal interactions. Maybe the rogue/bard/so on don't have enough to do in your game?

[Ice9]

I guess 3.x tabletop?

Yes. Apparently it's not clear in context? I have added a tag to the subject line of the OP to fix that.

Ok so my 8 cha level 1 evil commoner with no ranks or items needs how many of my friends with aid another actions to no fail convince a 90th level paladin of Tyr to kill all the babies in the city?

Whut? How the 'ell are you inferring genocide to be an option covered by the rules provided out of the examples given in the favours?

Well, theoretically for a 90th level cleric of Erythnul to kill all the babies within a city containing no one over 5th level and all of the people-not-over-5th-level who tried to stop them would be only a Minor Favour, as it'd inconvenience them and not be in any way morally objectionable to a devout follower of the god of slaughter.

Nothing about the descriptions of Minor Favour or Major Favour strictly rules out genocide against sufficiently weak beings by sufficiently powerful beings.

Sure, but that doesn't seem like an undesirable outcome. You're not getting a paladin to do it, you're getting someone already inclined to do that kind of thing to do it.

[Omegonthesane]

Yes. Apparently it's not clear in context? I have added a tag to the subject line of the OP to fix that.Whut? How the 'ell are you inferring genocide to be an option covered by the rules provided out of the examples given in the favours?

Well, theoretically for a 90th level cleric of Erythnul to kill all the babies within a city containing no one over 5th level and all of the people-not-over-5th-level who tried to stop them would be only a Minor Favour, as it'd inconvenience them and not be in any way morally objectionable to a devout follower of the god of slaughter.

Nothing about the descriptions of Minor Favour or Major Favour strictly rules out genocide against sufficiently weak beings by sufficiently powerful beings.

Sure, but that doesn't seem like an undesirable outcome. You're not getting a paladin to do it, you're getting someone already inclined to do that kind of thing to do it.

Yeah, getting someone with deep moral opposition to genocide to commit genocide seems outside the scope of a Major Favour, and this system doesn't have a save DC for getting someone to perform a This Is Why We Can't Have Diplomacy Rules Favour, like, at all.

It's just, Virgil was claiming that there was no scope at all for genocide in the rules as written despite them clearly being meant to encompass a broad array of conceivable favours.

[Korwin]

Per the Nanobot build, yes you can.

Having never heard of this 'nanobot build' until you mentioned it, followed by some Google research, am I correct in the feeling that it's on the same rules footing as Pun-pun? My first instinct is to ignore criticisms for my Diplomacy variant when they're founded on the same principles as a peasant-fueled space elevator/launcher.

Well RAW there is no hard limit on aid another, and while the Nanobot is an extreme case... you still might want to limit it in you rules. Or at least insert an rule about gruppenzwang (whats the english word for that? Google translates it from german Gruppenzwang to englisch gruppenzwang???).

[Leress]

Well RAW there is no hard limit on aid another, and while the Nanobot is an extreme case... you still might want to limit it in you rules. Or at least insert an rule about gruppenzwang (whats the english word for that? Google translates it from german Gruppenzwang to englisch gruppenzwang???).

My browser translates it to Peer Pressure.

[virgil]

It's just, Virgil was claiming that there was no scope at all for genocide in the rules as written despite them clearly being meant to encompass a broad array of conceivable favours.

The specific genocide was being requested of a paladin of Tyr, and specifically mass infanticide. When the examples of a major favour are on the moral scale of a negligent guard, then I'm going to call BS on interpretations like "ask the pillar of Law & Good to kill a bunch of babies."

Honestly, the closest way to 'counter' that would be something like "Minor favours cannot be viewed negatively under the nonplayer character's Taboo or Ideology, and Major Favours can only mildly go against them."

[Chamomile]

I don't really think it's fair to hold Virgil's system responsible for the failings of Aid Another. The Aid Another action breaks every skill, and every GM who wants skills to be balanced is going to have to find a solution to it.

[Leress]

I don't really think it's fair to hold Virgil's system responsible for the failings of Aid Another. The Aid Another action breaks every skill, and every GM who wants skills to be balanced is going to have to find a solution to it.

What is stopping him from writing a caveat?

[Lokey]

There's lots of other problematic spells and class features for any skill check design. No more than that. Way more than enough to make a die roll pointless (maybe by accident) on the scale above (32+hit dice or that neighborhood) with only a few levels, yet enough for John McLackOfSkillPoints to fall off the d20 too (lend me some holy water to save the city, oh that sucks. When can I try again, and how do I get a 20+ circumstance bonus?)

It's just not clear yet what the design goals are. Kinda nice to have them first, then apply a scaling check system that meets those goals. Depending on the table you want dcs in the 1000s at level 5 or dcs in the teens still at level 10. 3.x covers just a bit of ground

[Kaelik]

I don't really think it's fair to hold Virgil's system responsible for the failings of Aid Another. The Aid Another action breaks every skill, and every GM who wants skills to be balanced is going to have to find a solution to it.

No, Aid Another Breaks every skill that can be broken by breaking the RNG.

If he's writing a skill that is broken when it break the RNG, that's his fault.

Second, it is not a 'new' save or die when it explicitly does less than the original Diplomacy skill; especially since it cannot influence the behavior of PCs.

1) Okay, Blanket PC immunity, so it's just a skill based save or die on the enemy team, and therefore all NPCs need to have max diplo ranks, and still get RNG broken Save Or Died anyway.

2) You are writing new diplo rules, that means you are writing a new save or die, here is my logic:

a) Old Diplo rules are shit and no one uses them.
b) You are writing new rules.
c) You expect people to use your new rules.
d) Your rules have a save or die.
Therefore: New save or die.

IFF you look at the comparison of the king's HD to the peasant's. Were anyone to have an extravagant lifestyle, it would be a king, which makes the request a Minor Favour; while that much money is outside the realm of the peasant's entire month's lifestyle, and thus you cannot convince them to do so with any amount of Diplomacy.

Uh what? That... does not follow. Accepting for the moment that you mean for minor and major favor to apply to the target's lifestyle, then all you did was guaranteed that it is easier to go collect off a bunch of peasants than off one king. Still falling into the same permanent trap of "If you want money, find someone who doesn't have much and take what he has, because that will work more than asking someone with a lot."

I have modified (clarified?) the rules for parlay to include a major flaw.

So.... It's still a save or die that pisses off the entire party, but now sometimes it only works on one member of a group, and sometimes it works on the whole group, and in either case, it's still a war of stupid fucking Diplomancer versus Party.

Attitude explicitly modifies the DC for requests, and serves as a general prompt for their behavior when combined with Ethical Taboos and Ideologies. Unless I include rules for AI, which I don't intend to right now, that's about as much as I think I can do with Attitude. You're welcome to suggest rules around Attitude to show me wrong.

The point is that you wrote a bunch of rules that, aside from money, are still just 100% magic tea party. Also, no amount of non-RNG breaking modifier is ever going to make sense. The idea that you could ask literally anything of a hostile person and get it even possibly when asking the same thing of an indifferent person would fail is nonsense.

Especially when the only thing you actually have rules for is giving money.

I am thinking of including a rule against requesting more than one favour per encounter with any single person, with a penalty if you're already in their debt favour-wise. In addition, I'm tempted to change the Ideology modifier include a severity modifier since it's already got a hierarchical structure of importance; making it 2 to 4 (or 3 to 6) instead of a flat 3.

Uh.... that doesn't even.... Cart.... Horse.....

Look, I don't know what a favor even is, apparently it could be anything from "be my personal slave forever" to "please don't kill me this second" so your rule could be anywhere from meaningless to so crippling that it results in mandatory murder.

[virgil]

No, Aid Another Breaks every skill that can be broken by breaking the RNG.

If he's writing a skill that is broken when it break the RNG, that's his fault.

Then Jump is broken, because any game where a hamlet can throw people to the top of a mountain is not a sensible game; which is a flaw in Aid Another and not Jump. Now, outside of Aid Another nonsense, I am attempting to address the issue of extreme bonuses by restricting what the skill can do.

Uh what? That... does not follow. Accepting for the moment that you mean for minor and major favor to apply to the target's lifestyle, then all you did was guaranteed that it is easier to go collect off a bunch of peasants than off one king.

At which point, so what? Nobody is going to be offended at the idea of it being harder to ask a high level King for money than a peasant, even if it would require going out and finding several hundred commoners to all pitch in to equal the results of a single King's boon.

and in either case, it's still a war of stupid fucking Diplomancer versus Party.

Inconceivable, talking to people requires cooperation from the rest of the party! If I recall, you were offended at the idea of a Reaction Roll for similar reasons.

The idea that you could ask literally anything of a hostile person and get it even possibly when asking the same thing of an indifferent person would fail is nonsense.

Obviously people say different things to get it done, and that's represented by a skill check.

Look, I don't know what a favor even is, apparently it could be anything from "be my personal slave forever" to "please don't kill me this second"

Take your strawman and go svck a barrel of cocks. Like Pun Pun, you are being disingenuous to think the scope of my examples and think "be my slave" or "killing every baby is part of your lawful good paladin code" fit under the same umbrella.

Having some vagueness is a bloody requirement for a social system, and everyone needs to accept that. I'll take suggestions & criticisms for the guidelines, or even the organization of them, but leaving out equivocal examples is not an option. People are not rational actors, which means rules meant to interact with them can't be completely objective and rational. At the same time, everyone interacts with people, which means we have our own set of irrational beliefs in how others behave. Even when speaking of actual behavior in the past tense, people can call it unbelievable (just look at Poe's Law). Obviously a particular person is going to react differently based on numerous little things that accumulated throughout their life, their day, and the situation (including delivery). But conservation of detail is necessary in a cooperative storytelling game, especially for nonplayer characters, and so you need to accept that you'll need to retroactively add detail to explain a behavior and work off of prompts that can support the conclusion.

[Kaelik]

Then Jump is broken, because any game where a hamlet can throw people to the top of a mountain is not a sensible game; which is a flaw in Aid Another and not Jump.

That's both not broken and not what actually happens.

If you do the math, you will find out that a hamlet working together even of max size, still only gets a check of about 410 on their throwing a guy check, which is good for throwing someone 102 ft into the air, assuming they get a running start.

Obviously a village being able to throw a guy up a mountain isn't going to be broken at all.

Inconceivable, talking to people requires cooperation from the rest of the party! If I recall, you were offended at the idea of a Reaction Roll for similar reasons.

There are some ways that the Reaction Roll (such as it doesn't exist because no one is capable of writing rules for it) is better than your system, and there are ways it has the same problems as your rules.

It's better, primarily, in that it's something that literally happens "on the monsters turn" before the PCs even can do anything, so at least when the party collectively obtains larger and larger piles of minions who obey them and/or the party kills off more and more "friendly" enemies without letting the Diplomancer Mind Control them, the Diplomancer can't say "I spent my action convincing them to talk and then you wasted it with your fireball." and the Party won't say "Why the fuck do you spend your actions making all ours into actions we aren't allowed to take, so you can play the minigame you want to play."

It still has the same problem, in that the party and the Diplomancer actually want different results on the reaction roll, because the party knows that if the reaction roll comes up "friendly" they can't kill the goblin patrol without being the "dicks" since the roll assigned this encounter to the Diplomancer. So the two sides are in conflict in how they want to resolve the situation at all times. Your system carries over that same problem, because the rest of the Party is hoping that he fails the check to take the encounter away from him and turn into his game of Mind Control.

Take your strawman and go svck a barrel of cocks. Like Pun Pun, you are being disingenuous to think the scope of my examples and think "be my slave" or "killing every baby is part of your lawful good paladin code" fit under the same umbrella.

Your examples don't exist except for money. You have a minor favor for the goblin patrol to give you directions to Vraath Keep, but a major favor for the goblin patrol to tell you where Vraath Keep is.

You can't "Make people your slave" but you can totally just tell them to fucking switch sides, and they totally have to do that, so who gives a fuck? All it takes is the most basic ability to phrase requests to make people effectively your bitch slaves. You tell them to go stand in a fucking corner and wait for you to kill their boss, then you kill their boss, and then you tell them that since they don't have an employer, maybe they want a job.

But like I said, on the other end of your vagueness rules, while convincing someone to help you kill their boss is apparently something you can definitely do, convincing someone to not kill you is not listed anywhere.

If you run into some Hostile Fuck, and convince him to Parlay, you can definitely force him to run letters for you, but it's not clear whether he just tears off to deliver the letter, or he kills you first, then delivers the letter, because no part of either listed guideline includes the option "stop hitting me."

Having some vagueness is a bloody requirement for a social system, and everyone needs to accept that. I'll take suggestions & criticisms for the guidelines, or even the organization of them, but leaving out equivocal examples is not an option.

Okay fine, here's a suggestion, come up with any fucking guidelines at all.

[Ice9]

Are people even reading the OP, or are they reading the words "Diplomacy variant" and filling the rest in themselves?

While there are actual things you can complain about, being able to auto-enslave people by breaking the RNG isn't one of them. That's because this system doesn't even have an option for "be my slave forever" - the DC for that isn't a higher number, it's "go fuck yourself".

Which I'm fine with, in fact. "But some people IRL have totally mindfucked people!" Yeah, but that doesn't mean it has to be a basic function of having the skill at all, any more than having +$TEXAS in Knowledge(arcana) lets you cast spells. Spend a class feature on that shit, or at least a feat.

[virgil]

Okay fine, here's a suggestion, come up with any fucking guidelines at all.

On the one hand, more/better guidelines would be a good thing which I won't deny. On the other hand, I absolutely do not trust your judgement of what a good guideline is; because you are obviously in the camp where equivocal examples mean carte blanche mind control.