Reading this thread I've decided that there needs to be some kind of stake-setting that goes along with Diplomacy, which determines the consequences if negotiations fail. Low Stakes means little or no consequence - you offer an NPC a drink, and they decline, no harm done, you go on. Normal Stakes means the NPCs' opinion of you drops one category, from Loyal to Friendly to Neutral to Unfriendly, etc. - if the Princess throws herself at you and you deny her, your relationship drops a level. High Stakes is where lives/war are potentially on the line; if they're not Hostile, they become so, and if they are Hostile, then Bad Stuff happens - when the kingdom next door demands you remove your peasants from X region or they'll remove them for you, then if negotiations fail, someone is going to get hurt.quanta wrote:Needless to say, I disagree on the exact proportions. I only picked examples where diplomacy was overwhelmingly important to the goal of the adventure. Every time you talk to an NPC about a quest is an opportunity to apply diplomacy to negotiate the reward. If your PCs are temporarily working for someone, diplomacy lets you bargain for aid on your task: "Yes, we'll hunt down the evil green dragon, but things will go much more smoothly if we can borrow one of your pathfinders to guide us through the forest." Also, not every potentially hostile encounter needs to default to being hostile. Some encounters may default to being non-hostile and only become hostile if you fail at some other task(s).
It's just a rough idea right now, but it's a step towards preventing all social encounters from becoming hostile.
Well, yeah, but we're hoping to expand it into a slightly more robust system that incorporates more than just one metric - a skill. I agree, though, that forcing a PC to choose between being good at diplomacy/bad at combat, bad at diplomacy/good at combat, or not-quite-good-enough in both is not good, so there needs to be either 1) a low cost for increasing Diplomacy abilities, or 2) separate character resources for social stuff and combat.Regardless, Diplomacy does not have to be as effective a manner for handling hostile encounters as stabbing things is, just like combat doesn't have to be as effective as diplomacy for handling negotiations. Furthermore, diplomacy doesn't need to be equally strong when averaged over all the game time if being good diplomacy costs a lot less than being good at combat.