Social Combat

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 3:27 pm

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).

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.

It's just a rough idea right now, but it's a step towards preventing all social encounters from becoming hostile.

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.

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.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 4:03 pm

Step 1, before your diplomacy does anything else is that it needs to affect the fucking NPC reaction roll. If the diplomacy ability doesn't do that, then no one who is the slightest bit honest about it is going to recognize what it does as "diplomacy" over the course of a campaign. It might still be good, or at least good enough to buy at whatever price the game has set for it - but it won't be anything that a single honest person would recognize as being diplomatic in a game.

Unless you have the opportunity to keep a battle from happening in the first place, it's not fucking diplomacy. It could be combat mind lasers, or post-battle interrogation, and it might be useful in the game. But it's not diplomacy and anyone who says otherwise is literally taking a shit on this conversation.

If this were set in modern times, it wouldn't be an issue. The vast majority of people are in talkative moods and pretty much no one is running around with a drawn sword, jumping at shadows. You could have people come with whatever initial attitude you wanted and model social skills as shifting the ones that were already there (as 3e D&D does). However, the moment you enter D&D land and "roll initiative" becomes a normal reaction to encountering another creature for the first time, then setting initial attitudes becomes a completely necessary thing for any social ability to function at all.

If a standardly available initial attitude could be "you don't have a social encounter in the first place", then characters who invest in social encounter abilities need to be able to influence the initial attitudes of NPCs so that their social encounter abilities can even happen. This is damn near a tautology and if you're still arguing against it at this point there is genuinely something wrong with you.

-Username17

quanta · Post by **quanta** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 4:38 pm

And that task is a measure of your diplomatic ability, you ass.

It really doesn't have to be. That task could be something like "As long as you don't cut down the dryad's tree, she won't be hostile". It could be "Say the secret password, and they won't be hostile". It could be that you make a flashy display of your mighty combat power and intimidate your enemies into not fighting. It could be literally a million things that have fuck-all to do with your diplomatic ability. And all of those things are more interesting than "I have awesome diplomacy skills, combat will not occur unless the enemy is mindless."

If this were set in modern times, it wouldn't be an issue. The vast majority of people are in talkative moods and pretty much no one is running around with a drawn sword, jumping at shadows. You could have people come with whatever initial attitude you wanted and model social skills as shifting the ones that were already there (as 3e D&D does). However, the moment you enter D&D land and "roll initiative" becomes a normal reaction to encountering another creature for the first time, then setting initial attitudes becomes a completely necessary thing for any social ability to function at all.

It's not like anyone in modern times expects to engage in diplomacy in the middle of a fucking battlefield. D&D diplomacy doesn't have to be effective in this situation either.

And it's not like every D&D setting is required to be about nothing but potential facestabbing.

Now I don't particularly care if diplomacy can sometimes prevent hostilities, but it seems ridiculous to me to claim that it must be able to for anyone to realize it is diplomacy. Just like stabbing things to death should not always be an option to solve the problem at hand, diplomacy doesn't need to always be an option to solve the problem at hand.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 4:47 pm

quanta what the fuck do you think diplomacy IS? I'm imagining the bit in Left Behind where Nicolae Carpathia's big speech to the U.N. literally consists of him reciting the names of all the member nations in alphabetical order but it's received as the greatest oration in history because...well, the books are too shitty to explain why, but it's probably some sort of supernatural Antichrist mind-whammy that we might think of as a Diplomacy check modifier of +80.

I'm going to try to state this clearly. If "convince wary, potentially hostile people you've just met to negotiate with you" is NOT an action covered by your diplomacy subsystem, but rather one that takes place in ad-hoc "common sense" rulings, you have to explain what the fuck actually is covered by "diplomacy".

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 4:56 pm

Stubbazubba wrote:It's just a rough idea right now, but it's a step towards preventing all social encounters from becoming hostile.

If we're using action-adventure fiction as a guide it should be easier to make indifferent people your friend than it is to make indifferent or even unfriendly people want to fight you.

Except for the most shallow of action movies, most serious conversations don't devolve into fights unless one of the parties already intended to use violence. Even if negotiations break down and the parties end up turning hostile, it's rarely the case that people actually start fighting if they didn't already intend to throw down if the conversation didn't go how they wanted.

Notice that most violence in action-adventure fiction is either premeditated (it is my destiny to fight Darth Vader; shoot anyone who comes down this hallway without proper identification; if they don't agree to pay the bridge toll then waste them) or happens in the heat of the moment before one party can open negotiation channels.

quanta wrote:Now I don't particularly care if diplomacy can sometimes prevent hostilities, but it seems ridiculous to me to claim that it must be able to for anyone to realize it is diplomacy.

Why aren't you embarrassed at throwing out such a blatant misrepresentation of our position?

Sure, diplomacy should sometimes fail. Sometimes the guards arrest you because you pissed a patrolmen off and sometimes you start a bar fight even though you just wanted some pretzels.

But diplomacy has to have some chance of stopping a potential fight from happening at all. Otherwise you have the absurdity of people always fighting for one or more rounds before the conflict ends even though one or both parties would rather not fight. And THAT is actually what happens in shit systems like D&D 3E/4E and Exalted.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 6:30 pm

Can't people ready an action and talk?

Is the Diplomat supposed to have a decent chance of persuading the assassin not to shoot without knowing the assassin is there? If so, your Diplomacy skill should probably be called "Cute and Innocent" or something.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 6:52 pm

Foxwarrior wrote: Is the Diplomat supposed to have a decent chance of persuading the assassin not to shoot without knowing the assassin is there?

Believe it or not, the answer to this question is 'yes'. An unarmed diplomat (that doesn't quite look like the assassin's target) talking to the shadows to get the intruder to show himself should have a greater chance of not getting shot than a diplomat wielding a bloody axe and bragging to the shadows that he's going to relax after this confrontation by slaying the assassin's kids.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 7:03 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
Foxwarrior wrote: Is the Diplomat supposed to have a decent chance of persuading the assassin not to shoot without knowing the assassin is there?
Believe it or not, the answer to this question is 'yes'. An unarmed diplomat (that doesn't quite look like the assassin's target) talking to the shadows to get the intruder to show himself should have a greater chance of not getting shot than a diplomat wielding a bloody axe and bragging to the shadows that he's going to relax after this confrontation by slaying the assassin's kids.

Reverse the situational bonuses and penalties if you're rolling Intimidate instead.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 7:30 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
Foxwarrior wrote: Is the Diplomat supposed to have a decent chance of persuading the assassin not to shoot without knowing the assassin is there?
Believe it or not, the answer to this question is 'yes'. An unarmed diplomat (that doesn't quite look like the assassin's target) talking to the shadows to get the intruder to show himself should have a greater chance of not getting shot than a diplomat wielding a bloody axe and bragging to the shadows that he's going to relax after this confrontation by slaying the assassin's kids.

You've entirely missed the point if the diplomat knows enough to decide to talk to the shadows. If he does, why can't he cast Quickened Dimension Door instead?

quanta · Post by **quanta** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 7:44 pm

If "convince wary, potentially hostile people you've just met to negotiate with you" is NOT an action covered by your diplomacy subsystem, but rather one that takes place in ad-hoc "common sense" rulings, you have to explain what the fuck actually is covered by "diplomacy".

Don't be a fuckwit. There's a difference between potentially hostile people and PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY HOSTILE TO YOU AND HAVE ALREADY DECIDED TO FUCKING STAB YOU. What I'm claiming is that there doesn't need to be a reaction or attitude roll to decide whether or not someone has already chosen to stab you. You don't get a chance to diplomacize the assassin if he gets the jump on you, and you probably can't do anything with diplomacy in the middle of pitched battlefield even though you haven't technically engaged that particular enemy yet. And sometimes, you just can't diplomacy the enemy because his sole purpose in being there is to fucking kill you and he's not fucking retarded.

Would you flip out if I told you you couldn't use diplomacy on zombies?

Would you flip out if I told you that stabbing a priest of pelor wouldn't put you in Pelor's good graces even though being diplomatic with his priests might?

I'm pretty sure the answer to both of those is no. Now figure out how combat not always being a possible solution is somehow different than diplomacy not always being a possible solution.

Wait, actually, first go read my previous posts where I explained what diplomacy could do that's totally unrelated to preventing fights between you and someone else.

Why aren't you embarrassed at throwing out such a blatant misrepresentation of our position?

Sure, diplomacy should sometimes fail. Sometimes the guards arrest you because you pissed a patrolmen off and sometimes you start a bar fight even though you just wanted some pretzels.

But diplomacy has to have some chance of stopping a potential fight from happening at all. Otherwise you have the absurdity of people always fighting for one or more rounds before the conflict ends even though one or both parties would rather not fight. And THAT is actually what happens in shit systems like D&D 3E/4E and Exalted.

I'm not misrepresenting your positions. I didn't claim you said it should always stop them. I claimed you said it should always have a chance to work before a fight (always able in the sense that you always get a roll that might succeed), and that furthermore you claim if it can't do that, it's not useful. Correct me if that's not what you and Frank are saying.

I can easily come up with situations where no one is about to fight, and diplomacy is still useful. Thus I claim that even if it never works in a situation that could also be handled by fighting, it could still be a good and useful skill (in comparison to current D&D skills, which take a backseat to feats, class, etc.). Read my previous posts.

There are many situations where you wish to bargain with someone, they wish to bargain with you, and at no point does either person even consider stabbing the other as an option. Diplomacy is obviously applicable in these situations.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 8:04 pm

Foxwarrior wrote: You've entirely missed the point if the diplomat knows enough to decide to talk to the shadows.

Frank is at least consistent in his suggestions: if your diplomacy system has to involve someone deciding to talk, it's already too late. You should make a reaction roll as soon as you see someone, before they even have a chance to talk or do anything.

Of course, you can have bizarre hair-splitting. What if the assassin is blind? Or blind and deaf -- is detecting vibrations and air currents from a diplomat enough to trigger a reaction roll?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 10:41 pm

Foxwarrior wrote:You've entirely missed the point if the diplomat knows enough to decide to talk to the shadows.

The talking to the shadows is how you're presenting yourself, not the actual 'make a discrete check' trigger. Probably one of the best ways to indicate to someone that you'd like to parley with a potentially hostile person of unknown position is to of course raise your voice and make your demands known.

Declaring that the diplomacy trigger only goes off because the diplomat 'knows' somewhere is there is gross metagaming.

quanta wrote:I'm not misrepresenting your positions. I didn't claim you said it should always stop them. I claimed you said it should always have a chance to work before a fight (always able in the sense that you always get a roll that might succeed), and that furthermore you claim if it can't do that, it's not useful. Correct me if that's not what you and Frank are saying.

Oh, is that all? As long as you're not doing the most important thing that diplomacy is supposed to do I guess it's still okay to call what you have left diplomacy if it has enough other geegaw attached to it.

As far as D&D is concerned, diplomacy has to be able to stop potential fights before they get to the violence phase. If your system can't do that then your diplomat at the very least is going to have to try to cool hostilities down after someone turned someone into a skeleton or lopped off their head. And that's retarded.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 10:52 pm

So are you saying that good diplomats regularlyconstantly talk to shadows with the assumption that there might be an assassin in them, Lago?

Tell me when the Diplomat causes a Reaction Roll in this situation:

1. A Wizard assassin is hiding in the woods, looking at the town square, where he knows Ms. Diplomat will be speaking at this time.

2. The Wizard assassin casts fireball, at the town square.

3. The explosion reveals to Ms. Diplomat that someone is trying to attack her, as she fades into unconsciousness.

My assertion is that if you say it should happen before Step 3, your Reaction Roll stat should be called Cute and Innocent, because in order to speak to the assassin before Step 3, Ms. Diplomat would have to be prescient, and "all diplomats can sense danger before it happens, but are unwilling to run away or defend themselves until they have attempted to calm things down" is silly in a most unsatisfying way.

jadagul · Post by **jadagul** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 11:39 pm

I think y'all are conflating two parts of the problem here. Well, I don't think Frank is in his head, but I think he is in what he's actually writing. And I could be wrong about what's in Frank's head.

Sometimes you'll encounter creatures or people who don't have an opinion of you. They seriously don't. Right before you first walk into the guard post outside the castle and ask to speak to the captain, the guard there doesn't have an opinion of you. He's not indifferent towards you; he's never heard of you before and so doesn't have an opinion at all.

And so he forms his opinion after the encounter begins and so your character should have some control over the opinion he forms. Because it should make a difference if you show up with no visible weaponry and are polite and deferential, or if you come in waving a large axe and demanding that the captain of the guard present himself _now_. And people who have diplomatic skills should be able to make this go better for themselves. And in particular, even if you're an elf and the the guard post is in the City of Elf-Haters you should have some chance of defusing the situation with enough parley flags and such--otherwise the DM is arbitrarily deciding whether your diplomat gets a chance to talk his way in or not.

But there is a completely different situation where you're encountering a creature who already knows about you and has formed an opinion of you. You talk your way into the Captain's office in the City of the Elf-Haters and convince him that even though you're an elf you're a stand-up guy. And you have important news of a plot against the king by his vizier, and foil an assassination attempt in a very visible way, and now everyone in the city knows who you are. And pro-king people have heard of you and are fans because you saved the king, and pro-vizier people have heard of you and are mad because you foiled the vizier.

You don't really need a reaction roll per se any more because people have already formed an opinion of you. You should still get a chance to defuse situations by taking appropriate precautions, and enough parley-flags should let you start a negotiation with the vizier's second, but he's not rolling a _reaction_ because he already hates you. Similarly, if you don't know about an assassin sent for you and you haven't noticed him yet, he doesn't need to roll reaction; but if you notice him you get a chance to talk him down.

This is different from if you're walking through a corridor and there's an assassin hiding in the shadows for _someone else_. Maybe he'll decide to attack you and maybe he won't, but this depends on his reaction to you, and again you should get to influence this because it should make a difference whether, say, you're dressed up like someone on his side or someone on the other side.

quanta · Post by **quanta** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:05 am

The talking to the shadows is how you're presenting yourself, not the actual 'make a discrete check' trigger. Probably one of the best ways to indicate to someone that you'd like to parley with a potentially hostile person of unknown position is to of course raise your voice and make your demands known.

Declaring that the diplomacy trigger only goes off because the diplomat 'knows' somewhere is there is gross metagaming.

Are you being intentionally retarded Lago? The in-game diplomat does not know there is an assassin anywhere near him. He believes he is sitting alone in his room/in a dining hall full of friends/whatever. He doesn't make his demands known to the assassin because he doesn't spend his whole fucking day yelling out his parley demands on the off chance someone he does not even know exists happens to be near him and happens to be there to kill him.

The diplomat shouldn't get a check because he is unaware there is an assassin. He doesn't know there is an assassin somewhere but is just unsure of the assassin's position. JFK didn't get a diplomacy check against Lee Harvey Oswald before he got his brains blown out, because he was unaware that Lee Harvey Oswald even existed.

Any world where your target being aware of you gives them a chance to diplomacize you that has a significant chance to succeed is a world where anyone who needs to kill anyone is going to do their best to fucking nuke their target from as far away as possible, kill their target without their target ever being aware, or is going to put earplugs in their ears so they can't hear the diplomat talking.

The last one is actually kind of a cool idea, in that in a world where there are a significant number of people who can diplomacize you into dropping your weapon and singing kumbaya, it can make sense to handicap yourself so that they have a harder time influencing you.

Oh, is that all? As long as you're not doing the most important thing that diplomacy is supposed to do I guess it's still okay to call what you have left diplomacy if it has enough other geegaw attached to it.

As far as D&D is concerned, diplomacy has to be able to stop potential fights before they get to the violence phase. If your system can't do that then your diplomat at the very least is going to have to try to cool hostilities down after someone turned someone into a skeleton or lopped off their head. And that's retarded.

See, the difference between us is you view diplomacy as a thing you mostly do in a situation that is otherwise likely to lead to stabbing (between the very people talking, not the nations or parties they represent or something). That doesn't mesh with the idea of diplomacy in anyone's mind who hasn't played D&D. And the idea that every encounter (PC-NPC interaction) should have the possibility of leading to stabbing (not counting player decisions to stab first) is retarded.

I'm not even sure where you get the idea that diplomacy is mostly a thing you do when someone tries to mug you or murder you. That's... definitely not the real world, and it's an unintentional bug in 3.5 that a character with pimped out diplomacy can rush a diplomacy check as a full round action and always make someone instantly friendly. D&D diplomacy is already a thing you can also apply towards people who are your friends or who are indifferent to you (and thus are not going to stab you). And it's even more likely to work then.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:33 am

quanta wrote:I'm not even sure where you get the idea that diplomacy is mostly a thing you do when someone tries to mug you or murder you.

I'm pretty sure that was explained only a few posts up. It went something like "In the context of D&D: Murder Hoboes, 90-95% of potentially nonviolent conflicts start with 'You see a creature. Do you try to kill it?' If the creature being diplomatic doesn't affect that decision, being diplomatic is not a very valuable ability."

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 5:29 am

Foxwarrior wrote:'You see a creature. Do you try to kill it?' If the creature being diplomatic doesn't affect that decision, being diplomatic is not a very valuable ability."

Tell that to charm person. It is a diplomatic ability that does not prevent a combat, is used in combat, and which if fighting multiple opponents does not end the combat, but it is clearly of value.

The problem is you see that if you ACTUALLY look at D&D murder hobos the way it has been and the way people want it to be the vast majority of mechanical "social" themed effects are, and indeed ALREADY are, regular in combat effects, fears, charms, blesses, dazes, stuns, etc... with Inspirational Bardic Music probably racking in as the annoying poster child by sheer demographic majority.

If you are OBSESSED with social mechanics as actual "Diplomacy" you have basically gotten your head stuck up your ass in confusion over the fact that 3.x happened to just use that as a tangentially relevant title for one of it's few non magical social mechanics which actually was applied to what amounted to it's non-magical Charm Person option rather than, say, anything to do with fucking diplomats.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 5:58 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
Mguy wrote:Apparently I'm too much of a wanker for you to bother explaining how any of these options don't allow you to start a diplomatic encounter.
Ending a combat encounter is not the same thing as starting a social encounter. You might as well say that speak with dead is just as good as Diplomacy at that point.

-Username17

So what exactly keeps you from starting a social encounter with the options I laid out? What, to you, constitutes starting a social encounter?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 11:53 am

MGuy wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:
Mguy wrote:Apparently I'm too much of a wanker for you to bother explaining how any of these options don't allow you to start a diplomatic encounter.
Ending a combat encounter is not the same thing as starting a social encounter. You might as well say that speak with dead is just as good as Diplomacy at that point.

-Username17
So what exactly keeps you from starting a social encounter with the options I laid out? What, to you, constitutes starting a social encounter?

A social encounter is one in which you talk to someone. Rather than an encounter where you fight them and then interrogate them afterward. I really don't understand why this seems so fucking hard for you to understand.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:16 pm

quanta wrote:Are you being intentionally retarded Lago? The in-game diplomat does not know there is an assassin anywhere near him. He believes he is sitting alone in his room/in a dining hall full of friends/whatever. He doesn't make his demands known to the assassin because he doesn't spend his whole fucking day yelling out his parley demands on the off chance someone he does not even know exists happens to be near him and happens to be there to kill him.

Yes, quanta, if you change the bounds of my example to something that's completely different you can infer new arguments from it and then argue against the phantoms in your peabrain.

I don't know why you're so weirdly obsessed with the 'talking to shadows' thing; my theory is that your brain has been turned to parochial mush by 3E D&D and can't imagine any other diplomacy paradigm that isn't at its core I make a diplomacy check at it!!. Nonetheless, the point is that your poise should be a big factor in determine whether potential hostiles hear you out, walk away, or get to stabbing. And if you're out in the open and intentionally making yourself a target and making an attempt to talk, that should in most cases make someone less likely to stab you than if you were standing in a safe area being quiet. Similarly, standing in a safe area being quiet should in most cases make you less likely to be stabbed than waving your weapons and singing orcish war songs.

quanta wrote:I'm not even sure where you get the idea that diplomacy is mostly a thing you do when someone tries to mug you or murder you.

Foxwarrior wrote:I'm pretty sure that was explained only a few posts up. It went something like "In the context of D&D: Murder Hoboes, 90-95% of potentially nonviolent conflicts start with 'You see a creature. Do you try to kill it?' If the creature being diplomatic doesn't affect that decision, being diplomatic is not a very valuable ability."

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 2:41 pm

A lot of times I also wonder what people think the actual diplomatic actions you take are. They'll list a bunch of desired results, but then they'll also say that a bunch of specific actions that we would recognize as elements of diplomacy or negotiation are actually not a part of the system and are instead to be resolved by MTP or common sense or whatever. Is there a mental model for what actions a person with diplomacy is pumped, beyond "make a diplomacy check"/"make a Social Full Attack"/etc.?

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 3:53 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
quanta wrote:Are you being intentionally retarded Lago? The in-game diplomat does not know there is an assassin anywhere near him. (...) He doesn't make his demands known to the assassin because he doesn't spend his whole fucking day yelling out his parley demands on the off chance someone he does not even know exists happens to be near him and happens to be there to kill him.
Yes, quanta, if you change the bounds of my example to something that's completely different you can infer new arguments from it and then argue against the phantoms in your peabrain.

I don't know why you're so weirdly obsessed with the 'talking to shadows' thing; my theory is that your brain has been turned to parochial mush by 3E D&D and can't imagine any other diplomacy paradigm that isn't at its core I make a diplomacy check at it!!.

I have to admit, your trolling in this thread is brilliant Lago. I mean lets look at the example you gave.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
Foxwarrior wrote:Is the Diplomat supposed to have a decent chance of persuading the assassin not to shoot without knowing the assassin is there?
Believe it or not, the answer to this question is 'yes'. An unarmed diplomat (that doesn't quite look like the assassin's target) talking to the shadows to get the intruder to show himself should have a greater chance of not getting shot than a diplomat wielding a bloody axe and bragging to the shadows that he's going to relax after this confrontation by slaying the assassin's kids.

So you inverted the scenario and afterwards complain someone is asking the original question again. I laughed, but isn't your trolling becoming too obvious like this?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 4:06 pm

ishy wrote:So you inverted the scenario and afterwards complain someone is asking the original question again. I laughed, but isn't your trolling becoming too obvious like this?

Is it the truly the case that TGDers can only mentally handle the concept of 'attempting to parley' if it's accompanied and resolved by a discrete Proper Noun check?

I'm sorry of accusing quanta and anyone of misrepresenting my position. I was being sarcastic earlier, but apparently 3E D&D has turned peoples' brains to mush and any attempt to examine or create gameplay mechanics that don't emulate that standard throw a Divide By Zero exception.

I wonder what would've happened if I said that the potential diplomat was humming a soothing song at the shadows. I'd probably have gotten some confused rant about how it's unfair that only bards can parley. Fuck, I shouldn't have even said 'potential diplomat' in the first place -- that already poisoned the well such that people think that 'diplomat' solely and literally means 'someone who rolls the Diplomacy skill'.

But anyway, let's try this one more time.

quanta wrote:He doesn't make his demands known to the assassin because he doesn't spend his whole fucking day yelling out his parley demands on the off chance someone he does not even know exists happens to be near him and happens to be there to kill him.

My original post:

An unarmed diplomat (that doesn't quite look like the assassin's target) talking to the shadows to get the intruder to show himself should have a greater chance of not getting shot than a diplomat wielding a bloody axe and bragging to the shadows that he's going to relax after this confrontation by slaying the assassin's kids.

Okay? Let's step back a bit.

Thinking of diplomacy as 'you catch sight of someone or think someone is around, you DIPLOMACY it!' is totally the wrong way of implementing that system even though that's what 3E/4E D&D does. It's trivially easy to create cases where that paradigm breaks the barriers of common sense. And of course it also has a high chance of creating metagame scenarios -- unless you use something even more retarded like 3E D&D's deterministic, target-agnostic system.

Before you even should be allowed to make a bluff or diplomacy or seduce or any kind of check, you first have to be representing -- inadvertently or not -- a negotiating stance. The first diplomat does this by looking non-threatening and clearly wanting to parley. It literally doesn't even matter if the assassin left or there was never any assassin at all; the diplomat is trying to represent a position that the, any, or most critically no assassins can react to.

That scenario bends 3E D&D's diplomacy system over its knees and either forces the DM to metagame (there's no assassin there, stop making checks), implement on-the-spot houserules, or repeatedly make diplomacy checks every round that may or may not be doing anything.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 4:39 pm

So are you saying that good diplomats regularlyconstantly talk to shadows with the assumption that there might be an assassin in them, Lago?

Not regularly. But only someone who has had their brain turned to mush by 3E D&D would think that this is an implausible or even uncommon scenario. People talk to shadows or scenery in the hopes of attempting to parley to people who may or may not be there all the fucking time. Both in real life (see: any urban soldier/cop ever) and in action-adventure fiction (see: any horror movie ever).

Tell me when the Diplomat causes a Reaction Roll in this situation:

Before I answer these questions, my assumption is that the person who meets someone rolls the reaction roll. PCs don't roll reaction rolls for reasons outside the scope of this thread. If two NPC people meet they both make reaction rolls.

1. A Wizard assassin is hiding in the woods, looking at the town square, where he knows Ms. Diplomat will be speaking at this time.

Ms. Diplomat doesn't make reaction rolls. If she thinks that there are creepy crawlies out in the woods, she can present a negotiating stance. But until there's something to react to she's just walking blind.

The assassin makes the reaction roll against Ms. Diplomat when he notices her. What happens then is up in the air. If Ms. Diplomat looked like his secret wizard school crush and was wearing a hot outfit and was patting a small child on the head, the assassin might decide to delay the attack or even cancel it altogether. Alternatively, he might just be a cold or sadistic bastard who is targeting her for fanatically-held religious reasons; so even if Ms. Diplomat stacks as many positive-negotiating modifiers as she can bother it's not going to affect his decision to kill her.

If Ms. Diplomat had some sort of super sensing ability, she might make a reaction roll here. It would be pretty bad if she reacted to the wizard at this point, but not as bad as...

2. The Wizard assassin casts fireball, at the town square.

No reaction roll here, unless casting the fireball causes other bystanders who didn't notice the wizard to take heed.

If Ms. Diplomat reacted to the wizard for the first time here (for example, she has a contingency spell that among other things activates Lifesight or whatever), the reaction roll would presumably be made at a huge penalty.

3. The explosion reveals to Ms. Diplomat that someone is trying to attack her, as she fades into unconsciousness.

Unless Ms. Diplomat actually saw her attacker (or who she thought was the attacker) she still doesn't make a reaction roll. If the wizard shows up to gloat before she fades into unconsciousness or even just cast a spell to make it look like it was her jealous husband with a wand, she would make a reaction roll against that.

My assertion is that if you say it should happen before Step 3, your Reaction Roll stat should be called Cute and Innocent, because in order to speak to the assassin before Step 3, Ms. Diplomat would have to be prescient, and "all diplomats can sense danger before it happens, but are unwilling to run away or defend themselves until they have attempted to calm things down" is silly in a most unsatisfying way.

That's parochial 3E D&D thinking.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 4:55 pm

I said "cause", not "roll" for a reason, Lago.

Anyways, "If Ms. Diplomat looked like his secret wizard school crush and was wearing a hot outfit and was patting a small child on the head, the assassin might decide to delay the attack or even cancel it altogether" sounds about as close to "Diplomacy should be called Cute and Innocent" as I'm going to get out of you, isn't it?