Actual Anatomy of Failed Design: Diplomacy

[Chamomile]

I am not at all opposed to a real diplomacy system. Reaction rolls just aren't an actual real diplomacy system, they just give you a chance to use the broken one.

[jadagul]

I think the idea was to build a real diplomacy system, which would include reaction rolls. You're right that just sticking a gratuitous reaction roll on the current system causes as many problems as it solves, but I think everyone's been taking for granted that the 3.x diplomacy system sucks.

[Chamomile]

Whether or not reaction rolls benefit the rest of the system depends on what the rest of the system is. If there is no rest of the system, they're just a gratuitous randomizing element.

[Username17]

Whether or not reaction rolls benefit the rest of the system depends on what the rest of the system is. If there is no rest of the system, they're just a gratuitous randomizing element.

They are a necessary component of any diplomacy system that is supposed to work for a game where people habitually run into bandits and ruffians in forests and caves who may attack without warning.

It is a simple requirement for any game that is basically D&D-like.

-Username17

[tzor]

Chamomile, I'm never going to argue that reaction rolls are in any way a part of the dipomacy system. They form one method of "priming the pump" as it were just like deciding what CR levels of monsters should be on the other side of the door primes the pump for the combat situation later on.

You need a good diplomacy system. The one in 2E was almost good enough but it was still disassociated from the main combat system. There was one in 1E which was backwards; diplomacy was basically determined from combat and NPC opponents could during the combat decide "crap, we either surrender or we're out of here." Remember that diplomacy in 1E was somewhat a joke (in fact it was a joke comic right in the middle of the DMG, "the last creature we talked to ate half the party") and was almost all MTP in terms of game rules, but it worked.

But then again, reaction rolls can exist with or without a diplomacy system. A diplomacy system is based on the skills of a given character. A reaction system tells you if combat begins immediately or if people wait for a trigger. The fact that people think you must have diplomacy in the first place to prevent constant attacks is pattantly absurd. Non diplomats are not auto-attacked the moment they walk into the merchant (unless they are very bizzare). The use of limited reaction rolls to set variables at the start of the encounter (just like the notion of the surprise roll) can add variability to the encounter. No more and no less.

[Datawolf]

Question for the board: Would it make sense, then, to use reaction rolls for every single encounter with an NPC or group of NPCs, or would they be best saved for encounters with NPCs who do not have any "preset" attitude toward the PCs (i.e., non-scripted encounters or any encounter not central to the plot)?

[Kaelik]

Every time a creature first encounters the PCs with a modifier for the circumstances of the encounter.

Hearing about them murdering his best friend is encountering them, and has a modifier.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You'd really don't have to roll for as many NPCs as you'd think. In an environment where a lot of people would congregate (like a marketplace) there's no need to do a reaction roll because if the PCs are 'peaceful' and the crowd averages from peaceful to neutral you're not going to get a result more dramatic than 'NPC gives you the stinkeye'. If the PCs are taking an aggressive stance and have their weapons drawn and then head into the marketplace they'd probably get a hostile reaction very quickly from at least one of the civilians and then the guards would come by. If the PCs weren't perceived as badass enough they'd probably get their asses kicked by the crowd rather than them waiting on the guard. If they were perceived as really badass then you'd have a Blazing Saddles-ish reaction where the guards hung out at the edge of the crowd while everyone cowers in fear in an attempt to appease these insecure egotist PCs.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It in fact probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have a Crowd Reaction roll either for occasions in which you're affecting the reaction of a mass of people who have a mostly uniform mood and mindset. This roll would determine whether Cinderella made the participants at the ball weeped in envy (with a separate reaction roll to see how big of a boner the Prince got) or whether Scout dispersed the mob or only incensed them which only ended up with a lynching at Att--at Attickasphas.

I'm sorry, I can't finish that sentence. The thought of something that bad happening to that man is unthinkable and untypable. You get the general idea though.

[MGuy]

Can we move on past Reaction Rolls and talk about actual Diplomacy? This latest tidbit about it not being necessary in many cases is only pushing me away from it and I'm more interested in insights on how the fuck you can make in-game Diplomacy satisfying while still treating it as just another skill.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This latest tidbit about it not being necessary in many cases is only pushing me away from it

No, because you just interpreted 'not being necessary in many cases' as 'not being necessary for D&D'; you're not going to cut up an argument selectively and escape down the hatch that easily.. This is exactly why we're having this discussion.

[Swordslinger]

Question for the board: Would it make sense, then, to use reaction rolls for every single encounter with an NPC or group of NPCs, or would they be best saved for encounters with NPCs who do not have any "preset" attitude toward the PCs (i.e., non-scripted encounters or any encounter not central to the plot)?

Reaction rolls should be used for the latter, not the former. It's fine if a group of orcs that you run into in the woods might be friendly. There's plenty of reasons the orcs may want to talk.

However, once you're in part of the scripted area of the adventure and walk into a guard room, you're dealing with NPCs who act like guards. They're there specifically to bar entry to people who don't belong and keep out intruders.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Yeah, and that's fucking railroading. If someone wants to pull a Bavarian Fire Drill and get the guards to escort them to the treasure room or they want to trick the guards into abandoning their posts with offers of booze or they want to draft the guards into a riot spreading throughout town, how is this accomplished?

I find you and Chamomile's 'random rolls except for when I feel it's important to arbitrate stuff' positions not only uncreative and inflexible but also insulting.

[Swordslinger]

Yeah, and that's fucking railroading. If someone wants to pull a Bavarian Fire Drill and get the guards to escort them to the treasure room or they want to trick the guards into abandoning their posts with offers of booze or they want to draft the guards into a riot spreading throughout town, how is this accomplished?

Well first, are these guards bribeable? What do we know about them. If they're fanatical clerics, the answer is that you can't convince them. If they're orc mercenaries, then yes, you should have a shot at bribing them, assuming you offer them something the DM considers reasonable.

But the offer is considered the same way you'd convince a PC. If you were a PC assigned to guard something and some guys came up and offered you a bribe? Would you take it? As the DM, you use the same criteria. I don't know why that's considered so hard. That way the story makes sense afterwards. If your DM can't determine NPC responses, then they shouldn't be DMing at all.

[Lago PARANOIA]

There's no reason the social aspect of the game needs a special preliminary roll to determine the initial reaction of NPCs by random fiat.

Yes, you do actually. FrankTrollman has explained to you why this is flat-out impossible. No sane system is going to have enough granularity to have modifiers like 'I found out my wife is pregnant and I'd rather let the bandits take my heirloom than risk widowing her' or 'I have a bad hangover from the previous night drinking and I'm not in the mood for a fight'. But these kinds of details add depth and richness to a story and make them memorable.

Any manipulation of said factors by the PCs (wearing a hat to cover your Elf ears or whatever), could just as easily be put on to the Diplomacy roll.

That's stupid. After an initial round of firing their crossbows at the PCs the guards always go 'oh, whoops, didn't see those elf ears and uniform on you, sorry for the violence. Go in peace'? Or a racist shopkeeper sees these drow covered in blood and holding weapons and always lets them do their diplomacy thing rather than just reaching for the autocrossbow and opening fire? That's what the reaction roll is for. Not only is it to prevent stupidity when the NPCs get the drop on the PCs before the PCs have the chance to act, but it's also so that people don't waltz blindly into situations. If you're trying to make a Bluff Check on a guard to ask for keys to the treasury, under the old and stupid system you have no way of gauging the guard's mood and trust in your disguise until you actually made the roll or the DM tells you the DC and modifiers.

If the initiative roll is what determines whether or not you're on a death spiral, your GM has screwed you over and something ought to be changed.

Yeah, because things like critical hits and wound penalties don't exist in any system. Not all battles (even in D&D, which goes out of its way to do this) are a back and forth struggle where due to limit breaks and wound bonuses any side might be the victor at any particular moment and until the final blow comes the outcome is in doubt; sometimes you start off eating a shit sandwich and there's little chance to recover. It's not always a bad thing either; if Shadowrun had this kind of back-and-forth for combat it'd be unplayable so that system uses death spirals to great effect. Deal with it.

That means that social character concepts get screwed. You're better off playing stupid, ugly bruisers or miserly, aloof wizards who have the mechanical power in a fleshed out mini-game like combat and ignoring the social mini-game altogether, because whether or not you have a -1 or a +3 on your CHA really isn't going to affect your success regularly enough to be worth the opportunity cost.

Ugh, where to start...

A) Here's a quick primer on probability. Having everything being resolved by a single roll does not devalue the diplomancer's skills. All other things being equal, they are in aggregate about as useful whether things get resolved in one roll or ten of them. Yes, the ten-roll person's roll average will be in the 9-12 range. Which is good if that's all you need to pass most encounters, but totally screws them if they need to achieve bad or long-shot odds. Imagine if you will you come across a big angry ogre. The DC for getting him to back down is a 18 and the diplomancer has a skill of +5 modifying a d20. The single-roll diplomancer has a greater shot of 'winning' the roll (about 40%) than the 'take the average of ten rolls' diplomancer, who has seriously <10%. However, if the DC was 14, the ten-roll guy has a >90% chance of passing but the one-roll guy only has about a 55% chance of making the roll.

Which system is better? Who the fuck knows, it depends on how your system values things. I just wanted to make it clear that fewer rolls doesn't necessarily mean screwing over PCs. If you've analyzed 4E skill challenges it should be obvious.

B) Who said that we would make the aggregate modifiers for charisma or whatever that small? Who said that we were even going to use charisma? Those are just more bullshit assumptions on your part.

C) I have no idea where you got the idea that only having a -1 to a +3 on your CHA is always meaningless. It depends on the RNG, obviously. If you had a small RNG like a 1d4 or were using dicepools a +3 CHA would be an absolutely crushing advantage and we'd complain that +3 CHA guys were derailing the game by always winning. I know you were trying to discredit the whole concept by inserting a hidden strawman of 'what if the RNG was constructed poorly', but you utterly failed to even knock down that strawman.

All of these could be determined just like a surprise round is determined. This isn't just the reactions of the guards you're changing, this is the nature of the guards. Also, these are completely disassociated results; your CHA did not make those guards stoned, no matter how pleasing you think you are. The reaction roll is unnecessary and moreover, doesn't make sense.

A) We've already took you to task over being too presumptious about what the NPCs were doing. You have no idea that the guards were getting stoned or fawning over their Christmas bonus checks or feeling sick from undercooked rations or whatever. And if you don't like any of those explanations then you need to come up with a better one. I gave you four explanations as to why the guards don't immediately open fire on PCs bursting into the room with their crossbows and I can give you six more.

B) Your charisma did not make the guards stoned. Their low roll made them stoned. Even so, the fact that your party are pretty elves or ugly smelly orcs (which determines your charisma bonus) can still be the determining factor on whether they play along and just give you the keys to the treasury or they decide to fight you.

Great, then. Everything in your first counter-example is completely do-able without the reaction roll. It's even more unnecessary.

Uh, no, without the reaction roll then either stoned and sick out of their gourd guards would always open fire on the first meeting or even suspicious and belligerently drunk guards would give the PCs a chance to talk before attacking. Or the DM just sticks his dick in the game and decides that he wants these guards to attack you because it'd make a better story.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well first, are these guards bribeable? What do we know about them. If they're fanatical clerics, the answer is that you can't convince them.

You don't know if the guards are bribeable or not. Frankly, probably not even the DM knows; even if they describe the guards as disciplined, well-paid, and loyal there's a chance that this particular guard is a shitbird who the captain is planning to wash out in a week.

Secondly, there's no reason to even believe that fanatical clerics can't be convinced. If I came up to them dressed and acting as their abbot with two other PCs dressed up as guards for watch and told them that they're in huge trouble and need to see the Inquisitor right now then there should be a chance that they'd believe me and go answer the prank call.

If you were a PC assigned to guard something and some guys came up and offered you a bribe? Would you take it? As the DM, you use the same criteria. I don't know why that's considered so hard.

Because you don't know the mindset of individual PCs, let alone a game which has potentially thousands of distinct personalities? Seriously, my threshold for a bribe is really open. If I was guarding the campus computer lab and someone was offering me one thousand dollars to look the other way I'd say no, but if they were offering me thirty thousand dollars I'd say yes even though I'd run a huge risk of being expelled. I (or at least I would like to think) that there's no amount of money that would convince me to turn over my Trade Unionist brother's hiding position to the Nazis but a lot of people would do it for free.

The point is that unless you have that level of control freakiness over your game in which you know an individual guard's mood, salary, family size, morals, health, etc.. you don't know how an individual would respond. There's no way to fairly do this without having observers question whether you're considering all of the variables and making your best judgment, deciding things on a whim, or are cockblocking the PCs to run the plot that you personally think is the best.

[Swordslinger]

You don't know if the guards are bribeable or not. Frankly, probably not even the DM knows; even if they describe the guards as disciplined, well-paid, and loyal there's a chance that this particular guard

Obviously the DM may well fill things in at times, and a good DM won't be super stubborn about making his guards completely bribe immune. Even a loyal guard may well desert for an exorbitant bribe, but in practice you don't even have to worry about that because no PC will actually offer them some ridiculous amount of gold. It just won't happen.

Secondly, there's no reason to even believe that fanatical clerics can't be convinced. If I came up to them dressed and acting as their abbot with two other PCs dressed up as guards for watch and told them that they're in huge trouble and need to see the Inquisitor right now then there should be a chance that they'd believe me and go answer the prank call.

Sure, you can trick them, but you won't win them over with logical arguments. This is part of the strategy of social encounters, finding out the right angle to approach people. The problem with most diplomatic systems is the same problem as a 4E skill challenge. You don't use any strategy in picking the right choice, you just use the skill with the biggest plus. And we all know 4E skill challenges are boring as hell, so why try to implement that awful system elsewhere? While 4E introduced several good mechanics, skill challenges are one that just needs to be left out to die.

Just having the DM improvise is a lot more fun and entertaining for the PCs. Your NPCs seem more consistent, your story is better and everyone benefits.

All skills do is say "You can't bluff or intimidate this guy." and that screws you RP-wise, because all your paladin can ever do is diplomacy people and all your rogue can ever do is bluff. That's boring and bad for the game.

The point is that unless you have that level of control freakiness over your game in which you know an individual guard's mood, salary, family size, morals, health, etc.. you don't know how an individual would respond. There's no way to fairly do this without having observers question whether you're considering all of the variables and making your best judgment, deciding things on a whim, or are cockblocking the PCs to run the plot that you personally think is the best.

There's always going to be abstraction. But I'd rather take some consistency based on information known rather than just a social universe based on giant frog where people act totally at random and social characters are gods.

As far as feeling your DM is being vindictive, if you're one of those people looking for DM vindictiveness, you will always find it somewhere, regardless of what the rules are. Eventually the DM is going to say "No" to you about something, and you shouldn't get all petty about it. The DM can fuck over the PCs if he wants, that's old news and a necessary fact people have to accept if they want to play the game.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Even a loyal guard may well desert for an exorbitant bribe, but in practice you don't even have to worry about that because no PC will actually offer them some ridiculous amount of gold. It just won't happen.

That's quite an assumption. The wealth benchmarks of 3E (stupid as they are) pretty much tells us that you can comfortably retire on 1000 gold pieces. And even as stingy as 3E characters are encouraged to be I don't think it'd be beyond them to part with 1000 gold to advance the plot. Not to mention that the PC can just forge the banknote or coins or whatever. There are even spells that do the latter.

You can't make assumptions like this in the game, because if you say things like 'well, this guard is technically bribeable but I don't think you PCs have the stones to pony up the money' the PCs are going to rise up and meet your challenge. And then what?

Sure, you can trick them, but you won't win them over with logical arguments.

Who cares? You can socially interact with people in a lot of ways other than winning them over with rhetoric. Sometimes (oftentimes) a reasoned discourse is just not the best solution; you'll often want your targets to be agitated or fearful or horny or greedy or whatever.

You don't use any strategy in picking the right choice, you just use the skill with the biggest plus.

That is a problem with the diplomacy skill. The solution would be of course to limit the amount of static modifiers someone can get to it so that if someone wants a really outrageous result (like getting the king to offer half the kingdom) they either need to fight tooth and nail for every bonus or leave the dice to lady luck. I can understand your dismay at some stinky, violent hobos convincing every King they encounter to hand over the kingdom by dint of a large diplomacy modifier bulge, but would you feel the same way if they packed on the modifiers? I.E. rescued the prince from bandits, have a royal pedigree (forged or not), wooed the princess, have Pelor's personal approval, has or fakes political viewpoints that the king likes, ran their fiefdom especially well, etc.? At that point someone's diplomacy skill is frankly overshadowed by the situational modifiers.

Just having the DM improvise is a lot more fun and entertaining for the PCs. Your NPCs seem more consistent, your story is better and everyone benefits.

Ha ha, no.

I don't know what kind of utopian ideal you're under, but almost no one is that good. Occasionally a good and memorable NPC will slip through, but seriously, read a game log or an afterplay. Even when a DM prepares really hard they're pretty much shooting in the dark. This isn't a knock on their abilities (mine suck too) and most peoples' writing and/or improvisational skills suck (and you need BOTH for this exercise) and the time pressures of the DM force them to lean on cliches even when they have the ability.

As far as feeling your DM is being vindictive, if you're one of those people looking for DM vindictiveness, you will always find it somewhere, regardless of what the rules are. Eventually the DM is going to say "No" to you about something, and you shouldn't get all petty about it. The DM can fuck over the PCs if he wants, that's old news and a necessary fact people have to accept if they want to play the game.

There's absolutely nothing you can do about intentional vindictiveness, but accidental or perceived vindictiveness is a problem.

Bard: WHAT?! The orcs attacked anyway despite us waving the white flag?
DM: Yes. The orcs have been on edge from attacks lately and they're hungry and you look rich.
Bard: But I was singing a beloved orc drinking song and gave the secret Gruumsh handshake and two of our party members are half-orcs!
DM: True, but the orcs are so hungry and agitated that they're going to overlook that and rationalize the encounter later.
Cleric: I actually wanted to get in a fight so I'm glad the bard failed.
Wizard: No, this is crap, I've never seen anyone try that hard to influence a roll in roleplay so it should've worked.

So which one of the people should get their way? Even if the DM or Bard was 'right' it's not going to make the hard feelings go away. When you have a broad issue on which the players and DM would likely disagree on, you need to have an outside arbitrator or risk the game devolving into a 'bang, you're dead!' 'uh-uh, you missed!' argument.

[quanta]

Seriously, if the idea is to take into account all sorts of possible reasons a particular given NPC might have to behave one way or another or how the PCs walk up, why not just flesh out a full interaction minigame for talking?

People need to stop assuming players spam the diplomacy skill against a fixed DC or some such nonsense, because what the fuck no, that's not a required part of every system.

The interaction minigame could be adjective driven for all I care. There could be an HP for diplomacizing. Whatever. But for the love of Crom, why are we talking about shit as if we're using basically the worst system possible?

Seriously, if NPCs can be given meaningful appropriate varieties of possible interaction stats, then there's no reason the diplomacy minigame would be less interesting or fair than the combat minigame.

Reaction Roll! ----> Diplomacy minigame! -------> Outcomes.

Should be just as fun as

Initiative! ------> Combat minigame! --------> Outcomes.

Although Reaction Rolls should probably be less binary than Initiative.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It's generally easier to get a resolution mechanic to satisfactorily scale upwards than downwards. And let's face it, there are seriously a lot of times in which you want an activity to be resolved in one or two die rolls. I don't want to get into a complicated social minigame with the head of the Thieves' Guild just to find out whether I can determine who is actually running the secret police in the city.

[Chamomile]

Yeah, and that's fucking railroading. If someone wants to pull a Bavarian Fire Drill and get the guards to escort them to the treasure room or they want to trick the guards into abandoning their posts with offers of booze or they want to draft the guards into a riot spreading throughout town, how is this accomplished?

Respectively, Bluff check, Diplomacy check, and another Diplomacy check.

And the "no reaction rolls means no Diplomacy EVAR" strawman is central to pretty much all the rest of your posts, so I'm ignoring them and I recommend everyone else do the same so we can move on to talking about an actual Diplomacy mini-game that actually works.

[Stubbazubba]

Reaction to Lago:

There's no reason the social aspect of the game needs a special preliminary roll to determine the initial reaction of NPCs by random fiat.

Yes, you do actually. FrankTrollman has explained to you why this is flat-out impossible. No sane system is going to have enough granularity to have modifiers like 'I found out my wife is pregnant and I'd rather let the bandits take my heirloom than risk widowing her' or 'I have a bad hangover from the previous night drinking and I'm not in the mood for a fight'. But these kinds of details add depth and richness to a story and make them memorable.

FrankTrollman has also implied, Lago, that the reaction roll has nothing to do with stuff like that. He claims it is an associated mechanic, so when it's pretty much a Charisma check, it's mostly based on the NPCs initial opinion of the PCs alone. The NPC's background never comes into it. Explaining how the NPCs react to your Charisma by changing the NPC background doesn't make sense, and it is not an element of the reaction roll.

Any manipulation of said factors by the PCs (wearing a hat to cover your Elf ears or whatever), could just as easily be put on to the Diplomacy roll.

That's stupid. After an initial round of firing their crossbows at the PCs the guards always go 'oh, whoops, didn't see those elf ears and uniform on you, sorry for the violence. Go in peace'? Or a racist shopkeeper sees these drow covered in blood and holding weapons and always lets them do their diplomacy thing rather than just reaching for the autocrossbow and opening fire? That's what the reaction roll is for. Not only is it to prevent stupidity when the NPCs get the drop on the PCs before the PCs have the chance to act, but it's also so that people don't waltz blindly into situations. If you're trying to make a Bluff Check on a guard to ask for keys to the treasury, under the old and stupid system you have no way of gauging the guard's mood and trust in your disguise until you actually made the roll or the DM tells you the DC and modifiers.

Now you're getting the picture. That's how combat works, why should Diplomacy be different?

If the initiative roll is what determines whether or not you're on a death spiral, your GM has screwed you over and something ought to be changed.

Yeah, because things like critical hits and wound penalties don't exist in any system. Not all battles (even in D&D, which goes out of its way to do this) are a back and forth struggle where due to limit breaks and wound bonuses any side might be the victor at any particular moment and until the final blow comes the outcome is in doubt; sometimes you start off eating a shit sandwich and there's little chance to recover. It's not always a bad thing either; if Shadowrun had this kind of back-and-forth for combat it'd be unplayable so that system uses death spirals to great effect. Deal with it.

This thread has been explicitly relating to D&D, so forgive me for assuming you were on the same page as the rest of us. And yes, critical hits and wound penalties are a thing, but there's a reason those are rare occurrences, Lago, and you know full well that such an exception to the rule is no grounds for a counter-argument.

That means that social character concepts get screwed. You're better off playing stupid, ugly bruisers or miserly, aloof wizards who have the mechanical power in a fleshed out mini-game like combat and ignoring the social mini-game altogether, because whether or not you have a -1 or a +3 on your CHA really isn't going to affect your success regularly enough to be worth the opportunity cost.

Ugh, where to start...

A) Here's a quick primer on probability. Having everything being resolved by a single roll does not devalue the diplomancer's skills. All other things being equal, they are in aggregate about as useful whether things get resolved in one roll or ten of them. Yes, the ten-roll person's roll average will be in the 9-12 range. Which is good if that's all you need to pass most encounters, but totally screws them if they need to achieve bad or long-shot odds. Imagine if you will you come across a big angry ogre. The DC for getting him to back down is a 18 and the diplomancer has a skill of +5 modifying a d20. The single-roll diplomancer has a greater shot of 'winning' the roll (about 40%) than the 'take the average of ten rolls' diplomancer, who has seriously <10%. However, if the DC was 14, the ten-roll guy has a >90% chance of passing but the one-roll guy only has about a 55% chance of making the roll.

Which system is better? Who the fuck knows, it depends on how your system values things. I just wanted to make it clear that fewer rolls doesn't necessarily mean screwing over PCs. If you've analyzed 4E skill challenges it should be obvious.

Good point; the probabilities not averaging out aren't necessarily a bad thing; but the inflexibility of not having enough time to actually choose a good tactic because Diplomacy ends after 2 rolls is still a flaw. You may as well MTP it so you can at least realize the guy is a religious fanatic and the bribes aren't going to work, then try something else (i.e. "Ah, my friend, you have passed the test. Your faith has proven you worthy of...." etc.).

B) Who said that we would make the aggregate modifiers for charisma or whatever that small? Who said that we were even going to use charisma? Those are just more bullshit assumptions on your part.

Frank did, in order to keep the result on the RNG, and he was specifically using the 2E example. Again, you seem to be basing your counter-argument on ignoring the relevant assumptions that everyone else is grasping.

C) I have no idea where you got the idea that only having a -1 to a +3 on your CHA is always meaningless. It depends on the RNG, obviously. If you had a small RNG like a 1d4 or were using dicepools a +3 CHA would be an absolutely crushing advantage and we'd complain that +3 CHA guys were derailing the game by always winning. I know you were trying to discredit the whole concept by inserting a hidden strawman of 'what if the RNG was constructed poorly', but you utterly failed to even knock down that strawman.

See above.

All of these could be determined just like a surprise round is determined. This isn't just the reactions of the guards you're changing, this is the nature of the guards. Also, these are completely disassociated results; your CHA did not make those guards stoned, no matter how pleasing you think you are. The reaction roll is unnecessary and moreover, doesn't make sense.

A) We've already took you to task over being too presumptious about what the NPCs were doing. You have no idea that the guards were getting stoned or fawning over their Christmas bonus checks or feeling sick from undercooked rations or whatever. And if you don't like any of those explanations then you need to come up with a better one. I gave you four explanations as to why the guards don't immediately open fire on PCs bursting into the room with their crossbows and I can give you six more.

If you didn't add your CHA modifier or whatever the PCs were doing to try and manipulate the outcome of the roll to this, then these explanations would make sense, as you're just rolling to tell the mood of the guards, but because the roll is supposed to give Diplomancer characters a chance to use their skillset to affect the NPCs, and is supposed to be reflective of the guards' initial reaction to you and your actions, specifically, then these hackneyed explanations don't make sense. Moreover, any reaction that does make sense would be better represented by a Diplomacy/Intimidate/Bluff check.

B) Your charisma did not make the guards stoned. Their low roll made them stoned. Even so, the fact that your party are pretty elves or ugly smelly orcs (which determines your charisma bonus) can still be the determining factor on whether they play along and just give you the keys to the treasury or they decide to fight you.

But your Charisma modifier could be the difference between whether or not they got stoned. If it is going to be the determining factor one way, it also has to be the determining factor the other way. You can't just pick which part of the total to pay attention to.

Great, then. Everything in your first counter-example is completely do-able without the reaction roll. It's even more unnecessary.

Uh, no, without the reaction roll then either stoned and sick out of their gourd guards would always open fire on the first meeting or even suspicious and belligerently drunk guards would give the PCs a chance to talk before attacking. Or the DM just sticks his dick in the game and decides that he wants these guards to attack you because it'd make a better story.

No, you're willfully ignoring so much at this point as to make you difficult to fathom; those guards weren't stoned or sick or drunk before you met them, so all you knew was that they were guards. You know they're probably on the lookout for your group of Elven prisoners who have escaped, so you wear hats to cover your elf ears; make a Bluff check when they see you to see if they recognize you or not. If they don't, they'll probably ask you questions like, "What are you doing here?" Why? Because that's what guards do, Lago. If you want there to be drunk and stoned guards and priests all over the place, then put a table in the DMG, so when the DM is designing the dungeon they can roll 1d20 for the guards' disposition; rolling a 1 would be too stoned to notice anything, and a 20 would be belligerently drunk. Between those, 2-10 would be they don't jump to a fight, they ask questions first, then 11-18 would mean they kill PCs on sight. Or whatever. I get the feeling most DMs would ignore said option, however.

OK, so in a theoretical system, you would need to make some kind of relationship between the combat and social mini-game. Generally speaking, you would have some measure of NPC commitment to what they're doing, let's call it Morale. Let's say for sake of simplicity that there are only 3 levels; High, Medium, and Low. High morale indicates well-rested and/or deeply committed NPCs (religious fanatics, shop owners), Medium represents well-paid but uncommitted NPCs (typical guards, shop employees), and Low represents poorly-paid and/or very worn NPCs (the most slightly disgruntled slaves, mercenaries on a cheap job, anyone losing a fight). Assuming we're sticking with d20 DCs, a High morale NPC would be very difficult to diplomance, probably around DC 25, Medium probably 20, and Low might be around 15. So, even though the guards started at High morale, now that there's only 2 of the original 6 left and you have all your party members remaining, and they're fairly beat-down, they've fallen to Low and the party Face has a good chance of getting them to surrender or otherwise cooperate. Most NPCs would be Medium Morale to begin with.

If you wanted to prevent NPCs' morale from being man-handled by the DM, you could have a default morale for creatures in the MM and stock NPCs, and then have them make a Will save when they get to some fraction of HP not higher than 1/2. If said Will save is failed, they go down one morale level or something. The social mini-game would similarly have to have an effect on the combat mini-game, I would think; if an NPC hits Low morale, they get a -2 to both AC and attack rolls, or something, so at that point it's best to sue for peace or run.

Changing an NPC's morale purely through social means would, of course, also be possible. By bluffing/intimidating/using Diplomacy successfully against their morale's DC, you can lower their morale one level. Doing a big enough favor for someone might just lower their Morale towards you a level by default.

Initial reactions:

I'd say that NPCs have a range of initial behaviors. In the most complex form, each broad group of NPCs (guards, nobles, merchants, peasants, etc.) would have their own range of initial behaviors. For instance, let's say the Guard's range goes from 'Attack' at the worst to 'Interrogate' to 'Nothing' to 'Offer Advice' to 'Offer Assistance.' Now, normally, a town guard in a friendly part of town is at Nothing by default, though a town guard in an unfriendly part of town or well after nightfall might be set at Interrogate. These guidelines are explained in the DMG and/or MM. If the PCs are aware of the NPCs first, then they can decide how they want to engage him, if at all. If the NPC catches them by surprise, then they don't really get that chance, and there is a roll made, modified by the PCs current actions and/or appearance, to determine whether or not the NPC's behavior is changed. Having each NPC category be on a different chart might be a little much, though, so what could be done is to have all the reactions on one chart, so long as the reactions are flexible enough to make sense for anyone, pretty much, and have different NPCs simply begin at different levels on the chart. Said chart's DCs for modifying behavior do not scale as you go any direction, it's relative; the further away from initial position, the higher the DC, in either direction.

[Red_Rob]

FrankTrollman has also implied, Lago, that the reaction roll has nothing to do with stuff like that. He claims it is an associated mechanic, so when it's pretty much a Charisma check, it's mostly based on the NPCs initial opinion of the PCs alone. The NPC's background never comes into it. Explaining how the NPCs react to your Charisma by changing the NPC background doesn't make sense, and it is not an element of the reaction roll.

Are you intentionally being obtuse? I'll break it down real simple for you.

The reaction roll is composed of two parts: a die roll, and a charisma modifier. Okay?

The die roll represents the NPC's current state of mind. This is essentially how he feels today, which up until the die roll has not been modelled in the game. Why he feels this way is up to the DM to ad-lib once the die has fallen. High roll? Maybe it's his daughters wedding today. Low roll? Maybe he's just lost all his wages betting on dice. This is completely associated, in the same way that rolling a random encounter of some bandits means that there were bandits here all along, not they suddenly appeared to fight you. Vast swathes of RPG reality are undefined at any one time until the dice reveal how things were all along.

Now, the second part is the Charisma modifier. This represents how your personal presentation, body language and general "charm" alters his impression of you. High Charisma people are more likely to make friends than low charisma people. This is totally associated.

Now, you can add other modifiers like "Is racist against Elves, -4 to reaction rolls against parties that include elves", however none of this makes reaction rolls dissociated. So can we stop this bullshit that reaction rolls magically involve your characters altering the past?

[tzor]

One of the biggest differences between combat and diplomacy is that combat is totally one dimensional. The combat goal of the PC’s is to drive the HP of their opponents to zero. The goal of the opponents is to drive the HP of the PC’s down to zero. It’s perfectly linear and symmetric.

You might think you could work diplomacy by creating the diplomatic equivalent of HP; let’s call it morale, because that is what Stubbazubba called it. But the goal of diplomacy is not to drive the opponent’s morale down to zero. The goal is to get them to do something. So now you have added a second dimension to this problem. That “something” could be anything. That something could be somewhat agreeable or drastically disagreeable to the opponent.

But we still haven’t got the combat model yet. We have someone poking a weapon at a defenceless opponent until he dies. Combat is symmetric. So if the PC’s are trying to get the opponents to do something as well. And that means that if they lose the diplomatic mini-game the opponents get what they want.

“That’s right. I sold the family cow for these ‘magic’ beans!”

So now you have several dimensions. You have the goals and their alignment with the person you are imposing the goals on.

You want to bribe a paladin … FAT CHANCE.
You want to bribe an underpaid guard … DOABLE.

Each one also has a different level or morale; I’m guessing the paladin has more than the guard.

Each one has a different goal they want from you. The Paladin might want repentance, the guard more gold.

We can now see the biggest problem with diplomacy. Most designers give up at this point as it being not only too much work to implement, but too much work to explain.

[Strung Nether]

One of the biggest differences between combat and diplomacy is that combat is totally one dimensional. The combat goal of the PC’s is to drive the HP of their opponents to zero. The goal of the opponents is to drive the HP of the PC’s down to zero. It’s perfectly linear and symmetric.

You might think you could work diplomacy by creating the diplomatic equivalent of HP; let’s call it morale, because that is what Stubbazubba called it. But the goal of diplomacy is not to drive the opponent’s morale down to zero. The goal is to get them to do something. So now you have added a second dimension to this problem. That “something” could be anything. That something could be somewhat agreeable or drastically disagreeable to the opponent.

But we still haven’t got the combat model yet. We have someone poking a weapon at a defenceless opponent until he dies. Combat is symmetric. So if the PC’s are trying to get the opponents to do something as well. And that means that if they lose the diplomatic mini-game the opponents get what they want.

“That’s right. I sold the family cow for these ‘magic’ beans!”

So now you have several dimensions. You have the goals and their alignment with the person you are imposing the goals on.

You want to bribe a paladin … FAT CHANCE.
You want to bribe an underpaid guard … DOABLE.

Each one also has a different level or morale; I’m guessing the paladin has more than the guard.

Each one has a different goal they want from you. The Paladin might want repentance, the guard more gold.

We can now see the biggest problem with diplomacy. Most designers give up at this point as it being not only too much work to implement, but too much work to explain.

I tried once. I have never given up on any home-brew as fast as that one.