[3.X] How do you guys handle diplomacy?

[radthemad4]

Do you use some sort of tweak? Not allow it for extremely hostile encounters or in the middle of combat? Complete MTP? Some combination? Something else entirely? I'm curious.

[codeGlaze]

Diplomacy threads can quickly devolve into shit-shows almost as quickly as fighter threads (just a heads up).

Diplomacy threads on here are many and varied, several alternate takes on the system have been offered up, few people seem to have found a middle ground that they like.

The way my group tends to roll is... we tend to fall back to MTP for "important" NPCs. Diplo is only really rolled out when asking for ... introductions, asking for favors... tailored situations and sometimes dealing with lesser NPCs that DMs don't want to think too hard about.

Diplomacy is annoying.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I've used Diplo in several ways. My favorite was in a minigame fashion, where the players were doing a pre-dungeon travel montage, there were several Diplomacy-enabled encounters, they could get some small modifiers for various RP things, and then there was a list of TNs and what meeting those TNs got out of those encounters, from 'will trade' to 'advice and gifts.' (I did have some very low TNs which included 'thrown out.')

That was kind of prep-intensive, but it was popular, and everyone was glad someone in the party had it.

In my current game, I'm using a variant of one of the variants around here; it's used primarily for deal-making and for making charmed beings into long-term friends, and as you level up it starts to mimic spell effects like Sanctuary. Unfortunately, the PCs don't have any charm magic and don't negotiate much, so it barely comes up.

[hogarth]

In practice, I use the DCs for the Diplomacy skill, but with a much more limited list of favors that NPCs will do for the PCs. E.g. an Unfriendly farmer might give the PCs useful directions to a dragon's lair with a DC 15 check, or helpful advice about the dragon with a DC 25 check, but there's no possible check that will make him march into the dragon's lair on a suicide attack.

In return for capping the results of Diplomacy checks, I usually ignore the penalties for rushing Diplomacy checks.

[Krusk]

We use MTP for the majority of it. When attempting to influence NPCs to do stuff, we use a combination of the DCs in the books and gentlemans agreement not to optimize it much. And we don't include a DC for "Rushed checks" that can be done in 1 round.

We also lumped buying and selling into the appraise skill, and gave a static chart for %sold for = check result. The idea being that you've got no idea what its worth, so you think you came away with a great deal. Or if you do know what its worth, you actually get that value.

[ubernoob]

I typically use diplomacy as the social version of the lockpicking skill.

Is there a lock? You can make a skill check or cast knock. I don't care. You got past that obstacle. Continuing the mission.

Is there someone you need to make friends with? Charm/diplomacy/whatever. If they can and should be able to be charmed, they should be able to be diplomanced.

That said, no one has ever tried to play a diplomancer at my table. I view skill checks (with the exception of things like tumble or whatever that you use during combat maneuvers) as knot cutting/ "Are you this tall" things to progress the session.

If anyone did actually try to play the diplomancer at my table, I would first tell them to go fuck themselves and second make the entire session a zombie apocalypse session because fuck you. Obviously if they wanted to reroll right then and there with a character that doesn't invalidate the entire combat minigame, I would allow them to do it.

[Grek]

I typically use diplomacy as the social version of the lockpicking skill.

Basically this. Diplomacy opens doors, gets you rewards and lets you avoid some small number of encounters. The only difference between Diplomacy and Disable Device is which doors/treasure/encounters it works on.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This is more relevant for 4E than 3E D&D but since the games have largely the same problem with diplomacy:

When I DM, I pretty much beg my players before I start the game not to use it. I say that I'll run it as written in the rules if they insist on using it and will revoke it with a majority vote at the table if it becomes a problem then on. If people want to talk to opponents more and stuff we'll straight out MTP it with monsters being less violent and prone to interaction and I'll give the players the benefit of the doubt.

Using diplomacy for skill challenges is okay, though. I mean, if I bothered to ever run skill challenges after the first few catastrophes.

I don't know if I'm just lucky or have placid players or whatever but after bringing it up I've never had players test me on that point.

[Lago PARANOIA]

At any rate, here's the definite thread if you want to see the problems with diplomacy analyzed and dissected. It's done in a 3rd Edition D&D context like most things around here, but if you want to see where the lines in the sand where current diplomacy positions are drawn, it's here.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51971

The other thread failed hard before it even got going, so let's talk about what's actually wrong with Diplomacy. We can talk 3e, 3.5, PF, and 4e - since all of them fail in similar yet slightly different ways. First of all, Diplomacy is a skill that you use to get people o respond to you and your ideas better. That's what it is. But we also know that it fails pretty hard, but for a moment let's talk about 2nd Edition Diplomacy - which we will discuss because it actually worked OK.

Here's the skinny: back in the dark ages, social interactions were pretty much all magical teaparty, with the addition of a "reaction die" at the beginning of the encounter to determine whether the encountered creatures were hostile or not. Most MCs handwaved even that roll, because there was a general Monty Haul feeling, where you were "supposed" to kill all the goblins, so having them be friendly encounters periodically made MCs fume in rage. Thus, people thought Charisma was a terrible stat, because pretty much the only thing it did was adjust a die roll that the MC wouldn't even use in most campaigns. When 2nd edition came around, you had the ability to select a Diplomacy Skill that would let you roll against your Charisma to adjust the reaction of an encountered group of enemies. That was something that MCs would let you use, because it was a character ability instead of an optional stage on the other side of the DM Screen.

So anyway, when we went to 3e and later editions, and Diplomacy has always been a plate full of shit. It's poorly defined, but where it is defined it hands out results that pretty much everyone regards as ridiculous. And the core reason is because bonuses have become large. And the result is that the d20 simply isn't big enough to have all possible results of an encounter with a new creature appear for every character. There are only 20 numbers on the die, so if your bonuses to that die roll can vary by 20 or more, your system is either incapable of generating hostile results or incapable of generating friendly results for some characters (or both, in the case of 3e diplomancy rules).

So what 3e did was to have some fixed DCs to convert creatures from one attitude to another. First of all, this is bad because it assumes an initial attitude is present at all. Why would it be? Until you get through the hails and hallos there really isn't a reason for the creatures to be friend or foe. Neither one of you has said anything to identify the other as such! But when we look at the specific DCs involved, it's even worse. The DCs for different results are literally fifty points apart. And you're still rolling a d20 to generate a result. So you know that the system is broke before we even get to the player character side. And when we do look at the PC end, we find that their diplomacy bonuses vary by at least that much - meaning that players would be well into the "always/never gets X result" pile even if the DCs were close enough to get meaningful results out of the die roll itself. To add to that, the DCs just sit there and bonuses only go up as players advance in level. So while a diplomancer pretty much "always converts everything to friendlies" at low level, by the time he gets to high level he literally does have that talent literally all the time. And that's not much of a game.

So now lets talk about variable DCs for a moment, because both Pathfailure and (to an even greater extent) 4e went down that path. By tying the DCs to the level of the people you're talking to, you've just made higher level people into unreasonable psychopaths, which is hugely counterimmersive. Why should the angel be more inherently hostile than the goblin? That's nonsense. Even if it solved the problem of characters having bonuses that varied by more than the entire random number generator (which they do not), it would still fail the sniff test of "is this fucking retarded?" 4e makes it even worse by not even having guidelines as to how hard it should be to get a friendly encounter out of an Ogre under any circumstances.

Your party of adventurers is running around in the woods and they encounter a Harpy or a Rusalka. It's not one of the Dark Lord's minions, it's just some magical thing that lives here in the woods, so what kind of encounter do you have? One option of course is to have the MC of the game arbitrarily decide whether the encounter is one of fighting or fucking (and if both, in which order). That kind of magical teaparty system works, but it of course deprives any social abilities any characters have of having the capability to mean anything. The other way is to have some sort of "fair" system in which a die is rolled with situational modifiers to determine the other creature's disposition. And that can be made to work - but only if the situational modifiers are small enough to actually fit into the random number generator you are using. Otherwise your system isn't "fair" at all, you're just doing MC Fiat with a pretend die roll to waste time.

So how could you make an NPC Attitude roll for any edition of D&D after 2nd? The bonuses players get are titanic. And more importantly, they are titanically different one player to another. The answer is that if you are wedded to using 3e or 4e skill bonus numbers, then the NPC attitude roll has to be different from the skill roll. Your skill roll would be to "make an excellent introduction (+2 to attitude roll), DC 20" or whatever.

The 3e skill bonuses and DCs broke the Diplomacy Secondary Skill. Fixing it requires you to dissociate the attitude roll from the 3e skill bonuses. It's that simple.

-Username17

[radthemad4]

Thanks guys, that helps a lot. I think I'll use some unholy combination of all your advice.

@angelfromanotherpin: Could you give me a link and/or some examples?

[Ikeren]

Poker. You get additional draws equal to your diplomacy skill /10, rounded up. Characters gain an additional draw if they command a larger force (+1 draw for party of PC's versus 1; +1 draw for army against bandit band, +1 draw for kingdom versus anything else, really).

[hogarth]

At any rate, here's the definite thread if you want to see the problems with diplomacy analyzed and dissected.

That's a terrible thread for discussing Diplomacy because it almost instantly degenerated into the merits of rolling for initial disposition vs. the GM choosing an initial disposition, which has little or nothing to do with the Diplomacy skill.

[angelfromanotherpin]

@angelfromanotherpin: Could you give me a link and/or some examples?

Which version?

[radthemad4]

Which version?

I've used Diplo in several ways. My favorite was in a minigame fashion, where the players were doing a pre-dungeon travel montage, there were several Diplomacy-enabled encounters, they could get some small modifiers for various RP things, and then there was a list of TNs and what meeting those TNs got out of those encounters, from 'will trade' to 'advice and gifts.' (I did have some very low TNs which included 'thrown out.')

That was kind of prep-intensive, but it was popular, and everyone was glad someone in the party had it.

This.

In my current game, I'm using a variant of one of the variants around here

The variant here and your tweaks.

[Lago PARANOIA]

That's a terrible thread for discussing Diplomacy because it almost instantly degenerated into the merits of rolling for initial disposition vs. the GM choosing an initial disposition, which has little or nothing to do with the Diplomacy skill.

Aside from the fact that determining initial disposition has everything to do with the Diplomacy skill (in that even in a game as shallow as 4E D&D it will determine whether you get to use your skill at all and the difficulty class of using it) that wasn't the only topic discussed in that thread.

[PhoneLobster]

Aside from the fact that determining initial disposition has everything to do with the Diplomacy skill

Yeah but you only say that because you bought the demand for a reaction roll hook line and sinker without critical thought and you NEED to say it has "everything" to do with diplomacy for, lets note, no particular reason in order to justify your pre-existing stance.

Personally I would prefer to have had a thread where I could just have further made fun of Virgil's latest attempt on a diplomacy/reaction system which currently consists of pick a number out of your DMs ass to remove random influence from the selection of results on a table, which as of most recent updates the results themselves only have any meaning in that you pick that meaning out of your DMs ass. And then the rest of the diplomacy system after that has been foreshadowed to consist of... pulling stuff out of your DMs ass! BRILLIANT why had we not thought of it sooner?!

That would be so much more fun.

[Cyberzombie]

Diplomacy is one instance where I more or less ignore the rules and do my own thing.

I require the PC to tell me what what reason he's giving for the NPC to help him.

If the PC's offer is something beneficial to the NPC, he'll take it without a check. If the offer is something that the NPC might take, but isn't really happy with, I require a check of increasing DC (generally 10 - 30) depending on the request.

If the offer is ridiculous, then the request automatically fails.

[virgil]

Personally I would prefer to have had a thread where I could just have further made fun of Virgil's latest attempt on a diplomacy/reaction system...

A shame you got kicked out of the thread itself

[angelfromanotherpin]

I don't think I have any of my original notes for the minigame version, but a typical entry was something like:

Court of the Elf-King
Local modifiers: +2 if appropriate gift given, -2 if inappropriate or no gift given, +/-2 for rp, +5 if an Elf is present, -5 if a Dwarf is present. Aid Another attempts can be made with Knowledge (Nobility), (History), or (Nature).

≤0: Detained, questioned, fined, then released after 3 days.
0-4: Thrown out, must move on.
5-9: Snubbed, may trade at elf-market at 50% mark-up.
10-14: Welcomed, may join feasting for 1 day, may trade in elf-market.
15-19: Welcomed as guests, may feast and rest (treated by court doctors if wounded) for up to 3 days, may trade in elf-market at 20% discount.
20-24: As above, but audience w/Elf-king, will offer advice (specific notes for relevant matters to come).
25-29: As above, but Elf-king also gives minor gift to each party member (CLW potion or equivalent).
30+: As above, but Elf-king also grants token of favor (see encounter #22, 24 in dungeon).

As for the other one... huh. So, I'm pretty sure I started with the Tome of Prowess variant, but that actually doesn't look much like what I remember, so I may have been working with an earlier draft, or a different+similar system. In any case, I found something like a functional base system with scaling granted powers, but I tried to make the higher-level powers simpler and reference spell effects if possible. e.g. At 8 ranks, you can produce an [Ex] Sanctuary effect as a Standard action at will; at 10 ranks, Calm Emotions; at 12 ranks, Tongues. My guideline was that if a caster could do it 4 levels ago, it was probably okay as an at-will trick you got as part of your Int bonus.

[shadzar]

MTP is how it was done with one DM, and the other (novice player after 10 years and first time DM) asked ME what to do even though I didn't know jack of shit about 3.x. so it was basically MTP there too, except i had to play both sides.

another DM just threw it out and read the boxed text as LAW, and the games day DM didnt really have time for it during that event so just hurried it along.

when i took over a partial night for the 1st DM mentioned above, everything was aggressive negotiations. diplomacy was handled at sword-point. BBEG really doesnt care too much for talking when you halt his sacrificing the peasants to summon the one who will end the world.

[PhoneLobster]

A shame you got kicked out of the thread itself

A shame that's your only resort for defense of your non-system with it's non-mechanics.

[hogarth]

That's a terrible thread for discussing Diplomacy because it almost instantly degenerated into the merits of rolling for initial disposition vs. the GM choosing an initial disposition, which has little or nothing to do with the Diplomacy skill.

Aside from the fact that determining initial disposition has everything to do with the Diplomacy skill (in that even in a game as shallow as 4E D&D it will determine whether you get to use your skill at all and the difficulty class of using it) that wasn't the only topic discussed in that thread.

You can have a social system with reaction rolls and without a Diplomacy skill (see 1E D&D).

You can have a social system without reaction rolls and with a Diplomacy skill (see 3E D&D).

But you're right with your second point. The thread eventually got back around to talking about Diplomacy...after the first 20 or 25 pages of digression.

[virgil]

A shame you got kicked out of the thread itself

A shame that's your only resort for defense of your non-system with it's non-mechanics.

A shame you think you're opinion is of any value on the subject, or even merits serious retorts.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You can have a social system with reaction rolls and without a Diplomacy skill (see 1E D&D).

You can have a social system without reaction rolls and with a Diplomacy skill (see 3E D&D).

Yeah, you can have one in the sense that you can slap down a name on any thing and say that you have a social system.

The 3E D&D system causes a divide-by-zero error that needs to be MTP'd away as soon as you start. For example, let's take a really basic scenario: you have a really important message for Galadriel and you're trying to enter their territory. The elves who guard this territory are hostile and of the 'shoot first, ask questions later' type. They also are really good at stealth and detection, too, and have a range advantage on you.

Please explain to me how you can use in-game actions to avoid or at least reduce the chance of getting shot and possibly fatally injured in that system without DM Pity. If you say something asinine or evasive like 'Dimension Door to the watchtower and throw a Diplomacy Hail Mary' I'm just going to laugh at you.

[Kaelik]

Lago, you are an idiot. The elves of Lothlorien are not shoot first and ask questions later. So showing how 3e diplomacy fails to solve a problem the way it was solved in LOTR is completely bullshit.

If the elves are actually shoot first ask questions later then no one gets upset when Diplomacy doesn't avoid the fight. Just like they don't complain about Drow attacking them in the underdark in FR without talking first.

There is an initial MTP step in 3e, but your example fails to show it as a problem because your example is flawed. No one disputes the initial MTP step of 3e, they dispute whether or not it is a problem, or whether or not that step could be solved by rules, such as reaction rolls, that are not diplomacy.