For DnD DMs who insist on "roleplaying...

>For DnD DMs who insist on "roleplaying, not rollplaying" and prefer having players act out persuasion/bluff etc checks themselves instead of rolling skills for it: what do you do about the Charisma stat? It becomes even more of a dump stat in that case.

You still get to roll, but there's a hidden bonus or penalty depending on what you say that you do.

"I bluff the guard to let us past him" = -5 to the roll

"I bluff the guard by telling him that noise he heard a moment ago was some thieves getting caught and the other guards are divvying up their loot right now" = +5 to the roll

When I ask for a persuade roll, I don't want a Shakespearean monologue, I just want more than "I roll persuade."
This shit is what drives me up the wall
>I roll to convince him to let us pass
>>Okay, what do you say
>Uh... I got a 17
>>But like what do you say
>Uh... Is my 17 not good enough?
Like you still have to roll, obviously, I just want a little insight so that everyone else gets a better imagination of the scene

Simple, the player still rolls for persuasion but also has to have a reasonable idea of what they're going to say. Persuasion is a very powerful skill but if you're able to just roll a d20 and make all the party's problems evaporate you're doing it wrong.

This shit drives me insane. Why the fuck are you even playing a roleplaying game, just go play videogames if you just want stat building game.

RPGs are like video games you play on paper, right?

Adjust the DC if the players come up with something especially logical or potentially convincing, or if they say something completely true that I fucked up due to a plot hole

In my games, Charisma is how much attention your voice and presence draws. It's not which arguments your characters come up with, it's how well your character can deliver.
Consider: the players need the help of a greedy noble.
Appealing to the noble's sense of duty and sacrifice is incredibly difficult. You can do it if you're lucky, but having charisma helps.
Appealing to the noble's lust for material wealth (a harder option, it requires understanding the NPC and finding the right carrot) is easy. You'll probably manage, but if you're charismatic you're guaranteed to succeed.

In a nutshell: players pick the general idea of what they say; playing smart and being attentive matters. Character delivers depending on charisma.

In many cases, I tell my high-charisma players "as an experienced conman/diplomat, you know so and so works, but not so and so" if they want to play a smooth guy without being smooth themselves. In the end what really matters is being clever.

I have them act out what they want to say and then roll. If they miss by a point or two and they did a good job regardless I'll let them keep it.

This.

I don't run D&D so this isn't a problem.

A convincing argument in 5E gives you advantage.

Simple as that.

Did you really play with people who use social skills without any explanation, roll only? I find it quite hard to believe.

A good delivery by the player can enhance/override a bad roll, but a good roll will not be helped by no delivery. This way, players will be rewarded for actually making an effort, while not making Charisma totally worthless. If all they want to do is roll, they can, but they won't reap any of the benefits that actually saying something will give.

I work on a "minimum effort" rule. You don't just say--

>"I make a Bluff check to convince the guard to let me in."

--like you would with an attack. You have to actually say something to make your roll. The quality of it doesn't matter. Not everyone playing a tabletop RPG is going to be the most convincing motherfucker around. But you have to try, even if you're just saying:

>"Trust me, we're with the band."

The roll dictates whether you succeed or fail. The roleplaying is just the gateway to the roll. Sometimes this leads to disconnects where the player says something super dumb but the roll is extremely convincing, or vice versa. I really just gloss over that stuff. If the player does manage to say something so convincing that I cannot fathom a way for their roll to fail, I'll usually give it to them. Is that fair? Maybe not, but whatever.

You do know there's an archive with this shitpost right?

Acting out your character's dialog, or at least explaining in sufficient detail what your character is saying, frames what exactly your Charisma check is trying to accomplish and whether success is even possible given the other person's mindset and values. It's like in a fight, you don't just roll "fighting" to resolve everything all at once with no other information needed; it may matter what angle you're approaching from and what methods of attack you're using. Attacking an illusionary creature, stepping on a pit trap as you charge, or attacking with something the enemy is immune or resistant to won't work well for you.

I use their "Roleplaying" to help determine the DC. If they impress me, I will drop what I would determine to be the "base DC" by up to a d10 roll done in secret. Sort of like a reverse inspiration. That way, "roleplayers" have a invisible benefit to acting out their Charisma rolls, but doesn't necessarily make people who are good talkers but have a poor charisma be able to "roll to seduce." (although that's not really a thing I support at the table.)

I'm not a big fan of mental / social stats for that very reason. It should, however, be said that in the old days, the stats weren't created equal. Well, in the very old days, the stats did very little, but after that, some were a lot more useful than others. If you rolled 3d6 down the line, that wasn't a problem (because what you got in a stat was random, so it didn't have to balance out with something else), though admittedly, lots of times you got to allocated what you rolled as desired (which, to me, is the exact wrong way of doing shit -- I'd far rather you got to point-buy your scores and then have them randomly placed).

Anyway, the deal about physical stats is that they represent things that have nothing to do with a player's performance. You, as a player, can't role-play in a dexterous or hardy manner. Because role-playing is a mental activity, having physical stats doesn't interfere with anything. Mental stats can, however, get in your way. Depending on who you ask, they tell you how smart or likably to play your character (except, of course, that it's difficult to play more intelligently than you are intelligent). And while I think it's fine to have personality traits for a character that you try to play into, having a meter for every character telling you how clever you can be with them is bullshit.

But distancing yourself from the process and just rolling dice to decide outcomes is a move in the wrong direction. If you've got to have mental stats, they should solely (or at least primarily) represent shit that doesn't interfere with your control of a character. So you can have an intellect stat determine how well your character can decrypt a secret code, or tell you how many spells you can cast, or whatever, because those are things you, as a player, won't personally be doing. You aren't actually decrypting code or casting spells, yourself. But they shouldn't interfere with the sorts of choices you can make with your character.

>what do you do about the Charisma stat?
It's the primary stat for Paladins, Warlocks, Sorcerers, and Bards and that's really all it needs to be.

I don't complain when the Wizard dumps STR so why should I be mad if the Fighter dumps CHA?

Not be autistic and use both. My players must put some effort into it. Either be funny or try your best, then roll for Charisma. But don't say "I make a rousing call for democracy!"

You know there are 149 other threads on this board right?

I'm the one who makes high charisma characters and talks my way out of every encounter to the chagrin of my party. The GM doesn't give me much to work with though and is bad at roleplay himself. Sometimes even when a roll is successful and I've given a decent bit of dialogue to persuade someone the GM has them react poorly and stiffly like a video game npc with only so many dialogue options. Then we move along because the roll was good and got us what we needed without us actually being given it.

I need to play with people with actual imagination and ability to improvise. Not people who overplan to compensate.

In my mind, Roleplaying and Rollplaying are two sides of the same coin.

The mechanics must support the desired behavior. If they don't then hack the game or play something else.

Basing the player's success on their own acting might work in some groups. This is fine but in groups of people with varying skill, both at playing the game and acting, you're probably going to run into problems. On top of that, yeah, the charisma stat is devalued.

In my opinion I'd suggest just going and playing something built to encourage roleplay better. Fate, something in the Apocalypse World engine, or Burning Wheel (if you still want the crunchiness); are a couple examples. But that kind of dodges the answer OP is looking for.

I will say hacking DnD to encourage roleplay in social arenas can be kind of a headache. A lot of the game's rewards and tools are centered around combat and there isn't as much granularity in social situations as in combat.

For example, even a simple challenge in combat will likely take multiple actions, rolls, and maneuvers to complete. Each character has several tactical options provided by their class. The risks and rewards are, for the most part, well defined within the rules.

Contrast a social challenge which often boils down to a single roll, bears very little tactical complexity and has pretty much no rules guidance for the DM in gauging the risk of the roll and appropriate reward.

This is a problem because you need an incentive for players to put the effort in, preferably a mechanical incentive. Your thespians may ham it up without even a whiff of a reward, but your dug in Rollplayers are going to need to feel like the interaction was valuable. Fights are going to grant rewards of XP and Treasure. Talking to a dude, no matter how regal or important, holds no such promise and the risk may be great. You have 1 or 2 rolls to get what you want and little control over how they turn out.

If you don't want to put a lot of work into hacking the system but want to encourage some Roleplay. Advantage is a good call. Make it a clear reward for good roleplaying in the moment. 'Oh, you appealed to the Bond you share with this character. Take advantage' 'Oh yes, you utilize the Dragon's weakness to aggrandizing flattery that you learned about earlier. Take advantage' 'Ah, that lie is very believable in this context. Take advantage.', etc. Make sure you dole out the reward reliably. Incentivize players, avoid frustrating them with inconsistent reward states.
This solves the problem about as well as a bandage fixes a missing finger, but it might help. Adding situational modifiers in a more granular manner for specific triggers in their roleplay can also help but can get a bit game-breaky.

Beware of rewarding 'Roleplay XP' though. This can be a powerful incentive, but as I mentioned earlier it is hard to determine what the risk or reward for a social encounter should be. This makes it an inconsistent reward. This can break the game or frustrate your players in addition to being fiddly to maintain as a DM.

If you want to play DnD and have it encourage roleplay well, you will need to hack the game. Go find some games that do it well and try to integrate some of those mechanics. It won't be perfect. In fact, it will be an ill fit regardless of what you do. DnD's gameplay loop primarily feeds into making you a boss in combat. Gaining more of the reward resources in the game (XP, Gold, etc.) does not necessarily improve your ability to navigate social situations. But sometimes a patch job is all you need. It really depends on your group.

This.
/thread

I fuck your mother, your father, and your dog for likely being the sort of player who'll whine when I don't let your bard talk the king into handing over his throne to your gibbering lute jockey.

Something else to consider is intent. If you can, take a leaf out of Burning Wheel's book and get your player to give you a solid intent and how they intend to go about it, before they go into their roleplay. It will help avoid troubling incidents where the player succeeds and the result completely ignores what they really cared about.

>playing systems with an auto-win persuasion skill
what system's do? Because D&D3.5e isn't one of them. By RAW Diplomacy checks require an extended period of sitting down and talking with someone in order to get to roll to shift their attitude to you, and all it does is shift their attitude to you.

Use hirelings and henchmen. They have a morale of 7 modified by your charisma and you can have a maximum of 4 modified by your charisma. These are people who will fight alongside you and won't make morale checks until a dragon shows up out of nowhere and toasts half of the porters. They also roll morale after an adventure to see if they'll keep adventuring with you, though after two successes, they'll stick with you for life, just like how two succeeded morale rolls make people fight to the death.

In practice, most DM's will boil it down to a roll since the actual mechanics for it are too fiddly to use in practice...asssuming people decide to use it at all since it's generally much easier to murder whatever's in front of you than to sit down and attempt pleasantries once one side has already committed to murdering the other side.

>what do you do about the Charisma stat?
Charisma modifiers affect reaction rolls, the character’s ability to hire retainers, and the loyalty of those retainers.

>I roll to convince him to let us pass
I'm the DM, I tell you what to roll
>Uh... I got a 17
No you didn't, I never asked for a roll
>Uh... Is my 17 not good enough?
What 17? There was no roll called for.

Charisma informs the roleplaying obviously. A high charisma character is going to be received in a far more friendly fashion than a low charisma one , this doesn't stop the low charisma character from trying to persuade someone but it does mean they have to give an even stronger argument as they can't just flutter their eyelashes.

This.

Also, to me it goes like this:
>DM: what do you do?
>PC: I am going to try and lie my way past
>DM: What lie do you tell?
>PC: Um, well I guess I act as a distraction and tell him that “I... need a guard! Because there is a drunk fight around the corner and it’s about to go to bloodshed!”
>DM: Sure, roll to convince him
>d20: 5
>PC: Heh, I guess I stuttered a bit.
>DM: No, he believes you. In fact, he leans into the door and says “Phil! Gary! Go with this guy and take care of this fight!” and continues to stand vigilant.

>what do you do about the Charisma stat?
It's used for spellcasting. That's it. D&D skills aren't a functional subsystem, so except for the few specific uses outlined by the rules, I generally try to avoid it.

Skill challenges in 4E went some way to fixing this. They were a fantastic scene based resolution mechanic for social scenes. Charisma based characters could still shine but the entire group got to get involved in the scenario and work out creative ways to approach it, whether it was convincing the Duke to lend his army to aid them or convincing the town guard to let them into the city.

It didn't just all devolve to a binary pass/fail check, nor did it force the party member with the highest cha bonus to do all the talking while the others sat around twiddling their thumbs.

Players are also encouraged to use a stat with a slightly lower bonus as if they fail it's just one failure to the challenge rather than everything over for good. While the player with the highest stat got to contribute but didn't dominate the encounter, and stats and skills beyond charisma could be useful like history or even strength.

Sadly it was badly explained and the initial rules were kinda broken so it failed to get off the ground and they scrapped it with 5E.

I've been implementing my own homebrew version of skill challenges and they work really well in fixing the normal issues with charisma.

Playing a roleplaying game and refusing to roleplay is like going to a LARP and refusing to stand up. You might as well not be there.
>You expect me to act according to my character's personality? Can't I just roll Charisma to win the conversation?
>You want me to figure out how to solve the puzzle? Ugh, isn't that what my Intelligence stat is for?!
>I'm suppose to listen to your description of my surroundings? Can't I just use my Wisdom to find the loot?
Sorry, OP, but if you just want to bet on dice rolls, there are much simpler and more direct games you could play. For instance: Dice.

>you want me to lift this fridge to lift something in-game? Ugh, isn't that what my Strength stat is for?

>I rolled a NAT TWENTY on my "to fighting" roll DM!

Stop comparing D&D combat to D&D social. Fighting doesn't cause these arguments because it actually has rules for it.

STR, DEX, and CON have clearly defined limits for what's possible with scores of a certain value, that and it's hard to emulate physical prowess in a game of pretend.

WIS at least serves as the perception stat, which makes it invaluable to have in order to avoid ambushes while traveling through an area.

INT and CHA though? Most times the things they can do are vague at best and in a game that relies so heavily upon mental and social skills to progress, they're either the strongest stats in the game or the weakest depending on how open minded the DM is.

A lot of White Wolf games have a system called 'stunting' that's a lot better at encouraging that sort of roleplaying than just forcing it on players by taking away their skill points.

Do you guys also require your players to lift weights before making a STR check? Do you hand out chemistry test when they want to make a potion?
I never test the player's ability to do something the character is attempting.

Even saying "I make a rousing call for democracy" is better than the sort of shit my players do. I'm lucky if they do anything more than "I Persuasion the guard." (And yes, they use the names of all their skills as verbs, just like stupid people use "stealth" as a verb.) They will try to haggle over the cost of even the most minuscule purchase (once I had someone try to get a bulk discount for twenty 1cp pieces of chalk,) and yet they have never put more effort into it than "I roll to haggle" or "I Persuasion the money man."

I mean, you're right that fighting has more strictly-defined rules, but that doesn't help your argument whatsoever. One of the factors to consider is the PC's Charisma check, but that's only one factor. There's also the NPC's pre-existing attitude toward the PC, their personality, and what thibgs they do and don't care about. If those things are against you, no high dice roll will get you what you want. None of this is houseruling; it's right there in the DMG.

You know how a lot of more recent RPGs with console-friendly dialog wheels have really deceptive labels for each dialog option, where your character says something undesirable that you never could have guessed from the way the option was described? I like to do something similar when my players are too vague with the intent of their Charisma checks. If you won't decide what your character is saying, I will.

>None of this is houseruling; it's right there in the DMG.
It isn't enough. It's as if the rules defined to hit bonuses and ACs but not the effect of the attacks.

D&D and most good RPGs design rules for things the players couldn't work out yourself. So you have rules for say casting a spell or the chance to hit an enemy as that isn't necessarily intuitive.

Designing a satisfying social combat system using very simplistic mathematics ( because overly complex math in is a massive no for maintaining flow in an RPG) really difficult because unsurprisingly social situations are actually really complicated. Fortunately human beings are the best 'computers' we know of of being able to instantly and intuitively work out social situations on the fly.

Unfortunately the designers of these RPGs didn't factor in how autistic the player base is to this.

>D&D and most good RPGs design rules for things the players couldn't work out yourself.
Nobody can work out what an 18 charisma character with an autism at the helm is supposed to be, and for good reason.

I allow a lot of "table play" where if the players are roleplaying well, and logically, I won't interrupt them for force a dice roll right away. Mainly I bring them up short when it becomes clear that we need to find out how well all that fine roleplaying worked.

If it was exceptional, I will often give them advantage on the roll.

If D&D had full social combat rules like some RPGs, it'd ve a total clusterfuck, just like those other RPGs. There's no way around the simple fact that taking intuition and common sense out of social interaction will result in something unintuitive and nonsensical.

>just like those other RPGs
Yeah, all those "other" RPGs sure suck, don't they?

Charisma is a measure of how far you can push your luck. If you yell about the government with a charisma of seven, people will think you're an end-is-nigh doomsayer and completely ignore you, or assault you.

As others have suggested, I have the players tell me what they said. At the least, what their idea is.

I do allow auto fail and auto pass for RP. If your idea is so bad that nobody would go for it, the answer is 'no' with no roll needed. Same for if you suggest something that the NPC would go for right away I let the PC have it.

But mostly as others have suggested, I modify what is needed to pass.

>full social combat rules

what does this even mean? What the heck is 'full social combat' and how is that different from what D&D offers?

Exalted, for example, uses more or less the same systems for combat and social interaction, complete with parrying and dodges and the like.

The newest edition doesn't.

Socially well adjusted people who are able to show empathy certainly can adjudicate how various different social interactions would go down and be able to factor in someone's good looks and natural charisma into that.

>hurr why do you need rules it's all common sense
Not an argument.

It's changed somewhat, but it still has the hallmarks of a true social combat system: clear-cut rules and numbers that both NPCs and PCs are subject to, with little or no room for interpretation. That D&D rule about how dialog skills don't work on PCs is absent in Exalted. This can, and generally does, lead to PCs being forced to roleplay a set of intimacies that was imposed on them by NPCs (and sometimes other PCs.) You run out of willpower pretty quickly and then anyone can create two new intimacies in you, leapfrog them off of each other until they're defining, and then reduce your original intimacies to nothing. "Unnatural mental influence" is harder, but there are so many charms that explicitly circumvent the UMI rule that you wonder why they even bothered writing it in the first place.

>That D&D rule about how dialog skills don't work on PCs is absent in Exalted. This can, and generally does, lead to PCs being forced to roleplay a set of intimacies that was imposed on them by NPCs (and sometimes other PCs.)
This is a question of subjective preference, there is no point arguing about this.
>You run out of willpower pretty quickly and then anyone can create two new intimacies in you, leapfrog them off of each other until they're defining, and then reduce your original intimacies to nothing.
This is incredibly difficult to pull off for anyone who isn't a god of social interactions. Don't try to paint this as the norm. Willpower isn't the only thing opposing social influence.

>willpower isn't the only thing opposing social influence
Technically not, but effectively yes. Integrity charms have been gimped hard and mostly have nothing to do with resisting social influence anymore, and using one of your existing intimacies as a defense is unreliable and just as likely to backfire (every intimacy you have can and will be used against you to the point of being a double-edged sword or even a simple liability.) The only truly reliable way to escape a dinner party that threatens to rewrite your character is to spend that willpower and get as far away as you can before the next scene.

Do you also give out a bonus/penalty to attack actions?
Because you should. Make things equal.

You're presuming that the influence always succeeds without fail, and that all intimacies are somehow automatically known. It's an implausible scenario that just isn't worth worrying about. You're also still bringing up the possibility of a character's beliefs getting changed as a strict negative, which it isn't, that's purely subjective. You're also wrong about Integrity. A lot of its Charms help resist social influence.

Please go ahead and create a satisfying and comprehensive social RPG system that beats what non-autistic humans are already literally programmed to do by tens of thousands of years of human evolution.

I'm not here to solve the problems, I'm here to point them out. But if you pay me then I'll fix it.

It's Exalted. Social influence is one of the two main ways you can be destroyed, it's the way the fewest PCs prepare for, and almost everyone is going to come at you in one way or the other with beyond godlike power (at least. Gods kind of suck in Exalted and you can body most gods at chargen.)