So, Brendan Davis (one of my former publishers) was inspired by my recent repost of a classic rant on Social Skills to talk about it on youtube! In it, he talks about how his own very troubled relationship to social skills has influenced how he presents them in some of Bedrock's games (other than my own Arrows of Indra, of course).
So, since he mentions me, I'm just going to take a break today and let him do the talking:
RPGPundit
Currently Smoking: Ben Wade Collection Canadian + Image Latakia
Pretty much spot-on with how I handle this subject in my own games. I use B/X D&D as my core ruleset but freely borrow from other DM's published house rules as well as OSR clones, in order to flesh out areas of the game that B/X neglects.
ReplyDeleteI spent quite a bit of time trying to work in some mechanic for social skills, but never really felt comfortable with any of it. I finally just decided that if a player wants to do this sort of thing, he will just have to role-play it out. I might throw in a Charisma check, but otherwise it's up to the player (through his character) to convince the NPC (portrayed by me the DM, based on what I know about the NPC) to get what he wants.
Having said that, I am intrigued with introducing some kind of mechanic into my game like the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets skills of "Repartee" and "Witicisms". I also really like the character class concept of the Mountebank. But implementing any of these ideas would involve bringing in an artificial social skills mechanic, and that has so far prevented me from doing so.