Social Interactions

1. Starting Attitude

Choose the starting attitude of a creature the adventurers are interacting with: friendly, indifferent, or hostile. This will be based upon the context of the situation.

A friendly creature wants to help the adventurers and wishes for them to succeed. For tasks or actions that require no particular risk, effort, or cost, friendly creatures usually help without question. If an element of personal risk is involved, a successful Charisma check might be required to convince a friendly creature to take that risk.

An indifferent creature might help or hinder the party, depending on what the creature sees as most beneficial. A creature’s indifference doesn’t necessarily make it standoffish or disinterested. Indifferent creatures might be polite and genial, surly and irritable, or anything in between. A successful Charisma check is necessary when the adventurers try to persuade an indifferent creature to do something.

A hostile creature opposes the adventurers and their goals but doesn’t necessarily attack them on sight. For example, a condescending noble might wish to see a group of upstart adventurers fail so as to keep them from becoming rivals for the king’s attention, thwarting them with slander and scheming rather than direct threats and violence. The adventurers need to succeed on one or more challenging Charisma checks to convince a hostile creature to do anything on their behalf. That said, a hostile creature might be so ill-disposed toward the party that no Charisma check can improve its attitude, in which case any attempt to sway it through diplomacy fails automatically.

2. Conversation

Play out the conversation. Let the adventurers make their points, trying to frame their statements in terms that are meaningful to the creature they are interacting with.

Changing Attitude.

The attitude of a creature might change over the course of a conversation. If the adventurers say or do the right things during an interaction (perhaps by touching on a creature’s ideal, bond, or flaw), they can make a hostile creature temporarily indifferent, or make an indifferent creature temporarily friendly. Likewise, a gaffe, insult, or harmful deed might make a friendly creature temporarily indifferent or turn an indifferent creature hostile.

Whether the adventurers can shift a creature’s attitude is up to the DM. The DM decides whether the adventurers have successfully couched their statements in terms that matter to the creature. Typically, a creature’s attitude can’t shift more than one step during a single interaction, whether temporarily or permanently.

Determining Characteristics.

The adventurers don’t necessarily enter into a social interaction with a full understanding of a creature’s ideal, bond, or flaw. If they want to shift a creature’s attitude by playing on these characteristics, they first need to determine what the creature cares about. They can guess, but doing so runs the risk of shifting the creature’s attitude in the wrong direction if they guess badly.

After interacting with a creature long enough to get a sense of its personality traits and characteristics through conversation, an adventurer can attempt a Wisdom (Insight) check to uncover one of the creature’s characteristics. The DM sets the DC. A check that fails by 10 or more might misidentify a characteristic, so the DM should provide a false characteristic or invert one of the creature’s existing characteristics. For example, if an old sage’s flaw is that he is prejudiced against the uneducated, an adventurer who badly fails the check might be told that the sage enjoys personally seeing to the education of the downtrodden.

Given time, adventurers can also learn about a creature’s characteristics from other sources, including its friends and allies, personal letters, and publicly told stories. Acquiring such information might be the basis of an entirely different set of social interactions.

3. Charisma Check

When the adventurers get to the point of their request, demand, or suggestion — or if the DM decides the conversation has run its course — the DM calls for a Charisma check. Any character who has actively participated in the conversation can make the check. Depending on how the adventurers handled the conversation, the Persuasion, Deception, or Intimidation skill might apply to the check. The creature’s current attitude determines the DC required to achieve a specific reaction, as shown in the Conversation Reaction table.

4. Conversation Reaction

5. Other Factors

NPC Bias

NPCs all have bias that factors into these interactions. If a bias applies to anyone that is interacting with the NPC, then that bias applies to the interaction rolls. This means that if there are three characters interacting with the NPC that trigger their negative bias, the group will roll with a triple disadvantage.

Renown

Renown can offer benefits to interacting with members of the faction a character has renown with. Having renown in a faction that a NPC is part of does not negate the NPC Bias. These conditions stack.