Why Charisma Rolls are Stupid and Ugly and Stuff

     Ok... first post ever... time to bitch and moan.

    Whoever the hell decided rolling a singular dice to determine how an NPC responds to your PCs arguments, and didn't make a whole negotiation system, was a goddamn fool, maybe a nice person, but a goddamn fool, and here's why.

    You kids ever play Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas? No? Niether have I, but I know how the speech system works in both, so I am 'fully qualified'. In Fallout 3, the speech system uses rng to determine success or failure at convincing someone of something. In New Vegas, the system is more deterministic, if you have enough points in speech (or honestly, whatever necessary skill is needed to formulate a persuasive argument, like having enough points in the 'explosives' skill to convince a dude you can safely handle dynamite). Now what this difference in systems means is that there's no real point to putting much stock into speech in Fallout 3, because it's random anyways, even if you put a lot of points in, you can still fail, you can still have your investment mean nothing at the drop of a hat; it's just not reliable as a method of conflict resolution. In New Vegas, you either have enough points, or you don't, and it actually gives you a reliable way to resolve conflict with words, because there's no chance to it, you either invested enough, or you didn't.

    Now what in God's unholy name do some podunk vidya gaems have to do with the esteemed and venerable art of TTRPGs? 

    A fair bit: most modern TTRPGs use a singular charisma check to determine whether you succeed or not in convincing an NPC of something. Basically, no matter what you say, it all comes down to random chance; yes, maybe your referee will give you a bonus to the roll to shift the odds in your favor if you use some sort of specific knowledge or whatever, but at the end of the day, this comes down to a single dice roll, a single, unreliable dice roll. 

    Now faced with these prospects, the average player would rather shoot something, conversations, arguements, whatever, it's too unreliable, you're better off cutting a person to bits than you are talking to them, because combat is a series of rolls that still maintains an appearance of choice, because whether or not you 'hit' an opponent, isn't the end all be all, many combat systems offer other tactical options and at the end of the day, getting into a fight with someone just offers more choice than talking to them ever would. It de-incentivises roleplaying because you can only really do that meaningfully with other PCs and maybe a friendly NPC, otherwise it just comes down to a single roll where the player at this point is gambling, and may have every effort they invested, every secret explored, every in depth character study, whatever their efforts, completely invalidated, with not much they can do during the thing. I also forgot to mention that interacting with the world beyond murderhoboing is also de-incentivised with the single charisma roll thing, even if you make combat lethal as all hell, because finding out information about the world to talk to its denizens isn't effective and reliable as a strategy.

    So how do we fix this? Well, there's two ways: you can expand the negotiation system to be as expansive in options as combat (e.g. Nights of the Crusades, Burning Wheel) which gives players some control during the negotiation because there's more rolls, and more opportunities for them to get ahead. This is complicated, but it's a viable option. 

    The second option is this: if you are giving your PCs bonuses to the charisma rolls based on specific arguments used and knowledge obtained, you're already roleplaying the NPC and know what arguments would and wouldn't be effective, so why not just cut out the dice rolling, and roleplay the NPC completely. Think about it like this, if someone told you to go to war out of the blue, no matter how charismatic their utterance of "Come to war with me!" you wouldn't follow them most likely, after all, war is a dangerous thing that could get you killed. But if the guy plays to your other motives, like protecting your family, or your belief in your nation's superiority, or how everyone else is doing it, what have you, then they could be relatively plain, they could even have a bit of a stutter, but chances are, you would be more convinced. 

    Now of course, in the real life scenario, charisma does play a role, but not as much as being able to actually appeal to what matters to someone. If you assume your PCs are reasonably charismatic and articulate, then all you have to worry about is what they say in the negotiations, and what they say will be influenced by your players' knowledge of human behavior, and whatever else they learned by exploring your world that you built for them, either by asking questions to other NPCs, or digging around to find lore in ruins or writings, or whatever. Either way, your players will feel rewarded for their efforts if you simply roleplay the NPCs as opposed to leaving it up to the dice. 

    inb4 "so I should just let my players convince all the NPCs no rolls required" No, literally no, if your players try to convince a hermit to follow the crowd, they will fail every time. If you try to convince a person to kill someone they love, they'll say no without some serious playing on their motivations. Be realistic, not every argument will work on every person, you have to consider what they want and what they'd do for it.

    inb4 "but that's too many NPCs to roleplay" What the hell are you doing as a referee? Do you mean to tell me your NPCs operate on nothing but chance and convenience? It isn't hard to figure out what a farmer wants with a little thinking, and if your major NPCs don't have their motives written down somewhere, you sure as hell have no place as a referee for a TTRPG group. If you aren't willing to expend the slightest bit of effort to build up your major characters, and think up a rough idea for the minor characters, you would be better off playing at a table rather than running one.

This was my batshit rambling, see you next year or something.