The social combat section of Unlimited Intrigue (beginning on p164) is a real gold mine. Although the first dozen pages read like an excerpt from a new Game Mastery Guide, the real meat begins on page 176 with the part on Verbal Duels.
Verbal Duels cover any situation where the PCs are in conflict with someone else in front of an audience, whether it be the judge and jury in a courtroom, rowdy bar patrons, a church congregation or a local lord deciding who to award a mercenary contract to.
The overall system is very robust and the ten verbal tactics proposed are clever and varied. There are just a few points which aren't clear and prevent really using this system at the table:
1) Edges: Edges grant rerolls, and so are very important to success. But how many does a social combattant get? Page 177 tells us they come from "effects that increase the modifier of an entire associated skill", two examples of which are the circlet of persuasion and the feat skill focus. Presumably other feats which grant a bonus to all uses of a given skill would also count.
But which skills? A whole host of skills are potentially involved in verbal duels, anything from the standard social skills (diplomacy, bluff, intimidate & sense motive) to various perform, knowledge and profession skills. Do modifiers to all these skills grant edges, or only the ones a verbal duelist has selected to use during his duel? And are these edges totalled, to be applied anywhere, or specific to each associated tactic?
2) Procedure in assigning skills to tactics: "A duelist can only assign a given skill to a single tactic" - this implies that prior to the duel you need to make a list of the ten tactics with the selected skill attached to each one, or at least keep a running tally of which tactics you've used and which skill was used. I'm beginning to feel like I need a worksheet just to keep track of all this, especially since...
3) Changes in the way skill bonuses are calculated: although you have assigned various skills that you use all the time while adventuring, the skill bonus used in a verbal duel is not the same as the skill bonus you usually use. It isn't all that hard to figure out (ranks + class skill bonus + CHA modifier) but it's different. Some of the guys I play with, who can never keep track of their to hit bonus (modified by things like weapon focus, point blank shot, rapid shot, TWF and the like) are going to be very, very confused.
4) Keeping track of the exchange DC: The actual modified roll of each participant in a verbal exchange sets the DC for his adversary, so you must keep a running total going. Not intrinsically problematic, but it's going to require a paper trail.
It's a robust and interesting system, but one which is going to require a worksheet - at least for anyone unable to play more than a dozen moves of blindfold chess. Especially since it isn't clear on a first read what the order of actions is. I suggest the following order:
2) assign skills to tactics
3) calculate skill bonuses and associated edges
4) assess the audience biases, and possibly seed more (to gain specific edges)
5) begin the duel, choosing tactics and keeping a running total both of the DC to succeed and the "ante" of determination points at stake.
6) assess lost determination points at the end of each exchange until one side concedes the duel or is reduced to zero determination.
Can anyone comment on the interpretation I've made of this verbal duel system?
So is no one trying to suss out how this system is supposed to work? I'm planning on using it Wednesday (if my players make enough progress in the scenario) in our RotRL game.
Some bits seem unecessarily complicated, like the part about using a different skill bonus than one normally uses, even though it's still called by the same name, but I'm going to try to roll with it.
Suggestions?
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1. Edges due to skill bonuses apply only to the skill in question. You can gain general-use edges if you begin the duel with the advantage or win an exchange.
2. Listing out the tactics and skills is a smart way to organize things.
3. On your character sheets, just ignore the misc. or magic bonus column. Most skills won't be different unless you've invested feats or items in them or have racial bonuses.
4. It's not much different than tracking AC and hit points in combat. Writing it down will keep you sane, but is not strictly necessary.
Looks like you've got it down. Have fun playing, and comment again how it goes!
I've tried the system and my players and I have tweaked it intensely.
Edges seem to want to turn Social Combat into 5e, with re-rolls being the mechanic for success instead of higher bonuses as established by 3.x. As to not step on the toes of 5e completely, the game includes ways for the players to attain their own edges in ways other than 5e's inspiration/advantage system (which is almost exclusively by DM adjudication) by tying the additional bonuses to the number of edges gained.
A wizard with a familiar would gain an edge on anything requiring Sense Motive, for example, once he has 10 ranks into it.
The system has it's flaws and I'll be writing my own thread about it here in a couple days when I have all my findings and experiences organized properly.
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1. Edges due to skill bonuses apply only to the skill in question. You can gain general-use edges if you begin the duel with the advantage or win an exchange.
2. Listing out the tactics and skills is a smart way to organize things.
3. On your character sheets, just ignore the misc. or magic bonus column. Most skills won't be different unless you've invested feats or items in them or have racial bonuses.
4. It's not much different than tracking AC and hit points in combat. Writing it down will keep you sane, but is not strictly necessary.
Looks like you've got it down. Have fun playing, and comment again how it goes!
As I've often noticed recently, I agree with KingOfAnything. Wheldrake, if you're wondering why the bonuses and edges work like they do, it's an important part of the way you wind up seeing a diversity of tactics vis-a-vis the penalty for repetition of tactics and increase the depth and meaning of your choices in the duel. The number of exchanges you usually need to win to end a verbal duel is intentionally low (to keep it from going on too long and make it flow with the game better, especially if you're going to use several of them in the same session), so you don't want one tactic to be so high above the others that your best choice is just to use that tactic every time regardless of what the other person does; that leads to the optimal strategy being degenerate repetition, which is uninteresting from both a game and narrative standpoint, especially if you have lots of verbal duels and the same character always uses the same repetition strategy. Repetition strategies have their place (and are still effective in the system as presented, see below), but they shouldn't be the constantly superior option.
Compared to with edges, this is still an excellent strategy for the example mesmerist, since he has a large number of edges, but since we didn't start with +15 more on Bluff, after two or three winning exchanges, the penalty is going to be big enough, especially if the opponent is likely to counter with resolve, that we need to start thinking about other options too. If we do stick to baiting, unless our dice are quite hot, we'll probably need to spend several edges each time to keep the chain of formidable results going, and we'll eventually run out of them and have to switch tactics at that point to have a good chance of finishing the duel.
EDIT: It's also possible, since you were wondering at low response, that you would have gotten more responses in Advice or GenDiscussion, since this feels more like one of those than a Rules Question, though it has elements of all three.