Diplomacy issues

[Snickersnax]

So I tried to use diplomacy to handle an encounter in a recent game.

In the first situation my druid (with wild empathy)tried to use diplomacy against some animals that had been spotted by his flying leshy familiar.

We walked confidently up to the beasts hoping to make an impression on them.

Initiatives were rolled, and the animals won and attacked us. Even if we had won, somehow we would have had to engage them in conversation for one whole minute to even have a chance to make an impression.

Problem: there is no way for diplomacy to work to diffuse conflicts in actual encounter mode situations. Talking for one minute takes too long.

Solution: make make an impression something that can be accomplished in a single round of actions, preferably one action. Otherwise its useless for attempting to avoid fights.

[Fuzzy-Wuzzy]

How does this differ from PF1, where using Diplomacy for attitude adjustment also took one minute of interaction, including for druids using wild empathy? In either edition it's not really meant to be used on creatures so hostile they'll attack you on sight.

[Captain Morgan]

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

How does this differ from PF1, where using Diplomacy for attitude adjustment also took one minute of interaction, including for druids using wild empathy? In either edition it's not really meant to be used on creatures so hostile they'll attack you on sight.

This is correct. The intention is made very clear by the Glad-Hand feat, which lets you Make an Impression immediately when you meet someone rather than after one minute, but it explicitly doesn't work for hostile situations such as a combat encounter.

There is a reason the game has so many more rules governing combat than social encounters. It is made with the assumption you are gonna have to fight at some point and you can't talk your way out of every battle. Many adventures do explicitly allow specific encounters to be bypassed with diplomacy, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.

This limitation also seems to be what makes Legendary Negotiator; it lets you Make an Impression and Request them to stop fighting using a single 3 action activity.

Snickersnax: I don't have all the information on your game, but I suspect either the GM simply didn't want you to succeed or you approached a wee bit too confidently. Unless an animal has decided to hunt you or you have gotten too close to its young or something, most critters shouldn't attack you on sight because they want to size you up first, and if they think you are a threat they would rather scare you off than risk personal injury. This is a point which distinguishes them from Magical Beasts, which are often much more malicious and attack on sight.

So I think there probably should have been an opportunity to talk the cat down before it attacked. But you shouldn't be able to actually interrupt combat with something that has already committed to murdering you, sans Legendary Negotiator.