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First impressions are your strong suit. When you meet someone in a casual or social situation, you can immediately attempt a Diplomacy check to Make an Impression on that creature rather than needing to converse for 1 minute. You take a –5 penalty to the check. If you fail or critically fail, you can engage in 1 minute of conversation and attempt a new check at the end of that time rather than accepting the failure or critical failure result.
When you Make an Impression, you can compare your Diplomacy check result to the Will DCs of two targets instead of one. It’s possible to get a different degree of success for each target. The number of targets increases to four if you’re an expert, 10 if you’re a master, and 25 if you’re legendary.
Example scenario: the party meets a group of 5 unfriendly, but not hostile (yet), people.
A character with Glad-Hand would like to Make an Impression to de-escalate the situation. Glad-Hand does not require the normal 1 minute long engagement with each target, and it rather happens immediately, as soon as each target is first met. It is therefore my understanding that the character would be able to roll 5 different Make an Impression checks, without the need for Group Impression.
Having also Group Impression would instead allow the character to only roll two checks: one to Make an Impression on 4 out of 5 targets, and one to impress the last one.
Is this correct? Would you recommend Group Impression on a character using Glad-Hand mainly for situations like this, i.e. to try to avoid avoidable fights, or is Glad-Hand alone enough for this purpose?
Edit: oh wait it's an issue with redundancy. I would imagine you could benefit from having both when yoh don't want to take a penalty but still converse with everyone at once, since if you fail the first attempt you still get to converse for a minute, which means you still have a minute to converse with the entire group if you dont succeed on the first go.
If you manage to beat the DC straight up, great, but at a -5 you may not. Glad Hand gives you a second chance which is where Group Impression comes into effect, since you have to now converse with the group as normal. If you are hitting successes on Glad Hand back to back, yeah, Group Impression can be a little redundant but not if you have the potential for failure, in which case Group Impression becomes rather helpful.