Skill Checks
In addition to roleplaying, skill checks are key in determining the outcome of an interaction.
Your roleplaying efforts can alter an NPC’s attitude, but there might still be an element of chance in the situation. For example, your GM can call for a Charisma check at any point during an interaction if he or she wants the dice to play a role in determining an NPC’s reactions. Other checks might be appropriate in certain situations, at your GM’s discretion.
Pay attention to your skill proficiencies when thinking of how you want to interact with an NPC, and stack the deck in your favor by using an approach that relies on your best bonuses and skills. If the group needs to trick a guard into letting them into a castle, the rogue who is proficient in Deception is the best bet to lead the discussion. When negotiating for a hostage’s release, the cleric with persuasion should do most of the talking.
This section provides a structured way to resolve a social interaction.
1. Starting Attitude
Choose the starting attitude of a creature the adventurers are interacting with: friendly, indifferent, or hostile.
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 you. You decide 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. You set the DC. A check that fails by 10 or more might misidentify a characteristic, so you 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 you decide the conversation has run its course — call 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 tables below:
| DC | Friendly Creature’s Reaction |
|---|---|
| 0 | The creature does as asked without taking risks or making sacrifices. |
| 10 | The creature accepts a minor risk or sacrifice to do as asked. |
| 20 | The creature accepts a significant risk or sacrifice to do as asked. |
| DC | Indifferent Creature’s Reaction |
|---|---|
| 0 | The creature offers no help but does no harm. |
| 10 | The creature does as asked as long as no risks or sacrifices are involved. |
| 20 | The creature accepts a minor risk or sacrifice to do as asked. |
| DC | Hostile Creature’s Reaction |
|---|---|
| 0 | The creature opposes the adventurers’ actions and might take risks to do so. |
| 10 | The creature offers no help but does no harm. |
| 20 | The creature does as asked as long as no risks or sacrifices are involved. |
Aiding the Check
Other characters who make substantial contributions to the conversation can help the character making the check. If a helping character says or does something that would influence the interaction in a positive way, the character making the Charisma check can do so with advantage. If the other character inadvertently says something counterproductive or offensive, the character making the Charisma check has disadvantage on that check.
Multiple Checks
Certain situations might call for more than one check, particularly if the adventurers come into the interaction with multiple goals.
4. Repeat?
Once a Charisma check has been made, further attempts to influence the target of the interaction might be fruitless or run the risk of upsetting or angering the subject creature, potentially shifting its attitude toward hostility. Use your best judgment. For example, if the party’s rogue says something that pushes a noble’s attitude toward the party from indifferent to hostile, another character might be able to diffuse the noble’s hostility with clever roleplaying and a successful Charisma (Persuasion) check.