So, Bards, am I right?

Charming, talented, handsome (if you ask them), self assured, confident -- what's not to like about a bard?

Well, sometimes a Bard is all kinds of challenging in a role playing situation, trying to get in the pants of anything or get away with smooth talking for anyone, and generally just making a hash of the Influence action.

Well, what if things were a tad more, um, challenging?

What if the Mood of the subject as well as the Attitude were involved -- sorta like real life, but not really. What if even within those things you could spread it out among the chance to do so -- but still keep it somewhat role playing based?

Well, here's a little chart for DCs based on Mood of the subject, and expansion of possible Attitudes of the subject, and the chance of such a thing happening.

Now, obviously my approach is such that it makes things a little harder than normal -- the default for attitude would hav ehte DC for a Friendly and Open person with a great chance to be a 10, for example.

But I am showing this so that you can develop your own set of Difficulty Check values for your own game.

Now some of you may wonder where I got the Moods, lol. That's easy -- I used the six basic human emotions from the Ekman set. 

An additional option (and one I am still toying with) is to make the Mood a modifier to the Attitude roll.  Another option is to take out entirely the "Chance" measure, or use fewer than five .

The pattern is fairly simple -- from a max DC of 30, I dropped things down by a step of 15% each time (3 points). This is enough to keep Advantage in play and useful, but not so much that it guts things (and also why I haven't done the modifiers).

How do I use it? I set an adjusted value based on both (fancy speak for add the two that work and divide by two).

I feel like if you already know the chance of the thing happening, you don't need the chart.

Quote from ChoirOfFire >>

I feel like if you already know the chance of the thing happening, you don't need the chart.

 
So for you, something like this would be more useful:

This took a little bit because I had to re-evaluate the impact of the Mood in tangent with the Attitude. That meant making up for a slight error (I forgot indifferent. so restored it), and then shifting the percentage based on mood.

My group’s main DM tends to run as much as he can using passive scores instead of having players make active rolls. Wadaya got for him?

Quote from IamSposta >>

My group’s main DM tends to run as much as he can using passive scores instead of having players make active rolls. Wadaya got for him?

 
hmmmm. That I need to think on overnight…

So, as I head to bed, I am looking at a blend of mood and Approach for a passive run.

Approach would be based in the way the PC conveys their charm. I need to brainstorm through different styles, lol.

or, it could just be chance set up against the mood, adding a modifier to the three base attitudes, which might work better for a passive check.

Well, lemme know what you come up with.