Talk Your Way Into 5E D&D Adventure with Social Interaction

Not a day goes by when I don’t come across a fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master seeking help dealing with a character’s unusual features. One of these reached meme level long ago and doesn’t show any signs of going away any time soon — the Persuasion Expert. Many are the threads of lament and lengthy discussions on how Persuasion isn’t hypnotism, it’s too powerful, it’s abused by players and so forth. By the end of this post I suspect readers will tire of reminders about how it’s the DM — not the player — who determines when skill checks are made. Believe me when I tell you following the proper paradigm enhances the whole 5E D&D experience. But if you don’t I’ll employ a College of Eloquence bard’s Silver Tongue to show how. Let’s get into it.

Nuances of how to play 5E D&D

A Reddit thread I read recently explained how a College of Eloquence bard in the DM poster’s game causes frustration. The example they provide involves the party confronted by a group of bandits. Because of the bard’s Silver Tongue feature they could not get a result lower than 20 on any Charisma (Persuasion) checks — the highest DC required to shift NPC attitudes. Because of the bard persuaded enemies to flee, surrender and otherwise allow the party to bypass them with ease. Even though social interactions tables include text that sometimes it’s just impossible this DM struggled because if persuasion is used in every encounter then even sometimes isn’t enough.

Obviously a DM doesn’t want to nullify character features so nerfing Silver Tongue is a terrible solution. There’s always the out of game conversation solution too. Discussing with a player how their character impacts the game in a different way than everyone else is a reasonable thing to do. But the fact remains it’s a powerful feature in particular. Who has the leverage and what approach does the DM take in their game?

The rules for social interaction are more nuanced than I expected. What doesn’t surprise me is the rules quite elegantly provide guidance for a spectrum of game activity in a relatively short section of chapter 8: Adventuring. There’s a succinct explanation of social interaction with wonderful examples and a peek behind the curtain at the mechanics, which are unfortunately not included in the Basic Rules. I suppose a case could be made for indicating NPC attitude as either friendly, indifferent or hostile as a loose structure. The actual mechanics for social interaction then are an explicitly Dungeons & Dragons system found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide chapter 8: Running the Game. 

Two important things to note here are the fact these social interaction rules are not optional and incidentally the Social Interaction rules include an even better What Do You Do statement than the introduction:

“Exploring dungeons, overcoming obstacles, and slaying monsters are key parts of D&D adventures. No less important, though, are the social interactions that adventurers have with other inhabitants of the world.”

The rules for social interaction reinforce what 5E D&D establishes almost immediately in the introduction’s How to Play section — players don’t declare when they’ll roll the dice to make some sort of check. When the rubber hits the road this gets largely ignored but I feel no less confident it’s the preferable way to go. A terrific reason why lies nestled in the Social Interaction rules.

The outstanding guidance for both descriptive and active roleplaying and the alchemy with ability checks creates the D&D social interaction experience and this section illustrates how it happens.

• Step 1 — The DM Describes the Environment. “At a tavern, an obnoxious elf minstrel sits at Tordek’s table and tries to strike up a conversation with the dwarf.”
• Step 2 — The Players Describe What They Want To Do. “Tordek spits on the floor, growls an insult at the bard, and stomps over to the bar. He sits on a stool and glares at the minstrel before ordering another drink.” This is the step where the DM might ask the player to make a check of some sort.
• Step 3 — The DM Narrates The Results Of The Adventurers’ Actions. “The DM uses your character’s actions and attitudes to determine how an NPC reacts.” The rules don’t follow up with a specific example here but since Tordek clearly conveyed his dislike for the bard you might surmise the NPC is already hostile. In that case there’s nowhere left for the needle to point — no dice need be rolled.

How did we get here from a question about dealing with the College of Eloquence bard’s Silver Tongue feature? You might think me a reductionist who advocates playing 5E D&D as a cut and dry step-by-step process and if I’m honest you’d be right from a certain point of view. I find the rules as written comforting because of how simple and elegantly designed they are and I’m not talking about bounded accuracy, advantage, proficiency bonus or any of those crunchy bits.

I love citing How to Play because of how often the challenges players face can be overcome through embracing these steps. Believe me between all the platforms Nerdarchy engages with and my own interest in the hobby I get a ridiculous amount of exposure to D&D discussions. This dive into social interaction came about through one so I’ll use the College of Eloquence bard as the example.

The DM sought help for how to navigate encounters considering the bard’s Silver Tongue makes their Persuasion attempts nearly impossible to fail. This results in enemies surrendering, fleeing or otherwise overcoming the challenge with a single roll. Variations of this situation are about as common as questions about using two shields or casting a second fireball with Action Surge. At any rate there’s several components to work with:

• Does the social interaction take place during combat?
  • Characters can communicate however they are able, through brief utterances and gestures, as they take their turn. This doesn’t sound like enough to make a persuasive argument to surrender. An action on the other hand would. Now the character chooses to use their action on their turn and the DM asks for a Charisma (Persuasion) check. For the sake of argument their Silver Tongue feature pushes the result past 20 — the hardest possible DC. The enemies (or perhaps only one of them) shifts in attitude from hostile to indifferent. Hopefully the bard’s allies don’t attack that persuaded creature, which would surely shift their attitude right back.
• Does the social interaction take place out of combat?
  • Here is where the onus lies with the DM. In the bard example the intention was a combat encounter with bandits. And we already know everything we need from this statement. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a DM it’s to not assume anything. In this case remove the combat part and it’s still an encounter, still presenting a challenging threat and leaving it to the players in step two to determine what happens next.
    • Confronted by hostile bandits the party can attack
    • Detecting the bandits ahead of time the party can navigate their way past
    • Exchanging words the party can shift attitudes through conversation

Applying the social interaction guidance even further players like the bard in the example can deploy their Persuasion by describing how the character attempts to persuade the bandits or speaking as the character simply state their words. In either case offering something the NPCs want is the first step as the rules indicate. Make a compelling case and there may be no dice roll necessary. Congratulations — the College of Eloquence bard did their cool thing!

It’s entirely within a DM’s purview to call for a check at this point though. It’s a game after all and the dice add an element of tension. The bard really made an excellent point and they’ve got their Silver Tongue but will even this be enough? Thankfully the bard stacked the deck in their favor by using an approach relying on their best bonuses and skills — a point not missing from the rules either.

An accomplished performer and their biggest fan share an unusual background relationship in Girl with the Dragon SNAFU, one of 55 dynamic encounters ready to drop into your game in Out of the Box. [Illustration by Kim Van Deun]

It’s easy to pick apart 5E D&D or any other RPG, point to a single component and fault the entire game based on misaligned perspectives from both sides of the DM screen. Consider the following:

• 6-8 Encounters per Adventuring Day is Too Many. What if the party uses social interaction to talk their way past two of them and relies on exploration to navigate past another three? Resources were expended, challenges were overcome and everyone presumably got to do their character’s cool thing a couple of times.
• Support for Exploration Sucks. Regional Effects, Monster Lairs, Monuments, Ruins, Settlements, Strongholds, Weird Locales, Weather, Wilderness Hazards, Foraging, getting lost and more suggest otherwise. DM’s looking for more support might look across the table at the players to Describe What They Want To Do when confronted by any of these things. I guarantee memorable moments will occur.
• Character Feature X Impacts the Game Too Much. Challenge yourself to be more creative. If this examination of social interaction in 5E D&D is any indication a great start is looking at what the rules offer as a resource. Unless a player’s sole reasoning for playing a College of Eloquence bard is to Silver Tongue their way out of every confrontation presumably the fantasy of playing a charming individual is the appeal. Being open to more encounters to challenge (and reward!) the character seems a much better solution than seeking out a way to stymie their class features. If they are only making character choices to exploit them mechanically then I don’t know what to tell you — this is an unfulfilling way to play any RPG if you ask me. (It also breaks the most basic of rules, the good old How to Play because remember — the DM asks players to roll the dice!)

One last thing I thought about while working on this is imagining the scenario flipped on around. Whatever the specifics of this common situation the conceit is ruining combat encounters by talking past them with Charisma skills. The rest of the party likely enjoys the thrill of combat and testing their characters against monsters in a mathematical duel to the death, to whatever degree. The problem arises because an outlier character’s cool thing eliminates the combat, satisfying one player but disappointing the rest of the group.

As implausible as it sounds (actually not so implausible given the extremely broad playerbase and scope of games these days) imagine a 5E D&D party where all but one are social interaction experts. How would they feel if every time the party engaged NPCs in conversation when the outlier’s turn came they executed the creature in one hit?

I think there’s fertile ground to dig around for ideas about how to run a heavy social interaction game. In a campaign where Deception, Intimidation and Persuasion mean more than to hit bonuses and armor class a noble can be as dangerous as a night hag. Quite a few creatures in the Basic Rules come packing pretty high Deception bonuses and a story featuring monsters like doppelgangers, lamia, oni and rakshasha could be as perilous in word as more traditional campaigns are in deeds.

Until next time, stay nerdy!

*Featured image — In Dinner Party, part of Out of the Box Encounters, alliances between adventurers themselves get put to the test. [Art by Kim Van Deun]

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