Put simply, while I understand that it seems like a shame not to reward a ten minute impassioned speech, targeted carefully to the proper audience and delivered with the passion of a skilled actor by the player, the more subjectively you assess that, the less worthwhile social stats and skills become.

The system, as you describe it here, has a couple of logical conclusions to me –
#1) There is a natural party Face in any gaming group. No matter what, no matter how much another player designs for social interaction, there is a player who, given that same character, would be better at social situations. If he isn’t the primary social character, it will at best mean the party is worse off in social situations, and at worst mean that another player who took a chance and made social interaction their “thing” can be outshone by this player despite having +8 bonuses over them. Given the same build, anyone can be the front line fighter, or the rogue, or the magic user, and do about equally well. The Face, on the other hand, is a +10 better social character given the same build as the most shy/least socially adept player.

#2) As someone who is not good at social interaction IRL, there is a strong disincentive for me to create a character with social skills, much less the party’s social character. I’ve had “I’ll adjust your roll based on how you play” and “I’ll try to adjust my reaction with your bonuses” games before, and it doesn’t spur me to new heights – it tells me that my character will never be as effective because he’s holding the anchor of my slow-thinking and social faux-pas.

As I see it, the biggest problem is that we’re using a player’s actual skill at convincing as a metric for determing a character’s skill at the same thing. When you say “I run up and viciously slash the orc, letting my momentum carry me past him and widen the wound”, you’re using words to describe nonverbal action, and we roll dice, and everyone is generally happy. Sometimes you get a bonus for verbally describing a physical action well. When you say “I verbally maneuver him into a corner, and leave the impression that if he fails to agree, he’s a coward”, you’re encouraged to “play it out”, even though no DM would ever hand a player a stick and ask them to illustrate the running orc slash in the same medium as it’s supposed to be happening.

That, to me, is the main concern. Not much else in (tabletop) RPGs is limited by your own skill, because we accept the mechanics, but it’s hard to be more social in-character if you aren’t good at it OOC, and easy to be more social IC if you’re good at it OOC.

I’m big, and I have some training in swordfighting – but I can’t use my physical strength to make up for having a weak character with a “virtual roll” based on that skill, while more glib players can almost always use their gift of gab to make up for dumping Charisma and not investing in social skills.

Again, if the goal is to avoid the awkwardness of accepting “I convince him to agree”, then I suppose penalizing less socially adept players will do that – they’ll stop putting themselves in that situation when they realize more glib players can outdo them. But I don’t know if that’s your goal.

For me, it’s far easier to look at your example, and have it go:
“… I roll a 3.”
“You give your impassioned speech – Unfortunately, just as you seem to have the king convinced, an ACTUAL CHICKEN walks past the window, clucking. His Majesty is thoroughly convinced the gods are mocking his moment of doubt as cowardice, and charges out the door to make invasion plans.”

As others have mentioned, bring it in line with Explaining failure. You can’t “see” a social action any more or less than a physical one – just as you can invent a cause for failure in a surefire physical action, you can certainly invent one in social situations as well. Even if you accept that the players are describing the CONTENT of a speech 100%, they’re not describing their facial expressions, they probably haven’t explicitly ruled out a rumbling stomach, etc, etc. A social interaction is, trust me, no less fraught with random happenstance than a combat situation.

Interestingly I would be likely to do the exact opposite. If i know I am good at giving motivating speeches then build a character where that is his thing. If I had roleplaying negotiations with the king then build a taciturn fighter. ie put there points where I can take advantage of them, I know I am going to get good rolls on my diplomacy checks so I’d best have good diplomacy skill to back it up. I know I will always make poor rolls well I guess my character won’t be doing much diplomacy.

Perhaps that is my perceived problem with the suggestion it encourages niche play where players play characters with similar skills to themselves.

The solution you provide really favours the outgoing (sometimes loudmouth), dramatic, veteran player and penalizes the shyer, newbie players. I mean this solution may work in your campaign but it may not in mine. You really have to know your players. Because if I’m playing in your campaign and I know that I’m really good at arguing, then maybe I wouldn’t throw any skill points into my character’s Diplomacy score, counting on the virtual rolls rule to get me through. And then that gives me more skill points for Tumble or whatever.

Even without the Hero Point, I would be more inclined to say that the character had some spinach in his teeth while the player was making the otherwise rather convincing argument. Or quite simply, the target is just too distracted or fed up with the characters when the discussion happens.

I’ve got a related solution in our Beast Hunters game, for exactly the same reason: it promotes cool, creative narrative input. In Beast Hunters, there’s another step involved. It works like this:

1) The Player proposes a maneuver and provides the description and roleplay of it
2) The GM offers a certain result (in this system, a number of AP), depending on the perceived quality of the input. The offer is calculated on a baseline of the character traits.
3) The Player either accepts the result or rolls the dice, adding in character traits.

The reason No. 3) is in there is so that, if the player disagrees about the result or wants to achieve something higher and risk getting a lower result, they can always still go to dice.

But the virtual roll is a neat quick fix for an existing system. I’d still allow for a roll of the player wants to take the risk

1) All your players should get great breaks occassionally, and if one player hasn’t had any good breaks recently you should be looking for a chance to reward him when he puts in the effort and tries to roleplay, which leads into (2)

2) Roleplaying ability varies from player to player. You shouldn’t be judging against some arbitrary measure, but against the players own ability. 10 should be your benchmark for no effort. 20 you should be your benchmark for something truely exceptional for this player, his best performance to date. To continue getting 20s your player would have to continually improve, but the interesting thing is, they do. A player who’s a poor roleplayer or a nervous roleplayer would have to do a lot less to get that 20, but for him or her its a big thing. They’ve put themselves out on a limb and risked going that bit further (than they’ve gone before). Reward this and next time they’ll go that little further.

3) Sometimes things just don’t work. Sometimes it just isnt your day and lthough you put in the effort it comes out wrong. You say or do something that in real life would be a blunder. I still reward the effort in these cases. Anything where the player puts in some roleplaying effort should be rewarded more fully than just saying ‘ I talk her out of it.” or “I persuade him to give us it.”

I think it all depends how (pardon the phrase) random the conversation is. If it’s an unknown shopkeep, randomness and unexpected failure work fine — there could be all sorts of things that haven’t been considered that could come up, just as you say. We (the GM) don’t really know a lot about that shopkeep or how he might react.

The problem is more cases where the GM _knows_ the NPC. The more you know about the NPCs, their personality, the situation, the more predictable the reaction is for the GM (which is a good thing). Given all the background about the king, the war, and current events, the GM can be fairly certain what fits and what doesn’t. Random events can happen (“the king takes your friendliness for smugness — off with his head!”) but if random events overshadow thinking about the situation, it doesn’t reward smart roleplaying or close attention to the details of the game.

A physical action always has more inherent randomness, because we (the players & GM) can’t see how it’s really happening in the game world, because the players are only summarizing their character actions, not LARPing and the physical game world is imaginary (sure you run to cut the rope, but is there a puddle on the floor?). First-person roleplaying is the only part of gaming that “really” happens at the table — you do know exactly what was said [yes amusingly I noticed that my examples are summaries, not dialog].

Interesting stuff.

I guess it comes down to an intuitive thing, a feeling that this time it’s appropriate to roll, but in another circumstance a virtual roll is more fitting. Different tools for different jobs.

Another interesting point is that some games argue against rolling at all unless it’s important — the Dogs in the Vineyard logic of “say yes or roll.” Generally that makes a lot of sense to me, but without thinking about it the virtual roll went in the opposite direction — roll to resolve the trivial or random if want, but let the roleplaying quantify the big central stuff.

I wonder if you comments here
Learn to Explain Failure

might be an alternative way of approaching it. The rationale is great, the role playing superb, but the die roll is low. Something must be wrong! The king must be getting bad advice (from his Wormtongue) or the guard has been warned that Jedis have magical powers of persuasion , so she is on extra special alert.
You could even role play the scene one of unusual changes of mind.
“For a moment the dealer seems ready to make the trade, then he pauses.. he glances at the colors on your shield, and pulls his coin purse back out of reach. ‘No’ he says, ‘I won’t fall for it this time.’
Of course, then as GM you need to do some scrambling to make that make sense. But it could be an opportunity to make the scene come alive in surprising and fortuitous ways.
Also, highlighting failures (of the dice) will ultimately force some roleplaying/character generation decisions. I can’t leave my diplomatic skills untouched and expect my natural acting ability to carry the day. If I am playing an uncharismatic character, statistically that will average out in play.
The circumstance bonus can come into play for extraordinary roleplaying, and might it be necessary to achieve the sort of conversions you desire (using diplomacy to sway the loyal court to your side)[assuming a big number is needed].