Cinco: New Conversation Rules

I got new rules, I count 'em.I liked my existing rules for conversations, being basically the same as in D&D Fifth Edition, but I felt like they lacked structure up to the final roll. I kept hearing about how intuitive the rules from Draw Steel were, but Matthew Colville is such a maximalist rules writer that my eyes glazed over the constant weighing of situational permutations on the page—most rulebooks should really be like 70% shorter, huh? So I didn’t fully get them until I watched Ginny Di’s video where she boiled down Matt’s structure in a way that could be extended into principles beyond Draw Steel’s verbose mechanic framework. It’s basically like: We should have an idea of where the NPC already stands. The goal of negotiation is to shift the NPC’s perspective towards yours. At some point, you have to stop pushing the question. So rather than having a unstructured conversation leading up to a climatic roll where the outcome is finally decided—not that being unstructured is bad…