Pursuasion vs Fighting

[Luke S]

I do not seem to get experience when pursuading my way out of a fight, whats the upside... you miss out on experience.

for example the Gareth cornered by the magisters, pursuade them to leave and you get no exp, kill them you get a bunch

[Efesell]

It often suits the story more to not just leave corpses at every encounter.

[DarkFenix]

The best scenarios occur when you can persuade people not to fight. THEN you go and punch them in the face and kill them all anyway.

[Coffeepot]

If you got exp for persuading enemies not to fight then killing them anyway you would be double dipping.

[Ol' Knife Ears <3]

Sometimes persuading opens up quests. Finishing quests nets you big exp.

To hijack the thread a little, how do the choices on a Persuasion check work? Do you generally want to pick the most effective choice, or are all choices equally effective, with your stats + Persuasion skill determining whether or not it succeeds?

[jack_of_tears]

I agree, games which let you persuade your way out of combat should reward you for doing so - you had to spend the xp to improve your stats and skills used in the conversation the same way you would in a fight, so it's not as though you haven't "earned" that success.

If they're worried you'll just kill the people anyway, add a tag which makes them invulnerable once you choose the peaceful route and if they want to leave the option open to backstab them after you agreed to peace - give the player a "(lie) Sure I want peace" type dialogue option, to leave the option for violence open.

This is like playing PnP games in the days before social interaction was considered important and you'd have the same problem - even if you could manage to talk your way out of combat, nowhere in the rules did you get XP for doing so ... apparently, they assumed that real adventurers do their talking with fists.

This idea of punishing players for not choosing combat seriously detracts from the rpg element of the game.

[wendigo211]

If you persuade the skeleton around the burning pigs to go back to sleep, you get 3000 XP, if you fight him you get 1200 XP. So there are some circumstances where talking is better than fighting. I'm not sure how it evens out.