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CuSithBell comments on Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians - Less Wrong
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Put all my points into charisma and charm skills and go find me some wenches? Oh, you mean saving the world. Got it.
Actually that is another problem with RPG designs. There are social skills and stats provided but they are damn near pointless in practice. Even when you want to role play a lovable rogue who can charm, manipulate and deceive his way out of problems you may as well put your skills into battle axes. Because the only person that you need to use social skills on is the DM and that is an out of character action. Unless you somehow manage to find a DM who considers the interaction to be about the character trying to persuade an NPC and not the player trying to persuade him and just lets the player roll some dice already.
"What is the skill check for "seduce the maidservant and get her to show you the secret entrance to the castle"?"
... "No, I don't need to tell you what lines I'm going to use... since I would just have to lie so as to not offend the sensibilities of the company. Dice. I want to use dice and charm wenches!"
... "What? Oh, this is just too much hassle. Let's do what we know works. Guys, you take the guard on the left and I'll take the guard on the right. Rescue the princess and kill everything that tries to stop us."
That's an issue that traditional-game GMs go back and forth on all the time - some say "but it's more interesting if you role-play it out", and some say "but you're not making the fighter actually stab people when he wants to make an attack". Personally, in that sort of game I like to have players in-character to an extent, but their social stats should be the thing that determines their character's success at social tasks.
There are a ton of spectacular indie games that deal with this in other ways!
Wuthering Heights Roleplay is just incredible. Your main stats are Despair and Rage. There are general rules for matching tasks to stat rolls, and specific rules for Duels, Murder, Art, and Seduction. The general trajectory of a game is: a bunch of terrible people obsessed with their own problems (or rather, their Problems) start falling in love with each other and making dramatic revelations, until eventually they're all hacking each other to pieces. It's a fun evening.
The Mountain Witch is another interesting one. All "conflicts" are decided by a simple roll-off, d6 versus d6. You get more d6s (keep the highest) if you're working with other people. Players keep track of how much they Trust each other player, and you can spend someone else's Trust in you to help them out with bonuses in conflicts, to gain control of the narration of the outcome of their conflicts, or to give yourself bonuses when directly opposing them. (There's a lot more to this one, but that's the gist of the conflict mechanic.) Cool stuff.
What, no d20s? Or even a d8? Where's the geeky fun in that? P
Instead, you use poker chips to represent trust! I find that appealing somehow...
Yeah, that one just uses d6 - though there's an interesting "duel" mechanic where you and an opponent roll secretly, then decide together whether you'll each roll again - to emulate two ronin staring each other down before deciding the battle with a single cut. (The game has a very specific setting - you're a group of ronin who've been hired to climb Mt. Fuji and kill the Witch (though he's a dude?) that lives on top. You all have secret ulterior motives! I think it's been adapted to similar scenarios such as bank heists.)
Uh, Wuthering Heights uses d100, and you roll under or over your Despair / Rage depending on what you want to do. For example, killing someone means rolling below Rage (easier to do the angrier you are), whereas noticing other peoples' feelings and stuff requires a roll over Despair. Ooh, plus, if you're into nerdy dice-related stuff, there's a big Random Table of Problems, like "You are an alcoholic", "You are a homosexual", "You are Irish", "You are in love with a member of your family", or "You are a poet", and everyone has to roll d100 a few times to get their Problems.
Oh! And if you just want to chuck lots of different kinds of dice around, you can't go wrong with Dogs in the Vineyard - where you play itinerant teenage pseudo-Mormon enforcers of the faith in a west that never was. All your traits have some amount of dice of some size next to them, and when they come up in a conflict, you roll them into your pool and can use them when raising / seeing. For instance - possessions of any sort are 1d6, 1d4 if they're sorta worthless, 1d8 if they're excellent (criterion: in order to be excellent, a thing has to be good enough that people might remark on how excellent it is), 2 dice if they're big, and an extra d4 if it's a gun (so a big, excellent pistol is 2d8+1d4).
Huh, kinda geeked out there. ^-^;
Ok, poker chips qualify as a legitimate nerd-coolness alternative. I'm convinced. :P
A Mormon with a deagle
you know that's unheard of!
Hah! And of course, this being a roleplaying game, I defy you to find a player who won't take a big, excellent gun.