Players Handbook

Interaction Skills [bluff, diplomacy, disguise, handle animal, intimidation, perform, sense motive]
Certain skills, called interaction skills, are aimed at dealing with others through social interaction. Interaction skills allow you to influence attitudes and get others to cooperate with you. Since interaction skills are intended for dealing with others socially, they have certain requirements.
  • First, you must actually be able to interact with the subject or subjects of the skill. That means the subject must be aware of you and able to understand you. If you don’t speak the same language, or they can’t hear you for some reason, that’s the same as working without the proper tools, imposing a -4pt penalty on your skill check, since you have to convey your meaning through gestures, body language, tone, and so forth.
  • Interaction skills work best on intelligent subjects, ones with Intelligence 3 or higher. You can use them on creatures with lower Intelligence (-4 or -5) but with a -8 penalty on your check; they’re just too dumb to get the subtleties of your point. You can’t use interaction skills at all on subjects lacking a mental ability. (Try convincing a rock to be your friend—or afraid of you—sometime.)
  • Some interaction skills last a particular amount of time. Using Intimidate to demoralize an opponent, for example, lasts for only a few seconds (one round). In these cases, the time is always measured from the subject’s point of view. If you successfully demoralize an opponent, the effect lasts one full round starting on the target’s initiative and ending on the target’s place in the initiative order on the following round.
  • You can use interaction skills against groups, but you must be trying to influence the entire group in the same way. You can use Diplomacy, for example, to sway a group of people and improve their attitude toward you, but you must be trying to convince all of them about the same thing. Everyone in the group must be able to hear and understand you. You make one interaction skill check and the Narrator compares it against each person in the group (or against an average value for the group, to speed things up).