Rampant Games - Charisma, The Dump Stat

Free of never-ending Wiz8 battles, Jay Barnson has turned his attention back to RPG design issues with Charisma, The Dump Stat.  The pieces looks at social skills and the problems with current dialogue design as he sees them:

If we want to make non-combat, social encounters an integral part of a CRPG, we need to shake things up a bit. We probably need to make some fundamental changes to the very idea of how social interactions work. Social interactions need more feedback, twists, bends, and alternate resolution. As always, I think of the one thing that works reasonably well in CRPGs, and that is the combat system. So how could we make conversations reflect the kind of action we get in combat.