Just for laughs...

Why not both, bloody peasant.

 

Are "hamster" and "elderberries" swear words?

 

In RPGs it's often a juxtraposition, if you are just going to roleplay social interaction, why would you ever roll dice to have your character do something social. Which kind of makes playing a socialite character a waste of points when we never make the strong character roleplay out being physically strong.

So my group of friends is trying a new RPG system, where we roll the dice socially (game master and players), then try to adjust our roleplaying to match the dice roll. If the players roll poorly, they will try to adlib something dumb for their character to say. If the players roll well, the GM (me) will give them more time to think of something eloquent and flattering to say and the NPCs will be more gracious.

One that happened a lot is the PCs would roll a terrible intimidation roll BUT the PCs have the NPCs completely at their mercy. So what does it look like when you can easily destroy someone who knows this but they don't fear or respect you anyway. We were never sure how to roleplay that out.

This scene was a specific example given when I asked on a role playing forum, what does it look like when someone powerful fails an intimidation check.