passing notes in class (a social skill system)
Graft onto your favorite skill system.
assumptions
- Your intuitive impressions or gut reactions are something phenomenally external to you. It's not immersion-breaking (in the sense I care about) for the GM or rules to tell you what these are, or at least what aspects of these are.
- You can make your own decisions on the base of all the information you have available. Sometimes this implies you decide your gut is lying to you.
- Your gut/intuitions are evidence. All else being equal, your gut should be more likely to tell you something if it is true.
- You might want to pretend to be someone much more charismatic or discerning than yourself.
- Rules elide. You can always elide less by dropping down a level of abstraction into freeform dialogue.
the basic system
This is for conveying tacit knowledge of your mental state, mostly via facial expressions and body language - your subconscious talking to that of another person. The GM secretly makes all rolls and faithfully conveys the end-state information.
A Sender has some information which they're conveying, sincerely or insincerely, to a Receiver. Sender has some bonus, which we'll call Conveyance, and Receiver has some bonus to figuring this out, which we'll call Discernment.
In sincere cases, roll with both Conveyance and Discernment as bonuses, and if the check passes, the Receiver's gut tells them this is true; if it fails critically, their gut tells them this is false. Otherwise, the GM/procedure doesn't say anything about what their gut says.
In insincere cases, roll with Discernment added and Conveyance subtracted; if the check passes, the Receiver's gut tells them this is bullshit. If it fails critically, their gut tells them this is true. Otherwise, the GM/procedure doesn't say anything about what their gut says.
Example using 5e rules material: a child tells an elder red dragon that he's going to kick her scaly ass, saving the village, and means it. The child has Cha +2 and is not proficient in Intimidation (+0 for a total of +2). The red dragon has Wis +5 and Insight +5 (for a total of +10). GM takes the default difficulty of 15 and rolls 1d20+2+10, for a total of 19+2+10 which very easily passes. The dragon's gut tells her that he's entirely sincere, and her rational mind can consider the fact that her gut is wrong sometimes. The dragon's mind also knows that overconfident children vastly outnumber those that can actually defeat her, and so is not even remotely scared, even though in a sense the child "passed an Intimidation check." If the poor child were blustering, in a long shot attempt to save his village, the same roll would work out to 19+10-2 > 15, in which case the dragon's gut would say (accurately) that he was blustering.
Apply a bonus to this roll if the parties know each other, or a penalty if they are from very different cultural contexts.
some skills for conveying specific messages
By default these are indifferent between the sincere and insincere uses; you could also cap Conveyance at the lower of these or some generic deception skill. For Discernment, you could have a general skill, or a specific skill each for whichever of these you're using, or general skill up to some level that then has to specialize, or whatever.
bluster: "I will absolutely fight over this, and I expect to win"
bullshit: "I know about this technical subject." (Take higher of this or Sender's actual skill as Conveyance, and add Receiver's actual skill to Discernment. Only for insincere cases.)
cower: "I'm completely intimidated by you and will say or do anything to avoid your wrath"
flirt: "I'm considering whether it would be fun to spend some time with you, though of course I could just as easily do something else"
grandstand: "This thing has really outraged me"
play it cool: "this is nbd to me"
plead: "I'm in danger, and if you don't help me, no one will"
promise: "I will carry out this solemn oath, and would be deeply ashamed if I did not"
gush: "I really like you/this other person/thing"