So, here's the scene.
We have a party of eight people, and we're fighting a skeletal army. Most of it is low level. A couple skeletal birds, 8 level 1 skeletons, 4 skeletal halberdiers, 4 skeletal archers, and a few uniques. One of them is styled after the grim reaper, wearing a hood and wielding a scythe. He's basically made to kill you if he ever gets a critical hit. Another is a cold elemental that's ~*~eeeeeeeeevil~*~. A third is this zombie noble type guy, kinda high up on things, doesn't really do the fighting so much as was there to help the army find what we were looking for. The fourth is a skeletal commander with lots of leadership like stuff that keeps his army together.
Anyway, the zombie noble basically said that he didn't want to be a part of this fight. After all, it'd be TERRIBLE to risk his life. This was said in goblin, the ~*~sekrit language~*~ of the skeletal army. My character, Shoe, is the only one in the party that knows Goblin. So she's heard this. The fighting starts, and the first round, she says "Hey, Zombie! If you surrender now we'll let you live!" (or something to that effect), and he kind of hesitates, but proceeds. Can't do anything yet since his spells are generally close range. We beat up a few things, and at some point our meat shields completely DESTROY a skeletal bird, among other things. tl;dr we hurt them lots, at least the lower level cannon fodder. Next round Shoe tries again "You still have your chance. You saw what we just did. There won't be any issues if you do, since your leader will just be so many bones when we're done!" (again, something to that effect). At this point, the skeletal commander is like "IF YOU DESERT I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND FEED YOU TO MY WARGS", and gets a 31 on his intimidate check against the guy. Now, let me note at this point Shoe is far from a diplomancer. Her skills are generally more magic related and her CHA is 10, meaning no bonus. Stuffman is like "Yeah, there's no possible way you can defeat this intimidate check with any of your skills". I'm like "Oh? WELL I'M GOING TO TRY ANYWAY! HEY, PARTY, AID OTHER HERE!" and then I roll diplomacy. I roll a 19. Pretty good, but far from my goal. Then one of the meat shields, Axis, chimes in, beats the DC 10 for Aid Other (actually gets a 28, but we have to use my check since I started this ball rolling). So that's +2. Then another meat shield and a caster, Kaoli and Liadan add to it. They both succeed, granting another +4. So now I'm at +6, or 25. Even our pacifist healer, Mina, helps out (probably because it was sparing a guy). She succeds. Another +2. A few of our people were missing so I had to roll for them. First one is Alric, and he rolls a 1. So, doesn't help. Then June, our scout/ranger goes for it. Makes it, despite having a -1 to CHA. So that's 29 at this point. Finally, we come to our Bard, Rin, who LITERALLY CANNOT FAIL THE CHECK. So now I have 31 Diplomacy vs. the commander's 31 Intimidate. The DM is basically like "OK, this is going to coin flip". He rolls a 1d2. 1 is that the intimidate check wins and the zombie stays. 2 is that the zombie gets the fuck out of there. After a tense moment, the roll comes up two.
So out of sheer luck with some mechanical abuse, my pretty much unpersuasive character manages to get one of a skeleton commander's army to flee. And mostly on a whim too. I didn't actually expect it to go to rolls, but when Stuffs rolled intimidate I decided to go for it.
That's like, the coolest thing she's ever done.
