It's better in the sense that one is not guaranteed success at higher levels.

Picture this. The group is fighting an evil lich. Bedge makes a diplomacy check. If he gets twenty-five or higher, the lich becomes indifferent instead of hostile. He no longer cares enough to hurt the party. The fight is over, they can leave. There is no system for making the DCs higher because the lich hates their guts, or is going to be severely inconvenienced if the party succeeds.

Under the current system, once Bedge gets his diplomacy skill up to twenty-four (not hard to do by level nine or ten) he can't help but stop any combat. The party never has to fight anyone with whom they share a language.

It gets worse when one gets diplomacy up to the point fifty is attainable (not impossible by later levels, especially with an artificer in the party). Now Bedge can make the big bad evil guy helpful. Not only does he no longer want to stop the party, he wants to help them succeed! In fact, the epic rules state that a roll of fifty acts as the spell [i:9b1f012028]Suggestion[/i:9b1f012028], but with no save allowed.

That is the current system. There is no limit on who it can affect, and no system to increase DCs for people who really dislike the PCs. There is no such thing as a stubborn target.

Burlew's system limits what one can do with diplomacy (paring it down simply to getting people to accept/refuse deals) and gives DCs that one is not guaranteed to meet. Yes, it's harder, but does Garner really want the current system where a roll of the die can prevent nearly any combat in the game?

Ba had two choices, essentially. He could go with a new system for diplomacy, or he could scrap diplomacy entirely. That would penalize people who put points into diplomacy. As well, Ba likes having a system in place. Otherwise, frankly, it's going to come down to whether or not Ba wants them to be able to succeed, and that's not fair to the players either.

Roleplay, in this case, would be used to get people to be friendly/not friendly towards them. There is no longer a die roll for that. Does Garner object to that? Does he object to needing to roleplay to improve NPC attitudes? No, Ba knows Garner does not object to that. Garner likes having to roleplay instead of leaving everything to the dice. So Garner has to do some roleplaying to make people like him or dislike him. The die roll is now only for convincing people to take a specific deal. Their attitude is used to influence this, instead of the other way around.