Ah, but breaking things down into a few generic scenarios and how she should respond to them falls squarely within Mathilde's current skillset.
Kind of like Edda, except Mathilde is more flexible, and can always play the Wizard card.
I won't say no to free Diplo gains, but training a stat we almost never use, and have in fact found ways of getting around, is at the bottom of the to-do pile, and it's a big freaking pile.
...I'm really not sure how 'Mathilde is like the character that literally found a major part of her job impossible and tried to quite because of it, only slightly less bad because she keeps finding ways to put off dealing with the problem situations' is supposed to be an argument *against* mathilde needing diplomacy training, to be honest?
Like, no, its not a complete game changer. Yes, we mostly avoid it, because we mostly interact with people who either are already our friends from good diplo rolls in the past, are intimidated enough by our status that they won't fight us on things, or are people we only really interact in ways that our personal accomplishments matter. Yes, its not generally going to be about life or death in the immediate sense.
But. If we want to continue to get into imperial politics, either actively or just in a 'we are becoming too important a piece on the game board to not be involved'? If we want to become a lord magister and have to deal with the
political side of the Colleges instead of 'just' the academic? If we want to start that branch college that keeps getting mentioned every few hundred pages? If we want to continue being someone that Belegar or any future employers can safely send as a representative to other polities? If, as others have mentioned, we want to go on a war fieldtrip to a very divergent cultural group that is notably prickly about outsiders, in search of contacts and learning opportunities? Then diplomacy 1. becomes more and more important, and 2. becomes harder and harder to get around by shying away from it and relying on books for personal interactions.
Long term, i personally want (at least) to pursue practical diplomacy, imperial politics (might fall under 'altdorf'?), maybe psychology (which should have intrigue benefits as well), and of course finish off the advanced dwarf trait just by way of spending time at K8P like Boney has said is viable. That seems like it would cover the basics and the most important of our contacts (dwarves twice over, imperial politics, and we already have stirland and college diplo) and give a good ~4 diplo points for us. But like i said, thats long term. Short term i personally would favour practical diplo classes over most other self improvement actions, as well as several research actions. We have a ridiculous array of strengths, we should shore up our biggest weakness next, imo.
