In essence RPS might be fun with a friend like 4-5 rounds...but that is all. With NPCs at the lack of an intelligent persuasion minigame, I'd rather prefer classical checks and stuff.
I also want a world where skills, talents, attributes and ESPECIALLY your traits provide dialog options. However, that really is a TON of work for a bunch of, shall we say, "hidden content." That is, dialog options that players might not even see if they don't have certain characteristics. I'm working on a module which I hope to have some sort of dialog checks like that, but in reality I probably won't have that many since writing (actually good) dialog that everyone can see takes long enough.
As for an "intelligent persuasion minigame," there's another thing that could take a lot of writing, but could be really satisfying. I'm imaging a game where you're presented questions pertinent to the argument you're trying to make, and you have to choose the correct answer from a radial menu. It would be a mix of logic and finding the right answer quick enough, which I think would be a great way to simulate "wit and rhetoric" if you would. Meanwhile, you're opponent would be (behind the scenes) doing the same thing, and you'd see their correct answers adding up. Your charisma skill would effect how many questions you have to answer (rather, how much correct and incorrect answers are worth) and how long it takes the opponent to answer questions to build up to 10 points.
So if you have 0 charisma and you try and convince the immaculates to let you by, I imagine they would build up to 10 points in like 15-20 seconds, while you have to answer 5-6 questions. So basically, it would be impossible unless you reloaded a bunch of times and memorized the question-answers, and even then I would think the questions are randomly ordered and the radial menu answers are in different orders every time as well.
Same could apply to player vs. player arguments, which I think would actually work best for this kind of minigame.
The biggest issue, as I said before, is that this would be a ton of work to come up with good questions and answers that wouldn't be too obvious but not insanely obscure either. Maybe you would have to convince Immaculates you're trying to not fight that you've read the books, kind of like Loic's challenge, but different questions. It could be a mix of knowledge you might gain elsewhere, and logical connections. Not easy stuff to do well, however, so I can't see this minigame ever coming to fruition in almost any RPG, nevermind Divinity.
As for the OP's minigame, I didn't really understand how it worked, but frankly it didn't sound very fun or actually related to argument and charisma. Not that a charisma minigame has to be wordy and intellectual, but if Larian went to the trouble to add a minigame, I think it should be wordy and intellectual :P
