Does a target charmed via the Diplomat feat remain charmed if you are over 60 feet away from it but only briefly?

Question

In Unearthed Arcana: Feats for Skills, the Diplomat feat includes the following benefit:

• If you spend 1 minute talking to someone who can understand what you say, you can make a Charisma (Persuasion) check contested by the creature’s Wisdom (Insight) check. If you or your companions are fighting the creature, your check automatically fails. If your check succeeds, the target is charmed by you as long as it remains within 60 feet of you and for 1 minute thereafter.

I interpret the part I've emphasised to mean the target is charmed for as long as you are within 60 feet, then once you move further away, it remains charmed for a further minute before it "wears off". Hence, I believe the target should be charmed under the following scenarios (assuming your persuasion check succeeds in all scenarios):

• You charm the target, walk away, then in one minute's time, the target is no longer charmed;
• You charm the target, stand with it for 5 minutes, then walk away, and a minute later, the target is no longer charmed (so the target was charmed a total of 6 minutes);
• You charm the target, it follows you, it is indefinitely charmed so long as you remain within 60 feet of the target;

But what happens in this scenario?

• You charm the target, stand with it for 5 minutes, walk away (further than 60 feet away, just to clarify), then 30 seconds later, you walk back over to the target, hence you are within 60 feet of the target again. The target is still charmed at this point, since a whole minute has not yet elapsed since you walked away.

Since this is still within a minute after you originally walked further than 60 feet away from the target, does this effectively "reset" the minute countdown? Does the target remain indefinitely charmed from this point onwards up until you walk away again? Or, does the target stop being charmed after that minute has elapsed, regardless of where you are in relation to it since you've already been further than 60 feet away from it by this point?

I know this is Unearthed Arcana and therefore the wording is not always on par with their official material, but I was planning on letting a player have this feat and I want to fully understand how this part of the feat works, especially since this player's character likes making friends and will no doubt use this effect to charm potential NPC followers.

Answer 1

The target is no longer charmed 1 minute after you move more than 60 feet away. It doesn’t matter if you come back - the trigger for the charm effect ending is your leaving.

Answer 2

DaleM's answer has described the literal reading of the rule in question and is a perfectly valid answer (I upvoted it), but I wanted to offer an alternative interpretation. I'm not calling this a RAI answer, because I am only guessing at the designer's intent, but this is how I could see it working.

This is presented as an answer largely to see how the community compares my interpretive answer to DaleM's literal answer.

The idea of this feat is that a Diplomat (meaning a PC with that feat) can convince someone to follow them (or be otherwise charmed by them). As long as they are within 60 feet of the target, the Diplomat's continued presence maintains the charmed effect, which narratively could probably be described as the Diplomat continuously reassuring the charmed target, which is thematic with the fact that this feat is themed around the Persuasion skill.

Regarding leaving the target alone for a minute, the fact that the charmed status wears off implies to me that without the Diplomat's constant reassurance, the target starts to think for themselves, without their thoughts being coloured by the Diplomat's words. Thus, they are no longer charmed.

Should the Diplomat come back within that minute and continue reassuring the target, with the interpretation I've presented above, it would imply that the target would continue to be charmed until the Diplomat was away from the target for a full minute.

This, of course, it the crux of my question, and hence my answer is simply a line of reasoning to justify answering the question "is the target still charmed?" with a Yes rather than a No. However, this is not what the rules say literally, but is just my take on what narrative effect I think they were going for.