Right. Seems like the conversation changed the situation pretty significantly.
To give an example of how this might play out if it was my group.
So the guy who is captured refuses to escape because he’s taking some kind of principled stand.
A trial happens and that guy speaks in his defence, addressing the subjugated crowd. He’s prepared to die fighting tyranny. Sounds like a conflict. Do his words inspire the crowd to put aside their own lives in fighting the mad king?
And hey, here’s where the specifics of what is said can become important. If he says ‘you can live for life’s sake but living in fear isn’t living’. Then that’s a slightly different conflict to something like ‘tyrants everywhere must be overthrown.’
anyway we roll and he fails and it turns out that actually the populace will carry on, even if many are ashamed to do so, or admire the bravery or foolishness of the man.
He’s executed and we get some kind of theme.
Or the crowd rise up, a riot breaks out, we get some kind of theme.
What we don’t get is a multiple page thread about what’s realistic.
Now this isn’t even to say that the direction of the thread is wrong. It does show that focus on the mechanics of the situation might be a little bit of a distraction though because they’re always down stream of what we find cool. Why we're playing is really important and the source of the primary judgement about the actual gameplay loop.