NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency

[soviet]

Yup. Extremely frustrating. I want the statbock (and other information) in a monster's entry to represent them in the game, not just in a fight.

Reminds me of the old MERP Lords of Middle-Earth books, which told you in great detail every major NPC's bonus for every skill - so the Balrog's Skiing bonus, Gandalf's Swimming bonus, etc.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Reminds me of the old MERP Lords of Middle-Earth books, which told you in great detail every major NPC's bonus for every skill - so the Balrog's Skiing bonus, Gandalf's Swimming bonus, etc.

MERP is one my favorites from back in the day.

 

[aramis erak]

See my comment above. Not all games--probably not even most games--are set up with "Let's just see where things go" as the purpose. Sometimes they're about "Let's see how the players work it out" or even "Let's see what happens along the way."

Several games I've got are implicitly, or even explicitly, see how things get accomplished... the two best known of these:

Cosmic Patrol - the scenes have a trigger for "move on to next scene" and some opposition. The only way to not go forward boils down to either having no clue about the next scene (which is a no-no; the goal is stated up front), or being rendered inactive by the opposition hurting you. Most of the published adventures are 3-6 scenes, and most of those are active opposition. It also uses rotational GMing, scene by scene... and the scene's sheet is placed where players can see it specifically so they know what they are supposed to do (NB for PN - we did it partly wrong), and the list of key buzzwords for bonus metacurrency to make accomplishing the goal easier.

Sentinel Comics: the only way to fail is for the timer to run out. Being out of HP doesn't end you, doesn't even end your involvement in scene... it just restricts you to one action, and it's usually not potent. If you stop the threat, before the timer, and I've seen that happen due to an action from a downed PC, you move on to the next scene, with a chunk of HP restored. Death is at the downed player's discretion... but not during the scene. In SCRPG, no one dies during a scene...

And then you get all the games with procedural play... play to find out what's next.... often intended for solitaire play... where every situation can lead on with no reguard to what came before, relying upon pareidolia to coalesce into a coherent story in the mind of the player... To a point, Classic Traveller is good for this; Marooned Alone is an adventure explicitly for a player to play alone procedurally. FL's Dragonbane, likewise. Modiphius' Captain's Log. Crimson Cutlass is another early (1979) procedural play, and it's also player facing rolls, and uses both d8's and a tarot deck... it can be played GM-less due to procedures... a GM merely adds villains to an already full plate of adventure.

It's also worth noting that certain non-tactical boardgames were clearly linked to being procedurals linked to an RPG... the best example being Star Explorer, which is a stablemate and setting partner of Starships & Spacemen.

One can use SE to generate random missions to be played out in S&S, and through that to have a story even the GM doesn't know ahead of time evolve.

 

[Bill Zebub]

MERP is one my favorites from back in the day.

Yeah back then I ate up all the extensive, exhaustive detail.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah back then I ate up all the extensive, exhaustive detail.

Honestly, there's nothing I love in an RPG product more than extensive, exhaustive detail.

 

[pemerton]

Just got back from getting a much-needed haircut. Here is what I was thinking about:

• Having just leveled up, you get to choose a new spell. Do you take "Fireball" or "Lightning Bolt". You choose lightning bolt...
• Then the NPC offers to pay you to go recover an artifact from a dungeon. Do you accept or reject? You accept...
• You get the dungeon entrance on a dreary, raingy day, and find a menacing-appearing maw in the ground, and out of the darkness emanates a putrid smell. Do you dare venture forth? You go forward...
• The passage ends at a T. Do you go left or right? You choose left...
• You emerge into a cave with foul orcs, including a fearsome chieftan who hefts his mighty axe and roars ferociously at you! Do you fight or run? You fight...
• The battle is going poorly, and most of you are wounded and near death. Do you fight on, or try to flee? You fight on...
• Miraculously, you turn the tide. The chieftain grovels on the ground, his followers slaughtered, and begs for mercy. Eyes glinting, he tells you of a fabulous Horde, and he will share the location if you let him live. Do you believe him, or assume he's lying? You...

"...believe him," interjects the GM, looking at the 19 on the d20.

Why? Why of all the decisions you make, many of which have a significant impact on the story, does this one suddenly require a dice roll to determine? Why aren't you rolling on ALL of those decisions? All of the arguments I've been reading in this thread in favor of mechanics...about symmetry, consistency, verisimilitude, surprise, roleplaying, the dangers of letting players always make the most optimal choice, etc....could all apply to every one of those decisions. So why only some (or one) of them?

I already answered this quite a way upthread, in reply to you:

Where do we want surprises, and where do we want the direction of play to be dictated by someone making decisions that reflect their authority over some component of the fiction? Classic D&D made combat, and saving throws, the places where surprises were to be found. But even early RPGs carved the terrain differently - in Traveller (1977), for instance, the morale rules apply to PCs in just the same way that they apply to NPCs.

I mean, in your example, how was the battle resolved? You elided it in your description, but we can imagine that if the game being played is D&D, then it might have taken half the table time of the events that you describe. And a whole host of things would have been resolved by dice rolls (eg to hit, damage, saving throws) but some things would not have been (eg who to attack, where to move). Why have some parts of combat determined by dice rolls, but others not (and cf a RPG where movement in combat does have a random element: in Burning Wheel Revised's Fight! rules, you can declare you manoeuvre - Close, Withdraw, Maintain - as part of your blind declaration of actions, but whether you actually achieve your desired manoeuvre depends on a roll)?

The answer is the same.

EDIT: it's also notable that, in your example of play, the stakes at every turn seem to be set by the GM. Including the presence of the Orc, the Orc's story about the gold, the PC's desire for gold, etc. A game in which that is not true immediately changes the significance of social conflict resolution.

 

[pemerton]

And we reduce that complex interaction (in most cases) to a single roll, or perhaps a contested pair of rolls.

You seem to be assuming terrible resolution systems, and then drawing the completely uninteresting and unsurprising conclusion that terrible resolution systems are terrible.

I mean, here is a re-post of an episode of play from my Torchbearer 2e game:

Lareth then turned his attention to Fea-bella. The conversation established that Lareth's father was the wizard Pallando, and his mother (Fella) was an exile from Elfhome. She was exiled because of her role in the theft of the Dreamhouse post by Celedhring, the evil Elf who is now a barrow-wight beneath what was Megloss's house. Lareth explained that Celedhring was Fella's brother (and hence his and Fea-bella's uncle), and that Fella was exiled with him much as, in the ancient times, Galadriel was exiled with her cousin Feanor. "And who is your father?" asked Lareth of Fea-bella.

This caused much discussion among the players - was Lareth implying that Fea-bella was the child of an incestuous relationship between Fella and Celedhring? There was also discussion about where Fea-bella did her dreaming, before she woke, Dream-haunted, and ran off bearing a half-moon glaive. Was this not in the Elf-home Dreamhouse, but rather in Pallando's house?

I suggested that Fea-bella might try a Nature (Remembering ) test, but her player didn't want to - too much grind, and little chance of success. So I resorted to my NPC, and called for another Manipulator vs Manipulator due to Lareth's goading. This time Golin helped Lareth! The test was failed, and so (as a twist) Fea-bella could not help but cast her mind back . . . As her player put it, Fea-bella wanted to remember only happy times of her childhood, with the Elven forest and rainbows and unicorns, and I set this at (I think, from memory) Ob 2. Telemere helped with his own Remembering Nature, and Korvin used Oratory to remind Fea-bella of tales of her childhood she had told her companions. Golin also aided Fea-bella this time, with Dreams-wise.

This test was a success, and so Fea-bella was spared any horrible memories (and the truth about her father remains unknown at this point).

What is being "reduced" in this episode of play? How is it making the game worse?

 

[pemerton]

I don't know how to phrase it so that it doesn't come across as offensive to you. But to me this just reads like you do not know how to roleplay in the way I understand roleplaying. Like without the rules it is just you talking to the GM not a character talking to the NPC. That is the thing that is weird to me. Like incomprehensibly weird. To me the core of roleplaying is to inhabitation and expression of the character, and I don't need rules to do that, and I literally cannot even comprehend the viewpoint that one would.

What I don't get is, if this is your approach to RPing, then how does it disrupt it to be told - "and by the way, here's a thing that your character is doing/experiencing/thinking"?

 

[pemerton]

I feel like part of the premise you're presenting is that "creative engagement" here means, specifically, more thespianism and in-character dialogue at the table. That there's a desire to see standard TTRPG play be a little more LARP-like, with the PCs and the DM talking to each other in extended scenes (multiple minutes long) of in-character dialogue.

And there's a concern that allowing social checks would make these sort of activities less likely to occur.

To me it seems that that concern must be the result of only being familiar with, or imagining, terrible mechanics.

Because the mechanics that I use to resolve social conflicts don't discourage the player portraying their PC. They tend to require it, as this is the form that a relevant action declaration takes!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What I don't get is, if this is your approach to RPing, then how does it disrupt it to be told - "and by the way, here's a thing that your character is doing/experiencing/thinking"?

Because it is super jarring if that is different than what my internal model of my character says. Besides, if the rules or the GM determine what my character thinks, feels and does, then I obviously don't need to be there.