NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency

[pemerton]

Again, that's fine. I'm certainly not saying "that's not an RPG!".

But that style of play is a very specific preference within the genre of RPGs.

I'll make an analogy with really stinky cheese (e.g. Mont D'Or). Is it cheese? Yes. Do you have to enjoy it in order to be able to claim, "I like cheese!" No.

I'm not saying anything about what makes something a RPG, or not. I mean, clearly classic D&D is a RPG, and its only "social" conflict mechanics are charm-type spells used by NPCs on PCs. And clearly Classic Traveller is a RPG, and its only "social" conflict mechanics are the morale rules, which as discussed upthread affect PCs.

But I saying something about the relationship between social mechanics and player agency, namely, that it is simply false to assert that good social mechanics reduce player agency.

I mean, we've gone back and forth on this a million times.

There is a categorical difference between an internal state of mind and the result in the physical world. That doesn't mean you HAVE to treat those two things differently with RPG rules, but if you want to there's a clear line.

Many RPGs depend on this division. The one I'm familiar with that states it most clearly is Apocalypse World.

It's actually fairly straightforward, from a pedantic perspective, to come up with examples that cross the line: for instance, if physical event X occurs in the fictional world, and a PC who has normal perceptual and cognitive faculties is perceiving X, then the PC will form the belief that X has occurred. This is a basic consequence of being an embodied being with sensory capabilities.

This pedantic example does occasionally cause problems, because there are some events that are hard to describe in perceptual terms devoid of assumptions about a PC's belief system, values etc (eg suppose a player is playing a barbarian outlander, and they see a shopkeeper working on an abacus, it is not straightforward to narrate the perception in a way that doesn't beg certain questions about the PC's response and incorporation of that phenomenon into their own comportment towards the world they are in).

But a lot of the time the line is clear enough.

So while I respect (without sharing) the preference of treating both things the same, I don't buy the argument...if such an argument is being made...that they are one and the same and thus should be treated the same.

Well, they are one and the same in the following sense: they are events that can occur in the fiction that constitute failures on the part of the PC - in one case a failure to successfully traverse the narrow way; in the other case a failure to successfully remain faithful as one wishes to.

And they are one and the same in another sense too: they can both be failures that contradict the player's aspiration for their PC, in terms of how the PC will move through the world, make their mark, achieve great things and avoid failure, etc.

There are ways that they are different, too. You've pointed to one. Another one is that, in many RPG systems, falling over the edge will deplete some physical resilience value, whereas becoming infatuated with someone new will not do anything similar. (But there are other RPG systems - eg Marvel Heroic RP - where both failures might be expressed in pretty much identical mechanical terms, namely, as a debuff rated at a certain severity.)

I sometimes like to quote "the existences of dawn does not invalidate the difference between day and night" but in this case there is no dawn. At least that I have seen. I have yet to hear an example that blurs the line between internal mental state and result of action declaration.

I don't know how you handle knowledge checks in your RPGing, but the outcome of a knowledge check can mean that the result of the action declaration is the existence of an internal mental state (a memory or belief).

 

[TwoSix]

Did the DM command you to roll, or did you say, "I'm not sure what I would do...I think I'll let the dice decide."

Somebody asked "Does what she just said seem believable?". The DM rolled, and then asked us to make an Insight check. To some of us, the NPC seemed quite believable; to others, they believed her to be lying.

 

[Maxperson]

NPCs affecting other NPCs is just the DM doing their job framing. It's superflous to the conversation. I'm not going to roll to see if an NPC duke can bluff an NPC king.

And as for the Deception vs Insight check, if I fail it, I play as if my character believes the deception. Otherwise, why bother rolling?

To give you an idea of what the NPC believes. Is he being sincere or not? Many times the players roleplay like you say above and go with it. Sometimes, though, other things in the fiction still cast doubt on what the NPC is saying, even if he appears truthful, so they either don't believe him or reserve judgment.

Being forced to believe on a failed roll prevents the underlined from being a possibility. The idea that there can be strong evidence of falsehood that I've picked up elsewhere in the fiction, yet a persuasion check forces my PC to ignore that evidence and believe anyway, is bupkis.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ohhh I get to say this finally! 3E fixed the PC and NPC difference problem but but Grogs wanted tradition.

To be fair, there's another reason for that. And it took me a long time to (grudgingly) agree with it.

The degree of detail many 3e characters had was, in practice, prohibitive for a GM to keep track of beyond a certain point, because he was managing multiple NPCs. This is a particular quirk of games in the D&D sphere and those directly derived, because it is so bloody prone to special casing.

This might not be visible to those who only played games up to, say, 8th level, but about the time you started to hit double digits, it was impossible to ignore. You really needed to strip down NPCs in some way for them to be practical to manage. Which is why pretty much every version of D&D and its offshoots since then has done so.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Any game with rules for setting stakes and rolling to see what happens, which 5e comfortably fits into.

That's far too vague. Monopoly has rules for setting stakes and rolling to see what happens.

D&D 5e has, for example, very specific rules about how Suggestion works.

Interestingly, it also has specific rules for Charm Person, but those rules only say that certain ability checks using social skills are rolled with Advantage, but while the rules for how to implement those checks are defined, there are no defined rules for what the results will be.

And I'm not saying this asymmetric: even when PCs "use" social skills on NPCs, there are no defined results.

An ability or skill check is NOT, in any measure, a roll to determine how competently an action is taken (although narration to indicate such is certainly allowed). It is a resolution method to determine if a given intent with uncertain success is actually successful.

Agreed here. I think it's totally fine if somebody (either player or DM) wants to use a random die roll to grease the creativity gears, but it's not actually a rule in the game. Ability checks are binary.

 

[TwoSix]

Being forced to believe on a failed roll prevents the underlined from being a possibility. The idea that there can be strong evidence of falsehood that I've picked up elsewhere in the fiction, yet a persuasion check forces my PC to ignore that evidence and believe anyway, is bupkis.

If the GM isn't framing that knowledge into the context of establishing stakes for the check, then they're playing poorly as a GM.

Remember, it's imperative that the GM and the player agree on the stakes of any ability check. Oftentimes there's implicit understanding for commonly encountered situations, but if there's any ambiguity, the people at the table need to speak up.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Somebody asked "Does what she just said seem believable?". The DM rolled, and then asked us to make an Insight check. To some of us, the NPC seemed quite believable; to others, they believed her to be lying.

Ok, so the DM told you to roll, you didn't decide to roll because you were uncertain what your character would think. That's what I was asking.

 

[payn]

To be fair, there's another reason for that. And it took me a long time to (grudgingly) agree with it.

The degree of detail many 3e characters had was, in practice, prohibitive for a GM to keep track of beyond a certain point, because he was managing multiple NPCs. This is a particular quirk of games in the D&D sphere and those directly derived, because it is so bloody prone to special casing.

This might not be visible to those who only played games up to, say, 8th level, but about the time you started to hit double digits, it was impossible to ignore. You really needed to strip down NPCs in some way for them to be practical to manage. Which is why pretty much every version of D&D and its offshoots since then has done so.

I dont think it fair to saddle the workload as a strike against NPC = PC conceptually because just about everything was too much work in high level 3E and I say this as someone who finds 3E to be their favorite edition.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Remember, it's imperative that the GM and the player agree on the stakes of any ability check. Oftentimes there's implicit understanding for commonly encountered situations, but if there's any ambiguity, the people at the table need to speak up.

I'll agree with all of that. If the players are happy with the contested roll as you described above, then all is good, even if it's using 5e rules to play an older style of D&D.

What happens if a player speaks up and says, "Hey, I don't like the dice dictating to me how to play my character in these cases. I got a 1 on my Insight check, but I don't really believe the NPC, and I don't think it's fun to pretend to believe them." What happens then?

 

[TwoSix]

That's far too vague. Monopoly has rules for setting stakes and rolling to see what happens.

Monopoly doesn't have any fictional positioning to adjudicate. Everything that happens in the game is determined by the visible board state, or discussion between players as to the possibilty of trading tangible resources (properties, currency, etc.) That's pretty different from an TTRPG, where making sure that all participants are aware of the contents of the shared fiction is the primary task in play.