NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency

[Celebrim]

All true, but "Immersion" feels especially broad to me. And not just with different meanings, but diametrically opposed ones! Especially when used to describe "immersion breaking".

"It breaks my immersion to have to pretend I don't know about trolls and fire."

"It breaks my immersion to have my level 1 character know about trolls and fire." (Or: "It breaks my immersion when other players do that.")

To a certain extent you are right that "immersion" can be seen as just as synonym for "my expectations for the game" and those are of course going to be divergent and contradictory.

For me, "immersion" is that quality of feeling in the game, and I feel it sometimes in both cRPGs and ttRPGs. It's feeling emotionally invested in the story and the characters. It's particularly for me when I'm imagining myself in the situation and acting you my character.

Like, there was a Chill 2e adventure I was playing and I imagined myself going downstairs in the hotel to get breakfast, and because of who my character was he would have read the newspaper at breakfast, and it happened that there was a major clue to the adventure in the newspaper - not something made up at the moment, but waiting to be found. That's immersion. It's that moment where the characters are packing apples in their bags and talking in character as people in the story, and not out of character about the game. It's that moment when the characters are accepting punishment for an act they didn't do, because the player feels his character would do that. It's that moment when the player has a crush on an NPC they way they would crush on a literary character or a movie character.

It's a thing I know when I see it even if I can't easily define it.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It has been over hundred pages so might as well! Think about people saying that this or that helps them to relax. Those are different things. Some might find the sound of rain and thunder soothing, some annoying. Doesn't meant they mean different things with being relaxed though.

Ok, I'll bite.

It's possible...but unlikely...that those two people mean different things by "relaxed".

But in the immersion case, I do think it's a different kind of immersion. Using my troll example, I would think what person 1 means by "broken immersion" is "it doesn't feel like my character is me anymore" and in verison two they would say "it doesn't feel like I have become my character anymore."

How's THAT for splitting hairs?

 

[Bill Zebub]

To a certain extent you are right that "immersion" can be seen as just as synonym for "my expectations for the game" and those are of course going to be divergent and contradictory.

For me, "immersion" is that quality of feeling in the game, and I feel it sometimes in both cRPGs and ttRPGs. It's feeling emotionally invested in the story and the characters. It's particularly for me when I'm imagining myself in the situation and acting you my character.

Like, there was a Chill 2e adventure I was playing and I imagined myself going downstairs in the hotel to get breakfast, and because of who my character was he would have read the newspaper at breakfast, and it happened that there was a major clue to the adventure in the newspaper - not something made up at the moment, but waiting to be found. That's immersion. It's that moment where the characters are packing apples in their bags and talking in character as people in the story, and not out of character about the game. It's that moment when the characters are accepting punishment for an act they didn't do, because the player feels his character would do that. It's that moment when the player has a crush on an NPC they way they would crush on a literary character or a movie character.

It's a thing I know when I see it even if I can't easily define it.

The test for me is whether I, the player, feel strong emotions that my character would be feeling. If a beloved and trusted NPC betrays me, I want to feel actual jaw-dropping shock and surprise. I don't want to pretend to feel that, because I (the player) actually knew already that the NPC couldn't be trusted, and I was just playing along because my character wouldn't have known that.

 

[zakael19]

I think it's interesting that, if we assume the mechanics in a game are an intentional shaping of the conversation which occurs as you play, D&D assumes the DM is going to be routinely lying/concealing the truth with their NPCs to players. The Insight skill implies this, right? It exists to answer the question "hey, do I think this guy is telling us the truth?" So this means that throughout play you have two choices: never question what NPCs tell you, to preserve "surprise" or whatever; or use the vibe check that is Insight and then willfully ignore the dice outcome if it's anything besides "oh you can definitely tell he's lying." In the OP's example, would setting the NPC's Insight check high also rob you of agency?

Spoiler: Ramble about character/NPC dynamics in Thirsty Sword Lesbians below.

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I was just walking a prospective GM through some of the design ethos in Thirsty Sword Lesbians along with a couple short play examples. The entire point of that game is your character being flung into cool situations where they find other characters (PC and NPC) sexy, alluring, off-putting, fearsome, etc. A core player principle is "feel deeply" in your play - create those charged situations and let the mechanics play out. You can mechanically Entice somebody, Read a Person as part of a sword fight, and should you have downturns you dont lose heath - you gain conditions like Frightened / Insecure / Guilty / etc, and you're encouraged to role-play the heck out of those because other players have the ability to use Emotional Support.

In essence, this is a game designed from the core mechanics to create a specific feeling of play around the table - a style of conversation focused on an experience rooted in consent and communication around pretty heady emotional (and social) topics where the character discovers things about themselves and the people around them they may not have known. One where the GM and Players are all encouraged to push hard with persuasion and flirtation and all these very human conditions with mechanical weight that makes what your character says and does (or has done unto them and you say in response) have serious outcomes.

However, the core design intent is agency preserving. The player controls the stakes of the conflict (a la what @pemerton has said about TB etc), and chooses the moves they're doing while knowing the potential outcome space (and of course can always go 'oh, I'm not comfortable with this, can we back it off?' because that sort of communication is baked into the instructions).

So yeah, this sort of topic can be done via design - and you can get deeply affirming and incredible role-play out of it. And you don't have to just spout it out of your acting, you can have intentional design that channels the play towards this sort of conversation.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I think it's interesting that, if we assume the mechanics in a game are an intentional shaping of the conversation which occurs as you play, D&D assumes the DM is going to be routinely lying/concealing the truth with their NPCs to players. The Insight skill implies this, right? It exists to answer the question "hey, do I think this guy is telling us the truth?" So this means that throughout play you have two choices: never question what NPCs tell you, to preserve "surprise" or whatever; or use the vibe check that is Insight and then willfully ignore the dice outcome if it's anything besides "oh you can definitely tell he's lying." In the OP's example, would setting the NPC's Insight check high also rob you of agency?

Spoiler: Ramble about character/NPC dynamics in Thirsty Sword Lesbians below.

--------------------------
I was just walking a prospective GM through some of the design ethos in Thirsty Sword Lesbians along with a couple short play examples. The entire point of that game is your character being flung into cool situations where they find other characters (PC and NPC) sexy, alluring, off-putting, fearsome, etc. A core player principle is "feel deeply" in your play - create those charged situations and let the mechanics play out. You can mechanically Entice somebody, Read a Person as part of a sword fight, and should you have downturns you dont lose heath - you gain conditions like Frightened / Insecure / Guilty / etc, and you're encouraged to role-play the heck out of those because other players have the ability to use Emotional Support.

In essence, this is a game designed from the core mechanics to create a specific feeling of play around the table - a style of conversation focused on an experience rooted in consent and communication around pretty heady emotional (and social) topics where the character discovers things about themselves and the people around them they may not have known. One where the GM and Players are all encouraged to push hard with persuasion and flirtation and all these very human conditions with mechanical weight that makes what your character says and does (or has done unto them and you say in response) have serious outcomes.

However, the core design intent is agency preserving. The player controls the stakes of the conflict (a la what @pemerton has said about TB etc), and chooses the moves they're doing while knowing the potential outcome space (and of course can always go 'oh, I'm not comfortable with this, can we back it off?' because that sort of communication is baked into the instructions).

So yeah, this sort of topic can be done via design - and you can get deeply affirming and incredible role-play out of it. And you don't have to just spout it out of your acting, you can have intentional design that channels the play towards this sort of conversation.

I think you are making a lot of assumptions in how Insight is “meant’ to be used.

 

[zakael19]

I think you are making a lot of assumptions in how Insight is “meant’ to be used.

????

Quoting from the rules:

“Insight. Your Wisdom (Insight) check decides whether you can determine the true intentions of a creature, such as when searching out a lie or predicting someone's next move. Doing so involves gleaning clues from body language, speech habits, and changes in mannerisms.”

It exists to be the mechanical answer for any time a player is like “hey can I tell if this NPC is telling us the truth right now?”

 

[KYRON45]

I think you are making a lot of assumptions in how Insight is “meant’ to be used.

This assumption is dead on.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I can't speak for @Manbearcat or @pemerton or anyone else, but I know I generally view it as a pointless term for categorizing or explaining play in a TTRPG.

I just tend to use it because it gets pulled out as a "point of play" rationale so often, but I agree the experience of "immersion" is so personal that its utility in discussion is almost zero.

When I saw it first used a long time ago, it served a general purpose (and still does, IMO) in describing a play style where the player while playing tries to relate as deeply to a character in their experience and decision making as they can, but its always going to be impossible to say what does and doesn't do that for someone outside their personal experience because what leads to that better and what disrupts it is immensely personal. As such its largely a personal and aspiration term and you can't really talk about rules approaches "leading to it" or "interfering with it" outside a personal experience, which makes it mostly useless as a term of art for critique of certain rules elements.

 

[Thomas Shey]

your character isn't an alien to the setting, but the player behind that character functionally is and it behooves them to ask those kinds of questions of the GM before they declare their character's actions so they know what's what around the setting and don't do things an alien would.

I think there's a defensible argument that for some sorts of immersion a degree of alienness is necessary for most people, as engaging on that level with a character actually present more fully would make immersion essentially impossible for them, because the character would be too alien for them to engage with fully.

This is heavily dependent on all three of the setting, the character and the player, of course.

 

[Maxperson]

To be honest, I'm a bit worn out by this sort of commentary from people who have not played the RPG in question, and so have not experienced the actual phenomenology of play, and who seem to have giant blind-spots for the games they play.

In 5e D&D, for instance, all the following things are true:

*A player of a PC of midd-ish level (say 3 or higher) can have their PC face down an archer or crossbow-wielder knowing that a single shot cannot kill their PC. The PC cannot have that knowledge.​

This is the only one of your examples where the decision MIGHT be based on mechanics. Most of the time, though, if I do something like that I'm not stopping to think about the mechanics. That means that most of the time I'm not basing the PC's action on mechanics.

​

*A player of a PC can know that their PC can move from <here> to <there> without being intercepted, without stumbling, etc, in virtue of their ability to read the squares on the battle-map. The PC cannot have this knowledge (they do not live in a stop-motion world, and they do not know that they never trip over on small bumps in the ground).​

I doubt people stop to consider tripping over the pebbles on the map, so no decision based on mechanics is being made by the player. Sometimes there will be difficult terrain and the player will make the decision to avoid that, but the PC can see the difference between a few pebbles and a boulder strewn area, so he is making the same decision.

​

*A player of a PC can know that their PC will never sneeze while casting a spell, or mispronounce the arcane words, etc. The character can't have this knowledge.​

I guess someone in the history of D&D might have thought that and said, "I am deciding that my PC will not sneeze in the middle of casting this spell!" The overwhelming majority of the time, this isn't even a consideration, so no mechanics are being used by the player to make the decision.

​

*A player of a PC can know that their PC will never falter, panic, be smitten, smile at the simple beauty of a carving above a gate, etc unless they the player choose for this to happen to their PC. (Or unless their PC is ensorcelled.) The PC cannot have this knowledge, anymore than any human being can have knowledge of what their emotions will be and will cause them to do. The result of this is that the player of a PC can make tactical and operational decisions that pay no regard to morale and other emotions at all. The PC cannot make this decision.​

Since there are no mechanics for that, the decision by the player can't be made based on mechanics.

If I posted that, therefore, 5e D&D "seems more like making decisions about mechanics which then produce a story about the character", I would receive pages of replies telling me why I'm wrong, full of special pleading about the abstraction of hit points and stop-motion combat resolution, etc.

Given that only one of the four examples even touches on a mechanics sometimes, you would be wrong regarding that statement.

What you are saying up there is that if you can cross your eyes and twist your head around like the exorcist girl in order to find some sort of mechanic that you can kinda, sorta attach to the decision, then the decision by the player is being made because of that mechanic. It doesn't work that way.

While there are mechanical considerations that do happen in 5e, there aren't enough of them to make the game about making those decisions. The vast majority of decisions are not based on mechanics.