NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency

[hawkeyefan]

To be clear: I agree with you.

However, I also do not mind this sort of "costume" play when I know that I am playing it. I also sympathize with those who want this out of their games, because I think that some people do come to play TTRPGs for "power fantasy" play, and what you describe above can be at odds with "power fantasy" play. That may be the case, for example, with Neo-Trad/OC play. (I can't remember how the consensus landed on those terms in that thread from last year about Neo-Trad vs. OC.)

But my goal in that sort of play is also not the sort of inhabitation as you describe above. It may even be as simple as "watch my character do cool s#*t!"

Oh I have absolutely no issue with that kind of play, and I enjoy it myself from time to time. There’s nothing at all wrong with it.

I just think it’s focused in something other than inhabitation of character.

 

[hawkeyefan]

This is so strange to me. Such surprises can still arise, they just arise from unexpected interaction between the situation and the mental model of the character. Just like your surprising reactions in the real life arise from the interaction between your mind and the situation you're in.

I have had a character in my game to switch sides at the end battle of the campaign because they were moved by the events and the villain's monologue. And I am sure no one, including the player of that character, could have guessed that would happen before the session.

The whole idea that you need dice for this, that the dice are desirable for this is utterly alien to me.

People don’t always get to choose how they feel or even act. Sometimes, we do things that seem like things we’d never choose to do.

A player retaining all control at all times is therefore unable to not choose. They’re always making a choice about how the character reacts.

To give the player that feeling of not being in control, the dice can determine the outcome.

I’ll offer a very simple example from my Stonetop game from this past Friday night. One character, the Heavy, a fighter/barbarian type who is marked with lightning runes of the storm god… he was trying to reconcile with his estranged son. He has a tumultuous family life, and his thoughtful and artistic son is something totally alien to him. They had an altercation, and he got angry… which is a playbook feature much like a Barbarian’s rage in D&D.

Unlike in D&D, the Heavy has to make a roll to stop raging. The roll determines if they’re able to calm down and think clearly, or if they do something dangerous or foolish.

So the Heavy had to make this roll to calm down to have a chance to reconcile with his son. Can he do it? Letting the dice decide gives the whole situation that uncertainty. The dice then tell us what happens.

If the player decides… they’re just choosing which story they prefer.

 

[thefutilist]

This is so strange to me. Such surprises can still arise, they just arise from unexpected interaction between the situation and the mental model of the character. Just like your surprising reactions in the real life arise from the interaction between your mind and the situation you're in.

I have had a character in my game to switch sides at the end battle of the campaign because they were moved by the events and the villain's monologue. And I am sure no one, including the player of that character, could have guessed that would happen before the session.

The whole idea that you need dice for this, that the dice are desirable for this is utterly alien to me.

I 100% agree with you. When you switch sides due to a villain monologue you're making an artistic statement and if the dice are taking that away from you then you're just generating fiction together, which I find inane but each to their own. There are some nuances and caveats though.


So you don't have to be consciously aware or identify that 'making a statement' is what you're doing. For me it would happen a bit like this:


I'm hearing the monologue (as the character) and it's words hit me in such a way that I'm going to switch sides. In character I've been persuaded. If I was thinking about the character in a more third person view, it would be like they have a life of their own and they're making the choice.


So the question is, are all value forcing mechanics equal?


I find FATE a terrible game because the compels prevent me making a statement with no upside. It becomes a tedious fiction generator.

What about the steel test in Burning Wheel? Well that's where I think things get interesting. Yes it does absolutely prevent certain types of statements being made because it's giving weight and 'bounce' to other statements. You play Burning Wheel with the expectation that this can happen because you desire that specific type of influence.

What about stuff like Read A Person in Apocalypse World? zakael19 mentions why you'd use this and I fully agree. You're sacrificing pure IC conversation for something that has a little bit more mechanical elaboration. I tend to like these mechanics a lot but they're not at all in the same bucket as making choices for you, in fact they tend to highlight the choices and therefore push you to make them a bit harder.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And given the online environment, are there really that many deserts?

Depends on how many people are willing to play online. Its hard to answer that question, but there's certainly no small number who aren't or can't for various reasons.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Can’t help those who choose the desert.

"Choose" is doing some heavy lifting there, though. If they find online play isn't doing it for them or is impractical, getting "out of the desert" is not, in practice, an option.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I did explain the mechanical constraints. He didn't like the mechanics. He wanted to go fight the monster. He didn't like rules preventing him from doing what he wanted. He didn't believe that his barbarian should ever be afraid for any reason.

I tried to soften the blow by saying that he wasn't so much afraid of the monster, but afraid at the concept of being afraid (you know, so that his rugged warrior didn't lose as much "face"). But it was a bad call, so I tried again by asking him to tell us how his character reacts. To roleplay it out.

I'm sure plenty of people here will tear me a new one for my approach, but in the heat of the moment, I tried my best with very good intentions and still effed up.

GMing isn't always easy when the rules say: "temporarily, the PC cannot be free to do whatever they want", some players will simply resist that, no matter what. It isn't jsut a D20 thing.

Before any of you accuse me of all sorts of things, I try never to have a character be knocked out or removed from the action for too long. As a player, I hated waiting it out for longer than a few turns. So I actively encourage other players to help out: stabilize a fallen ally, dispel the magic, help them stand up etc.

I wasn't going to accuse you of anything. It sounds like that player just doesn't understand the game.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Seems very "gamey" to me, and extraordinarily dry, but I'm sure some folks would see it as freeing instead. To each their own.

It doesn't have to be. The player still has the option of leaning into the narrative.

And if the player doesn't want to, if they prefer "gamey", they also have the option to play that way.

Here...

 

[Aldarc]

I find FATE a terrible game because the compels prevent me making a statement with no upside. It becomes a tedious fiction generator.

You can spend Fate points to resist compels, which IME is making a statement when players choose to do that for their characters. Your opinion may vary.

 

[payn]

"Choose" is doing some heavy lifting there, though. If they find online play isn't doing it for them or is impractical, getting "out of the desert" is not, in practice, an option.

A self imposed position.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The dice/rules are desirable for this because they let you test your character absent from yourself, they enhance the uncertainty and distinction of that character as a person you can never truly inhabit (you aren't feeling the heavy sword in their hands, seeing the tears run down their friend's face, tasting the blood in their mouth); the closest being the like nearly hallucination Nordic LARP type play.

I don't want to enhance that distinction, I want to minimise it! And yeah, to me LARPs to me in many ways have the qualities that I find essential in RP, immersion and inhabitation of the character, acting and portraying their emotions. You indeed might even see those tears!

Essentially, a deliberately created ruleset that allows the world to act on a character's inner state (and outer state for that matter) can greatly enhance the illusion of that character as a being existing in a world it knows. This was like, (one of) the incredible paradigm shifting design moments in Apocalypse World: Read a Person where you have a back and forth with another player in a way which tries to reveal to the table as a whole what exactly two people engaging in a charged conversation with all the body language and movement and vocal cues & etc would actually be able to get.

How about just portraying the body language and the vocal cues for real?

Totally get that some people don't like this idea of mild-separation and retaining their character as a mental model of a character you're running in your meat substrate vice trying to pretend you're actually them. In every game that I've played where the mechanics squeeze at the character's mental/emotional states and ask hard questions and we then drag those things out into the shared conversation for everybody to see it's been just so much higher quality stuff to say then first person talking-IC has tended to.

To me first person talking IC is one of the most essential aspects of roleplaying. If it is not happening, I don't want to participate.