NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency

[Crimson Longinus]

And my response is, obviously you have every right to do this. However, I find this sort of characterization shallow and unconvincing in general, to me. I want the character concept tested and explored fully. Instead of a predetermined absolute inviolable idea that can't be challenged Narrativist styles of play generally don't take who you think you are as ground truth. You want to show your loyalty? Prove it, withstand temptation, and not just by fiat. You have to do it, or fail, and it's all on the table. For me, that's truly inhabiting the character.

Yeah, that's cool, that can be done. By putting the character in actually difficult situations, forcing them to make hard choices.
But "can I roll high enough on the dice" is not an interesting or evocative way to test the character's beliefs.
That to me is incredibly shallow.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Two things here:

1. I'm not sure I ever saw anyone suggest that really graphic violence is particularly acceptable by the majority of players without warning either. They may not have specifically mentioned it, but that doesn't say anything.

2. Romance /= sex. Thee are a lot more people who would be comfortable with some of the former elements in play than the latter.



I think you're probably wrong, but largely because of some general discomfort with being flirted with by someone that you aren't actually, well, interested in being flirted with. A lot of people are not good at separating that sort of thing from the one-step remove of a game (far as that goes, they aren't good at separating an angry vocal confrontation from a few past experiences). And at the other end, legacy or not, people throughout the hobby are used to violence both from the hobby's history and from its prevalence in adventure fiction, and the vast majority of RPGs (at least in the West) are rooted in adventure fiction. Whether these two facts are desirable has no relationship with them being true or not.

I see both in fiction, so I don't think it's that. Also, I think people at the table acting out something like flirting is only a tiny part of interpersonal social interaction of this sort. D&D focused originally on violence and a sort of basic skilled play within a very narrow set of situations.

In a game of, say Apocalypse World, all sorts of interactions are assumed to be possibly in scope. I've yet to see this lead to problems.

 

[TwoSix]

Yeah, that's cool, that can be done. By putting the character in actually difficult situations, forcing them to make hard choices.
But "can I roll high enough on the dice" is not an interesting or evocative way to test the character's beliefs.
That to me is incredibly shallow.

Whereas I think the opposing opinion is of "If you just get to pick what your character does, where was the test?"

Basically, overcoming a beholder and overcoming a temptation are both just tests of your character. Why does the resolution method in the game need to apply to one and not the other?

 

[Celebrim]

Whereas I think the opposing opinion is of "If you just get to pick what your character does, where was the test?"

Basically, overcoming a beholder and overcoming a temptation are both just tests of your character. Why does the resolution method in the game need to apply to one and not the other?

I don't think it has to, but I do think it depends on the system. And I do also think that most games are poorly designed to handle tests of philosophy, belief, and integrity. In D&D, we'd not so much be testing the character, than testing how many resources the GM was willing to give to the NPC. What's the fair CR of a social encounter where someone's beliefs are tested?

In Pendragon, testing someone's virtue in various ways makes complete sense, but Pendragon gives the player a lot more control over what his character's character is going to be like as well as a something of a system for testing that. And even then, it's less about compulsion than steering the player to play how his character is written. Dogs in the Vinyard does a decent job of testing a conversation in a scene for outcome. But if the system wasn't designed for it, I'd expect bad things kludging it in with some sort of generic 'persuade' test used against a player character.

If you want to test beliefs in something like D&D, there are better approaches to doing it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I mentioned this a while back. A ton of games have a system like this. They were particularly popular back in the 90s (or as I call it, the Golden Age of Content).

This is quite different from a system like AW. Systems like FATE are good at flagging character traits, but they're not really designed to test and explore that. I would consider FATE to be most focused on a neo-trad type of play where the players define the characters and the GM's job is simply to show them in action. If they do evolve, it's a player directed arc, possibly with genre/premise dictating the models for that.

AW OTOH has ways of signalling character traits, but characters are not assumed to actually embody those, or at least you can't take them for granted. Actual play is the arbiter of actual character. If what is going on in the fiction doesn't match what you wrote on the sheet, then you rewrite your character. It's actually expected that an AW character will change playbooks during a campaign. You might start as a hardholder with your own community, etc. and become a rootless wanderer channeling the maelstrom. Interesting stuff.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Whereas I think the opposing opinion is of "If you just get to pick what your character does, where was the test?"

The choice is the test. To reuse my earlier example about empowering a nefarious necromancer so that they can save your mother, it is choice between opposing evil and saving one you love. You test the beliefs of characters by putting them in situations where they have to make hard choices without obvious "correct" answers. Randomising the character's reaction and denying the player the agency of making the choice would defeat the whole point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is quite different from a system like AW. Systems like FATE are good at flagging character traits, but they're not really designed to test and explore that. I would consider FATE to be most focused on a neo-trad type of play where the players define the characters and the GM's job is simply to show them in action. If they do evolve, it's a player directed arc, possibly with genre/premise dictating the models for that.

AW OTOH has ways of signalling character traits, but characters are not assumed to actually embody those, or at least you can't take them for granted. Actual play is the arbiter of actual character. If what is going on in the fiction doesn't match what you wrote on the sheet, then you rewrite your character. It's actually expected that an AW character will change playbooks during a campaign. You might start as a hardholder with your own community, etc. and become a rootless wanderer channeling the maelstrom. Interesting stuff.

Fair enough. FATE, PBtA, and similar Narrativist systems are as everyone knows not my cup of tea. I'd rather fond other ways to have my PC evolve in-game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The choice is the test. To reuse my earlier example about empowering a nefarious necromancer so that they can save your mother, it is choice between opposing evil and saving one you love. You test the beliefs of characters by putting them in situations where they have to make hard choices without obvious "correct" answers. Randomising the character's reaction and denying the player the agency of making the choice would defeat the whole point.

That doesn't answer the question of why combat challenges need to use a far different and more mechanical method of resolution than literally all other challenges though.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That doesn't answer the question of why combat challenges need to use a far different and more mechanical method of resolution than literally all other challenges though.

They don't need to. But D&D evolved from a wargame so it has inherited this tactical minigame for combat.

But even in combat the player gets to decide what the character wants to do. That is at the core of player agency, especially in a game like D&D without player agency outside of the character. If we have rules that dictate to the player what the character wants, then that erodes agency rather significantly.

 

[payn]

Whereas I think the opposing opinion is of "If you just get to pick what your character does, where was the test?"

Basically, overcoming a beholder and overcoming a temptation are both just tests of your character. Why does the resolution method in the game need to apply to one and not the other?

There are a lot of these contradictions that I think are bore out of tradition and expectation. For example, magic can have complete and total overriding of a character on a single dice roll. However, for a lot of folks any effect by a social skill is not acceptable. Combat can be mechanically complex and nuanced, but social pillar should/must remain mostly/completely freeform.

...and im sympathetic to it, even if I dont agree with it here. I didnt like 4E NADs, I like rolling saving throws for my characters and NPCs, it feels like fate is in the player's hands, and I like that! Even if I can admit its more expedient to have attacker always roll.

So, there isnt a correct answer, its all based on preference. What I dont appreciate is the slippery slopes and strawmen trying to explain social skills and pillar encounters away. YMMV.