NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency

[Manbearcat]

I think I'm gonna close up my intervention on this thread (unless someone wants to keep chasing something I have said that they feel might be an incorrect reading or interpretation) with the following:

The response of Narrativism-oriented design to the problem I picked up back at NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency, has been that, instead of trying to simultaneously be invested in getting it right while also advocating for a character's preferred outcomes, we recognize that getting it right is inherently an act of creative interpretation and let that fall naturally into place.

We dispense any notions of objective truths and instead we go all-in on advocating for the NPC’s preferred outcomes, allowing the game’s instrumentation to guide our incorporation of consequences in alignment with our creative understanding of the characters evolving motivations and desires. And it totally works, and is coherent and grounded when we do it right!

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The opposite approach, seems to say: let's go all-in on getting it right, prioritizing our own subjective interpretation of the character’s internal logic and completely dispense of advocating for their preferred outcomes. This means treating the NPC as an autonomous entity and focusing on faithfully portraying their motivations and decisions rather than pushing for what they want to achieve in the fiction.

And as I said before, this brings us back to resolving conflicts of interest in one of two ways:

1. Pure puzzle-solving, where the challenge is to figure out the NPC’s personality keys and push the right buttons—without any real active opposition, just a mechanical or fiat time limit ("Patience") or other constraints.
2. Role-playing it out, where we talk until one of us decides we’ve had enough and concedes, or until someone exerts situational authority to force an outcome—which could very well be leaving the conflict unresolved, subtly implying that the initiator doesn’t actually get what they wanted.
3. GM as the arbiter of aesthetic and creative judgment, where the GM ultimately decides whether the PC’s approach satisfies their personal sense of what feels right for the fiction and rules accordingly. The problem here is that it effectively makes the GM the final authority on what is convincing or earned in the fiction, rather than letting the process of play and its instrumentation carry that weight. This risks creating an implicit approval/disapproval dynamic, where the players’ ability to succeed depends not just on the internal logic of the game world but on the GM’s taste and narrative instincts, which are inherently subjective, SPECIALLY so in the context of NPC Deception/Persuasion.

I’m open to hearing other alternatives, but I think these are the natural results of that approach. Certainly the ones I'm familiar with having had personal experience with all three.

Are any of these inherently not fun or wrong? No, I’m not prepared to argue that.

Looking at number three, perhaps the most controversial one: Is it wrong for players to enjoy letting the GM act as an arbiter of what feels right for the fiction, if the game ends up being fun and everyone is having a good time?

Like, who am I to say that that's wrong? But I do think it’s worth acknowledging the trade-offs involved.

When the GM takes on the role of arbiter, the flow of play becomes subtly dependent on their personal sense of narrative satisfaction. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it does mean that what “feels right” is ultimately filtered through one person’s instincts rather than emerging from the shared structures of play. This can lead to moments where players find themselves intuiting or negotiating what the GM wants more than engaging directly with the fiction on its own terms.

More importantly, in the specific context of NPC deception and persuasion, this approach risks making social interactions feel less like a structured game space and more like an appeal to the GM’s sensibilities—what they find convincing, what they think the NPC would buy, what they deem a sufficiently clever or compelling argument. At worst, this can blur the line between character logic and GM fiat, making it unclear whether success was due to in-fiction dynamics or simply because the GM found it aesthetically satisfying.

So while I wouldn’t call it wrong, I do think it’s fair to ask: is that really the kind of game you want to be playing? And, more importantly, does everyone at the table know that this is what’s happening? Because if they don’t, that’s where real problems can start to emerge.

If I were to lay out my own thoughts on the subject matter at-hand (and do so beautifully and fully!), these thoughts above would be them.

So just an actual (prospective) play add-on, I'm going to pull from our 1KA game here to demonstrate. Your PC (an Oda clan Foot Soldier/Castellan who was awarded a stronghold on Iga territory over a ranking samurai who is basically your rival) is going to be "breaking bread" with a neighboring (loosely...days travel from your own castle), elderly samurai from Oda's clan next game. The details of what transpired in our prior session (Iga assassins performing a trial run for ingress/egress in order to actually pull off the hit later...which was foiled by your PC) will certainly feature prominently. However, equally prominently (perhaps more...perhaps less...we'll see how it goes) will be the very controversial bequeathing of your stronghold to a "lowly" foot soldier...and over an actual samurai? Why is stuff like that going to happen within this samurai's court who is hosting you?

* Because you've signaled you're interested in this exact sort of controversy and potential fallout when you built your PC this way (along with your, ever-increasing, Drive of Ambition).

* Because it should make for compelling play and this is the perfect opportunity.

* And, only lastly, because it is trivially coherent for a samurai and his court to see controversy in, and potentially take offense at (or at least be open about social sleights or conspiracy theories!), their rightful place in the caste hierarchy being so morbidly subverted!

But this last bullet point takes a major backseat when compared to the priority of those first two bullet points.

And same goes for the other two PCs in that game.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think this sums it up very succinctly.

It seems to me that there are many, many instances where a character's agency in the game is reduced or denied, and the player should be able to represent that faithfully, without any kind of forceful intervention by the GM: fear effects, enchantments, illusions, intoxication, whatever. It does seem odd to me that a social interaction which is skill-governed should deserve special consideration; I still don't see why.

Given that - in the real world - it is the social interaction which we would encounter (barring intoxication, I suppose), I can only state that I have encountered situations where I have been goaded into precipitous action against my better judgement, and I have backed down in situations where I felt intimidated, I have been deceived etc. No magic was involved, and it seems only reasonable that any character which I might portray in an RPG be subject to the same emotional and situational pressures.

No one is against PCs being intimidated or deceived. The only question is who gets to decide if they are.

 

[FrogReaver]

There is some kind of fundamental difference in how we parse fiction. If not in general exegetic terms then certainly as it applies to rpg's. It's not that I don't have the problems you, Luke Crane and Andre have, it's that I can't even conceive of how you get those problems. So I suspect it comes more from the social layer.

At a guess it's like we diverged from trad games but took two totally different paths. Luke, Andre and you saw issues with the rules and authority and so your approach to system nails them down. My issues were more with a kind of expressive coherence, how are we mutually parsing what's happening.

I think it's impossible to gain any further understanding because forums turn into pissing contests and we'd need to actually compare video to see what was happening. Even then we probably just value really different things.

Anyway it's been an interesting discussion, I've had a lot to think about and it might have made me more open minded towards your and Andre's playstyle.

For what it’s worth, ive on rare occasion had a player and NPCs get stuck in that reoccurring and/or escalating loop where neither would back down (almost always over totally unimportant stuff). The solution I found was to better transition scenes to the meaningful moments and just let the player succeed at most of the meaningless stuff they want to try.

 

[FrogReaver]

They lost their agency in that one singular moment, not for the entirety of play, this feels misrepresentative of their loss of agency in the same way ‘my answers have a 100% chance of being right (10% of the time)’ misleads the chance of being right.

You could equally say the GM looses 100% of their agency in the moments every time one of their NPCs opinions is overturned.

I’m with you that it’s not the entirety of play, but there’s going to be alot of those ‘one singular moments’ if socials skills work that way.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

In the context of the play of the game, it may also be true that someone will just yield. But does that reflect the authenticity of character? Or rather does it reflect the social dynamics of the play of the game? I agree with @andreszarta that it typically will be the latter:
Or something along those lines.

You are completely ignoring my point. Whilst it is possible that what @andreszarta suggests happens, there is no need to assume that it always or even usually does. In real world there are no rules or GM fiat to end arguments, yet people do not get stuck for arguing for days, unable to do something else. So if we accept that real people are authentic, then certainly authentic resolution is perfectly possible with characters as well.

This assumes that the player is not able to actually accept the established fiction. In principle, it can be equally true of combat - my implacable guy would never be bested by a mere Orc - but most RPGers know that they don't get to prioritise their feeling about their character over the dictates of combat dice.

Indeed. As these are completely very different things even though you're unable to see it. One is about external the other is about internal. The internal state of the character is about emotions, wants etc that will influence the goals of the character. If you mess wit them you mess with the core of the player agency. It is quite different the rules to tell the player that their character was unable to beat the ogre king, than that they no longer want to beat the ogre king.

And more fundamentally, the internal life is intuitive and subjective. It is far more personal and tied to to our self than the external.

@kenada, in my view, dealt with this pretty early in the thread:
Generalising these points - one part of the skillset of playing a PC in a RPG can include being able to portray the character as the game requires them to be portrayed.

Sure, to certain degree. Willing suspension of disbelief and all that. But this doesn't mean anything goes. The GM must actually do the work. Like sure in a horror game the players should be willing to play characters that can get scared and endeavour to maintain the atmosphere, but the GM still needs to make the things actually feel scary. You just cannot replace genuine feeling with rules. That's why horror movies actually spend a lot of effort establishing the atmosphere and making stuff genuinely frightening instead of the narrator just saying "this is scary, now be scared." Same goes for romance and whatever atmosphere or feeling one might wish to evoke. Now if the GM is bad at doing this, if they cannot evoke genuine feeling, then it might be tempting to replace this by rules, but at least to me that is just as futile than a comedian saying "this is funny, now laugh."

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Given that - in the real world - it is the social interaction which we would encounter (barring intoxication, I suppose), I can only state that I have encountered situations where I have been goaded into precipitous action against my better judgement, and I have backed down in situations where I felt intimidated, I have been deceived etc. No magic was involved, and it seems only reasonable that any character which I might portray in an RPG be subject to the same emotional and situational pressures.

But how is that possible? In the real worlds there was no rules or the GM who forced you to act this way, yet you did!

Yes, in my games the characters have quite often been goaded by the NPCs to do questionable things. Yet no rules forced them to. I just created a situation where the characters were under pressure and compelling NPC that convinced them of this stuff.

 

[AnotherGuy]

This assumes that the player is not able to actually accept the established fiction. In principle, it can be equally true of combat - my implacable guy would never be bested by a mere Orc - but most RPGers know that they don't get to prioritise their feeling about their character over the dictates of combat dice.

Perhaps I'm confusing things here but I'm pretty sure you have taken the opposite position when it comes to the knowledge a character has. As an example, a DM calls you to make a skill check for the PC to see if they are aware that fire is more effective against a troll.
In that instance you disagreed with player having to roleplay such lack of knowledge which conflicted with the player's knowledge but in this instance you're arguing for players to accept the established fiction as dictated by the dice.

If I have made a mess of things, I apologise but this is what I'm recalling from past conversations.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Yes, in my games the characters have quite often been goaded by the NPCs to do questionable things. Yet no rules forced them to. I just created a situation where the characters were under pressure and compelling NPC that convinced them of this stuff.

For me at least, I do not want to rely every time on my personal deception skills to try outwit an entire table of friends. Oh I will try, do not get me wrong, I'm happy to use roleplaying skills but I also like that there is an element of a game in this hobby.

So, if it comes down to a skill challenge (preferably) or a single skill check that must be used by the PCs to persuade others (NPC/s), then I as DM am happy to also provide my stakes to the check should the PCs fail. It is a game of roleplaying a character, not a game of roleplaying yourself.

 

[Celebrim]

And as I said before, this brings us back to resolving conflicts of interest in one of three ways:

1. Pure puzzle-solving, where the challenge is to figure out the NPC’s personality keys and push the right buttons—without any real active opposition, just a mechanical or fiat time limit ("Patience") or other constraints.
2. Role-playing it out, where we talk until one of us decides we’ve had enough and concedes, or until someone exerts situational authority to force an outcome—which could very well be leaving the conflict unresolved, subtly implying that the initiator doesn’t actually get what they wanted.
3. GM as the arbiter of aesthetic and creative judgment, where the GM ultimately decides whether the PC’s approach satisfies their personal sense of what feels right for the fiction and rules accordingly. The problem here is that it effectively makes the GM the final authority on what is convincing or earned in the fiction, rather than letting the process of play and its instrumentation carry that weight. This risks creating an implicit approval/disapproval dynamic, where the players’ ability to succeed depends not just on the internal logic of the game world but on the GM’s taste and narrative instincts, which are inherently subjective, SPECIALLY so in the context of NPC Deception/Persuasion.

I’m open to hearing other alternatives, but I think these are the natural results of that approach. Certainly the ones I'm familiar with having had personal experience with all three.

I think you are right but I think that we don't have to deal in binaries here. One of my design realizations over the years is that everything that can be a quantity should be a quantity. So for example, fire elementals in my game don't have immunity to fire, they have fire resistance of 50. The ur-fire elemental at the heart of the plane of fire, the incarnate idea of fire itself, might have fire resistance 100. If you can somehow do more than 100 points of fire damage you can burn even a living fire. That's how my game works.

And while all of the above you describe is part of my process of play, it's all quantized. It's a DC 30 to convince the NPC, but only 20 if the PC's by investigation or intuition have figured out his personality levers and know the right buttons to push. And this is written down beforehand because it is a puzzle. In fact, a complex puzzle might involve persuading half of a group of NPCs each of which has their own description and laid out secret motives or levers that can be used to persuade them more easily. Some might be easily intimidated, especially if you have the key to blackmail them with. Some might be persuaded if you appeal to their greed, and others by appealing to their honor and pity for the unfortunate. Some might be persuaded if you appeal to their secret past - "It's what Marie would have wanted."

We role play it out, but we don't concede. We just reach the point where it feels like a potential change in the fiction as represented by a particular character's attitude might have been earned or if we've reached some natural stopping point in the conversation and then we make a fortune test to see if the desired change or the created change (through that roleplay) actually occurs. That fortune test has particular rules based on the relationship of the PCs to the target - hostile or friendly, superiors or inferiors, strangers or long relationship, etc. We don't play it out forever. While I might allow each PC a shot at influencing the character, I'd not allow a second shot by the same PC in the same scene unless that PC radically changed their approach (and this the skill or difficulty of the check).

And, as the GM I am the arbiter of aesthetics, not only in that I've laid out beforehand secret keys that give an effective bonus to complete the social challenge, but also in that if the player really does a good job of laying out the argument and roleplaying well, I'll reward that with a small bonus of say +1 or +3 bonus on the roll - enough to make it worthwhile to roleplay, but not so much that the dour dwarf fighter with 8 charisma and no points in diplomacy out performs the cleric with maximum ranks in diplomacy. The idea here is that whatever comes out at the table is translated through the character's own charisma into something either more stirring or more stumbling than what the player themselves said - although I should note I wouldn't penalize the player of the dwarf for being deliberately gruff and halting with his words if the words themselves are well said and on target. On the contrary, that's even better roleplaying.

While I agree with you that the GM is always in the space, kind of interfering with the communication between the player and the game universe, so that the player must rely on the GM's judgment, I feel like that's inevitable in any system where you have a GM who is supposed to pass judgement on the player's propositions regardless of whether they are social propositions or physical ones. "I'm going to pick up this log and lean it against the wall and use it to climb more easily." also involves a set of assumptions and rulings and relies on the GM's arbitration as well - how much does the log weigh, can it bear the player's weight, is the friction high enough to keep it from sliding down the wall or falling to the side once the player's weight is on it, how rough of a surface is the log and how difficult is it to climb. Every GM is going to run that slightly differently IME particularly if the system doesn't give you any real guidance.

Social challenges are of the same sort except that that's players mind is more inevitably a part of the fiction than the player's body is, because the player has to be allowed to make choices within the fiction which is an act of their mind in away that a character swinging a sword isn't an act of the player's body. But the GMs mind is present in both and has to be restrained in some fashion in order to produce fair and neutral arbitration and allow thereby the player to have actual agency.

 

[Celebrim]

Perhaps I'm confusing things here but I'm pretty sure you have taken the opposite position when it comes to the knowledge a character has. As an example, a DM calls you to make a skill check for the PC to see if they are aware that fire is more effective against a troll.

In that instance you disagreed with player having to roleplay such lack of knowledge which conflicted with the player's knowledge but in this instance you're arguing for players to accept the established fiction as dictated by the dice.

I realize that there are GMs that are highly inconsistent in this, but in my case I try to be highly consistent. If the player has the knowledge that trolls are vulnerable to fire, then the character has that knowledge as well if the player decides for themself that they do. I never try to control metagame knowledge. I believe it is not fair to try to ask the player how their character would behave in the absence of information that they actually have. If they want to try to take that on themself, that's their prerogative.

I do have a system for quantifying how likely it is that you know a troll is susceptible to fire so that a character can know something the player doesn't, like: "This is a troll. They are a type of fey, capricious, always hungry, frequently not picky about who or what they eat, and they are hard to kill but are vulnerable to fire." A common farmer would likely know that much about trolls based on stories they've picked up in the pub. You'd only need an 8 or so on a lore check to know that much.