I'm there to play a character that - because it's my own invention - I in theory already know everything about that I need to know in order to play it. If there's still things to learn about the character then either the char-gen system or (more likely) my own imagination has failed me.
Which means I should, I hope, either already know whether my character is iron enough to kill or be able to decide it on the spot without help or force from game mechanics.
Doesn't this conflict with stuff you have said to me in the past, where you want characters that grow organically over time and which
aren't pre-planned perfectly from the beginning?
If you already know truly everything there is to know about your character, how can that happen? It seems like you want to have your cake and eat it too. The story of the character can only arise out of the actions they take--a reflection-back, never in-the-moment and definitely not in advance--but everything that could ever affect those actions must be perfectly nailed down, by you, in advance!
Combat has to be abstracted because we can't do it at the table. Thinking as my character can be done at the table, though, with no abstraction (and thus no mechanics) required.
Can it, though? Like do we actually expect every player to perfectly produce every social behavior they engage in, at the table, every single time? I sure as hell don't, and I would find it more than a little funny to be told "no no no, you
have to actually sing an actual song of inspiration
every single time you inspire an ally, and it has to be actually inspirational too, or else it doesn't count." I would be extremely unamused if that were not revealed to be a ridiculous joke, and were instead the literal requirement.
You, as a player, cannot research the world, you can't even
attempt to do so, as that information is only in the DM's head-and-notes (per the clear and consistent throughline of the thread). You can only give quite loose descriptions of research. Necessarily the results and consequences of that research will be highly abstracted and summarized, because we don't have three weeks to blow on actually reading multi-hundred-page tomes conjured up by the DM (and even if we
did have that time, I struggle to believe you would want to spend it so--and all that presumes the DM is even willing or able to
write such books in the first place!)
Likewise, all sorts of things--following a monster's spoor, performing any sort of magic whatsoever, rallying your troops against expected bad news, divining the true thoughts of literally inhuman beings, learning to speak languages that emphatically don't exist--are always going to have a significant, I'd say
dramatic layer of abstraction and separation between yourself and your character. We take steps to make that separation
seem small, but it never actually
is small. It's actually not very easy to come up with situations where your thoughts or actions as a player truly do map fully and neatly to the thoughts or actions of your character. (This, incidentally, is why in a previous thread, I was such an advocate for pre-defined, even if not necessarily pre-
authored, mystery-solving, because it's one of the rare places where the player's thinking
truly does map quite closely to the character's thinking.)
Thinking as your character almost always has abstraction, even
without mechanics, and even without any intrusion of the fantastical or otherworldly. That abstraction is often quite thick, and almost never particularly thin. Much of it is abstraction that folks
no longer notice, not because it isn't there, not because it's been actually removed nor reduced in any meaningful way, but because we have become so
comfortable with its presence, we no longer pay it heed. Like all those jokes about "you are very aware of your tongue inside your mouth" or "you are now manually breathing" etc. Real, active presences that have faded so far from awareness we no longer observe them, not because they aren't there or don't have any effect, but because we've become desensitized to them.
Now if one is willing to play in a system where social mechanics apply to PCs the same as they do to NPCs and thus can change their mind and-or actions in directions the player doesn't want, that's different. But I suspect if this were to be proposed to the masses as a rule change in, say, a hypothetical D&D 6e the collective "No" would be resounding - one instance where conservatism is the right call.
But isn't it
already the case that social/mental mechanics apply to PCs the same as NPCs? Both can lie to one another, using Deception vs Insight. There has been no huge wave of antagonism against this. Similarly with Intimidate; there are frequently mechanical consequences for failing to resist Intimidation, and (for example) a Battle Master Fighter NPC who uses Goading Attack or Menacing Attack on a PC unquestionably affects that PC's actions if the PC fails a Wisdom saving throw, even though all Battle Master maneuvers are perfectly mundane.
