The question is not 'could choose'. The question is 'will choose'.
Right. I mean, I think I was pretty clear in my post:
Because it's also fun, at least for many RPGers, for unexpected stuff to happen - stuff that no one would just choose here and now, if left to their own devices - we use mechanical systems to constrain our imagining and introduce stuff into it. Social mechanics are a way of doing that, just like any other mechanics are.
I didn't say anything about what people can or can't choose, but about what they will or won't choose.
And as
@Hriston noted, my way of thinking about this is informed by
Vincent Baker, who I think is also pretty clear:
As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's . . . what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject. . . .
The challenge facing rpg designers is to create outcomes that every single person at the table would reject, yet are compelling enough that nobody actually does so.
This is not any sort of claim about
human cognitive or creative ability. Nor is it any sort of claim about
how consistent or predictable or plausible events are in human life.
It's an
aesthetic claim: it's the idea that an artistic work - in the context of RPGing, that's a
work of fiction (a story, broadly conceived) - can be
compelling, even though it is
not what you would choose i- and is something that you would reject - if left to your own devices.
I think it's pretty well established anecdotally that an author, in a non-RPG context, can be surprised, in the process of writing, by what their character(s) do(es), so I don't think that's what's at stake here.
But by definition they can't choose something that they would not choose.
Baker uses the descriptions "unwelcome and unwanted" and "would reject" in a particular sense. Because it's obvious that, in a certain sense, the outcomes he's talking about
are wanted: that's why people are playing a RPG that generates them - they want these compelling moments. He makes it clear what the sense of his phrases is, by way of his glossing of them in what I've quoted.
And I used the description "unexpected" in a particular sense, that I think I made clear enough by my glossing of it: as stuff that no one, left to their own devices, would just
choose here and now. An author who surprises themself with the stuff that they choose to write is, nevertheless, choosing that stuff here and now.
It's possible to elaborate on this a bit more. If someone presents you with surprising or unexpected
prompts, you can find yourself thinking surprising or unexpected things. In the context of RPGing, though, we can put that prompt in different places. We can ask a participant
given this fictional state of affairs, what happens next? If the state of affairs that is described is surprising or unexpected, so might be the reply. This is a technique for getting non-anodyne freeform.
But in RPGing, we can also put the prompt in a different place:
given this fictional state of affairs, perform this procedure - <procedure is performed> - given the outcome of that procedure, here's what happens next! Now the surprising or unexpected prompt is not an invitation to author what happens next, but an account of what happens next which the audience (that is, the RPG participants) must somehow incorporate into their overall conception of what is happening in the fiction. That's what Baker is getting at, as the reason to use mechanics rather than freeform. This is what his aesthetic claim is: that these mechanically shaped and constrained accounts of what happens next can (if the game is well-designed) be
more compelling than what the participants would come up with themselves.
The points made in the preceding two paragraphs are particularly evident in the design of Apocalypse World - with its different resolution modes of
the GM asking the players questions and building on the answers,
the GM making a move, typically soft, when everyone else looks to them to see what happens next, and
a player's declared action for their PC triggering a move by way of the rubric "if you do it, you do it". But they can be seen in other RPGs too: eg in Burning Wheel, the GM frames scenes that prompt action declarations; and then under the rubric of "say 'yes' or roll the dice" either the player determines what happens next or the dice oblige the GM to bring some sort of consequence to bear.
We can see the same thing even all the way back in classic D&D, although the
fictional scope of the unexpected/unwelcome/unwanted is narrower - it comes up in contexts of combat, and when saving throws are triggered. (We can also see why some features of, say, Tomb of Horrors verge on the unreasonable/unfair -
freeform introduction of adverse consequences, without any mechanical mediation, puts a strain on the relationship between participants that mechanics serve the function of alleviating. Gygax's discussion of this in his DMG, where he eschews a "simulationist" treatment of saving throws, is more insightful in my view than some of his actual adventure design, which from time-to-time eschews saving throws on ostensibly "simulationist" grounds.)
I think it's more about mechanics vs player having (some) authorship over the character's various mental states. There doesn't seem to be any objective reason why this is different from allowing mechanics to have a say in what a character does physically.
This I agree with, 100%. My "mental model" of my character can tell me that no mere Orc can defeat them in combat, as much as it can tell me about how they would respond cognitively or emotionally.
And the "cops and robber" problem ("I shot you!" "No you didn't!") can arise just as easily in the social as in the physical domain: the GM's conception of a NPC is that they're so silver-tongued no one can resist them; the player's conception of their PC is that they're so stubborn (at least in respect of <whatever the matter at hand happens to be>), that they're not going to be persuaded by mere words.
The design decision about how to deal with these things - where to draw boundaries between freeform and mechanics, and on the freeform side of it where to draw boundaries between the authority of participants - are not going to be done in ignorance of the topic of the fiction. But there are no
structural, gameplay reasons that mean the boundaries have to correspond to some sort of dualism of mind and body.
D&D "solves" the cops-and-robbers problem in the social domain by more-or-less arbitrarily making nearly all the silver-tongued characters, fearsome characters, etc
sorcerers - like the Mummy's Dreadful Glare that I mentioned upthread - and thereby bringing them into the framework of saving throws vs spells/magic. I say "nearly all" because there are exceptions in 5e, like the Battle Master manoeuvres Goading Attack and Menacing Attack. I don't know how the critics of social mechanics handle these, but I suspect that they are treated as if they were mind-control sorcery: for instance, once the mechanical effect of Menacing Attack wears off, I doubt that many D&D players would portray their PC as still scared of the menacing attacker, even though whatever it was about them that was menacing won't have changed.
I can’t help but see the desire to have total control over the character’s mental state and decisions at all times as a form of power fantasy.
It can also be a response to railroading, I think.
