D&D General Styles of Roleplaying and Characters

loverdrive said:

Debating "whether should we fight" or knocking people out is one thing. Raising one's weapon, going for a killing blow and then stopping, because killing people is mentally hard is completely another.

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First, the discussion is not just a tactical one, but often a moral one. "It's just wrong to attack these kobolds who haven't actually attacked us" or whatever.

Second, if what you are looking for is a player acting out the emotional strain ("I...just...can't...do it..." or whatever) no, we're not doing that. But what we are doing could be interpreted as the result of that moral anguish. So if you want to come play with us and do exactly that, it would certainly be welcome/applauded.

Aldarc said:

Just remember that in 5e, if it makes you feel any better, whoever rolls higher on social skills just performed better "background magic" than you were able to resist.

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Well, "just remember that..." is misleading because nowhere does the text of the game claim anything remotely like that. So it's not "remembering" but "inventing".

But, yes, certainly if one chose to interpret things that way, and you wanted the world to be that deeply magical, it would be a consistent interpretation. I would find it weird if a simple skill roll, usable every turn with no resource consumption, were as potent as actual spells, but ok.

But.....ick.

P.S. In fairness, I'm not "remembering" that a dragon's fear is supernatural, I'm interpreting it as such.

Ok, yet another thing I want to add (as a result of thinking about this while preparing lunch):

I am sympathetic to the idea that IRL we don't control...or don't have complete control over...our own emotions and reactions and decisions, so therefore it's "unrealistic" to have complete control over our character's emotions/reactions/decisions. If modeling reality is our goal, and since we can't actually model brains, I agree that RNG is a decent substitute.

I just don't find that very appealing. I hesitate to draw too many parallels between authoring fiction and playing roleplaying games, but I wouldn't roll dice to "find out" what my written characters would do; I want to choose what I think is the best story. Same with my RPG characters.

Of course there are limits to this analogy: in written fiction I choose not only what actions my characters take, but also how successful they are at those actions. But the written fiction is 100% mine. In a game with multiple participants (and also just because it's a "game" not just a story) there has to be a cut-off between where you simply choose, and where the rules of the game (and potentially dice) choose for you. My preferred line of demarcation is the boundary between what goes in my character's brain, and everything else.*. I'm not saying this is the correct way to play, but it's the way I prefer.

*Unless "magic".

I don't know how typical my tastes are, but while I am fine with social influence that provides incentives and penalties or might constrain my play I really dislike mind altering magic (as implemented in most RPGs). Mostly because it usually takes the form of what Exalted calls Unacceptable Social Influence, the sort of stuff that fails to take fictional positioning and who the characters are as people into account. It's usually also implemented by handing your character sheet over to somebody else and letting them basically play your character. I am fine with being influenced or constrained, but at the end of the day I want to be the one playing my character through the process. I also want things like what you are being asked to do to have an impact on how hard something is.

On an aesthetic level I really hate mind control tropes. I'm fine with being convinced and having those stakes being real, but like someone snapping their fingers and like just messing with your mind in a way that does not feel earned just kind of feels cheap to me.

Bill Zebub said:

To me that's effectively the same thing. Arthur C. Clarke and all that. The point being that (in 5e) the ability is explicitly described as imposing the Afraid condition. That makes it an explicit exception to the rule that players decide what they think.

This is in contrast to, for example, the Dragon rolling Charisma (Intimidate) and telling the player, "You now have the Afraid condition." Which in my opinion is NOT ok.

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Bill Zebub said:

As I mentioned upthread, for me the real litmus test is not whether the effect is described as "magic" but rather if the rule explicitly describes the loss-of-PC-control consequence. That way when I play the game I'm buying into such exceptions to the general rule about that control belonging to me, and I can just think of those exceptions as being due to magical/supernatural/whatever.

This is in contrast to leaving this up to interpretation of the DM (or other players) who think they know how you ought to play your character.

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Bill Zebub said:

I'd also like to understand why what I described sounds arbitrary to you. I'll state it again: the dividing line for me is between spells/abilities/whatever that explicitly state what the effect on a targeted creature will be, and those that do not. Where is the arbitrariness?

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I can't speak for @Aldarc, but I can explain why it seems arbitrary to me.

Aldarc, I and some other posters have all described RPG systems in which various abilities are explicitly described as establishing exceptions to the general rule that a player decides what a character will think or do. Not all of them are about imposing "conditions" (eg that terminology has no real meaning in Prince Valiant) but some are (eg in Buring Wheel, hesitation is analogous to a D&D "condition"; in Cortex+ Heroic having a certain degree of stress or complication is analogous to a D&D "condition"; in 4e D&D being stunned by terror at the roar of a Tyrant Fang Drake or recoiling in horror at the horrific visage of a Deathlock Wight is literally a D&D "condition").

Not all of them involve activating "special abilities" but some do: eg I've already posted multiple times upthread about how, in our Prince Valiant game, Lady Lorette of Lothian - as a game entity - carried with her the Incite Lust special effect, which I as GM used on Sir Morgath when the latter was carrying Lorette in his arms having rescued her from her pursuers.

So when playing these games a player is buying into such exceptions. These books don't conceal this. The MHRP rulebook has a full-page discussion, aimed at players, with advice about how to handle having Emotional or Mental stress, or social/influence type complications, inflicted on your PC. The Burning Wheel rulebook is replete with discussions about the prospect of your character changing through play, and identifies that as one of the most significant aspects of the system. Apocalypse World has a complex analysis of how its Seduce/Manipulate move works, with multiple worked examples. Prince Valiant has a GM-oriented discussion of how Incite Lust is expected to work, and that it can be cruel to a player and hence needs a degree of careful handling.

Yet upthread you've said that you can't imagine yourself enjoying these systems, although they seem to tick the boxes that you're now pointing to. That's where the impression of arbitrariness comes from.

Upthread I posted the following:

pemerton said:

The whole it's magic thing doesn't really resonate with me.

In real life people get persuaded and influenced all the time, although that's presumably mostly if not exclusively non-magical. So in the world of the fiction, presumably similar things happen. (5e D&D seems to assume that it does, given it has a non-magical skill called Persuade.)

So the magic/non-magic things seems to have little bearing on the verisimilitude of influence-type mechanics.

And it has no impact on the rationing of influence-type mechanics, given that a GM can use as many dryads or 1st level MUs as they like.

So it seems to me that what is going on with the magic/non-magic is this: that people want to be able to author their PC's choices, as part of maintaining control over the nature of their PC's character/personality. If the PC chooses something different from what the player would have chosen, but in the fiction it's magic, then the player hasn't lost authorial control over the nature of their PC's character/personality.

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Nothing since I posted that has made me revise my conjecture about what is going on: that it's about authorial control over the character/personality of the PC.

Because, as I said, these other factors you're pointing to are all present in the systems that you're saying you don't like.

Xetheral said:

I think the previously noted distinction between magic influence and non-magical influence could be better characterized as realistic vs unrealistic. If a creature has an explicit mind control ability that would be impossible in the real world, that's "magic" enough for me to categorize it differently from ordinary persuasion, even if under the game rules it wasn't sufficiently magical to fail in an antimagic field.

<snip>

In terms of my own preferences, I'm more likely to be ok with a mechanic that overrides my authority to author my character's feelings and/or decisions if it simulates an explicit in-fiction effect separate from and beyond the level of influence possible in the real world

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How is being scared by a dragon flying overhead separate from and beyond the level of influence possible in the real world? It doesn't seem unrealistic to me.

4e D&D was subjected to unending barrages of criticism, but one that I don't recall ever hearing is that a Fang Titan Drake (effectively a T-Rex) can Stun (as in, impose the condition) with its terrible roar. The effect is expressly called out as a Fear one (which means some characters get defence bonuses against it, or are immune). But no one thinks that that roar is magic, do they? Or that it's any more unrealistic than any of the other "mundane" action of a mid-to-upper paragon 4e D&D game?

Bill Zebub said:

But if the fear effect were mundane, then a fluff description would be sufficient, "Many people will be overcome with terror." Or it could be left out entirely. Either way, players can simply decide how to roleplay this, and the DM could decide how the peasants react.

But it's written into the creature as an ability, therefore (in my book) somehow it is tied to the essence of this magical creature.

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This is just question-begging.

In AD&D OA - a game published in the mid-80s, under the D&D label and using AD&D mechanics - the kensai (*at 7th level) and samurai (at 6th level) can cause fear to characters and creatures with 1 HD or less on a failed save vs breath weapon. There is not the least suggestion that this is magic: it's because these characters can be terrifying!

And in the history of D&D since then there have been many features written into characters and creatures as special abilities that are obviously not magic.

Oofta said:

In the real world, I don't care how persuasive someone's argument is, it may or may not convince me.

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In the real world, much of human decision making isn't conscious, and therefore not nearly as inviolate as many would think.

Bill Zebub said:

I suppose it comes down to this:

There is a conflict between the reality that an actual dragon would cause terror in human beings, and the common trope in fiction (of many genres) of the hero charging toward that from which others flee.

So the question is whether the decision to act that way should be left entirely in the hands of the player, or whether the game determines how the hero reacts, and the player's job is to enact it. (And this specific example is just one of many involving human emotions.)

My answer is that the it's always the player's decision....unless the rules explicitly state otherwise.

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As per my post not far upthread, this does not distinguish the stuff you're say you're happy with with the stuff you say you're not happy with.

Bill Zebub said:

And, if they do, it's some kind of "magic".

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Xetheral said:

I think differences of opinion on this point may be related to different conceptions of self and decisionmaking in the real world.

<snip>

I would not be surprised at all if differences in how "magical" an effect must be to be a palatable external influence correlates with differences in how one views human volition

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While an interesting conjecture, I don't think this is right. I can certainly say in my own case that on the (few) occasions when ENworld posters have tried to infer to my philosophical beliefs from my roleplaying preferences they have got it wrong.

I really doubt that @Bill Zebub and I have deep metaphysical differences of conviction - or at least I see no evidence for that in any of our posts. What I think is true is that we are looking for different things out of RPGing.

Xetheral said:

further complicated by differences in how one sees the relationship between the player and their character.

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This is far more plausible to me. It is reinforced by posts like this:

Bill Zebub said:

I am sympathetic to the idea that IRL we don't control...or don't have complete control over...our own emotions and reactions and decisions, so therefore it's "unrealistic" to have complete control over our character's emotions/reactions/decisions. If modeling reality is our goal, and since we can't actually model brains, I agree that RNG is a decent substitute.

I just don't find that very appealing. I hesitate to draw too many parallels between authoring fiction and playing roleplaying games, but I wouldn't roll dice to "find out" what my written characters would do; I want to choose what I think is the best story. Same with my RPG characters.

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That is to say, and as I posted earlier this morning not far upthread and also a day or two ago back on about page 36, the difference here is about desires for authorship. Who gets to establish the personality and character of a player's PC?

Campbell said:

I don't know how typical my tastes are, but while I am fine with social influence that provides incentives and penalties or might constrain my play I really dislike mind altering magic (as implemented in most RPGs). Mostly because it usually takes the form of what Exalted calls Unacceptable Social Influence, the sort of stuff that fails to take fictional positioning and who the characters are as people into account. It's usually also implemented by handing your character sheet over to somebody else and letting them basically play your character. I am fine with being influenced or constrained, but at the end of the day I want to be the one playing my character through the process. I also want things like what you are being asked to do to have an impact on how hard something is.

On an aesthetic level I really hate mind control tropes. I'm fine with being convinced and having those stakes being real, but like someone snapping their fingers and like just messing with your mind in a way that does not feel earned just kind of feels cheap to me.

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I don't have your dislike for mind control, though I'm not the biggest fan of mind control mechanics which require, as part of their resolution, the controlled PC's player having to stop playing the game. (Hence why I like the BW approach of requiring the player to rewrite a Belief.)

But in the Aedhros episode that has been discussed upthread, I think it was the failed Steel check rather than the successful Persuasion check that was the key moment for me. The former was where Aedhros faltered - the latter was just Alicia taking up that opportunity to get what she wanted (ie no cold-blooded murder). (Presumably for Alicia's player the weight of those two moments was reversed.)

pemerton said:

I can't speak for @Aldarc, but I can explain why it seems arbitrary to me.

Aldarc, I and some other posters have all described RPG systems in which various abilities are explicitly described as establishing exceptions to the general rule that a player decides what a character will think or do. Not all of them are about imposing "conditions" (eg that terminology has no real meaning in Prince Valiant) but some are (eg in Buring Wheel, hesitation is analogous to a D&D "condition"; in Cortex+ Heroic having a certain degree of stress or complication is analogous to a D&D "condition"; in 4e D&D being stunned by terror at the roar of a Tyrant Fang Drake or recoiling in horror at the horrific visage of a Deathlock Wight is literally a D&D "condition").

Not all of them involve activating "special abilities" but some do: eg I've already posted multiple times upthread about how, in our Prince Valiant game, Lady Lorette of Lothian - as a game entity - carried with her the Incite Lust special effect, which I as GM used on Sir Morgath when the latter was carrying Lorette in his arms having rescued her from her pursuers.

So when playing these games a player is buying into such exceptions. These books don't conceal this. The MHRP rulebook has a full-page discussion, aimed at players, with advice about how to handle having Emotional or Mental stress, or social/influence type complications, inflicted on your PC. The Burning Wheel rulebook is replete with discussions about the prospect of your character changing through play, and identifies that as one of the most significant aspects of the system. Apocalypse World has a complex analysis of how its Seduce/Manipulate move works, with multiple worked examples. Prince Valiant has a GM-oriented discussion of how Incite Lust is expected to work, and that it can be cruel to a player and hence needs a degree of careful handling.

Yet upthread you've said that you can't imagine yourself enjoying these systems, although they seem to tick the boxes that you're now pointing to. That's where the impression of arbitrariness comes from.

Upthread I posted the following:
Nothing since I posted that has made me revise my conjecture about what is going on: that it's about authorial control over the character/personality of the PC.

Because, as I said, these other factors you're pointing to are all present in the systems that you're saying you don't like.

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Well, I don't know those systems, so I don't know exactly how they work, but based on your description the difference is that in D&D this kind of loss-of-control is both very relatively rare, and can always be associated with some "power" (for people who don't like "magic"). Thus the assumption is that you control your character, but there are some exceptions. And (for me) when those exceptions occur, it very much feels like ceding control of that character to someone/something else.

But if the underlying premise of the game is that you don't control your character, and the core mechanics are built around you not controlling your character, then I'm just not really interested. I don't want the premise of the game to be that I don't control my character.

On the positive side, it sounds like that loss-of-control is an upfront fact about the game, so for people who want to play that way, go for it! That's MUCH better than (arbitrarily) telling a player of D&D "your character wouldn't do/think/know that".