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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 8152044" data-attributes="member: 7025508">How not being able to decide how my chracter behaves and acts limits my agency? Should be rather apparent.Is this the point where I according to the forum etiquette am supposed to snap at you that I'm not here to educate you?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />But seriously, I have the books packed somewhere (two copies of most of them in fact) but I haven't opened them in years. This is why I really didn't want to go into specifics, as I simply do not remember the specifics even though it is one of my most played games. It has been too long.You get to assign points to your virtues, but regardless of how you assign them at least one will end up as three, even on a starting character.In certain situations yes. And I would rather trust the players to determine whether this was the sort of situation instead of mechanics making that decision for them. People know how to roleplay their characters without the rules doing it for them. And as written, this virtue would literally force the character to commit a suicide against an overwhelming foe.Yes. But it is used for other things and is really valuable. And as it is also main way to overcome conditions imposed on you by social combat. So it might be a choice of being autopiloted by virtues or directed by NPCs. And that was just the mundane stuff. On top of that there is magical mind control and the Solar Exalted (and IIRC other too, but it might be slightly different...) have a curse. They have a 'limit break' track (not a nice thing like in Final Fantasy) that accrues in certain situations and once it gets filled they kinda go mad and lose control completely for a while. And one way to accrue this is to use willpower to resist your main virtue. So it might be a choice between a small lose of control now or larger later. This game really has a lot of mechanics that cause you to lose control of your character one way or another.You should use whatever system is most fun for you, but but I really don't believe in systems fixing people issues. That the system allows railroading doesn't mean that system results railroading. And if it wouldn't allow railroading, these adventure paths wouldn't exist! (Not a loss for me, but would be for people making them.)First of I don't think that being physically hurt* and being attracted to someone are comparable things. This system definitely tells the player how their character feels and in turn how to roleplay them. Now I fully admit that this system is way subtler that the Exalted one. I'd simply say this is a better made system that gives the player leeway how to interpret things. It still is not the sort of mechanic I like. Furthermore, unlike in Exalted where virtue mechanics and social combat are just one small facet in the game and can easily be amended/overruled/ignored by a sensible GM, my understanding is that Monster Heart is basically built around this kind of mechanic, it is central to the whole game. So in that sense it would be an bigger issue for me. None of this is saying that it is a bad game, I get what they're doing and why. But it is still trading the sort of agency that I care about a lot to get those results, so it is unlikely that I would like this game.* (That being said, being able to control the physical integrity of your character would be a form of agency. It is not something most games have, but it could in theory exist. In certain types of freeform roleplay it does exist, also in some LARPs)</blockquote>

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