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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 8152277" data-attributes="member: 7025508">I have hard time seeing how it could not be a form of limiting agency.Well basically. Though the resistance roll is kinda backwards, they need to fail at the virtue roll in order to not according the virtue. Not that it terribly matters. And of course you most choose at least one virtue to be high, you cannot opt out of this by just having low virtues.It is a dicepool system, and even one success on the virtue roll causes the compulsion. With three dice this has about 80% chance of happening.  And the problem with using resource to overcome this is easier said than done. You have very limited amount of willpower points.But why would they do that? It would mean they're roleplaying badly and why would you roleplay badly? And if they indeed did all the time, then the GM could just instruct them to change their virtues, as they didn't obviously actually want to play a valorous person.The problem with the system written that it is a completely context free compulsion. It doesn't matter what the situation is or how impossible the dare or the challenge. It also relies on rather specific interpretation of valour, coupling things that are not necessary related. A person who is unlikely to retreat from combat and feels honour bound to accept challenges needs not also be a person who accepts any crazy dare or wants to avenge every trivial slight.And I remind that this part of the system is not supposed to represent anything supernatural, it is just a normal mundane personality mechanic.It is a crazy anime/wuxia/mythology/acid trip inspired game about demigodly heroes. It is supposed to be empowering. And sure, the limit break/curse mechanic is thematically important, but that the personality mechanics and the social combat kinda undermine it. Losing control due the curse is kinda big deal... except that you risk losing control all the time anyway. I suspect they just failed at tuning the mechanic. I think thematically the curse/ limit break thing would have worked just fine, if you could always suppress the compulsion from a virtue for free (without using willpower) but doing so would still give you limit break. (Though even that might me more than I like.)Yeah. a GM can mitigate it a lot, but by RAW it is pretty brutal.What's the difference?Yes. Why is that a problem?It forces an emotional reaction on you. You have control how to exactly interpret it, but still.They're different categories. I get to why this matters in a bit.Yes. We might have exhausted the usefulness of discussing a game neither of us properly understands.You are correct that 'increase' and 'decrease' of agency are relative terms from an assumed baseline. And that baseline is not some objective reality, merely a convention. As I said earlier, there could be (and there are) games where the player has complete agency over the physical integrity of their character; no physical harm can come to the character without the player's explicit approval. Now such games are rare, whilst games where the players have near complete agency over their character's mental faculties are pretty common. And now we get to why I feel you can't treat mental and physical in the same way. You obviously can have a RPG where the players have no agency over the physical integrity of their characters, mechanics or GM can inflict injury on their character, pretty standard. But you could even imagine a RPG where the players have no control over the physical actions of their characters. Quadriplegics sitting in a wheelchair, disembodied minds that cannot affect anything physical. As long as the characters can think and are able to communicate in some way, you can have a game. Rather limited, sure, but such a game could be played. And in effect such games are played pretty often. Ones where the characters just discuss, they have control over their bodies, but aren't really doing anything particularly important with them, just hanging out and talking. But can you imagine a roleplaying game where the players have zero agency over the mental faculties of their characters? Because I can't. It would not be in any way recognisable as an roleplaying game. So in that sense I feel that the player's agency over the character's mental faculties is more fundamental; there must be at least some amount of it for the roleplay to able to happen at all.</blockquote>

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