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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 8158765" data-attributes="member: 6795602">That's fair.  I think there's definitely a difference in those kinds of games.  I've definitely been operating from the perspective the games being brought up all were intended to be examples of what you refer to as story advocacy games.That helps.I agree.I think I agree here.  It summarizes my position that such mechanics do cost one type of agency, but as you bring up here, that sacrifice buys another kind of agency.I think I agree here as well.  I can even see how this would feel quite empowering.I agree with the assessment as well, or at least most of it.  I mean consider the tension when what you term playing with integrity and playing toward the parties objectives comes into conflict when playing an alcoholic.  "A mechanic I had no control over made my PC hungover for this mission."  It alleviates the player from the responsibility that having their character act out a flaw might be detrimental to the party.  Except let's delve into this a little deeper.(Of course there's also the "I choose to have my character be hungover which is bad but I get metacurrency to compensate and so that essentially balances out so having my character do this bad thing didn't actually screw over the party".)I'm going to focus on the first style of mechanic for the rest of this post.  The first only works when players are forced to pick some relatively equal impact flaw compared to the other players.  Otherwise a player can just pick no flaw or very minor flaw and perform better than the other players PC's.  Essentially leading to the same kind of problem - you screw over the team if you pick a bad flaw and so social pressure to not pick bad flaws.  This shows that the solution isn't actually the mechanic, but the constraint on character design that only includes characters that have flaws that have nearly the same impact.  A game like D&D could accomplish the same thing by constraining you to making a character that always acts in the best interests of the party or that are all as equally flawed with the social expectation being that the flaws need to be played to when they arise.</blockquote>

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