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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 7916667" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Lanefan, the problem here is that you are not going to sell me, or [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] , or certain others that this is true.You might think that you can intimately inhabit the hugely complex system of your PC...but that is where it ends.With respect, you're deluding yourself.  You are doing exactly what [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] has said you're doing...you're merely deciding, or the GM is deciding, to have thing x happen over things y and z (and any innumerable other possibilities) when it comes to social conflict.Professional actors can do a great job of characterizing a suite of traits and then spitting out a portrait by way of preconceived lines.  But they're just deluding themselves too if they think that they're actually, authentically modeling the extraordinarily complex interactions of endocrine and neurological systems of a social animal relating to other complex exogenous systems.* You can't simulate and you can't incorporate the system-overwhelming response of extreme anxiety borne from trauma from horrific betrayals, brutal hardship/abuse during formative years, life-philosophy-upending instances in the past, the experience of knowing you're lower on the dominance hierarchy than someone and having that someone crush your social perception of yourself through callous bullying in front of others (either intellectually or physically), the pressure of having someone lean on you for hours and hours and hours (or years) and the burden of that collective weight.  And dozens and dozens of other instances.Humans do not have NEARLY the agency that their (mis)perceptions tell them they do.  And also, neurological diversity (both hardware and software) is probably the most profound type of diversity in the social animal kingdom.  We're just starting to peel back these distinctions.You may think you have the ability to soundly model how behavioral suite a deals with endocrine response b while being unconsciously beholden to prefrontal cortex disposition c (and a myriad of other inputs)...but you cannot.  You flatly...cannot.You are deciding...you aren't experiencing and then channeling this complex system through the inputs of a TTRPG conversation to model a complex creature.  You are deciding.And I don't see how your decision (especially with all of this extreme agency in social animals that just doesn't exist in the wild) is more robust and better simulates social conflict, than conflict resolution mechanics that actually wrests some agency from us, imposes dispositions on us that we wish weren't present, and induces finality of resolution (as happens all_the_time in social conflict with other social animals).</blockquote>

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