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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7742228" data-attributes="member: 42582">This seems like another instance of (sensibly) objecting to poor mechanics.I think it's more helpful to think about systems with effective social mechanics to discuss what such mechanics bring to the game, and also what might be some players concerns aobut them.I like a system which generates an experience for the player which, in some tenable sense, mirrors the experience the PC is going through. A simple example: blind action declarations in combat mirror the PC's uncertainty about what his/her opponent is going to do next.I think it's hard to achieve this with the persuasive/non-persuasive input method. When my PC is persuaded, they want to do X. So a "mirroring" system should make me want to do X. But if I haven't myself experienced the duke's charm, then why am I going to want to do X if I'm otherwise not disposed too? To me, it seems to require more pretending to be my PC, rather than "inhabiting" my PC.I don't use puzzles of this sort that often in RPGing. In the course of a 30-level 4e game, there were (from memory) 3 riddles. The playiers solved the rivddles.The last puzzle I remember was in my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy game. I established a scene distinction: Mysterious Sigils on the Walls. Now the PCs were - at that time - lost in the dungeon, and hence were suffering an appropriate complication. So one of the players declared "I reckon those mysterious sigils have information about where we are in the dungeon", and made a check using the Scene Distinction in his pool - the check succeeded and indeed he was able to decipher the sigils and eliminate his Lost in the Dungeon complication.Cortex+ supports this sort of thing better than 4e - an "abstract" puzzle in 4e would just be a (pretty uninteresting) INT check; whereas in Cortex+ there is the interaction with the fiction both in building the dice pool, and in establishing what effect is being sought (eg, in this case, eliminating a complication).But notice that the Cortex+ player himself had to do a clever thing, namely, coming up with the idea that the Sigils might be a map or guide to the dungeon. No one else in the group thought of it, so it was not an utterly obvious possibility. That sort of cleverness is pretty fundamental to RPGing, in my view - otherwise what's the point of playing at all?I don't see why not using dice rolls is problematic. There are a lot of decisions in the game that don't use dice rolls (eg, in a typical D&D game, deciding what equipment to buy for a PC; deciding whether to talk to an orc you meet, or attack it; deciding which corridor to take at a dungeon intersection; etc). I'm not sure why riddles being decided by thinking about it, rathter than rolling dice, is a problem.I mean, it might be weird of the INT 8 brute solves the riddle; but it's also odd if the INT 8 brute is always the one who has the best advice about which corrridor to take at the intersections (because the player is a clever wargamer). Or if the CHA 8 wizard is the party leader (because the player has a powerful personality). This is just a consequence of allowing the human players of the game to play PCs whom the rules and at least the odd occasion in the fiction is presented as less clever or less persuasive than the player is.(There can be other problems of course: riddles can suck if the players spend an hour on it and can't solve it! Luckily at least two of the riddles I used were solved pretty quickly. I can't remember the first one well enough, though I do think it came closer to the sort of suckitude I just described.)There's only one "game theoretic" notion of "illusionism", namely, The Forge's. And in that usage, it's not illusionism if the player gets to make a check (eg Insight) and success on that check would have changed the outcome.In 4e, the "trickster" ability would, as a matter of mechanical convention, be more likely to involve an attack vs Will; but otherwise could play out the way described - if the attack succeeds (or, in a departure from convention, the Insight check fails) then the PC falls prone (or whatever) which - in the fiction - corresponds to having been lured into a trap.As best I can recall I've never used a monster/NPC with this exactly ability; the closest I've come is a pact hag. And the closet I've come to doing what Elfcrusher describes is the following:The PCs were in rather tense negotiations with the pact hag and friends. Mechanically, this was being resolved as a skill challenge.The player of the dwarf fighter failed a check (Insight? I can't remember now, more than 5 years later.) I narrated the result - manipulated by the hag, the PC moves across the room, and then the hag pulls the rope and a pit opens beneath the dwarf's feet, dropping him into tunnels below.When I've posted that example of play in the past, many posters have responded that it was a railroad. I personally don't see how - it's just the narration of adverse consequences for a failed check.There are two or three reasons I didn't do it exactly as Elfcrusher describes:(1) 4e likes maps, and so I had maps, and to make my tunnel map and my upper floor map line up, the pit has to be in a particular place; (2) But 4e only likes maps in combat, and this was a skill challenge, so we weren't bothering with the maps at that point except perhaps in general terms ("you're near the doorway, the woman you're talking to is on the other side of the room") and so there was no sense in which the player might have indicated a movement to a square where I would then place the trapdoor; (3) In real life people walk around when talking, and it is not too hard to manipuate them into going to place X or place Y (stage magicians depend in part upon being able to manipulate people in these sorts of ways) - but when resolving a conversation while everyone is sitting around at the table, it is trivially easy for a player to just have his/her PC stand still regardless of what the NPC interlocutor is saying/doing. So to have the manipulation actually work, I included as a component of the failure narration that the PC took some steps across the room.I think it's obvious, also, that there's not the least illusionism in the example I've described: the player makes a check, sees it fail, and knows exactly why the adverse consequence is being narrated by me as GM. It's just action resolution and result thereof.</blockquote>

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