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How far is too far when describing what a PC senses and feels?
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<blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 7598515" data-attributes="member: 177"><p>Yep. There's a difference. </p><p></p><p>In the case where the event is not something the player originally envisioned, telling them how the character feels about it informs them of the event's import and impact that we didn't have time to communicate through other means. For example - "You watched kids getting sold into slavery in The War - as you see this guy push kids around now, it makes you very angry." They are still free to act on that anger or not, so I view this more as a tool for the player to remain in the context, rather than an imposition. </p><p></p><p>In the case where the issue is competency, the emotions or thoughts detailed are unlikely to be particularly visceral. When given a story about something that happened at court, the character with understanding of Diplomacy might be told, "You're skeptical - the king is well-known to hate fish, so him being happy about a gift of smoked salmon sounds... off." It is still what they think or feel, because that *should* come with the competency, but it doesn't tell them what they should do about it, so they still have a great deal of agency.</p><p></p><p>Note that real people don't have a whole lot of control over their emotions. This is real neurophysiology here: emotional responses are not controlled by the conscious portions of our brains, and the bits that determine them run faster than our logical centers - we feel things about stimuli before we can make conscious decisions about them. We only get to choose how we outwardly act on those emotions, and then only sometimes.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Umbran, post: 7598515, member: 177"] Yep. There's a difference. In the case where the event is not something the player originally envisioned, telling them how the character feels about it informs them of the event's import and impact that we didn't have time to communicate through other means. For example - "You watched kids getting sold into slavery in The War - as you see this guy push kids around now, it makes you very angry." They are still free to act on that anger or not, so I view this more as a tool for the player to remain in the context, rather than an imposition. In the case where the issue is competency, the emotions or thoughts detailed are unlikely to be particularly visceral. When given a story about something that happened at court, the character with understanding of Diplomacy might be told, "You're skeptical - the king is well-known to hate fish, so him being happy about a gift of smoked salmon sounds... off." It is still what they think or feel, because that *should* come with the competency, but it doesn't tell them what they should do about it, so they still have a great deal of agency. Note that real people don't have a whole lot of control over their emotions. This is real neurophysiology here: emotional responses are not controlled by the conscious portions of our brains, and the bits that determine them run faster than our logical centers - we feel things about stimuli before we can make conscious decisions about them. We only get to choose how we outwardly act on those emotions, and then only sometimes. [/QUOTE]
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How far is too far when describing what a PC senses and feels?
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