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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6162258" data-attributes="member: 2067">Not to side-track too much, but I think the crux of my point rests on the generally mediocre understanding that RPG designers have of the psychology of behavior. Think of something like the DM handing out a FATE point in exchange for a PC doing something in character but potentially harmful. Great role-playing mechanic, right? Only no. Because there needs to be a meta-reward from the DM based on the meta-need for the player to still "win" and when you're swapping tokens and when other people are determining your actions, you're not acting in-character. It's a good mechanic and it encourages a PC to act in-character and I like it, but, setting Forge buzzwords to the side, it is not something I would consider good for pretending to be the character, for playing that role, because that character isn't in a game and doesn't get a reward for acting that way and isn't under the control of the other players.Any time you're imagining the context of the game itself, you're forgetting the context of the character, because the character is not in a game. It's worth a longer discussion elsewhere, I think, but suffice it to say that for now, what most of the Indie RPG world considers good "roleplaying" mechanics are perhaps more accurately called good genre emulation mechanics. And unless your character is Abed, your character is not aware of their own meta-context, so in order to think like your character, you must abandon that meta-context as a player as well. Which is why mechanics that encourage you to think like your character cannot be very meta-game, or else you will, by virtue of using them, not be thinking like your character anymore, and instead you will be thinking like the player of a game.They can still be awesome and fun and useful mechanics, but they're not good for hitting that place on the Venn diagram between what you're thinking and what your character is thinking where the two overlap.</blockquote>

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