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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9548718" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not saying anything about what makes something a RPG, or not. I mean, clearly classic D&D is a RPG, and its only "social" conflict mechanics are charm-type spells used by NPCs on PCs. And clearly Classic Traveller is a RPG, and its only "social" conflict mechanics are the morale rules, which as discussed upthread affect PCs.But I saying something about the relationship between social mechanics and player agency, namely, that it is simply false to assert that good social mechanics reduce player agency.Many RPGs depend on this division. The one I'm familiar with that states it most clearly is Apocalypse World.It's actually fairly straightforward, from a pedantic perspective, to come up with examples that cross the line: for instance, if physical event X occurs in the fictional world, and a PC who has normal perceptual and cognitive faculties is perceiving X, then the PC will form the belief that X has occurred. This is a basic consequence of being an embodied being with sensory capabilities.This pedantic example does occasionally cause problems, because there are some events that are hard to describe in perceptual terms devoid of assumptions about a PC's belief system, values etc (eg suppose a player is playing a barbarian outlander, and they see a shopkeeper working on an abacus, it is not straightforward to narrate the perception in a way that doesn't beg certain questions about the PC's response and incorporation of that phenomenon into their own comportment towards the world they are in).But a lot of the time the line is clear enough. Well, they are one and the same in the following sense: they are events that can occur in the fiction that constitute failures on the part of the PC - in one case a failure to successfully traverse the narrow way; in the other case a failure to successfully remain faithful as one wishes to.And they are one and the same in another sense too: they can both be failures that contradict the player's aspiration for their PC, in terms of how the PC will move through the world, make their mark, achieve great things and avoid failure, etc.There are ways that they are different, too. You've pointed to one. Another one is that, in many RPG systems, falling over the edge will deplete some physical resilience value, whereas becoming infatuated with someone new will not do anything similar. (But there are other RPG systems - eg Marvel Heroic RP - where both failures might be expressed in pretty much identical mechanical terms, namely, as a debuff rated at a certain severity.)I don't know how you handle knowledge checks in your RPGing, but the outcome of a knowledge check can mean that the result of the action declaration is the existence of an internal mental state (a memory or belief).</blockquote>

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