NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="zakael19" data-source="post: 9556641" data-attributes="member: 7044099">I think it's interesting that, if we assume the mechanics in a game are an intentional shaping of the conversation which occurs as you play, D&D assumes the DM is going to be routinely lying/concealing the truth with their NPCs to players. The Insight skill implies this, right? It exists to answer the question "hey, do I think this guy is telling us the truth?" So this means that throughout play you have two choices: never question what NPCs tell you, to preserve "surprise" or whatever; or use the vibe check that is Insight and then willfully ignore the dice outcome if it's anything besides "oh you can definitely tell he's lying." In the OP's example, would setting the NPC's Insight check high also rob you of agency?[SPOILER="Ramble about character/NPC dynamics in Thirsty Sword Lesbians below."]--------------------------I was just walking a prospective GM through some of the design ethos in Thirsty Sword Lesbians along with a couple short play examples. The entire point of that game is your character being flung into cool situations where they find other characters (PC and NPC) sexy, alluring, off-putting, fearsome, etc. A core player principle is "feel deeply" in your play - create those charged situations and let the mechanics play out. You can mechanically Entice somebody, Read a Person as part of a sword fight, and should you have downturns you dont lose heath - you gain conditions like Frightened / Insecure / Guilty / etc, and you're encouraged to role-play the heck out of those because other players have the ability to use Emotional Support. In essence, this is a game designed from the core mechanics to create a specific feeling of play around the table - a style of conversation focused on an experience rooted in consent and communication around pretty heady emotional (and social) topics where the character discovers things about themselves and the people around them they may not have known. One where the GM and Players are all encouraged to push hard with persuasion and flirtation and all these very human conditions with mechanical weight that makes what your character says and does (or has done unto them and you say in response) have serious outcomes.However, the core design intent is agency preserving. The player controls the stakes of the conflict (a la what [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] has said about TB etc), and chooses the moves they're doing while knowing the potential outcome space (and of course can always go 'oh, I'm not comfortable with this, can we back it off?' because that sort of communication is baked into the instructions).So yeah, this sort of topic can be done via design - and you can get deeply affirming and incredible role-play out of it. And you don't have to just spout it out of your acting, you can have intentional design that channels the play towards this sort of conversation.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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