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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9562614" data-attributes="member: 6785785">But what about the many games that don’t differentiate all that much based on what kind of conflict or challenge the player is dealing with? How come many of those games all seem to work so well? If by “tactics” you mean what decisions did the player make to arrive at that situation… then it started with me asking what his character was doing. He responded that he was at the forge to hep his wife, who is the blacksmith. They’ve been having troubles because he’s often away from town for days or weeks at a time, leaving her to take care of their many children. So he was trying to mend that situation. We made a Charisma roll to see how it went, and he rolled poorly, so I added the complication of the wayward son hearing something he said and running off in anger. The player then decided that he too was angry… which for his character can be dangerous. A storm kicked up immediately and he ran after the boy. He caught up to him so we decided what was most important was if he would be able to stop raging… a roll he had yet to succeed at. It uses Wisdom, one of his lowest stats. So the situation was an accretion of prior player decisions and results of attempted actions. That’s why the agency argument doesn’t ring true… the player knew exactly how things got to this point and why. So then the outcome… could he calm down and try and resolve the issues with his son? Or would he do something disastrous?Letting him choose takes away the stakes. All the past events that led us to this moment… they can simply be ignored so he could choose the happy resolution. This is the key I think… the player has not already decided everything about his character ahead of the events of play. He’s actively learning about his character THROUGH play. Is he the kind of guy who’d put his son in danger? We found out when the dice landed. That’s how people work. We have ideas about who we are and what we’ll do. Some of those ideas may be stronger than others. We may be right about these things. We may be wrong. We cannot KNOW until we are in the moment and actually dealing with it.Your players don’t make lots of choices in social interactions? Sure it does.Let’s say the character in my Stonetop game from the example above was instead chasing an enemy with the intention of attacking them. Is he robbed of agency because we don’t leave the outcome of the attack up to him, but rather to the dice? I don’t think anyone here would describe it as such.It’s about risk. It’s about the “unwelcome” results that Vince Baker talks about in bit that [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] posted. Combat is full of risk. Characters can die or lose and fail at their objectives and so on. It would lack risk if we instead left the outcome up to the players.To obtain that same level of risk in a social or emotional way, there needs to be similar risk involved. Without that risk, as I said… you’re much more simply portraying character rather than exploring character.</blockquote>

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