Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7646015" data-attributes="member: 4937">Even less force is required if the Emperor is the PC, since the GM could have already decided that the assassin confesses to the PC he's been thinking hard about his life and his mission and is not the man who started out the journey.   It's been a few years since I watched the movie, but as I recall the scene there really wasn't a charisma test going on here.   The assassin was absorbing the lessons of his journey and the deaths he'd caused on his way to this moment.Nothing prevents a PC from doing this, and the best way to arrange this is not through any sort of mechanical force, but simply good storytelling.   Is the bad guy sympathetic?  Pull a twist here.  Do a reveal.   Alter the player's perspective on the fiction.   There are plenty of stories where the PC hates the bad guy, only to discover the bad guy isn't a bad guy.   There are plenty of heel face turns in fiction.   But it's only good story telling when it is earned, and it's very unlikely to be earned if primarily game mechanics were involved.This tension between the mission of the good guys and the mission of the bad guys has been a central theme of my current campaign.  The bad guy in his encounters with the PC's repeatedly tells them that they are pawns, dupes, slaves, and villains - not even the villains, just the minions of villains - and that he not they is the hero to the story.  This would just be insane ranting except the longer the story goes, the more collateral damage the PC's are piling up in their pursuit of the villain, the more obviously they are just as bad as the bad guy, and the more they understand the villains real motives and intentions the less cut and dried they see him.   Am I actually going to get the PC's to switch sides?   Probably not, in part because their is a cleric in the party with strong motives not to side with someone that thinks the gods are all evil villains, but they are certainly now chewing what the villain has said more thoughtfully.   And just at the moment, they are on a mission to rescue the villain rather than kill him, turning the relationship on its head a bit.</blockquote>

Verification