D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[AlViking]

Wanting sole authorship of the character you play's inner world, emotions and the like is fine preference to have. So is a shared authorship model where what we do affects and impacts who our characters are. Is it more potentially fraught in some ways? In some ways yes, but less fraught in others. No matter what you should game with people you trust.

The moralizing around shared versus individual ownership of character and setting is frankly not helpful to fruitful discussion.

Like I don't view the characters I play as belonging to me. I view them as something I am responsible for, and I trust that the GMs (and other players) I play with are as interested and invested in them as I am. That they are considering my character as played and acting of interest in them when they use their judgement to invoke social mechanics or invoke the meta channel when the actions I declare do not make sense to them (given the fictional context).

When you play certain games or in the case of my group (when we play more trad games) it's just part of the explicit social contract that you are opting into. If you do not want to opt in don't. But don't tell us we have no agency.

Different strokes for different folks, different games for different ... umm ... dames? In any case the default assumptions and approaches to games matter. In D&D the assumption is pretty clear that the player is in control of their character barring supernatural effects. It's neither good nor bad, it's just a preference and a choice of what game you want to play. I don't see much moralizing around shared versus individual ownership, just people stating what they want out of games. Whether they're dames or not.

 

[Lanefan]

I'll outright say that there are mechanical elements of D&D that I think a large number of other games just handle better. I just don't expect D&D fans to generally agree with me.

I don't disagree.

The problem comes when you take one really-well-done mechanical element from this game, another from that game, a third from somewhere else, etc. etc. and then try to cobble them all together into something the least bit coherent and-or playable. I won't say it's impossible but it's close enough that I ain't about to try it.

And so instead, the dedicated kitbasher starts with a system that, while not perfect, works well enough to get by for most things and then augments it with good ideas form elsewhere provided those ideas can be made to vaguely fit in. The end result still isn't perfect and never will be, but it's good enough to be good enough and that's all that matters.

 

[Faolyn]

Again though, let's not get too far into the weeds. We're not talking about "ways". We're talking about a single way. Same as a social check with an NPC. You don't allow a persuasion check to force an NPC to do something that the NPC would never do. So, why would it be any different for a PC? The effect has to be plausible, same as it is for an NPC.

The effect has to be plausible but the mechanics don't need to be the same. As I said to Lanefan, this is to help provide balance, to help prevent the GM from making their NPCs untouchable.

So the example of giving away a magic item is right off the table. No NPC would ever give away a magic item based on a persuasion check (barring specific examples of course). So, why would a PC? Now, running away because your courage failed you in the face of seeing horrific things done to the person beside you? Perfectly plausible. The fact that the PC's NEVER suffer any sort of trauma or anything like that is far less plausible at the end of the day. Your character can never be influenced by a persuasive argument? Not very plausible. So on and so forth.

The character can be influenced lots. The player is the one who allows the influence. Good players will allow themselves be influenced appropriately. The reason I said that you can't enforce it is that for a game like D&D, which doesn't emphasize working together to tell a story, you will get people who don't care and who try to game the system. In a narrative game, you won't have this sort of problem--at least not nearly as much, because the game is built around the narrative.

And who says that the PCs can't suffer trauma? In Daggerheart, as an example, with one of the death moves you get a Scar. While you have to cross out a Hope slot, you choose the narrative effect of the Scar. Suggestions include "a physical scar, a painful memory, or a deep fear." D&D can easily do something like this. Not with the Hope slot, of course--although I wouldn't mind too terribly much if they brought back the permanent reduction to Constitution upon resurrection, like in AD&D--but with the narrative effects.

(Mind, from what I've seen, most D&D players aren't even that cool with taking a level of exhaustion after being dropped to 0 hp, so the -1 to Con almost certainly wouldn't fly.)

There's nothing saying you can't have a similar house rule--or even an official rule in a future update/edition to the game--that's similar. "When you die, you suffer some sort of trauma of your choice, here's some examples."

But note that trauma is not the same thing as in "run away because you rolled badly on a morale check against a bunch of orcs."

Comparing a single event in the course of a campaign to the death of the character seems a bit over the top no?

No. This is a morale check we're talking about. It will likely happen, at minimum, once every combat that's of Hard or greater difficulty, which likely means once few game days. So, potentially hundreds of times over the course of a campaign, as opposed to once to a handful of times a character dies.

It's like @Maxperson's examples of how losing control of an NPC for a single check is okay because he has millions of NPC's, but is totally different from a player losing a tiny bit of control for a short period of time in a campaign.
Heck, you even double down on the players not being trustworthy with:


So, players cannot be trusted to act in good faith, thus we should not have social rules.

We're not talking about a social rule or even a game or genre expectation. We're talking about a game mechanic. Those are very, very different things. And D&D is not a narrative-focused game. It's a game that focuses on the mechanics.

And again: there are no other mind-compelling effects in 5e that aren't magical or originating from a super-deadly monster of some sort like a dragon. So why should a nonmagical effect with a mundane origin be treated like one of those?

(And as I pointed out, despite what you said, Vex (the weapon mastery effect) merely says what the effects are; they don't tell you how the opponent will react. Because it's a nonmagical effect with a mundane origin.)

 

[FrozenNorth]

circumstances. Even Sherlock Holmes, notorious for his logical-pragmatic nature to the point that nowadays the default presentation is "on the autism spectrum" (with a frustratingly common side of "...and an absolute jerk to everyone else", even though that directly contradicts his behavior in several of the stories), isn't like that.

I 100% agree that “Sherlock Holmes that is an insufferable jerk to everyone” is both a frustratingly common and the worst presentation of him.

 

[Eric V]

I drink on very rare occasions, but if I'm not in the mood? Nah. Insist? No, thank you. Continue? "I said no, stop asking." At a certain point the more somebody pushes, the more I'm going to dig in my heels.

Sure...unless you just haven't been persuaded by the right person, in the right circumstance. Imagining it as a white-room scenario really doesn't amount to much.

Every person who goes against one of their hard-core beliefs was previously 100% sure they wouldn't go against their beliefs.

 

[Enrahim]

Because that’s kind of the point of the thread. How could D&D do things differently.

How is this not clear at this point?

The problem is when the discussion involve terms that seemingly cannot have a well defined meaning outside the scope of a given system. Like it seem like someone suggested D&D could use "fail forward", but when drilling into that suggestion it turned out "fail forward" is not defined in a way that made the suggestion even inteligable.

 

[Faolyn]

But, you just got through saying that adding mechanical heft to this is impossible since players cannot be trusted to act in good faith, but, lacking any mechanical heft is fine because players will act in good faith.

Yep. Once you add mechanics, players will find ways around them. Have players buy into the idea of a narrative and group storytelling, and they'll work with that.

 

[Faolyn]

I think you’ll have to explain why it matters, because it seems like a fair amount of people (myself included) aren’t understanding this distinction you view as important.

It’s coming across to me like this definition of success is almost tautological.

He's saying "don't have degrees of success, just make it easier."

 

[Maxperson]

So?

Some people enjoy having agency when they play.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

I think we can all call upon stories where this has happened in real life without any magic involved, though. It's quite common for someone to do X, even when they told themselves they'd never do X. Persuasion is a real thing in the real world...why couldn't it be present in an RPG?

I have been on both sides of the narrative vs simulationist debate that has underwrote the last several hundred pages of this thread. I am coming at this topic for a different point of view. I hold a deep reverence for my player's creative freedom of their character concepts, and very much respect their choices on their character's personality and inner state. So with that out of the way, I could not care less what is "realistic" here in this context.

In an RPG, at least those like D&D, the player has authorship over their character. If the player says, “My character wouldn’t do this,” then using a dice roll to override that is overriding authorship. It just so happens, it is also far from realistic, more on this later. The game isn’t real life. It's a shared narrative, and each participant owns part of it. The GM doesn’t own the PCs.

You can simulate persuasion through dialogue, roleplay, pressure, or consequences. But forcing a change in deeply held values or personality via a single roll doesn’t simulate human psychology. It shortcuts character development and undermines the collaborative nature of the game.

I promised more on the psychology later. Now is later. If we look into Robert Cialdini’s writing, He's a professor of psychology at Arizona state. He explains what the science is behind persuasion, as six principles in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Reciprocity, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. In the book he shows that people are influenced by subtle cues and motivations, not by simply winning an argument. This is why online discourse rarely changes minds on topics people care about. If it was just a weighted random number, you'd see much more changing of minds in online discourse.

Brain studies and neuroscience work to show that persuastion phsyically changes the brain activity, only when the messages align with other psychological triggers. Source below. The research is very clear in this aspect, persuasion is a process unlike a the roll of a dice.

The game is social at its very core, and if you're forcing players, through mechanics and DM fiat, to act in ways that contradict their character's will, without prior consent, then there's been a serious breakdown in the table’s social contract. If a player consents to having their character influenced by a persuasion roll, that’s perfectly fine. But I’ve yet to meet one who explicitly wants their character’s thoughts or decisions dictated to them without their input even under the false guise of realism.

So if you believe using persuasion rolls, as PC mind control, leads to good gameplay. You do you. But citing realism where none exists isn't compelling.


Source; Predicting Persuasion-Induced Behavior Change from the Brain - PMC

Edit: Forgot a source; Exploring physiologic reactions to persuasive information - PMC