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="pemerton" data-source="post: 8499517" data-attributes="member: 42582">Setting aside the bit about essentially turning the PC into an NPC - which raises further interesting questions about participant status and authority over game elements - what you say about Charm effects is how I tend to see them, and Fear, and generally Dominate.Here's an exception in respect of Dominate, from 4e: there's a monster called a Gorechain Devil which can uses its chains to control another person like a marionette. Mechanically, this is expressed as a Domination effect. I would regard this as a case where a dominated PC is not choosing their own actions but is being manipulated (literally) like a puppet.But generally I see these mental effects as changing the mental states of the target, so that they now experience emotions or volitions or desires that are as "internal" as any others, though resulting from a non-standard causal process (it's hard to describe the process in any great detail given (i) magic and (ii) the mind-body dualism that tends to be part of the assumed metaphysics of fantasy RPGs).In Burning Wheel the most powerful of these sorts of effects is Force of Will - the rules text says that The words of the mage become thoughts - as if the victim had formulated them himself. When this effect was used by a dark naga on a PC, the player and I discussed and changed one of the PC's Beliefs to reflect the effect of the spell. I was pleased to see, a few years later, that a revised version of the BW rules (Gold Edition Revised) added exactly that to the spell description: The sorcerer may rewrite one Belief.I don't know if changing BIFTs in 5e D&D would carry quite the same heft.</blockquote>

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