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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6094554" data-attributes="member: 2067">That's not how it works in your mind, though. Placebo effects rely on external phenomena. Biologically, it's nothing external, psychologically, it's entirely external. And I think we'd all agree that a fantasy RPG that tries to accurately model biology at the expense of how we actually think and talk about these things as human beings with magical thinking and narrative instincts is aiming for the wrong goals.The agency is mom's. The agency is the sugar pills', or the snake oil's, or that of the deity you pray to or the medicine man who makes you drink the hallucinogen or the spirits that surround you. Again, I'm not trying to convince someone away from what works for them. I'm just trying to describe why this is really problematic for a big chunk of players. You can say the team triggered Willis's healing surges, but you can also say that Willis entered "rage" and powered through just long enough to give the rest of the team some hope. One isn't more correct than the other, but one comports with how human beings generally conceive of agency, and the other conflicts with it. The degree to which that conflict is a problem is going to depend on the individual and their own goals (such as how deeply they want to be immersive).</blockquote>