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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8252197" data-attributes="member: 42582">As Ovinomancer says, [USER=6801252]@The-Magic-Sword[/USER] seems to be talking about "bleed in" and its presence or absence.I've not played Masks, but clearly is doesn't require the player to be angry in order for the character to be angry. That is to say, it doesn't require bleed into the character from the player. But presumably it can generate "bleed out". The mechanics for clearing conditions mean that if my character is Afraid then I, the player, have a reason to want to have my character run away; or if my character is Angry than I, the player, have a reason to want to have my character hit Ronan or Isidro. And I can imagine that, in the right context, that could lead to "bleed out" in the sense that I feel the same aversion to dangerous situations that my Afraid character does; or I feel the same overwhelming impulse to punch Isidro or Ronin in the fact that my character does.A cleverly-designed 4e D&D mechanic that can generate this sort of bleed from character to player is the Chained Cambion's psychic shackles ability, in MM3. The Cambion is described in the flavour text as having a "tortured psyche", as "hat[ing] its life, its captors, and its enemies who roam free", and as "screaming its despair within the minds of nearby foes." Its mind shackles ability causes two enemies to take ongoing damage unless they are adjacent to one another, with each victim having to make a separate saving throw. When I used this in game, I shackled the melee fighter to the archer ranger. As the two players had to coordinate their actions or else take damage, they started bickering and complaining. Once one had saved but the other hadn't, the bickering got worse, because the one who had saved nevertheless had to stay shackled because the other player couldn't roll a d20 high enough. In other words, I didn't have to tell the players to pretend to be filled with despair and hate towards one another; the mechanic ensured that this actually happened.I don't think that typical D&D play is going to produce the sort of sustained bleed from character to player that one might hope for from a more dramatically sophisticated system like some of the PbtA ones. This relates very much to the discussion in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/that-thread-in-which-we-ruminate-on-the-confluence-of-actor-stance-immersion-and-playing-as-if-i-was-my-character.679354/" target="_blank">this current thread</a> about characters as gameplay ciphers (eg for defeating the dragon) rather than as fictionally rich protagonists with their own emotional lives and dramatic needs.</blockquote>

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