Personality mechanics: Yay or Nay ?

[silva]

Do you guys like the kind of mechanics seen in, say, Pendragon where various vices and virtues take the form of atributes that influence the gameplay, either by suggesting, incentivizing or straight up forcing player behaviour and decisions ?

If so, whats the best way for implementing this for you ?

[shadzar]

It was stupid in Traits & Disadvantages in 2nd other than to boost muchkinism and Month Jaul style of play and has no palce.

XP is the mechanic for roleplaying. People still cant figure out how to make something as simple as Good<-> Evil, and Law<->Chaos work, so how in the hell would the figure out something with more than 2 sets of 2 options?

look at the nonsense flavour crunch for DDN and see how bad it is. either you have a game built around the personality stuff with it at the core of the game, or you bake it on and it just screws things up.

if you have ANY sort of combat then a game will give combat mechanics for personality stuff, and then you lose the reason for having a personality trait at all.

roleplay mechanics will always be silly i na game where there is combat.

[Longes]

It was stupid in Traits & Disadvantages in 2nd other than to boost muchkinism and Month Jaul style of play and has no palce.

XP is the mechanic for roleplaying. People still cant figure out how to make something as simple as Good<-> Evil, and Law<->Chaos work, so how in the hell would the figure out something with more than 2 sets of 2 options?

look at the nonsense flavour crunch for DDN and see how bad it is. either you have a game built around the personality stuff with it at the core of the game, or you bake it on and it just screws things up.

if you have ANY sort of combat then a game will give combat mechanics for personality stuff, and then you lose the reason for having a personality trait at all.

roleplay mechanics will always be silly i na game where there is combat.

Divide between Valorous/Cowardly or Chaste/Lustful is much clearer than Good/Evil. And Law/Chaos is just insane.

[Blade]

Roleplay mechanics, just like any mechanics, are interesting if they serve the game.

In CoC, the Sanity mechanics helps focus on how the characters go insane. If they weren't there, most investigators would be completely jaded, and would go "so, a giant monsters with eyes and tentacles, what's the big deal?" when facing an eldritch abomination.

In Dying Earth, the vices mechanics are useful to force the PC to fall into obvious traps, which is necessary to fit the setting.

"But it's roleplay, aren't players supposed to decide whether or not their characters are scared by something, or how they react in some situation ?"

Sure, that's why such systems should be there, just as other systems, not to decide what the PC does, but IF he can do what the player wants him to do, and do it correctly.

Just like a player can't say (in most games) "I shoot the bad guy and he's dead", he can't say "I decline the glass of delicious alcoholic drink even though I'm very thirsty and alcoholic". What he can say is "I try to resist the drink" and then roll to see if he can do it.

Another thing that's important for such mechanics to work fine, is that it should give the player directions rather than force him into a path. For example, if the PC fails a "Cowardice" roll, he shouldn't be forced to run away screaming. He should be forced to act cowardly, but it should be up to him whether to run away, find a good excuse to stay in the back or change his mind about the whole thing.

[hogarth]

I'm lukewarm on the idea at best.

On the one hand, personality quirks can be interesting.

On the other hand, I've never met a player who said "I'm a great roleplayer, but I refuse to roleplay unless the rules encourage me to". That's not a thing that exists in real life, as far as I can tell. And I hate rules that encourage players to say "It's not me being an asshole and hurting the group, my CHARACTER is being an asshole; I can't help it!" (which I have seen in real life plenty of times, sadly).

[Leress]

And I hate rules that encourage players to say "It's not me being an asshole and hurting the group, my CHARACTER is being an asshole; I can't help it!" (which I have seen in real life plenty of times, sadly).

*Looks at Dragonlance's Kinder character generation rules*

[radthemad4]

Would mechanizing personality limit the complexity of characters? Especially if there's a finite pool of traits or quirks or whatever you want to call them for you to pick from.

If you're planning on making one, tread carefully. If it's too restrictive, it could run the risk of becoming a straitjacket instead of an aid to roleplaying, and if it's too inconsequential it won't be worth the effort.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Month Jaul

Now I need to join a campaign so I can use this as a character name.

[Stinktopus]

I find personality mechanics to be useful f?or one-shots/short games with pregen characters.

I don't like them in long campaigns, since they lead to one dimensional characters.

[Whipstitch]

This is one of those instances where I dislike the carrot model as much or more than the stick-- the personality mechanics that bother me the most tend to be the ones that allow you to concentrate on one set of behavior and repeat that shit for credit, like fishing for willpower in nWoD by being a klepto or trying to screw everything on two legs.

[Atmo]

*Looks at Dragonlance's Kinder character generation rules*

Now pick a Kender, throw him or her on WoD and let a Malkavian turn him or her into a... Malkavian Kender!

What do you do now?

[GnomeWorks]

On the other hand, I've never met a player who said "I'm a great roleplayer, but I refuse to roleplay unless the rules encourage me to". That's not a thing that exists in real life, as far as I can tell.

In the game I'm developing, in which I'm trying to implement personality mechanics, the notion isn't that they're for experienced roleplayers. The idea is that they'll help folks who aren't so good at it, or are just getting into the idea, to help them figure out how to do so naturally.

At the same time, they're there to help reinforce the divide between the player and the character. I'm interested in trying to establish a "dialogue" between the player and the character; using personality mechanics and such is a way to try to make the player do things "in-character."

[silva]

XP is the mechanic for roleplaying. People still cant figure out how to make something as simple as Good<-> Evil, and Law<->Chaos work, so how in the hell would the figure out something with more than 2 sets of 2 options?

Shad, genereally I agree with you but Ill have to disagree here. See, the alignments are bad precisely because they try to emcompass so much meaning in just 2 axis, ending up ambiguous at best and totally nonsensic at worst. Pendragon virtues/vices are far clearer and precise in comparison.

The problem with "personality atributes" as seen in Pendragon, is that can work as straightjackets, forcing players decisions and behaviours. Instead of that, I would prefer if they incentivized decisions/behaviours through some kind of reward.

TL;DR: I prefer incentive over forcing.

[Whipstitch]

I'm going to take a second here to give a shout out to the taboos in After Sundown. For the uninitiated, taboos were just Frank's slightly free-form way of giving characters a nice fat bonus to resist doing various types of activities when coerced or hit with mind-affecting powers. It's not perfect, since I could see the sufficiently argumentative trying to game things with sufficiently vague taboos but overall I've seen far more disruptive ways to encourage people to write down some traits.

[silva]

How that works, Whip ? Can you give an example ?

[Grek]

For each character, write a list of 6 things that character likes and 6 things that character hates. Convincing a character to do things they like, to support doing something they approve of, to stop doing something they hate or to speak out against things they hate is one step easier than normal. Convincing a character to do something they dislike, to speak in support of something they hate, to refrain from taking actions they admire or to speak out against things they like is one step harder than normal. These bonuses also apply to using magic to making them do things, and if they're mind controlled to do something on their Hates list, they get a second chance to resist.

Example from a character in my current campaign:
Likes: Honesty, marksmanship, intelligence, compassion, discipline, wit
Hates: Self-serving lies, blind devotion, cowardice, bad faith business, self-destruction, harming children

It would be exceptionally hard to use mind control to get this character to lie, to scare them away from a fight, to get them to hurt people (especially children) and, somewhat obnoxiously, to get them to stop making quips during battle.

[Longes]

For each character, write a list of 6 things that character likes and 6 things that character hates. Convincing a character to do things they like, to support doing something they approve of, to stop doing something they hate or to speak out against things they hate is one step easier than normal. Convincing a character to do something they dislike, to speak in support of something they hate, to refrain from taking actions they admire or to speak out against things they like is one step harder than normal. These bonuses also apply to using magic to making them do things, and if they're mind controlled to do something on their Hates list, they get a second chance to resist.

Example from a character in my current campaign:
Likes: Honesty, marksmanship, intelligence, compassion, discipline, wit
Hates: Self-serving lies, blind devotion, cowardice, bad faith business, self-destruction, harming children

It would be exceptionally hard to use mind control to get this character to lie, to scare them away from a fight, to get them to hurt people (especially children) and, somewhat obnoxiously, to get them to stop making quips during battle.

Ah, so like Intimacy mechanic in Exalted.

[Ice9]

Something similar I saw is a proposed mechanic for a "hard" social influence system, to solve the issue that it's difficult to lay out every detail of a PC's personality ahead of time, and yet going against it can destroy the player's connection to the character.

It was basically "Schrodinger's Intimacies" - at any time (generally when someone was trying to convince you of something), you could declare your character had an Intimacy, of any strength up to the maximum. This was a penalty to make you do things against it and a bonus to make you do things in accord with it.

Once you declared one though, you were stuck with it. So maybe someone's trying to get you to betray your friends, and you declare "Loyal to my Friends +5", and resist it. Later though, if one of your friends turned out to be evil, but appealed to your friendship for you not to stand in his way, he'd get the +5 from that.

Seemed pretty workable. Sure, it could be gamed by someone picking things like "Nobody tells me what to do" and "I trust what [hardest to influence character] says", but:
A) Declarations like that still aren't bulletproof.
B) If a player really hates being socially influenced, it's better to let them avoid it than make them miserable (and inclined to sabotaging the game).

[MGuy]

I don't like the 'alignment' at all but vices and virtues, when they work, I think are good. At worst they are character traits good RPers are going to observe anyway at best they give incentives to people who are not so good at it to think about their characters and their actions a little deeper.

Ice I have to say that on the surface that seems like a pretty nifty little thing. Where did you see it at?

[hogarth]

In the game I'm developing, in which I'm trying to implement personality mechanics, the notion isn't that they're for experienced roleplayers. The idea is that they'll help folks who aren't so good at it, or are just getting into the idea, to help them figure out how to do so naturally.

I can't comment on your system, but most of the "reward roleplaying" mechanics I've seen have worked the same way -- players who already love doing lots of roleplaying get a big bonus for no particular reason, and players who are weak roleplayers get a much smaller bonus as...punishment?

Another reason I'm not crazy about a "pick traits at character creation" system is that I don't think it's superior to letting a character develop during play. For instance, suppose a player chooses the trait "Trusting" during character creation and then later acts suspicious most of the time. That would generally be considered a roleplaying failure, even though if the same player had chosen the trait "Suspicious" that might be considered a roleplaying success.

[silva]

Another reason I'm not crazy about a "pick traits at character creation" system is that I don't think it's superior to letting a character develop during play. For instance, suppose a player chooses the trait "Trusting" during character creation and then later acts suspicious most of the time. That would generally be considered a roleplaying failure, even though if the same player had chosen the trait "Suspicious" that might be considered a roleplaying success.

But what if the rules reward the player in question for acting "trusting", like giving bonuses to rolls or gaining xp or something ?

I think thats how "spiritual atributes" work in Riddle of Steel - each time you fight for something you believe you gain a substantial bonus. Coupling this with the game innate lethality, it makes important for players to pick the right fights.

Unknown Armies Obsessions are like this too, if I remember right - any time you do something related to it, you can flip-flop the roll (change the tens for the digits die) which can be a huge advantage in that system.

[hogarth]

But what if the rules reward the player in question for acting "trusting", like giving bonuses to rolls or gaining xp or something?

That's not rewarding roleplaying; that's rewarding the ability to predict in advance what your roleplaying will be like. I'm not sure what the benefit is in rewarding that kind of prediction.

At any rate, listening to good roleplayers talking about how roleplaying rewards will encourage poor roleplayers reminds me of listening to rich people talking about how a flat tax will benefit the poor and middle class. The rich get richer, and the hammy get hammier.

[silva]

I think we are talking different things here, Hogarth. I dont see the value of mechanics for addressing roleplaying. The rules I just cited (Pendragon, Riddle of Steel, Unknown Armies) have the purpose, I think, to promote each game themes and genres. Nothing to do with "roleplaying" (by the way, what do you mean with this word? I tend to understand "roleplaying" as the act of playing an rpg, whatever the specifics may be, but you seem to givd it a different meaning).

[Longes]

While we are talking about Pendragon, I'd like to mention that Passion mechanic is completely broken, and takes anyone half competent off the rng the minute it's used.

[silva]

Longes, I dont remember how Passion works in PD. Care to resume it for me ?