by Tony Hoffart
Have you ever heard “You feel strangely compelled to…” said by the GM during a role-playing session? I have, and I’ve probably said it myself a few times too.
It just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Those words are a cheat in my opinion: a simple way for a Game Master to take control of a Player’s Character for an instant and yank that character in the direction needed. The problem is that the word “strangely” is an admission that there is seemingly no good reason for the character to do this thing, an admission of guilt that the Poor GM cannot think of a way to justify how to make the PC do what’s needed rationally.
The thing is… it’s not the GM’s fault. Even in the most pure of sandboxes – sometimes a PC needs a little nudge. Most GM’s aren’t maliciously trying to take our characters from us and make them dance like marionettes. GM’s are just trying to run a fun and interesting game and that requires events to occur and decisions to be made for the game to keep humming along at a good pace. Sometimes to accomplish that, an NPC must do a bit of “diplomacy”, some social-fu to make your obstinate character go from “I-be-difficult” mode to “let’s-do-this-shite!” The problem is that most social mojo rules in RPG’s have little in the way of justification or explanation to what went on to make the character who was just “socialized” now behave the way he’s supposed to.
With physical combat, RPG’s have it pretty-much locked. Countless maneuvers, modifiers, powers, defenses, weapons and armor to make sure you have a pretty good idea just which pointy sharp-thing gave your character another troublesome orifice to deal with. Social on the other hand is often resolved with a “I beat you! Now do what I say Biatch!” kind of finality.
At this point you’re probably rolling your eyes knowing where I’m going… mental hit points, which is probably sounding like the stupidest idea since the Smart Car I’m sure… but hear me out.
There is precedence for mental hit points. In an earlier post I discussed an idea I had about personality traits as attributes. One of those was Neuroticism, mental equilibrium. Ever met someone neurotic? They were probably pretty easy to get revved up weren’t they. (I love people like that.) Now have you ever been stressed out? Experienced a panic attack perhaps? Probably not the most productive time of your life was it? Shaky hands, sweats, mind wandering making it hard to focus, its pretty tangible the difficulties associated with stress.
Now consider that some pretty well-established games are using variants on mental hit-points. White Wolf has Willpower, Call of Cthulhu has Sanity, Cyberpunk has Humanity.
The questions we need to ask about the concept of mental hit-points is what happens when we lose them and how do we get them back? The first question has a relatively obvious answer; penalties – the unpleasant kind that make getting good dice roll results harder.
The second answer though is a bit more tricky because there lies the reason for making social rules exist, a way to make the character take action because to do nothing is stressing him out…
In my system, mental hit points are called Calm, and I’m just dying to tell you how it works.
Any questions?
I think the idea of mental hit points is interesting but impractical in some sense. The complexities of what all can stress people out and cause them to break down mentally is a lot to try to simulate in a game while also making it fun. But that’s not really the problem I have with it. What I don’t like about the idea is telling the players how their character is feeling and asking them to roleplay it that way. It takes control over the characters from the players. I think things like that should be left up to roleplaying not to mechanics. Being told “your character is stressed, you get a -1 to all diplomacy checks.” is worse IMO than saying “that guy doesn’t like you, you get a -1 to diplomacy checks against him.”
That might be fun in a game that’s supposed to feature “social combat” of a sort, but I wouldn’t want it in most games. If a character is interacting a certain way, it’s because that’s their personality.
I am really having difficulties seeing a situation where you’d need to mechanically change a character’s mind that don’t boil down to either, 1) you’re railroading them, or 2) they’re about to do something boneheaded that’s better solved by a menacing, “Are you SURE you want to say that to the duke?”
And it seems like any situation that didn’t fall into one of those categories would come up rarely enough to be better solved by an out-of-game, “Hey guys, it’d be great if you’d just trust this NPC for now; I really didn’t have a chance to prepare a plan B if you didn’t.”
If the problem is that PCs are spending too much time arguing and diplomacy-ing and not moving along the plot, there are a lot of other solutions that don’t involve using game mechanics to wrest away control of a character’s actions.
Sounds like what Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3Ed has incorporated…
@TheWizard
Ah, well that’s the great thing about keeping the stress (or calm) mechanic nice and vague. It doesn’t dictate the way the player needs to play things. Stress can manifest as a blind rage, a tearful tantrum, a short outburst, or even a quiet uncertainty. I believe that how a character wants to play a character’s emotional reactions needs to be kept under the control of the player. Having said that, I also believe that manipulating players actions through task difficulty is a fundamental part of roleplaying. If a character gets hurt in the middle of the dungeon it’s not in his best interests to face off against the dragon when he’s nearly at death’s door (unless there’s no other choice), so that character will likely seek healing first. The same principles apply here.
The principles of what I propose are honestly geared to keeping the role-playing sacrosanct, but offering a way for small things (like a beautiful or fearsome looking sword) to actually have an effect in the game.
@Swordgleam
These rules aren’t overly geared towards “changing a character’s mind” so much as they’re about kicking the character in the pants and forcing a decision. The way I set up the calm mechanic is that stress doesn’t go away until there is some sort of resolution. Now of course the PC can just walk away and forget too, but that in and of it’s self is a decision. The big thing I wanted was for PC’s to gravitate towards the things and people they trusted to solve the things that stressed out their characters. In most cases these trusted things should be obvious, their favorite sword, their trusty lockpick and the other PC’s.
@Just Visiting
I haven’t played WFRP in ages. How did they do it again?
With Warhammer FRP 3Ed they have a dice pool that is rolled, when a person/party is stressed or fatigued and trying to accomplish a task then there are more “bad” dice added to the pool: dice that either come up blank or show a symbol that is a negative and counters positive dice rolls in that dice pool.
@Swordgleam
So how do you remove bad stress dice? The healing is the important part really.
I think it’s really weird, and odd, that gamers feel that pummeling someone into submission by way of their hit points is fine, but convincing them of something using another part of the system, using something like mental hit points, or Duel of Wits from Burning Wheel, or whatever, is intrusion of some kind on their character. You can beat my guy to death, but you can’t use the system to affect his behavior in any other way. Makes no sense.
@Doug. I rolled an 18, so you think it does make sense.
The division of control over the characters and setting between the GM and the players is arbitrary, but one extremely common way is to say the GM controls the physical world and all the NPCs decisions, but the players control their own characters’ decisions. It’s no more nonsensical than saying the player is allowed to say “I swing my sword at the orc” but not “I hit the orc with my sword, chopping its head clean off.” Crossing the implicit boundaries can be seen as a form of cheating, just as much as if the player declares a critical hit without rolling for it.
Hmmm…. Well, none of those examples were really for social situations… Maybe, WW’s Willpower, but not so much Humanity or Sanity. Their loss could effect social rolls, but social rolls didn’t necessarily effect them. But, I think see what you are driving at here.
And, I just don’t see the need. I need physical hit points and the like because I can’t do all the fighting at the table anymore than my players can; I don’t need the same for social interactions, because I can talk to my players, they can talk to me. If dice come into the social process it is because a player is having an off day or is RPing their character’s lack of social grace and the risk of failure is relevant. Dice and social mechanics are their to save the suave and sophisticated PC from their exhausted player who is just trying to unwind after work. I wouldn’t let dice influence the PCs (mind control being a whole other ball of wax separate from persuasion or a bluff), or the PCs rolling to influence each other. But, on the whole I prefer to keep the dice and the numbers out of the role-playing as much as possible. A random element is fun once in a while, but HPs?
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ’0 which is not a hashcash value.