Human Behaviour is Patterned

[TonyLB]

Isn't the increase in over-head only because the personality mechanic is a separate thing from the mechanics that are occurring throughout the game anyway?

Like, if rolling a 1 on d20 for monsters were "Monster morale breaks," instead of "Critical fumble" then you'd have zero increase in points of contact or search time.

[JMendes]

Hey, :)

Shreyas, sorry to be coming back to this point, but...

Soft-Hearted (L5R RPG) - 2 points
You have a profound respect for human life. Your conscience overcomes you whenever you are about to commit an act of inhumane cruelty. Whenever you try to take a human life, you must make a simple Willpower roll against a 20 or you can't follow through with the action.

Or yet...

Insensitive (L5R RPG) - 2 points
The three most important things in your life are your health, your welfare, and your wealth. You care little for the plights of others and don't make any motions to keep it a secret. You must spend a Void Point whenever you want to put yourself at risk for another.

How is this not what you are talking about?

Cheers,

J.

[contracycle]

Basically, I'm indirectly trying to ask, "Games that have declared themselves Sim over the ages have tried to simulate everything but people. Why the weird gap? What's this self-identified Sim phobia of humans?"

I'll have a go, as it is something that intrigues me greatly.

I think the proposal that human behaviour is patterned is itself very provocative, and implies certain things about 'human nature'.  But there is a long-established view of ourselves as rational; beings of free will, making free and meaningful choices in the world as we experience it.  If in fact some of these interactions are rule-governed, what then of free will, of the free market?

Related to free will is the concept of judgement, of decision, of choice.  The idea that we are answerable for our morality depends on the conceit that we chose our actions freely.  If our actions are rule-bounded, then the emphasis on personal meaning and ethics mst be misplaced.

I find the FVLMINATA rule quite radical indeed.  I do not know whether it was informed by such concerns, but in the UK anyway the issue of "confidence" is overtly recognised as relevant to for example university admissions.  The argument is that university, or public school, education increases the confidence of its recipients and that this is reflected in their subsequent lives; that is precisely the feature that the FVLMINATA class-based initiative rule duplicates very well.  But this analysis in the UK operates by recognising this as an insitiutional, class based bias, and I expect the equivalent argument in the USnto face more resistance.  And yet, to my suprise, the FVLMINATA rule seems to bother very few people.

--

Footnote on the differences between the FVLMINATA class rule and opther rules proposed above.  The FVLMINATA rule does not just prompt or suggest or recommend action - it takes it systematically.  Personality mechanics like Insensitive or whatever rest on the GM invoking them; the FVLMINATA rule is simply a rule that executes.

[Domhnall]

As a heavy simulationist I am very concerned with psychological structures/consistent personality-behavior.  I conclude that rolling to govern NPCs is not the preferred way to go.    Perhaps for young role players charts w/ die rolls to select a behavior is useful, but an adult GM should be able to put himself in the mind of each character and make decisions for them.  On the other hand, some people are prone to unstable behavior and may warrant die-rolls.  On some days certain personality types would do X, while on other days they would do Y.  But, most people are not very inconsistent their general behavior.  

A good knowledge of a variety of personality types is useful to help guide GM decisions.  I used to hail the Meyers-Briggs (most game designers will be INTJs by the way) as the best personality guide, but now have replaced that with the Enneagram structure http://www.authenticenneagram.com/what_is_the_enneagram.html (and most designers are Personality #5).  This is the structure I'll be including in my system's publication as a sideline guide for GMs and to aid players in playing personality types different from their own.

[beingfrank]

The issue of How People Work is a key one for me, and one that can ruin my fun in a game.  However, the mechanics of modelling How People Work in ways that don't instantly get on my nerves are rather tricky.  For example, I can't play D&D 3.5 unless I'm in a silly mood, because the rules dicate that people behave in ways that just do not match with my understanding of human behaviour.

So it ends up falling as a burden on the GM (in the case of all the NPCs) and the other players (in the case of the other PCs).  Mechanics to help them would be nice for sim games where that is important, but I have no idea where one would start.  I mean, I'd already start arguing with Domhnall, because I loath MBTI, don't think Enneagram is much better.  The personality model that has the strongest empirical support is the Five Factor Model (most designers will be high on Openness to Experience, but who knows on everything else, which is probably as well, because it wouldn't be very helpful), but nobody seems to think that's so funky.

Thus the essential problem.  Everyone has a different view of how people work.  There are many patterns in human behaviour, but either people don't know about them consciously, or they likely think they're wrong.  So what do you model?

[TonyLB]

Uh... surely this would fall under the province of Techniques, and not (therefore) be assigned to any particular CA.  I don't think a rule-mechanic that helps people to more easily act in believable ways is only important to Sim game-play.

[James Holloway]

Uh... surely this would fall under the province of Techniques, and not (therefore) be assigned to any particular CA.  I don't think a rule-mechanic that helps people to more easily act in believable ways is only important to Sim game-play.

Agreed. Believable character behavior has benefits for Gamist play (indeed, it adds a whole new area of challenge to it) and for Nar (believable characters definitely contribute to a memorable story).

Now, I do think that there are rather more such mechanics than Shreyas seems to -- UA, GODLIKE and CoC all have mechanics which try to produce behavior under stress situations, whatever you may think of them. Non-stress situations, not so much.

This is often difficult to implement mechanically -- I've mentioned elsewhere that since RPG characters can't actually feel tired or be inconvenienced, they tend to pursue minor points with the tenacity of crazed wolverines, whereas real people often abandon projects of great importance because they'd rather watch TV.

However, I'm wondering if this is necessarily a bad thing. Attempting to enforce "realistic" behavior on the PCs sounds a little bit like that attitude that views the players as a sort of gaming Id, having to be knocked into shape in order to play like adults. Presumably if they wish to play characters realistically, they'll do so -- assuming they can -- and if they don't they won't.

What am I missing?

[Shreyas Sampat]

Daniel, care to explain your distate for mechanical methods in greater detail? From your post, I can only guess that you are assuming "mechanics are not useful for anything remotely complex, and a necessary evil that should be avoided wherever possible, and also kids don't know the difference," which I find alternately confusing and insulting on a variety of levels.

James, you're not missing, you're increasing: I'm asking about the existence and function of existing mechanics that determine non-stress behaviour; no one's said anything yet about constraining players with such a thing.

I don't think this is such a bad thing, though: consider MLwM, which (I hear) does something like this with great success.

beingfrank (I'm sorry that I don't remember your name!), the question of where to start bugs me as well. I think Gareth makes a relevant point about the FVLMINATA initiative rule (he's also expressed the distinction I've been trying to get across much more clearly) - you start and stop where it's relevant to your game, and you express a view of human behaviour that's consistent with your other material. So, since F is so class-conscious and takes social stratification to be a good thing, it makes higher social class mechanically better.

To extend that into a larger example, suppose that you've got a game that's concerned with social climbing - maybe it's about "the new kids" finding their place in high school. You might have some trait that measures each character's social prominence, and the social prominence of people involved in a conflict affects the ways it's likely to resolve: Each character's personal prominence sets a basic chance for victory, serving a more-prominent character's wishes adds some portion of their prominence, antagonising less-prominent characters is easier, and so on.

That's the squishy indirect portion of the system.

The bit that simply executes says something like, "You can transfer a point of prominence to someone to make them try to do what you want." Yeah, that's not very clever. I thought of it in five minutes!

So, that's my extended answer to "how people work"; you don't need to comprehensively account for behaviour, but you're able to do so where it counts.

I think, at this point, my question's been answered, so I don't really have a role in the thread any longer. Thanks for all the thoughts, guys; I'm going to turn to implementation. (That's not to say that the thread's closed, for anyone who might want to continue discussing.)

[Harlequin]

Just a quick add-on to a very interesting thread...

An insight of my own quite recently has led me to considering the use of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for deciding on areas of conflict.  I think this ties into Shreyas' question, but I wanted to post that link as being a tool which I find very useful in other areas (I'm a foster parent) but haven't ever seen applied in gaming.  No RPG examples available yet; I'm workin' on it.

- Eric

[John Kim]

Daniel, care to explain your distate for mechanical methods in greater detail? From your post, I can only guess that you are assuming "mechanics are not useful for anything remotely complex, and a necessary evil that should be avoided wherever possible, and also kids don't know the difference," which I find alternately confusing and insulting on a variety of levels.

James, you're not missing, you're increasing: I'm asking about the existence and function of existing mechanics that determine non-stress behaviour; no one's said anything yet about constraining players with such a thing.

I don't think this is such a bad thing, though: consider MLwM, which (I hear) does something like this with great success.

I don't see why it should be insulting.  I am not at all opposed to mechanics in general -- but I agree that mechanics (insofar as I have seen) do not enhance the realism of NPC or PC behavior.  MLWM does have a mechanic for behavior -- that is the roll for whether the minions obey the Master's orders -- and I'd say it works.  But I don't think it adds to realism (nor was it intended to).  I have a page on personality mechanics:

http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/personality.html

I'd be open to comments on it, of course.

[Domhnall]

Daniel, care to explain your distate for mechanical methods in greater detail? From your post, I can only guess that you are assuming "mechanics are not useful for anything remotely complex, and a necessary evil that should be avoided wherever possible, and also kids don't know the difference," which I find alternately confusing and insulting on a variety of levels.
....

No, I don't believe that at all.  In fact, I'm prone to using more intricate rules than most.  But, regarding psychology/choices I am largely diceless-- avoiding rolls to decide character decisions (most of the time).  I'm also uncertain where the insulting part comes in.  Was it in reference to children in role playing?  If so, that is based on the conclusion that they cannot yet adequately understand psychology, and so must rely on charts with rolling rules to guide them.

[Eve]

As a biologist, I like to add the following:

Human behaviour is patterned and structured, but not in a simple way. We do have a pretty good simulator for most kinds of remotely or more human characters: we. Perhaps we can't always point to the "why", but we can think up what a certain kind of character would do in a given situation, however complex.

This complexity is what makes simple, straightforward rules on human behaviour so hard: there is no simple and realistic mapping between a pool of dices and human decission making.

This is why a dice-human would be so much less satisfying compared to a GM/player simulated human. The latter feels so much more real. In stead of totally artificial and crude.

To illustrate the point, I make a minor detour. Suppose you have to make an important decision: break up with your girlfriend or don't. Of course, you don't want to rush this, for that could do much damage. So there's a system: make two columns, one for yes, one for no. To each column, add as many advantages (and disadvantages of the other choice). If you can't think up anything else, count, act. Most probably, you either start to think up many more detailed reasons for one side or you end up ignoring the paper completely.
Important decisions are not linear or simple in any other way. The same goes for simulating human behaviour with a simple system. At one point or another it just "feels" wrong.

[Bill Masek]

Hey Folks,

Hmmm... hope people are still reading this thread.  I'm beginning to wish I'd responded a couple days ago.

I agree with Eva.  It is a waste of time to try to simulate all human behavior in an RPG.  Even if you succeeded the results would slower and no more fun then a purely freeform RPG.  I once wrote a system that came close to simulating "true human behavior".  After a few playtests I abandoned it because it was boring.

A game can benefit greatly, however, from specific aspects of human behavior being highlighted while others are not.  If done properly, this will help focus how the game is played, bringing out conflicts innate to all of us.  All of the games mentioned previously (at least that I've played) focus on a very small subset of human behavior.  This subset was chosen by the game designers because it highlighted what the game was about.

I think that psychological/behavioral devices can greatly enhance games.  But they can not be used to truly reflect all human behavior.

Best,
Bill