[Misery Bubblegum] If you REALLY loved me ....

[TonyLB]

No set of "truths about myself" is privileged, in this set-up -- you don't have one set of things labelled "this is the final answer about who you are" and another set labelled "this shit don't matter, really." You have a whole bunch of "truths" and the game keeps testing you (Dogs in the Vineyard-style) to see which ones are final and which ones aren't. Maybe "I stand up for those weaker than myself" is a permanent truth about your character, or maybe that's just who you were last week. Maybe "I always write a little heart over an 'i'" is an abiding truth of who you are.

Nod, nod.  Yeah.  You don't get to dictate "This truth is the real one, this truth is just color."  I'm with you on that.  The process of play is precisely meant for discovering such things.

But ... but ... I think there is a benefit to having some game-mechanic that lets you say "This truth is the real one, this truth is just color," so long as that is only the start of the conversation, not the end of it.  I think it would be cool to let everyone at the table know that you think "I stand up for those weaker than myself" is a vitally important truth.  Having a way of saying that means that when you realize you were wrong, everyone realizes you were wrong.  The revelation that the character is not what was expected becomes public, rather than private.

Contrariwise, this would be a mechanism for saying "No, though it seems very much as if this must no longer be a truth about the character, that's not the case."  I'm thinking particularly of someone who takes "I'm a virgin" as an important truth, then the character has sex, but they say that "I'm a virgin" remains an important truth of their character and that they're going to continue to back it up.  That's utterly nonsensical, of course, which is what makes it so wonderful and spectacular.

You need an explicit way to both "say" and "do" before you can look at the mechanics and observe "Hey, what you say and what you do don't really match."  What you say provides the context and meaning for everything you do.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Well, mechanically, maybe what you need to do is have the resolution feed strength into specific defenses.
  For instance, if I make a character that uses "Perfect Student" as a defense, then I get so many toekns to use that defense. When the conflict arises, I give cotrol of that defense to another character. And they spend the tokens for my character. And my character's actions and changes get my tokens back. And if the character doesn't act like a perfect student or discovers that they are not a perfect student, then they don't get tokens.
  I dunno, just riffing here...