There have been several threads about personality mechanics recently, but I suddenly had a thought about these that might be worth addressing.

I think it was Personality Mechanics that work (for you) that introduced the subject to my thinking of late, and Brief Critique of Relationship Mechanics struck me as very much connected to that. So my mind was in the neighborhood.

I was writing one of my as yet unpublished Game Ideas Unlimited columns, about using weather and natural disasters within games,

when I wrote: Man against nature is usually listed as the first of the three great story conflicts (the other two being man against man and man against himself), and while that includes more than battling the weather, it certainly does include battling the weather.

I can't comment on MLWM just now. I have read it once but I need to read it through again a couple of times more to really absorb it. That said, it occurs to me that Humanity as it is treated in Sorcerer is the Man vs. himself conflict as adjudicated by a die roll. The characters have the ability to choose their behavior at every point except when they hit Humanity 0.

Trevis

The entire concept of the Synthesis system that I and JB Bell came up with is that the character is constantly changing, and that this is at constant odds with his own self-perception. In fact, we called it the Self System at first.

A copy of the latest rules is available in the files section at Indie-Netgaming if it's at all interesting.

From a really dramatic protagonist viewpoint, not to mention a real world Zen standpoint, the character can do anything. It's only himself that he has to contend with to get to his goals.

Mike

An interesting topic.

The power of choice or freewill reverberates strongly in most people (although surprisingly few seemed to get this was the core idea behind Matrix: Reloaded). We mostly just take it for granted that we as players should be able to control our characters as we please barring external circumstances (mind control for example, and even then most players absolutely despise this). A part of being a hero is that he follows his own path, and that's why we look up to heroes. They do things that we wish we could, not just because they are better at tasks than we are, but because they had the courage and strength of conviction to actually follow their power of choice.

But in real life, we are often at odds with our own inner demons. Should this be reflected in RPG's? Some personality mechanisms can reflect this "steering" of a character's behavior. At least in the Hero campaigns I've run in the past, players almost always bellyache when they aren't allowed to do as they please, even when they got points as disadvantages and I enforce their psychological limitations on them. Only the best players take it in stride and realize it's a part of the challenge of roleplaying.

And here we can delve a little into the GNS model of player focus. I've noticed that the players who bellyache the least about power of choice manipulations are the players who have Simulationist leanings. For Gamists, they want to win or be powerful....a lack of choice takes away from their tactical arsenal. For the Narrativist, having their choice determined for them is like having another actor steal their lines. But for the Simulationists, they seem to see it as a rational modeling of inherent limitations of man's psyche.

So if you're developing a game with a Simulationist framework, I think having "Man vs. Himself" would be a good idea to play with. It should be easy enough to implement with a robust personality mechanic, and well-defined "triggers". For example, let's say a character has a Personality Trait of Slothful. The character may be strong and have good skills, but he'll probably perform some skills more poorly than others (say for example a farming skill). The trigger is dependant on both the trait and the context of the situation, but plenty of examples should be given which could trigger the trait to express itself.

M. J. Young wrote: But I realized that those mechanics are, in the main, personality and relationship mechanics--and that such mechanics are probably necessary for some man-against-man stories and nearly all man-against-himself stories.
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On the other hand, would I ever say that my character finds the wine too tempting to resist, and so endangers the lives of his companions as he sits and guzzles this beverage? Most players would not do so, I think. A personality mechanic may be the only way to make temptation work.