When player agency meets character compulsions

When you're playing a role, sometimes your character ought to act in some way.

• The goodly hero has a moral code regarding the treatment of prisoners
• The addicted wizard would do anything to get more purple poppy
• The impulsive barbarian wants to destroy doors, spines, and magic items
• The traditionalist dwarf can't rein in her hatred of goblins or desire for gold
• The life priest's role demands self-sacrifice if it comes down to it
• The emergency medic has a duty of care to her patients
• The brash brute can't keep his foot out of his mouth

These traits create roleplaying obligations. The obligation is on the player, constraining their choice down to how their character "should act".

It often happens that a character who acts on an obligation risks getting a negative outcome – perhaps even a catastrophic one. And this may be obvious to the player. So it's natural that players won't always want to have their character act as they "ought" to.

An aside: I'm talking about classic roleplaying games here, where character success amounts to player success. In storytelling games, or even in RPGs played as if they were storytelling games, players tend to be much more open to making deliberately "suboptimal" in-character choices.

At the game table, whose job is it to ensure that obligations are followed through? The rules? The GM? The social dynamics of the group?

The strength of an obligation – how much a player "should" follow it – varies depending on the character, player, group, and game system. For example, in a point buy system where a burdensome personality trait compensates you with extra points, there's a strong expectation that the trait's obligations will be followed. In these cases, there might be rules laid out to cover roleplaying obligations.

Compulsions versus obligations

Now compare in-world things that the characters might encounter like magical geases, mind control rays, charm spells, and brain parasites. These essentially do the same thing. The player character is compelled, rather than obliged, to act in some way.

Of course, modern games almost always structure these things in a meticulously rule-based way, with various "outs", and make them short term and/or weak.

That's because it's a truism of RPGs that it sucks to have your agency taken away.

(Your agency in particular; but your character stuff in general)

After character creation, a traditional TTRPG offers the player the ability to do exactly one thing: make in-world choices on their character's behalf. They can't choose the corresponding outcomes, or odds, or stakes, but they can choose what to try.

Undermining this one capability – even for the sake of in-world things, like established character compulsions or magical mind control – is generally a bad idea. It feels like an attack on autonomy and agency.

So we want to support situations where, through obligation or compulsion, players ought to have their characters act certain ways. But we don't want to take away their ability to decide.

 

How do we square these two things?

Player choice is pretty close to an unequivocal good, making constraint on player choice pretty unambiguously bad. My favourite approach just turns the bad thing into more of the good thing.

➡️ Let the player decide whether their character resists being obliged or compelled, at some in-world cost.

Let's say the player is confronted with some situation where their character is compelled or obliged to act some way. Now they decide whether the character is able to resist, suffering some consequence if they do.

"You resist the call of the purple poppy, at great personal cost. You'll have a morale penalty until you next imbibe it."

"Straining with every part of your soul, you overcome the suggestion spell. You feel a huge fatigue upon you."

"With muscles and tendons clenched, you give the goblin merchant a forced smile and polite nod as you pass. Something in your jaw clicks. Take 2 points of damage."

What is the in-world cost?

The consequence of managing to resist a compulsion/obligation should ideally

• be mechanically grounded (weighty and yet easy to apply)
• be player-facing (rules-based, or at least announced by the GM in advance)
• have an immediate impact (the consequence feels associated with the decision)

Obviously this is easiest in gritty detailed systems with character resources. Stress, Stamina, Focus, whatever it's called as long as it's measured in points that can be taken away.

What if my game doesn't have an appropriate stat?

You could improvise one. 

Or the character could suffer other in-world consequences.

• For an unmet abstract obligation like following a code of conduct, the character might well encounter social problems. Rumours spring up. Hirelings abandon the party. Opportunities dry up. The parent organisation sends a formal rebuke or starts an inquiry.
• For other obligatory traits, the character gets stressed/worried/grumpy/distracted when they don't follow their nature, and end up mislaying an object, getting a bad reaction roll, missing details when looking for clues, etc.
• When an external compulsion is resisted, the character might be disoriented and flub things for a while (rerolling successful rolls, etc).

A specific suggestion

I have long thought that the perfect RPG is one that rewards the PCs with a dice bonus/malus for getting a good/bad night's sleep. I wrote about this the other day. Use a general 'well-being' stat measuring a character's overall mental and physical condition, which the players can push to try to improve, and which modifies most if not all rolls and tests.

This is a perfect candidate for tying in to this choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion system. If you decide your character resists, that bonus is reduced (or malus increased).

Otherwise

You could flip this around and offer a player character experience points (etc) for giving in to their obligation. But this doesn't feel the same, for a couple of reasons.

• Offering a mechanical benefit to specifically "good roleplaying that goes against the characters' best interests" will rankle.
• Paying an in-world cost to overcome a compulsion, or choosing to let the character act on it, make it feel like a thing actually having an effect. Just declining a prize feels like nothing happens.
• Players tend to be risk-averse when it comes to stuff like this, so you'll end up with the character whose character quirk never actually gets them into trouble, and the villain's charm spell that never actually does anything.

Other benefits

Sort of buried the lede here, but the big advantage of doing choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion is that you can hang lots of stuff off a single mechanic. So there's obligatory character traits, but also...

Thing #1: Mind control. As mentioned, taking away agency is usually unfun, can disrupt a game, and can be too swingy in a tactical combat game (strictly worse than save-or-suck); modern games usually make control spells very weak and brief as a result. (Compare OD&D, where the level one Charm person spell could control someone indefinitely, and even the first supplement only reined it in to the point where a particularly lucky superintelligence might shrug it off after a few days)

Suppose instead that the subject of the magic really feels the compulsion deeply, and can resist at some steep cost. And they can be effected by the spell and decide the point where it wears off, as the 'price' to escape goes down over time.

Thing #2: Other magical effects that subvert character control. Illusion, fascination, terror, berserk rage, altered perception, foolishness, cursed objects that whisper dark thoughts. Games tend to have detailed subsystems for these and/or be pretty weak, because of what they do to characters. Using choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion means a simpler, unified system, potentially greater effects, and more player agency through the whole thing.

Thing #3: Social-fu systems that can be used to influence PC action. Games are understandably reluctant to make social skill rolls have actual impact by influencing, let alone determining or constraining, PC choices. Now we have a framework where players will have to decide the lesser of two evils: go along with social influence, or pay the cost (become emotionally run-down, sapped of energy, have low morale, etc).

Thing #4: The same choose-whether-to-pay kind of tradeoff, but introduced to other parts of a game. Possibly as a single unified mechanic.

I'm thinking in particular of things like saving throws and luck points, which aren't very nuanced and involve no in-world decision-making. What if instead you could reliably avoid disaster by suffering some other major long-term consequence? "You fling yourself desperately away but hurt a tendon and can no longer stand up until you receive healing." "You block the blow but are winded and can't succeed on strength rolls until you rest." "You catch a branch on the way past but a strap snaps and your satchel disappears down the mountainside."

Thing #5: In a crunchy character-building system, we now have new options for a character's (in)ability to resist various things. Appropriate traits like "stubborn" or "weak-willed" or "dedicated to the cause" can vary up the cost that a character pays to resist particular obligations or compulsions.

Where'd this idea come from?

I don't remember; I suspect I saw at least the kernel of it somewhere. 

➡️ Lots of games have meta-resources, and sometimes trade in them directly. In Numenera, a GM can suggest something bad may happen and an affected player can either gain XP and let it happen, or lose XP to deny it. Related but not my preferred approach, and not specific to obligations/compulsions.

➡️ In that vein, player-facing story-gaming mechanics may directly affect character actions and/or overall narrative.

➡️ There's this blog post which I found quite compelling. It has a somewhat similar approach to the problem of combat stunts: https://oddskullblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/combat-maneuvers-the-easy-way/

➡️ I vaguely remember seeing a GURPS house rule or hack where Disadvantages that compel action can be paid off with FP. I don't recall, but it would make sense to vary the FP cost depending on whether the compulsion was mandatory or resisted with a self-control roll, or more generally if it depended on the point value of the Disadvantage.

If there's a notable/obvious game that does this, let me know!