So I feel like there’s some things happening at a few levels.

A lot of the knee-jerk backlash I see around “social conflict” systems seems to be coming from a trad/immersive gaming mindset where “metagaming” is naughty badfun, so winning these sorts of conflicts seems analogous to mind control or something. I think that’s a weird read, but understandable from that point of view.

When it’s understood that we’re creating drama at the player level about which way the story is going to go, and then we’re dicing off to see which way it goes, I think it’s pretty fun. If the outcome of the dice tells me I’ve become consumed with rage and am now planning to murder my brother, I’ll figure out how to roll with it.

At worst, failing to build mechanics around social conflict sort of implies that physical conflicts are the only valid conflicts. Which has been how a long of gaming has operated, and I’m increasingly finding to be boring as fuck.

I don’t feel like there’s anything squicky about this so long as there’s explicit social contract buy-in from all the participants.

I’ll concede it’s a weird default state for gaming to have. It seems like we should at least be having the conversation at the outset, “Loss of absolute control of the direction your character is going is a convention of the game we’re playing, cool?”

On the other hand, there’s been a number of conversations I’ve been privy to (mostly in larp circles) about consent-based gaming, and using your game mechanics themselves as a tool for teaching good consent culture, in the broader sense.

(Tagging Tayler Stokes who has a lot of interesting ideas around this.)