I and my friends are making a ttrpg for fun, and have come to an impasse. We disagree about the inclusion of an attribute, that dictates the PCs bravery. Therefore I wonder what a gamedev plugged into the TTRPG scene, thinks about mechanics that make PCs act brave/cowardly.
Well if you ask me specifically, I’m going to tell you don’t include anything that can take control of a player’s character away from them, but that does not mean that you can't have any kind of mechanic/stat that governs a PCs fear or stress level.
I personally can’t stand that mechanics that dictate that PCs run away, or dictate that they do anything at all like by falling under mind control, not because I think of the character as myself or some shit like that, I just consider myself to be the person most qualified to know what he or she would do in any given situation, so I’ve never been a fans of passing or failing saving throws or whatever determining if my character takes a certain action or not.
This is not to be confused with, like, regular dice rolls. Rolls to determine if my character can do a certain action well enough to succeed are totally fine, in fact I often want more of those.
This is one of the reasons why the Composure and Tiers of Fear systems in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy work the way they do.
We definitely wanted fear to be something that could affect the PCs and cause them to run away in a realistic fashion, these aren’t supposed to be fearless action-heroes, but I didn’t want it to be just a dice roll and then the GM tells you that your PC has to run away now. So, instead, Composure acts as a “cap” to the PC’s Skill modifiers. Base Skills cannot be higher than the PC’s current Composure level, making them worse and worse at succeeding skill checks the more frazzled and fatigued they are.
This never forces a situation where a player is told “your PC is going to run away no matter what,” but it means that the lower and lower that Composure gets, the more running away or surrender seems like a better and better idea.
That isn’t to say that mechanics that force certain character actions have absolutely no place in RPGs, hell Eureka even has one instance of this with wolfman rampages, but that’s only for one single character type, not a main mechanic which affects all PCs.
It’s well known that I really love AD&D2e, which has tons of that, though I also think that that may be one of the reasons why such a mechanic is so prevalent in TTRPGs in general. I’ve found that for a lot of TTRPGs, if you pick any random mechanic and ask “why is this in the game,” the answer is often some variation of “because D&D did it,” with little thought as to whether it needs to be in this RPG that isn’t D&D, or as to whether it was even a good idea when D&D did it.
Ultimately, study lots of RPGs, and know that there is more than one option besides just "do it the way D&D does it" and "don't do it at all."
