That's...not wrong, but for me it's more nuanced. Sanity checks are intended to be "act appropriately based on information and opinions that the the characters should have but the players wouldn't, such as knowledge of culture and expectations." There's a tension there between reasonable application of character knowledge and the QM solving the players' problems for them. The whole point of this quest is to give the players maximum agency so that their triumphs can be sweeter because the potential for defeat exists. Every time a fraught situation comes up that might have negative consequences, or even simply mixed consequences, we need to weigh whether or not this is something that the NPCs would solve for you. NPC agency has been an oft-visited debate in QM channels literally since the quest started, and sanity checks tend to stir it up.
For what it's worth, I personally do not like sanity checks... but I don't think it makes sense to stop using them the way things are. I would be more willing to go without them, but it seems inevitable that if we don't have them, it only takes one poorly phrased or vague line of a plan to have Hazou revealing important secrets or have us committing a faux pas we didn't know was a faux pas. Like, faflec's comment here:
I am perfectly willing to retain my title as the paranoid lunatic if it keeps preventable catastrophes away.
is honestly perfectly reasonable because I can totally imagine Hazou causing some kind of social catastrophe from a throwaway line about giving the proctor a gift. Hence we just run everything by sanity checkers every time to avoid things like that. Even though Hazou has the highest Deceit in Uplift barring Mari, he can't help but blurt out important secrets if we don't sanity check 24/7 because players are imperfect and miss things that can be interpreted in ways we don't want. And I totally understand that QMs want consequences to emerge from player plans/decisionmaking, but like honestly, having massive issues arise from small instances of bad wording instead of the plan as a whole being a bad approach is just not super engaging for me. I suspect it could be part of
why it's sort of rare plans do anything risky or bombastic most of the time. We fail before the main thrust of such schemes even gets to be tested.
My favorite anti-example of this was Hazoupilot realizing he was annoying Orochimaru with an Empathy check and changing tacks. That was socially aware of him, but against a less straightforward personality he might not have caught it, and had we failed, we would know we could avoid similar future scenarios by improving his Empathy. And the problem arose in the first place because our plan/approach as a whole was very flawed for the type of person we were interacting with, not some one-off line that needed a bit more time in the oven. If we flubbed the conversation it felt 100% like we just concocted a bad plan for the situation. Rather than like, "the plan was mostly fine except this one phrase that a sanity checker would have caught ended up screwing up the rest of it."
I think how it plays out narratively could be a factor in our devotion to sanity checking as well. For example maybe next time there's a line that may give up a secret we don't want to give up, Hazou could realize he was about to slip up and cover himself with a Deceit check or something to play it off. And against a more suave opponent they could still piece the truth together as our 'failure', rather than Hazou just dumping classified info like a kid who never graduated from Enforce the Village Military Hierarchy Academy. The end result (Hazou accidentally revealed an important secret) is the same but they
feel much different. (EDIT: I just realized Hazou basically did this with Shino recently. And it was great! More things like that please.)
In the case of the gift, I feel like as things usually are, we would include that in the plan and if there was no sanity check, Hazou might make that proctor's whole clan hate him somehow ("How dare you insult how poor we are!") or think he's embarrassing or something, or he might become BFFs with them, and there's not really a way for me to be sure ahead of time which outcome would happen because the players don't know anything about gift giving culture and Hazou seemingly can't make these decisions on his own initiative unless he runs it by everyone else. But then it's a massive headache for the QMs to need to answer all these kinds of questions in advance and chart out like, the history of gift giving in Leaf in the context of test administration, just so we can add that small detail. So it gets sanity checked, despite how minimal it is. But if Hazou could just make, like, an Empathy 10 (Average) check or something to determine "is this a thing normal people do in this situation" and we don't need to worry about it, then I think Sanity Checks would be seen far less as necessary.
And I definitely
don't want QMs to solve the problems for us because that does take the fun out of it for everyone, but the aforementioned chance of severe punishment sorta leads us there sometimes.
