No take a step back from feats and abilities. As an author (DM) you can establish (create) history, relationships, allies, assign wealth, equipment, magical items even artifacts to your NPCs,
All true.
nevermind secret backstory knowledge which should expand the options available to your NPCs over that of the PCs.
Only so far as the particular NPC I'm running at that time has extra knowledge, if any.
Simple example: the vizier is secretly plotting to take down the king; both are NPCs. If the PCs talk to both, what they hear from the king will be in blissful ignorance of any such plot while what they hear from the vizier may well be tainted with that knowledge.
If done right (and I freely admit it isn't always) any NPC is only operating with the knowledge it would reasonably have in any given situation, and the DM has to thus constrain herself when running an NPC whose knowledge is incomplete e.g. the king, above.
pemerton said:
For instance, a game in which every outcome of action declaration is decided by the GM based on what s/he thinks makes sense or would be fun would fit your description of player agency.
And also be a badly-run game, if the DM isn't being consistent with what she decides and-or isn't consistent with the already-established fiction.
It also relates to what I posted upthread, which I took @innerdude to be in broady sympathy with in a recent post: what you describes opens up the scope for a very big gap between playing the character I want to play, and what actually happens in the game.
This gap can happen in any game or system - the character I want to play just doesn't suit the party or the story, or violates the morals of the DM and-or other players, or simply can't be made (or made well) in that system.
I mean, I'm willing to bet that if I came into your game wanting to play a happy-go-lucky character without really a care in the world who just wanted to go out adventuring for the fun of it (I've played this one), that might not work out so well. Your game is looking for characters with well-defined goals and, dare I say, a certain amount of angst to them.
Side question that came up in a chat with a friend/fellow DM tonight: how in your game do you handle it when during char-gen or at session 1 two players present you with goals for their characters that are vastly different in scope and scale? For example:
- character one has placed lots of importance on home and family and thus its goal in life is to save the family farm from foreclosure (a nice, small-scale goal likely achievable at low PC level after not too many game sessions)
- character two is all about religion and has made its goal in life to completely change the faith of the entire realm from one pantheon over to another using means up to and including killing the currently-worshipped deities (a huge-scale goal likely unachievable until very high PC level and after years of play, and maybe not even then)
All this means is that pretending to talk to a mayor is different from pretending to fight some orcs. That's obvious. It doesn't prove that imaginary things make real things happen!
Speaking to the imaginary mayor causes real words to come out of my mouth which wouldn't come out were I not speaking to the imaginary mayor...
AbdulAlhazred said:
No, that's the point YOU CAN'T! Because each one of those events which you are discussing as 'in game fiction' is related to the others by way of the game happening at the table in the real world! They cannot be analyzed on their own.
This is also why my somewhat 'far out' comment about dependent origination is germane, because it points out that you cannot determine what was a chain of causality without understanding the TOTALITY of the context. In the case of an RPG narrative that totality simply doesn't exist.
Why do I ever EVER need to look at the entire forever endless chain of causality when all I'm after is the simple link or two or three between cause A and effect B, whether in fiction or in reality?
I don't at this point care what causes brought about A to begin with, nor do I care about what B might itself cause later. If something forces me to look at either of these, then I will; otherwise I'm happy not caring.
Lan-"it's too late at night to dig in to the rest of all this"-efan