The GM here needs to make judgement calls in many of the same situations than in more traditional games, and yes, obviously in Blades they've less freedom and flexibility to do so. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion, I don't feel it is a good thing. And of course in any RPG the GM is in reality constrained by the fiction and the consequences of the actions must logically fit to what was established before. But I have no doubt that the GM in Blades has far less agency than in one D&D. This is the thing you seem to be obsesses about and to what I referred earlier with my post about 'relative agency'. Whether player has more agency, I am not so sure about. In a certain sense they have more narrative agency, they can poke anything to make it important. Then again, this is rather illusory. How much does it really matter whether you poked a painting with a magic skill and it ghostified it and it tried to life-drain you, or whether you poked a door with a physical skill and it spawned a guard that bonked you in the head? How meaningful this is depends on how much value you place on these different flavours. To me this sort of agency seems rather fake. There is no objective reality, there are no mysteries to uncover, there are no right or wrong answers. This is Quantum Ogre, the Game, except you get to influence the skin of the ogre.
And D&D is not? I mean, fundamentally, if you're going to break a game down to this level, it's utterly unfair to say that Blades is Quantum Ogres because people decide things and 5e is not because... people decide things? The difference here is that you're assigning a value statement to single player prepared material as being good and that unprepped, multiple player input material is bad. It's a value statement about your preference, where you apply different standards of analysis to validate the underlying preference. It's entirely circular logic coupled with special pleading -- if you applied the same analysis to 5e, you'd end up with quantum ogres. As such, this is useless except as a circular reinforcement of your pre-existing biases.
Holy crap! After twenty pages I got through!
No, you didn't, and if you read the rest of that paragraph, you'll see I discard this statement as obfuscation. I did forget to add the (ad argumentum) to is, so that is my bad. I was using your concept for the sake of the argument and showing how it fails, not agreeing with you. I could have worded that better.
Obviously. It is a game with completely different purpose. And yes, the players accept those limitations in their agency when they choose to play that game, just like they accept different sort of limitations on their agency when they choose to play D&D.
Constraints are accepted, yes, but, again, player agency cannot be viewed on subdivisions of play -- this leads to obfuscation of what's going on and only enables flawed arguments that less agency exists in this narrowly defined context so it's the same or worse as the preferred arrangement.
Yes. Your claim that there are no different types of agency obfuscates things.
"Nuh-uh, you are," is not a flattering mode of argumentation, nor one that convinces anyone except fellow travelers. If your intent is just to get
@FrogReaver to once again like your post, by all means, continue. If your intent is to engage in discussion, this is a failed approach. You should consider this.
Different games offer different types of agency in different quantities. Recognising this is really important for analysing them and even more important for recommending them. Trying to count some ultimate total agency is of questionable value. If a game offers a player little the sort of agency they care about but 'compensates' is by offering a lot of the type of agency they do not care about, it will result the player feeling that they do not have enough agency. And whether the players feel that they have enough agency is ultimately the only agency question that really matters; everything else is just trying to find the best way to get there.
No, subdividing agency allows one to make flawed arguments about the game such that they can claim superiority in one capacity by ignoring the effects in others. For instance, your continued claims that there is player agency in being the sole controller of your character's mental state (outside of allowed exceptions, naturally, special pleading be damned) allows you to claim more agency, despite the fact that this is empty in the broader context because you have no agency to actually enforce this on the rest of the game. You've claimed agency, and winning agency, in an act that is ultimately irrelevant to the rest of the game -- as shown by me previously that I can get the same level of choice and action in game without acting in-character at all.
This is the trap of subdivided agency. The games discussed are not separate silos of activity placed next to each other -- they interconnect at multiple points. Treating agency as something that can be evaluated in distinct silos totally ignores these interconnects and the ability of one to affect another or not. If I can imagine my character however I want, but can't place that into the game without someone else's permission, then I am not actually exercising much player agency at all, especially since I can imagine my character in any RPG equally well.
Right. Earlier a mocking example of character reminiscing their childhood as a motivation to walk towards the water was used. This is the same thing. And yes, I strongly feel that these sort of things matter, but they matter in any RPG. Drop your bizarre double standard.
It wasn't mocking. It was silly, but that's because I have a silly streak, not because I was mocking anyone other than my own strange choices.
And, no, it's not the same thing. The same thing would be if the player reminisced and then was able to establish that there was water down that passage and that was a true thing. Here, the GM provided that -- it was entirely decided by the GM. The player acted onto that, they didn't really choose it, and made choice not based on the player's interests, but instead molding their character to the GM's prompts. That's not exercising agency, even if it can be fun, because no choice is being made in reminiscing in-character that impacts the gameworld. The only choice is to go down that passage, and it's based on very little that's agency enabling. Bob the Fighter made the choice based on things Bob the Fighter could control, at least in part, because Bob the Fighter knew they had a potion of water breathing and this was a way to exert control over a situation involving water. Fynn just playacted against the GM established fiction and made a choice that was barely better than random.
Now, was Fynn's action more entertaining to the table and the player? Most likely, but not definitely. If that's the axis you want to value, then, absolutely, do so -- I usually put weight on this as well, and not a little. But it doesn't create player agency within the game to do so -- Bob's player has the same agency as Fynn's player, and Bob's player made a choice that enabled future agency via control over options in the fiction while Fynn's player just entertained everyone. Again, if you like that kind of thing, great and awesome and please go get all of it you can!
