I think
@chaochou's point is apposite here.
The boardgame Seven Wonders has "involved victory conditions" in the sense that there are multiple dimensions of play in which victory points can be accrued, and for relatively casual players the maths at any given moment (particularly at earlier stages of play) is not easily solvable to yield an obviously superior move. There's a contrast in this respect with, say, backgammon.
This is a misunderstanding of my point. Seven Wonders has 1 very simple condition, "acquire the most victory points." The game is in tracking how best to achieve this goal as the board state unfolds. The thing I keep saying is different in a TTRPG is that you can set your own constantly changing goal.
But if the victory condition is "light a signal fire on top of the mountain", achieving that victory consists precisely in everyone at the table agreeing that, in the fiction, some character or other has reached the top of the mountain and has lit a fire. Which is shared imagination. Given that, in a RPG, no participant has unilateral authority to stipulate either that the fiction does or does not contain such a state of affairs within it, it's negotiated imagination.
Well, this is why I don't like getting bogged down in these discussions. Light a signal fire on a mountain is almost certainly a smaller part of a larger goal like "assemble a sufficiently large army to take down the incoming demon horde" or "trick a nation into declaring war" or something, and any challenge that can be resolved in a single skill check is probably too small to treat that way. But, I quibble quite a bit about "unilateral authority." Players get to declare actions, actions do what they say they do, the fiction is changed by those actions as they specify. Player agency is precisely that, unilateral authority to alter the fiction in some specific, mechanically mediated way.
On top of
@chaochou's point:
I've played RPGs which do not involve unbounded play time. Agon is an example, with a formal structure to support its lack of unbounded play time (both at the session level and the "campaign" level). I've not played My Life With Master but believe it might be the first - certainly an early - example of a RPG with that sort of formal structure.
As well as formal structures to constrain play time, I've played RPGs with an understanding among all the participants that play time is not unbounded, and as the GM I've used my authority over the fiction to frame matters towards and then into a climax at the appropriate time.
That's reasonable. Some less absolute formation about playtime is probably more accurate, but I think it's reasonable to suggest that RPGs tend to be less constrained this way than board games.
I think in this particular post you are reiterating this point made by
@LostSoul a while ago now:
But anyway: one key point that I take
@AbdulAlhazred to be making, or at least pointing toward, in his discussions of Dungeon World and 4e D&D, is this:
who gets to decide whether balancing on a cloud, or any other feat of heroics, will help the PC achieve the goal that the player has set for the PC?
I think
@Manbearcat is pointing toward something similar in his post upthread about the technical aspects of climbing, and genre logic.
At some tables, the answer is
the GM. Some RPG systems - eg 3E and 5e D&D - tend to reinforce this answer in their rulebooks and in their procedures of play.
At some tables, the answer is
the table - both player(s) and GM.Some RPG systems - eg BitD, DW, 4e D&D, Agon, Burning Wheel, MHRP - tend to reinforce this answer in their rulebooks and in their procedures of play.
Ah! This feels significant. I'm rejecting this as a dichotomy.
I would not assign that authority to the GM, nor to the table at large. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I keep using the word "objective." The question of whether an ability is useful should be mediated by the mechanics. Taking an action will change the board state, and after a variety of actions have been taken, you can tell if the goal has been achieved, or not. In fact, I'd contend it's basically essential to have a meaningful state of gameplay (a term I'm using here to specifically refer to the process of trying to navigate a complex system of decisions to achieve a desired outcome; the basic play loop of any eurogame, for example), that this not be a decision made by a person (or people), but a process.
It is possible to have a system with "objective" difficulties (like DC120 for balancing on a cloud) that otherwise fits in the second category of pointed to: Burning Wheel is an example. But in my experience that is aesthetic and has little relevance to player agency.
Suppose a player knows that, should it be relevant to achieving their goal, their PC in this game is almost certain to be able to climb any wall at full speed, one handed while wielding a weapon. How does that give them agency? Who decides the relationship between performing such a feat, and achieving any goal?
That is all about who gets to decide the content of the fiction - in framing, and then how performing certain feats in the fiction will allow certain goals to be achieved. Negotiated imagination.
The assumption here, seems to be that a GM, upon creating a fiction world, will necessarily then map out the interaction of player abilities and that world. A GM that presents the players with a castle, will know (and can/should know) what the interaction of every ability the players can bring to bear against that castle will be, and will apparently have designed the castle with that in mind. I just don't think that's true, particularly if you assign players the choice of "what to care about" in the first place, that determines if they're even interested in walking into castles.
The interesting gameplay part is finding efficiencies between an obstacle the players are facing and their abilities. Consider a classic combat example, like fighting a fire elemental. A player with the option will opt to use their Frostbrand to attack with, over a +2 mace, and will opt not cast
burning hands. That is the least interesting possible optimization problem, doesn't offer a ton of room for customization, and will still absolutely the fighter who had two weapons to pick from, because it is satisfying to make a choice that has an impact on the situation. Add some more dimensions to combat and things start to get more interesting from there.
That same decision making web can absolutely extend outside of that realm to the rest of the experience, if you build your design to offer the same sort of mechanically mediated outcomes to all player declared actions.