If you're thinking of the story where the carousing party charmed the harlot who turned out to be a royal agent etc., that was a hypothetical example I made up for that post in order to highlight the idea of unknown and unknowable possible downstream consequences of what at the time seems like something trivial.
Oh, I don't know what the specifics were... I just remember you talking about PCs going about a town and painting it or some such. Whatever it was, it did not appear to have any consequences at all... and I believe that was the point of the story.
But I have run many a session that was pretty much nothing but in-character roleplay and-or hijinks and-or infighting, where whatever adventure or mission or etc. they were in theory doing didn't get advanced in the slightest. Fine with me; if that's what they want to do then that's what I'm DMing, and they (or whoever's left, depending) can always get back on mission next session or the session after that or whenever.
The game is open-ended, including in overall duration. I'm not running it on a clock; and having hit 1100 sessions as of last Sunday I'd say it's so far, so good.
Yes, that's fine of course. But by now you must realize that not everyone shares your preferences, right? I mean, we've been discussing this stuff for years... why are you still bewildered when someone talks about some other preference in their game?
Regarding the loss of character control... if this is a known risk and the player accepts that as part of the game, it's not really a loss of agency.
You're a hockey guy... while a player going into the penalty box may take away his agency for 2 minutes, it doesn't mean he has no agency in the game. He has just as much as anyone else... and he did the thing that landed him in the box. So no... this isn't really about a loss of agency. This is one of the potential consequences of play.
I want to highlight this, because it appears to me to be one of the crucial observations from the discussion. I alluded to it before in the Rules Elide post, and some responses to
@pemerton. But here's a thesis:
The major innovation of the narrative systems like BW is not giving the players agency. It is about removing agency from the GM and placing it in the hands of the system.
As we've seen, the players don't actually have any more agency in these games. Their choices are more subject to the whims of the dice. They might get a bad roll and then find their character can't act the way they want. Their choices are less meaningful, because the world they are interacting with is not going to react in fixed ways. If the world is fixed, the decision to sneak past or shoot some guards has weight--one may be better than the others. But if similar dice rolls are used to resolve in either case, then the choice doesn't really matter.
The main benefit, instead is to prevent the DM from having to make too many choices. This occurred to me when reading
@pemerton's posts about railroading and the faction reprisal scenario. I thought it was interesting that the primary complaint there didn't seem to be that the
players were complaining; but that the DM found themselves at a loss for how to proceed. What they really want is a way for the system to decide, so they don't have to.
I think the bolded items are not certain. I do think that taking some authority from the GM and offloading it to the system is an element of all of this, but it's only a part. Because that is what creates player agency.
See when there's a game, and I know what I'm trying to do, and I have a sense of the opposition and the odds of me doing so, and what resources I have to perhaps improve my odds or otherwise affect play... my success is not certain, but it is in my hands. Not someone else's. In most games, most of these things are clear. They are observable and knowable. They aren't hidden. And they certainly aren't all the product of one other participant in the game.
So it's up to the GM to make a functional game. When they make decisions, they need to remain aware of this. Giving an NPC a trait like being unbribable is one such decision. It may not be problematic on its own, but that trait will shape play, and when combined with other elements of the setting (all of which the GM decides) it may become problematic in some way. This is why offloading some of this decision making onto the system is desirable... it removes some of the GM's decision making. Waaaaa the poor GM now only decides 98% of everything. This tiny shift in authority... allowing the dice to tell us what happens instead of the GM... can grant a player agency in a situation where it is otherwise lacking.... because it gives him a chance or some sense of odds or otherwise gives him an observable phenomenon rather than all of it occurring inside the GM's mind.
So no, your conclusion that it's not about player agency is, in my opinion, wrong.
Learning about the world in order to make intelligent choices is playing the game.
Yes, and who is most responsible for the players learning about the world? Who controls like 99% of the world and what's in it and how difficult it is to learn and so on?
The GM.
The GM is the
game-master. Not the setting master. There's a game that's being played. if the players are unable to effectively play the game, then the GM has failed.
