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I don't think I can disagree hard about the borders at least being very porous. I think one can have agency over different things though and that was why I put things in the order I did. The fewer kinds of things you can decide the more likely you are to be a cog in someone else's wheel.

Yup. I care about both the extent of agency and the number of dimensions.

The only non-negative value where it doesn't change is zero as best I can tell. Anything else and you metaphorically go from measuring inches to square inches to cubic inches and those are all different.

OK then. Think of the types as something like dimensions. n+n+n=3n. n*n*n=n^3. In either case something is incrementing.

Sorry but no. Those are correctly placed in order of ascending amount of agency. Minimal agency is more than no agency. More agency is more than minimal agency.

No agency is the GM tells the players what the characters do without asking for action declarations or any other input from the players. Possibly the GM has decided everything ahead of time. Minimal agency is the players get to declare actions but the GM decides and narrates all outcomes...

How many times will you need to be told that's not how those games work before you will believe that's not how those games work? They're not my own most-preferred games but I've enjoyed some play in the style and your persistent misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the games and the...

"Planning what will happen if the PCs do nothing" is not the same as "deciding what will happen before the PCs do anything." I don't think we disagree more than around the edges. The former is probably OK. The latter is probably not OK.

If you are deciding what will happen before any player actions you are explicitly being prescriptive.

I figure you're probably better off starting over. Any retconning is going to just nuke whatever meaning the PCs' choices might have had. You might want to suggest the players make characters that will work better together or at least more easily if you want to run a game where the PCs work...

I'm pretty sure I recognize the tongue-in-cheek nature of this but I do not think "The GM should not make plans" is the same as "the GM should not have future events pre-determined" and I will stand by the latter.

Anything having to do with the GM having a story to tell plotted out past the current situation. Anything implying the players don't need to know or maybe even shouldn't know the rules of the game.

I'd be happy to discuss though I agree that discussion is probably best forked.

What is best on this axis depends at least as much on who your players are as on how many there are. I've recently run D&D-ish games for parties of three and five and six and I've never needed to start the campaign any sort of "obvious in-the-setting goal" for the parties to achieve in mind. All...

Eh. Having an end goal in place that doesn't take into consideration the players at the table and the characters they choose to play doesn't seem to me to be about seeing what happens as those characters engage the world. It seems to me more like seeing if those characters can get to the end...

My experience has been that campaigns that do not start out with any sort of end goal can be the best campaigns of all if an end goal is allowed to emerge from play. I strongly prefer campaigns where the players/characters choose their goals overall and I see no reason why an end goal cannot be...

I wasn't offended and didn't mean to convey offense. Apologies. Different approaches to prep will suit different people even if they're putatively prepping the same game. This is neither a surprise to me nor a problem. As I said I haven't "plotted a course" as GM for any game in more than a...

I did say it wasn't necessarily planning the course of what would happen. I didn't say it couldn't be. I haven't made those sorts of detailed plans as a GM in decades. I just need to know what the situation is. I never decide what the situation will become as the PCs interact with it. It's...

If the PCs' defeating Count Evil is a necessary thing for other things to happen then yes. If you have Count Evil placed in context and have a sense of what will happen if the PCs kill him then not necessarily. Anticipating possible actions or results needn't be deciding what play will be about...

Back in the 1980s the people I gamed with then played AD&D 1e pretty close to the way the people I game with now play 5e. Play centers on what the PCs want and do and the GM frames in situations and scenarios that apply and appeal.