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How would you analyze, say, AD&D then? It has initiative, surprise, stealth checks, saves, attack rolls, find traps, sense secret doors, hear noise, reaction, morale, wandering monster checks, probably others. That's all on top of the often unknown and possibly unknowable DM judgement calls and...

I think this is akin to analyzing a traffic accident and only considering the last split second before the head on crash. Sure, you can say the cause was driver X didn't swerve, but calling that the cause when driver Y was drunk, travelling twice the speed limit and in the wrong lane is missing...

Yeah, I admit to wanting to give it a pass, given that I've played it pretty much since the start of the hobby. OTOH other 'toolbox' systems always strike me as bland and rather dull for largely the same reason. I guess D&D is kind of rescued by its quirky genre as well. Like a lot of people...

To me they're both just luck. That being said, @pemerton brought up a critical point. We have to understand how all of this fits into the goals of play. In general we can't really say much. I think we would all agree that saving throws in classic D&D are not instances of player agency. That...

There could be 3 paths to the introduction of such fiction. It could be part of the setting, like in BitD the Bluecoats are canonically a faction. It could be GM prep, AW allows the GM to create threats, but their introduction into a scene requires some degree of telegraphing, or at least that...

I'm not sure what you mean. It sounded like he was pretty frustrated, at one point, but he has amply described his own extensive experience of such play.

Any RPG, or instance of employment of such, will evince some goals or agenda. Beyond that will be some sort of premise, something which the game/genre/setting says about some elements of situation/setting/character. So, for example, BitD makes some pretty definite statements about authority and...

Yes! I am assigning homework. It will be on the final too. 😎

I disagree, a decision made without any information doesn't engage agency because the decision is meaningless. Whether you pick door A, B, or C is no decision at all, rolling dice for it is exactly equivalent to just saying 'A', it is equally arbitrary. Agency requires some means to understand...

Well, I don't agree that you cannot do skilled play. The skills are slightly different, perhaps. But you better be good at spinning lots of plates and making your resources count in BitD if you want your crew to be around next Tuesday. IME it can be a brutally deadly game, though not nearly as...

I think this is a bit of a broad brush. Yes, it COULD be true for some specific kinds of Narrativist play that the Assassin Guild of Nyx happens to be established as a way of explicating later events. In no way does that preclude the possibility it was established earlier in play. Information...

Right, and all of these questions and dilemmas were effectively addressed by Narrativist play. That's where I came into a (very much from the GM side). By putting the addressing of the game's agenda (where that is often closely tied to player specified concerns) as the function of the GM, and...

Ever read Hobbes' Leviathan? He has a few things to say about this!

Well, I'm going to take a look at this from the standpoint of 1000 Arrows. This is a PbtA in which the PCs are Kurusawa-esque participants in a great Sengoku Era drama of Japanese power politics/war. Situations are fraught with hard choices and compromise, or action with potentially terrible...

As I said to @Crimson Longinus , I think a lot of this definiteness does exist, in something like dungeon play. This is, in fact, the reason for such play! Dave placed the action within an environment where his wargame-style rules worked. One where questions of space, time, and basic dynamics...

I think this allows us to understand the specific differences here and so many people are not making the transition to understanding Narrativist play. So, let's imagine a Blades in the Dark version of this warehouse scenario. The job is an ambush and the players decide, or the larger situation...

I think you have a point here. What ends up happening though is, you take D&D, a game fundamentally designed to handle the sorts of fairly stereotyped situations constituting dungeon play, and you try to extrapolate it out to any situation. It doesn't hold up well at all. Around the mid-80s...

Exactly there's no objective answer, all of these myriad details are simply established at the whim of the GM in this case. I agree it's good enough, maybe even great, but some sort of 'simulation' or model of a world with any independent character, any compelling reason to be X, or Y, is not...

Just go read/play TB2e, there's plenty of game there! Quite hard core play actually.

Exactly! The social dynamics of play, its process, and agenda. We've been saying this for at a dozen years here!