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After reading the book, and possibly after reading some reviews and discussion about the game. It of course might sometimes be necessary to alter rules mid campaign, but I do my best to make major revisions before the game begins and communicate them to the players so that they know what they’re...

How is that not description of all of our physical reality, including our brains? It is all just particles, electric signals etc bouncing around. That is a supposition, and one I am not sure is terribly tenable. Whilst I personally am rather doubtful about our current materialistic approach...

Wells and Verne are not steampunk in the same reason Parthenon is not neoclassicism. Scifi is about futuristic technologies, regardless of whether nominal era it is set would be the present or the future. Steampunk is about the reimagined past, inspired by vision of the future by people of that...

What Wells and Verne were doing was just scifi. It may seem "steampunkish" to us, as it is set to era usually featured in steampunk. Steampunk is specifically a form of retrofuturism, and you cannot be "retro" to the era you're actually living in!

Yes, but there probably is no point in taking it seriously.

What I prefer is what I call "grounded weirdness." There are weird and fantastic things, but I try to present them as believable part of the world. For my current setting Artra, I wanted the world to feel feel a bit alien, but still recognisable. So it has a lot of little things that set it...

Right. Not only do the AI steal the artists' jobs, if the artist doesn't want to be complicit in this they need to stop displaying their artwork. And yeah, this is happening, I know a lot of people are these days reluctant to post their art online. Dead internet theory becomes more likely every day.

I usually try to keep the world in motion that something is always happening even if the PCs didn't initiate it. Then the PCs can decide to get involved or not.

I mean I of course chose to roll to resist a thing, but I rolled really badly and IIRC took five stress. And it was not "trivial" in a sense that the effect would have not been bad, it was physical harm, but it was not emotionally meaninful. The events after that however vey much were (and I...

Obviously not. You can randomise a lot of things and for certain sort of gameplay you must. But this does not mean that randomising everything, produces the best gameplay, does it? Like I don't think it is particularly weird to think, that randomising timing of dramatic beats and then following...

And it can actually do maths correctly!

That, in fact, is still random. That you can gauge the odds doesn't mean it is not random. This nevertheless results trauma happening in completely random situations, unless you just stop resisting anything once you have spent just four of your nine stress. And I think they realised that this...

I genuinely have no idea. I don't have time or brainpower to decipher your post at the moment. But ultimately whenever a decision about the fiction (content, outcome, etc) is dictated by mechanics, instead of decided by any of the participants, then that decision has been outsourced to the...

The stress from resistance is random, and by my understanding you need to commit to it before you roll, so you do not know whether it gives you trauma or not. You can get up to five stress from one resistance, so it is hard to gauge whether you can "afford" it.

Yet you have previously advocated for rules that take away that control via social and personality mechanics. Though of course if you like to play such low agency games there is nothing wrong with that. I think they could have rather significant amount of agency. For example I think "real...

Agency over the character's psyche and also resulting dramatic beats. I think the moments leading to it were perfectly sensible. And I had no issue with my character taking trauma as result of that scene, that ended in a cold-blooded murder and dramatic revelation of regarding my character's...

Yeah, though I think all those are subsets of agency. And this is what I have said before in these agency discussions. Agency over what? It actually is not terribly helpful to discuss whether game has more or less player agency in some absolute sense, it is far more useful to discuss over what...

I don't offer them as universal solve, only as potential one. But that human element certainly is what is unique to RPGs. (For now, we all will soon be replaced by unfeeling bots that fake humanity convincingly enough.)

All I can say that in the actual situation I alluded to earlier, I felt that my agency was honoured by the GM acceptance of setting aside the rules a bit so that the fictional situation could unfold in satisfactory and logical manner and had we not done so I would have felt that my agency was...

Look, I was not one true waying, that was what the OP was doing. If you don't want the GM to do that, then don't play that way. But my point was that doing so is not intrinsically antithetical to the player agency. And you are again talking about the "gameable space" and I have already said...