Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8136747" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I honestly don't think there is a real conflict in these definitions, though. Freedom to operate freely in the setting is a manner of agency. Narrative authority by players beyond declaring what their characters do is another manner. A further manner. I'd say that allowing a player to declare actions for their character is almost the baseline level of agency, and if it is absent then likely something has gone very wrong. Games that allow players to more definitively shape the fiction than just that baseline of declaring actions allow more agency. I don't even really see how this is up for debate. It seems that because the conversation largely assumes agency is a good thing, that any reduction of it is a reduction of good, and no one wants to admit that their game is less good......so they insist that their game has all the good. All the agency. But it's just not the case. My 5E game allows less player agency than my Blades in the Dark game. That's not a bad thing. The game is designed that way, after all.I can understand this, and I've done it myself, although more so in the past than I would today. Because it absolutely is reducing the players' agency. If the fight is too easy....then the fight is easy. Let the results stand. I get the idea of trying to preserve the status of a threat that's been built up, but the game isn't about preserving my ideas of what it is about. If the encounter is too hard.....then maybe they need to approach things differently than trying to fight? Maybe they need to negotiate or run away? Typically, the GM would only do these things if they had an expected outcome, which could even be something like "after a difficult battle, the PCs emerge victorious!"I don't think that your definition of success can ever really exist. I mean, in D&D the PCs want to win the fight with the evil necromancer and his undead minions. Ultimately, they do win.....but it took some resources, and no one emerged unscathed. Would you say that they failed to win the fight? I feel you are applying the concept of success far too broadly. I mean, my PC wants to jump the chasm. That's his goal, and that's what the roll is for. In the case of BitD and most PbtA games, the roll is also folding in several other rolls (the kind typically made by the GM in D&D and similar games) into that roll. So, to kind of compare it to combat in D&D, the player makes a roll to attack the orc. Then the orc and everyone else involved in combat would get a turn of some kind. The equivalent roll in BitD/PbtA games would encompass the orc's response, and potentially his allies' responses as well, depending on what had been established already. Each individual roll is doing more than what a roll in D&D does.I don't think that's an accurate way to look at it. Complication is not a failure. I realize I may be beating a dead horse here, and I don't mean to.....I just think that your take on this is skewed by a bit of flawed reasoning.</blockquote>

Verification