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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 8137488" data-attributes="member: 99817">I posted this before, but I'm going to reiterate it again. The question of agency boils down to: Who has created the purpose of my character?Creating a purpose is not the same as accepting a quest from the GM, nor choosing from a GM provided list. It means what it says - I the player create for myself what my character is up to in this game. Otherwise someone else does.It's an either / or situation. There's no sliding scale here - either I have created the purpose of my character or I have not.Resolution systems then support one or other of these two binary options. Both the PbtA moves and the Burning Wheel action resolution (and both advancement systems) are designed to facilitate the GM / MC to generate new challenges as a character sets about the purpose which the player has created.Misplaced perceptions of how PbtA or Blades or Burning Wheel work (from vocal posters who've actually never played them, it has to be said) simply reveal a baseline failure to understand that everything from those games flows from the starting point of player created objectives. To say they do nothing different from D&D is to misunderstand the entirety of what happens during play in a macro sense. Trying to pick apart the micro is to miss the wood for the trees.And if an MC tries to create purpose for the characters in BW or PbTA to pursue they will find the mechanics fight them, and fail to facilitate their vision, at every step. The untested rejection of such mechanics is illustrative of a learned desire for GM control, covert or otherwise.This is in stark contrast to D&D and traditional forms, in which covert GM control is inherent and the purpose of the characters is assumed to be 'whatever the GM creates for them'. Character purpose is created in secret, not by the players but away from them. Some effort may (or may not) be put into co-opting the players into accepting a vague call to action, although most players are trained to do so - and of course, the majority have never played a game which offered the alternative.I played and ran GM-led games for 20 years. I've been running player-led games for close to 20 years. I'm not averse to different play priorities. I am averse to hearing doublespeak about player agency from posters who have clearly never engaged in it.One final note - I wish people wouldn't conflate backstory, plot, situation and narration. Those are all completely seperate things. Authority for each of those can be seperated and transferred between rpg participants with no problem. There are a range of techniques to do this.The fact that traditional games lump them together and call it 'GM-ing' doesn't change the fact that they are distinct and seperate parts of the game and can be moved independently between participants with no harm to consistency, immersion, plausibility, or any of these other frequently repeated (and false) claims.</blockquote>

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