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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8152256" data-attributes="member: 82106">And to the final step, it is makes no sense to assert somehow that the player in a game where the GM asserts control over all of this stuff offers the players the same agency in the game that, say, Dungeon World does. There is no sense to it at all, it is merest sophistry!As near as I can tell the arguments amount to "I am always free to RP my character however I want" followed by "hypothetically there might be a rule in some narrative style game which impedes this" ergo "D&D has at least as much agency as X." (where X seems to be basically any such game). Not only are all of these facts extremely dubious on their own, but they don't even add up to an argument. Nor does the tactic of trying to split agency up into multiple 'types' and then only discuss one effect of narrative game X and compare whatever the conclusion is (usually incorrectly) with all of D&D anything but a type of category error (actually I'm not sure what the right term for this is, 'gerrymandering' is certainly being misused, but it seems apt). The truth is, most modern RPGs provide players with some sort of concrete access to defining fiction, or at the very least constraining its definition in a way which enables them to have an incontrovertible say in what it is. That is a form of input into the game which is not present in D&D and other classic RPGs. Yes, you can role play in any game, but your ability to have it mean anything is strictly limited in classic play because the fiction off of which that RP must be based is not under your control, and it has no influence on the mechanics of the game whatsoever. In fact any 'agency' whatsoever accrued by a player by means of RP in this way, must be 'leant' to the them by the GM! Yes, they can pantomime, but so can I do that in Dungeon World (actually its hard, because if I do the GM better fold it into the fiction or else he's not doing his job). This entire topic mystifies me. While I 'get' that people have preferences and whatever, I don't really think this is about preference. It honestly feels more just about a hard feeling. Like if I have another way to play, then I'm threatening the legitimacy of the way D&D works and thus it has to be attacked. Its a sort of base tribalism kind of thing. The preferences should be respected, but the rest of it? I'm reaching the conclusion that there simply weren't good arguments there. There is no 'there' there...</blockquote>

Verification