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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8156725">This is not a persuasive argument, and it honestly seems like a deeply flawed one as well. These points have all been addressed multiple times, from just about every conceivable angle. There appears to be some kind of equivocation going on in your use of contributing to/creating the fiction. I mean if taking something that already exists in the setting, an orc the GM has introduced, and defeating it in combat, is the player having narrative power, well I guess narrative power is a pretty meaningless concept in that case, because it pretty much always arises, in every game ever. But you are using that to build an argument for something much greater (the players having far more control of the setting than the they normally do). First, the players didn't introduce a dead orc. An orc was introduced by the GM, then it was killed by the player acting through their character's attacks. That isn't narrating a dead orc, that isn't contributing a dead orc to the fiction. That is successfully attacking and killing the orc through the powers the pc has in the world. Describing this as narrative power, ignores the logical series of steps and succesful actions that have to occur in the setting in order for that to happen. The secret door is the same: it already existed. The player merely discovers it through an abilty that reflects the character's senses of such things. That isn't the character bringing it about. And again, if all you mean by contributing to the fiction is using a character's abilities to achieve things in the setting, no one here would disagree with you. But you are making a much bigger point and this appears to be serving as a point of equivocation or blurring. Because what the other side objecting to, isn't players finding a secret door using their characters abilities. The thing the other side objects to, or considers not an element of what they mean by agency, is the player being able to invoke things into the setting like events, like mountains, like doors that were never really there in the first place, by a means outside their character's actual powers in the setting. There is something seriously wrong and specious about this argument. I may be missing some fine detail here or there, or not fully analyzing the problem but I think it is very clear that dead orc assertion is a hugely flawed one.</blockquote>

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