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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8163710" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER], I'm starting to work through your epic posts. I won't respond to everything because of (i) time and/or (ii) nothing useful to say.On this we're agreed. I think I push this harder then you do. It's what my example of the defeated/dead Orc has been about: the player declares an action (I attack the Orc) and the outcome is a change in the fiction that goes beyond the character - ie now the Orc is dead.Off the top of my head, the only exceptions I can think of are what I have called, upthread, exploration-type actions that don't produce any change in the fiction beyond perhaps the mental states of the PCs, but only prompt the GM to share information with the players (so that what was a private or secret or unilateral fiction becomes shared).I would add that there is a classic flash-point here: the player declares the action wanting nothing more than information from the GM; but the GM adjudicates it in a way that also changes the fiction beyond the PCs' mental states. The best-known example is the look for traps action that the GM adjudicates as triggering the trap, but there can also be other forms of this - eg the player has the PC "hang out" (in a bar or whatever) to gain information/rumours and the GM responds with a substantive move (eg thugs turn up at the PCs' hotel room).No dissent in relation to any of the snipped examples. I'm not fully persuaded by the [i[flashback[/i] example, though maybe I don't know the system well enough. I think that narrating something the character did in the past can still count as manipulating the character in the shared fiction.I was going to add: suppose that via a flashback you can bring it about that your valet left the useful widge at such-and-such a place, that would be a clear example. But now I want to canvass the possibility that valets, gangs, henchmen etc are in a sense "extensions" of the character. If so, that also picks up some of the snipped examples (eg maybe Khan of Khans, maybe also though perhaps less so Lover in Every Port). Given the discussions in this thread about Circles etc I think this question of where the PC boundary lies can be quite interesting. In my Classic Traveller game, too, there are characters who are listed on the PC sheets, are - in D&D terms - something like henchmen, and who in play move very fluidly between PC status (players narrating what they do) and NPC status (me as GM narrating what they do).I agree that (i) the tactical/strategic boundary is blurred and (ii) it is real. 4e has almost no strategic aspect to it - which is part of what makes it great! My thought here is that you are treating GM is obliged to take suggestions seriously as a manifestation of player agency. I don't object to that; I just think it's worth calling out as a distinctive technique which (to the best of my knowledge) reaches its high point of realisation in PbtA games.All I would add to this is that the "profilicness" (maybe proliferation) of player agency over situation and setting is constrained, in part, through topic or subject-matter based constraints: like if the GM has already announced that a bit of the setting exists, then players can work on that; but otherwise they can't. And if the work the players do can be correlated pretty directly to work their characters do, then it's OK; but otherwise it's suspect.This is interesting. Using your matrix/schema, 4e D&D, Burning Wheel and Prince Valiant all tend to downplay strategic agency (ie the GM is in charge of scene-framing) in order to allow tactical agency and protagonist agency to co-exist. Of the three systems, BW puts the biggest pressure on this because it does have some long-term stuff (recovery of injury, recovery of resources, training) - unsurprisingly, you would probably say, this is the bit which in the Adventure Burner/Codex discussion has the highest degree of GM, sort it out in a fair way!Prince Valiant is at completely the other end from BW (to the extent that the two systems probably illustrate two ends of a continuum within the high tactical, high protagonist, low strategic agency cluster of RPG designs) - even injury and healing, which is sacrosanct in so many RPGs, is almost entirely at the GM's discretion. And of course I've already described upthread how irrelevant map-and-key resolution of travel is in this system.</blockquote>

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