NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 8163734" data-attributes="member: 85870">See, this is where I get confused, because this is a contradiction.How does the GM unilaterally making this decision---the brother of Player X's character is already dead---not, by its very instantiation, thwart any and all possible choices Player X might make that relate to the player's desire to explore the relationship between the character and the character's brother?Any and all choices Player X makes to explore that component of the fiction are now diversionary at best, and meaningless wastes of time at worst. It's indicative of a mindset and decision-making process by the GM to basically say, "There's no story here, stop looking for it."[USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] noted the exact same thing:How is this not an instant negation of player agency with respect to protagonism? The player has clearly expressed a desire to explore a dramatic need / protagonistic drive, and the GM has unilaterally altered / created a fictional state in opposition to that expression.This falls in line with [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]'s post that probed the notion of "shared fiction." I liked his explanation that the descriptor of "shared" can only be applied to the fictional state in RPG play after it had some other descriptor. Until such point as it is brought forward to the group, the fiction exists as a "secret" or "unilateral" fiction controlled by some other participant (in nearly all cases the GM). If the fiction is not "shared," then it is necessarily something else.From what I gather, for those in favor of "sandbox" play, secretly declaring the brother dead unilaterally is wholly acceptable, because the player still has the freedom to direct their character's actions such that the GM may eventually reveal this secret---thus changing this predetermined fictional descriptor from "unilateral" to "shared."So even though this unilateral decision denies the player the capacity to meaningfully interact with their desired protagonistic goal---before the player declares a single action related to its pursuit---the GM has not meaningfully reduced "agency," because the player has the freedom to direct play in such a way that will eventually reveal this information.Am I reading this right?</blockquote>

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