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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8165206" data-attributes="member: 42582">In the real world, people are subject to forces/processes that they can't control.Imagined worlds don't "unfold" according to their own causal processes. Because they're imagined. They have to be authored.So the analogue of forces that people can't control becomes decisions made by another participant in establishing the imagined world. In the context of the sandboxes being discussed, that is the GM.I don't really see how reiterating this point about your preferred allocation of authorial power is meant to persuade me (or anyone else) that players have more of it and GMs less.What you seem to be doing is arguing why players in such games should be satisfied with having less authorial power than the GM: because the GM is the analogue in their game experience of forces/processes they can't control in the rest of their life experience.I also still don't understand why this doesn't apply to combat resolution.(I mean, I know the historical explanation: most RPGs' approach to combat is influenced by D&D which was in this respect derived from wargaming, and the whole point of wargaming is that the referee doesn't just decide what happens. But I don't understand how this approach is reconciled with the notion that the imagined world should be established by GM decision-making as an analogue for the impersonal processes that shape so much of the real world.)</blockquote>