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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9641976">This isn’t what I said. I wasn’t talking about exploration sandbox. The game I first played in wasn’t a sandbox. It was a cinematic mechwarrior campaign. What made it feel distinct to me is it was totally unlike a board game or video game because it had this sense of being boundless where we could go beyond what was programmed or written in advance. And a big part of what made that happen was the GM being able to facilitate play and not being constrained. To be clear, I am not saying you can’t achieve this in other ways or that placing constraints on the GM will automatically ruin agency. I am saying this is what you guys are butting up against in this thread when you tell people they have no agency in RPGs where the GM isn’t operating with constraints (for many many players this was the feature they noticed that set apart RPGs from other mediums). I am not saying this experience is universal. This is a very subjective thing. I am saying that is why the idea is getting so much push back. I am not doing that. I am trying to be non prescriptive. And I am not even talking about sandbox play. I am explaining to you how the medium felt to me when I first encountered it. Other people will have different experiences I am sure. And I have heard from many others who feel exactly as I do. So I am just saying when you tell people they don’t have agency, when this is at the heart of what gave them agency in the medium, they aren’t going to be persuaded by your reasoning. That experience is simply too powerful in shaping how they viewed the mediumNo. That isn’t what I am doing. I said in my other post constrained GMing and unconstrained are both valid and both seem to have agency as a goal.</blockquote>

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