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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 9662408" data-attributes="member: 99817">Hi [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I had misunderstood the direction of your previous post! And largely I agree with what you say.So I think what you're describing is fleshing out what, in my formulation, is called the reliability of the rules. Or, more fully, the reliability of the rules to achieve your known goals.I would describe the situation you present like this. The 'world' in an rpg is simply an imagined boardstate. It is a common feature of many rpgs that the only participant who is allowed to change the 'world' (ie the boardstate) is the GM. It is therefore self evident that any goals requiring a change in 'the world' can only be done by the GM - and so only the GM has agency to achieve them.What happens in practice is that the sometimes the GM changes the boardstate in accordance with my wishes and then claims I exerted the agency. This is the heart of illusionism. Part of the same illusion is GMs who declare the boardstate independent of them, autonomous, with it's own causal and motive power. It's alive on its own. Utter nonsense when examined, and yet repeated again and again on these boards with complete seriousness. And the reason is to give GMs a fig leaf to pretend it isn't their agency changing the board.Earlier, another poster asked why debates about agency are so frequent. My answer is because the predominant rpg playstyle is to give the GM all the agency, while denying that this is the case.I played AD&D with friends (but no GM) and used the random dungeon generator and random encounter tables by dungeon level, random treasure tables. The game worked totally fine. We had reliable processes to generate what we needed. We could assess our ammo, spells, hit points and make judgements whether to move forward another room based on what we might encounter and what we might gain. All a GM would have done in this game is introduce unreliability into all these processes and overwritten our agency with their own!</blockquote>

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