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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8931974" data-attributes="member: 6690965">This is a misunderstanding of my point. Seven Wonders has 1 very simple condition, "acquire the most victory points." The game is in tracking how best to achieve this goal as the board state unfolds. The thing I keep saying is different in a TTRPG is that you can set your own constantly changing goal.Well, this is why I don't like getting bogged down in these discussions. Light a signal fire on a mountain is almost certainly a smaller part of a larger goal like "assemble a sufficiently large army to take down the incoming demon horde" or "trick a nation into declaring war" or something, and any challenge that can be resolved in a single skill check is probably too small to treat that way. But, I quibble quite a bit about "unilateral authority." Players get to declare actions, actions do what they say they do, the fiction is changed by those actions as they specify. Player agency is precisely that, unilateral authority to alter the fiction in some specific, mechanically mediated way.That's reasonable. Some less absolute formation about playtime is probably more accurate, but I think it's reasonable to suggest that RPGs tend to be less constrained this way than board games.Ah! This feels significant. I'm rejecting this as a dichotomy.I would not assign that authority to the GM, nor to the table at large. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I keep using the word "objective." The question of whether an ability is useful should be mediated by the mechanics. Taking an action will change the board state, and after a variety of actions have been taken, you can tell if the goal has been achieved, or not. In fact, I'd contend it's basically essential to have a meaningful state of gameplay (a term I'm using here to specifically refer to the process of trying to navigate a complex system of decisions to achieve a desired outcome; the basic play loop of any eurogame, for example), that this not be a decision made by a person (or people), but a process.The assumption here, seems to be that a GM, upon creating a fiction world, will necessarily then map out the interaction of player abilities and that world. A GM that presents the players with a castle, will know (and can/should know) what the interaction of every ability the players can bring to bear against that castle will be, and will apparently have designed the castle with that in mind. I just don't think that's true, particularly if you assign players the choice of "what to care about" in the first place, that determines if they're even interested in walking into castles.The interesting gameplay part is finding efficiencies between an obstacle the players are facing and their abilities. Consider a classic combat example, like fighting a fire elemental. A player with the option will opt to use their Frostbrand to attack with, over a +2 mace, and will opt not cast burning hands. That is the least interesting possible optimization problem, doesn't offer a ton of room for customization, and will still absolutely the fighter who had two weapons to pick from, because it is satisfying to make a choice that has an impact on the situation. Add some more dimensions to combat and things start to get more interesting from there. That same decision making web can absolutely extend outside of that realm to the rest of the experience, if you build your design to offer the same sort of mechanically mediated outcomes to all player declared actions.</blockquote>

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