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General Tabletop Discussion
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Do You Prefer Sandbox or Party Level Areas In Your Game World?
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<blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8220492" data-attributes="member: 16814"><p>Well, you still haven't, because I certainly don't think I even need to "fool" the players.</p><p></p><p>See, I get this. And, I agree that I strongly dislike play that decreases my agency as a player or the protagonism of my PC. There are approaches, though, even in D&D, where you can do high levels of improv and still protect these things. This usually requires the GM to adopt clear, open, player-facing principles of play that do this job. One such would be to only negate an action declaration if it violates genre expectations or established fiction. This means that the GM doesn't just say an action fails if it doesn't run afoul of openly established fiction (ie, notes don't count). The GM can only challenge such things by calling for a check, and setting DCs openly and according to the fiction -- ie, not just setting arbitrarily high DCs. Doing this openly makes the process transparent and reveals distortion by the GM. Pair this with a second principle to always honor success and you get a strong core of agency while not having to do a lot of prep -- if a called for check succeeds, the player achieves or moves toward their goals. On a failure, the GM introduces a consequence. This lets play develop organically while maintaining player agency -- their decisions really matter.</p><p></p><p>Of course, a lot of people might dislike this kind of play, but it goes to the point that disliking this is for a different reason than improv results in low agency play.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ovinomancer, post: 8220492, member: 16814"] Well, you still haven't, because I certainly don't think I even need to "fool" the players. See, I get this. And, I agree that I strongly dislike play that decreases my agency as a player or the protagonism of my PC. There are approaches, though, even in D&D, where you can do high levels of improv and still protect these things. This usually requires the GM to adopt clear, open, player-facing principles of play that do this job. One such would be to only negate an action declaration if it violates genre expectations or established fiction. This means that the GM doesn't just say an action fails if it doesn't run afoul of openly established fiction (ie, notes don't count). The GM can only challenge such things by calling for a check, and setting DCs openly and according to the fiction -- ie, not just setting arbitrarily high DCs. Doing this openly makes the process transparent and reveals distortion by the GM. Pair this with a second principle to always honor success and you get a strong core of agency while not having to do a lot of prep -- if a called for check succeeds, the player achieves or moves toward their goals. On a failure, the GM introduces a consequence. This lets play develop organically while maintaining player agency -- their decisions really matter. Of course, a lot of people might dislike this kind of play, but it goes to the point that disliking this is for a different reason than improv results in low agency play. [/QUOTE]
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