This is something like saying: with a halfway competent card shark, who can tell whether s/he's dealing off the top or the bottom? But to some extent the meaning of the experience depends upon the way in which it is generated.
Doesn't matter if the card shark is dealing off the top or bottom: if the resulting hand is fair for all involved the experience is exactly the same.
I think this is part of what [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] is trying to get at in repeatedly emphasising the significance of motives, expectations, etc. What counts as good faith vs (at the extreme, say) cheating depends heavily on these facts about the participants.
Well, matters to whom? Presumably not you. But that sort of thing matters to me in respect of the games that I'm part of. And some posters seemed to care when I expressed a preference in the OP.
Maybe I'm misreading this, but how can something matter to you if you don't know what it is?
If you're the DM what goes on behind your screen - or how, or why - is none of my business as a player. I'd expect the same courtesy in return were the positions reversed. Therefore, you in theory have no way of knowing any processes that go into the game you're playing other than those I-as-DM might reveal.
Just in passing - there is already quite a bit of assumption built into this. For instance, it already presents the PCs as "A-Team"-types who "go on missions" and then take time off between them. I have not GMed a game that has that sort of underlying structure since around 1986.
So characters in your games never find themselves with nothing pressing? Never get a chance to take some downtime and then decide what to do next? Never get a chance to step back and look at the big picture? Hell, that all sounds way more DM-driven than anything I run.
But if we're asking whether the game just described is player- or GM-driven, I find it very hard to conceive of that as anything but a GM-driven game. It doesn't seem to have the somewhat static, reactive nature of a classic sandbox - which nature is part of what enables the players to drive the play of such a campaign, by choosing which elements of the sandbox to engage.
Er...in order to choose which elements to engage don't they first need to find out what elements might be out there awaiting engagement? And the only way to do that is to...wait for it...ask!
The game seems vulnerable to a player deciding that his/her PC is no longer going to be a soldier of fortune, but instead wants to (say) become a local magistrate. It's not even clear what happens if a player wants his/her PC to become leader of the mercenaries' guild, or of the militia, or become advisor and confidant to Baron Larchwood.
Of course it's vulnerable to this sort of thing - that's what player agency is all about, which is the very thing you've been arguing for all the way along!
If a character's next logical in-character move is to do something that takes it out of the party, then out it goes. I've role-played myself out of many a party in the past.
If a single PC decides to pack it in and become a local magistrate, or take over the local mercenaries' guild, that's just fine - the PC retires from adventuring (and the player either already has a replacement or rolls one up, assuming she is staying in the game) and at some point we'll update it to see how its magisterial or mercenary career might be going.
If the party as a whole decide out of the blue to chuck in with Baron Larchwood then I've got to be ready to DM that, wherever it might go. In fact, one thing that separates a good DM from a bad one is the ability to hit those sort of curveballs.
Lan-"next man up"-efan
