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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6152008" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Could be.  But I suspect, given your erudition and your field of work, that you were well aware of the term before I started applying it to metagame mechanics and actor vs author vs director stance.Starfox, its a theory in personality psychology developed in the 1950s.  Roughly, the concept declares a person's "locus" (Latin for "location") is as either internal or  external focused.  Internal locus of control means the person believes that they are empowered to make decisions of which the outcomes are the primary output of their life's body of work/story; eg they can control their life/destiny.  External locus of control means that the person believes that their decisions and life are  controlled by environmental factors (entropy or interactions far, far beyond 1st or 2nd order with respect to their own decisions) which they cannot influence either at all or in any meaningful way; eg external factors control their life/destiny.Pemerton's above is a great encapsulation.  I'll try another.  Consider a door in an infiltration challenge:Actor Stance - I interact with (open it/pick the lock/disarm the trap) the door.Author Stance - I know the guard on patrol.  He owes me a favor for clearing his debt with a dangerous bookmaker.  I call in the favor and have him leave the door unlocked and unguarded (this is either mechanically available to him now when it wouldn't have been otherwise or it automatically happens).Director Stance - I skulk up to the entryway.  I hear the sounds of rambunctious revelry down the hall.  The guards are in a drunken dice game and the sentry must have joined them.  In his haste he forgot to lock the door!As you move down the stance track, character locus of control moves further from inner to outer while player locus of control moves further from outer to inner; and further toward metagame mechanics.</blockquote>

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