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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9418005" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I disagree with this stance--or, at least, I disagree with using these terms for it. Because that turns "authoring" into being 100% identical with playing chess, and that's not a useful term anymore. It's watered down "authoring" until it's essentially a meaningless buzzword for "someone does something."I mean, again, the distinction I would make is that players can ACT in essentially any style of TTRPG play. They cannot AUTHOR in certain styles, but can in others. Authorship is very distinct from actions; indeed, authorship in some ways may be completely divorced from "actions" in the way you described above. That's the whole point of having a verb for this specific thing--actually inserting story elements, not just declaring personal actions in response to a fictional environment.I'm not really sure what the distinction being made here is. How does player-authorship--again, recognizing that I do not consider absolutely all actions taken by players as "authorship"--interfere with players' ability to "establish their own goals"? From where I'm sitting, most "sandbox" games actually offer very limited freedom to engage in authorship, because most "sandbox" gaming is done in the "Hexcrawl" style where there are very specific goals that need to be met in order to make progress. For example, GP = XP means you need to make a lot of money; you just...don't earn XP from quests or personal achievements, and even defeating monsters is a very very thin quantity of XP, by design and intent. While the way in which one tackles the things in the hexes is allowed to stay completely open, there's...really no support for, and AFAICT very little appetite for, doing something like "settle down and start a business" or "earn my liege-lord's ribbon of favor" or "reveal what really happened to my ancestral home" or the like. Partly, this is because the "sandbox" style of play is strongly geared for a mix of high logistical planning and pure in-the-moment action, with anything like an ongoing "story" only resulting as an afterthought.I would agree that it is the players agreeing to a set of goals. I would not therefore say that it is the players choosing their own goals. Consenting to using what someone else has authored is not the same as authoring something yourself, otherwise there would never have been any need for, nor interest in, things like Dungeon World or other systems that others know better (like Prince Valiant, which IIRC Pemerton has spoken of repeatedly.)</blockquote>

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