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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertsconley" data-source="post: 9658546" data-attributes="member: 13383">An outsized role in what, exactly? This is not about challenging your statement. If we want to avoid talking past each other, we need to be specific: what is the referee controlling, and what are the players controlling? Too often “referee control” gets thrown around without clarifying whether it’s about narration, adjudication, pacing, or the setting.As I’ve said before, just like with railroading, this isn’t a simple on/off switch, it’s a matter of nuance. The impact of referee procedures depends entirely on the creative goals of the campaign.The point of Blades in the Dark is to recreate the feeling of a heist story in the world of Doskvol. Its mechanics, including flashbacks, flow from that goal. Sharing narrative authority is part of the system’s design, and clearly, that style resonates with many, given how much it's created a family of Powered by the Dark RPGs.By contrast, the point of my Living World Sandbox campaigns is to present a setting that feels real, where players feel like they’ve been there as their characters. Everything I do flows from that. I handle the World in Motion because the players only have access to what their characters could plausibly know. Their agency comes from choosing what to pursue and how to act, not from framing scenes, asserting authorial control, or sharing the fiction.And to be clear: player agency in my campaigns goes far beyond just “choosing where to go.” If the players wander into a village of basket weavers and decide they want to become basket weavers, that’s the campaign now. It’s not a joke, I’ve run campaigns where the players built and ran an inn after retiring from mercenary life. The game shifted entirely based on their choices. That’s not limited agency. That’s deep integration into a world that reacts.</blockquote>

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