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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maxperson" data-source="post: 9660892" data-attributes="member: 23751">No they aren't.  There's is no part of "the player controls what his PC says and does" that touches on "the player authors the fiction outside of the PC," and vice versa. They are two very different things.See above.  The two types of agency cannot happen at the same time.  You cannot both author the fiction outside the PC in the same moment as you are saying what the PC does or says that affects things.  They can occur closely after one another, but so can multiple instances of one or the other.  Time is finite.  You cannot have more agency in one game that the other, because the two agencies are mutually exclusive in the same moment of time.Maybe you're some magic man that controls time and creates time loops or does other crazy stuff that no one else can.  I doubt it, though. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Nice Strawman.  I'm not talking about a living world. I'm talking about a sandbox.  In fact, if you were actually going to start reading to understand instead of reading to reply, you'd have read that I said that when the game shifts to be more linear with the passive players, the living portion of the game still happens.  So of course a living world doesn't grind to a halt due to players not being proactive.  A sandbox does, though.  A sandbox cannot happen if the DM is initiating things.You said that in less 10 seconds of game gnolls could seek out giants, persuade them to attack, and then the giants could get to town to attack it.  Because that's how much time happens when nothing is happening.  The players aren't sitting at the table in the inn for the days or weeks it would take for all that to happen.You did say 10 seconds, because that's how much time passes while the PCs are just sitting at the table and the players are staring at me.  And it was during the staring time that this is all happening.If I'm going to initiate something, it's not going to be something that takes days or weeks to happen when only a few seconds of game time are happening.In a living world the DM doesn't just decide to backdate time and have something occur in the past that did not already happen, so the gnolls didn't decide to retroactively have approached the giants. It would 1) have already have had to be planned, and 2) could not be aimed at the PCs like that.  If either one of those isn't happening, it's not part of a living world.  If I'm initiating something to get the game moving with passive players, it cannot be part of the living world unless it just coincidentally was something pre-planned for that specific moment and the PCs just happened to proactively go there.  None of which occurs when PCs are passively sitting at a bar.Right.  I said that.  It's just not 1) a living breathing part of the world, and 2) not a sandbox any longer.I also said that in my experience, passive players don't switch to proactive.  Your experience may be different, but in mine if they aren't proactive from the get go, I have to initiate things a lot over the course of the entire campaign.</blockquote>

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