NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8013688" data-attributes="member: 16586">So a fundamental conceit important to my understanding of role playing games (related to agency) is that the fiction is shared. Once anyone introduces something to the fiction it no longer belongs to just them. You are tacitly agreeing to allow the characters you introduce or setting elements be affected and changed by what goes on in the fiction. You do not really get to decide and limit how they will be affected, although emotional safety and creative boundary stuff will apply.This manifests itself slightly differently in more challenge focused games. The emotional state of a B/X character is not under threat, but it is also like not a focus of play. Still you can be poisoned, diseased, subjected to all manner of spells, paralyzed, turned to stone, and/or  level drained. All manner of nasty things can happen to you.For their part the referee must play the dungeon denizens with integrity and make fair impartial rulings. They must respect your fictional positioning and let things play out. They are bound by things like wandering monster tables, morale rolls, and reaction rolls.In a more character focused environment the expectation is that everyone is playing their characters with integrity - letting what happens in the fiction affect  their characters physically, mentally, and emotionally. This includes the GM. They must play the world with integrity. No gets to hold on to their conceptions of things. No character concepts - only characters.If we are all protecting the things we think we own and setting up carefully constructed boundaries of how we will allow other players to affect them there can be no real meaningful agency over the fiction. Agency over the shared fiction is dependent on playing with people who are vulnerable enough to allow their conceptions of the setting, characters, and relationships to meaningfully change.I think in many ways agency over the shared fiction and agency over the content we create are opposing forces. Assuming equitable relationships and not naughty word ones (where I can affect your stuff and you cannot affect mine) the more agency we have over our stuff the less everyone else has over it. Agency then becomes this elaborate maze of walled of gardens where we must carefully negotiate the ones in which we can effect each others stuff.</blockquote>

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