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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8026312" data-attributes="member: 42582">Says whom?Are you able to understand that there are different ways of playing RPGs? I don't understand why you present your own approach as having universal normative force.Who has agency over the fiction in a play? Not the actors. In the case of a prop. either the director, the producer or the playwright, depending on the detais of the production.So can you not see that, if a RPG is approached the way that you describe, the players are not exercising agency in respect of the content of the fiction?Whether or not one has a certain preference, isn't the analysis crystal clear?But aren't you simply saying here that you prefer a game in which the players do not have agency in respect of certain aspects of the shared fiction? Such as the contents of boxes that their PCs open.Are you really saying that you are unable to comprehend that there are other approaches?This is a bit like having a conversation about which side of a car the steering wheel is on, and which sort of turn yields an obligtion to give way, and having someone respond to an Australian that, yes, I understand, the steering wheel is on the left and one yields when turning lefft. As if they are literally unable to comprehend that there are parts of the world that have different having different traffic conventions than those that prevail in North America.Here, again, is your post to which I replied:Are literally unable to comperehend that there are approaches to RPGing in which the action resolutoin I look in the box fro the Crown of Revel is determined by a check, with success meaning that the PC finds the Crown in the box when s/he looks, and failure meaning that the GM narrates something different from that which is in some fashion adverse to the PC?I'm not confused about how Lanefan approaches RPGing. I'm puzzle that he seems unable even to comprehend that others do it differently. And that those differences reflect - in part - different distributions of agency over the content of the shared fiction.Given that, in this context, agency over the shared fiction and authority in respect of the shared fiction or authorship of the shared fiction are all synonyms, I don't understand your contrast.That the latter two are synonyms (in this context) is evident in the fact that author and authority are cognate words. As far as the first is concerned - if the players can't, via the procedures of game play, bring it about that the shared fiction is or contains (say) X rather than (say) Y, they manifestly are not exercising agency in respect of it.When [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] (who introduced this discussion of agency some way upthread) and I (who have always been crystal clear that I am followin chaochou's usage) talk about agency over the fiction, we are not talking about the power to oblige the GM to reveal what s/he has already written. We are talking about the power to have the content of the fiction follow one's desires in respect of it.The contrast emerges pretty clearly in the OP's situation. The player, in that situation, clearly had the power to trigger the GM to reveal the GM's prior conception of the burgomaster - this is in fact exactly what happened when the insult by the PC led the GM to narrate the burgomaster's response. But pretty clearly the player was not exercising agency over the content of the shared fiction: it seems pretty clear that the player wanted the shared fiction to contain a burgomaster who was cowed or chastised or rebuked, or in some other, roughtly similar way put back into his box by the PC's harsh remark. But the player had no chance to bring this about. Which is to say, the player was not exercising agency over the shard fiction.As I have said to Lanefan, one may or may nor prefer a game in which players exercise this sort of agency. But I am not talking here about preferences. I am simply analysing the way that game play unfolds. [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] has, upthread, set out an account of one approach to play in which one does not want players to exercise agency over the content of a box - namely, OSR-ish/"skilled play" RPGing in which part of the point of play is to figure out what the GM has decided is in the box, or - if one wants to find the Crown of Revel - where the GM has written, ahead of time, that it is hidden.Likewise there may be approaches to play in which part of the point of play is to figure out whether or not the GM has decided, ahead of time, that the burogmaster will call the guards in response to any insult. I'm not sure if anyone in this thread has clearly articulated what such an approach would be - the obvious one that comes to my mind is an approach to play in which the players' goal is to experience the gameworld and the various components of that fiction as the GM conceives of them.But one can't talk coherently about these various approaches to play without actually first noting what jobs, and what sorts of agency, they give to various participants.For instance, suppose one wanted to write an instruction manual for RPGing that woiuld help produce situations like that described in the OP. That manual would have to tell the GM something like you decide how the burgomaster reacts to insults, and you narrate consequences by following the implications of that decision. If the manual said when PCs interact with the burgomaster, they get to have an influenced over how the story unfolds it would be unhelpful at best, and misleading at worst.</blockquote>

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