If a game doesn't work for you aesthetically, it doesn't work for you aesthetically. I'm still not really seeing fundamental differences in how agency works among these games, aside from small cases like go aggro (AW, as a rule, gives agency to the character who is the victim of whatever is happening).
Would you mind giving another example?
This is contrary to everything I've read by either of these people.
Like I said, I'm not interested in getting sucked into a debate over that. Doesn't end well.
I like to look at RP and G as things that belong together. There is a type of game where these are modal: you’re either role-playing, or you’re engaging with mechanics; but I think RPGing is better when they work together. That’s something that has driven the design of the conflict resolution processes in my game. I want players to do what their characters would do, and when there is a conflict, we have a means to resolve it. It’s not: and here are the monsters; or here is the social combat. It’s you want a thing, and there are going to be consequences if you do it. Now we can resolve it while you continue to have your character do what they would do.
It may seem like an out of left field tangent, but this does remind me a lot of the nature of musicals and how one can argue that action films are just musicals where the song and dance is replaced with bullets and martial arts.
Typically, even with impeccable quality in the choreography and effects, when an action film isn't seen as terribly engaging its usually because they're failing to employ techniques that complement these things, and integrate them well into the overall experience.
For example, in Endgame the fight between the two Captain Americas was actually well choreographed if you can find footage of it uncut.
But because it was so chopped up and unceremoniously dropped into the middle of a montage, it isn't near as engaging. Ironically, in the same film we see this done really well in the climax, from the Hulk Snap to Portals to Avengers Assemble and that charge, but then as soon as Spiderman comes in and hugs Tony Stark, the momentum of the action just fizzles out. The scenes are after are mostly still compelling, but they're no longer a cohesive continuum.
That modal play you speak of, and wanting to more or less eliminate it reminds me of all that. I'm sure it'd raise some eyebrows, but I'd personally identify what you're striving for as an immersive quality, which as it happens is a similiar effect we see in filmmaking.
That momentum in Endgame throughout that part of it is highly immersive and gripping, up until it isn't, and we can identify when and why that happens. In an RPG, the modal shift can be quite jarring, and while I think a little bit of it is useful, its often overdone.
How tightly tied are they to those categories? Do players have flexibility in how they interpret them. For example, suppose we are looking for lodgings, and I get the event “They are coming...run!”. Can I then say: “We found an old inn out of the way where we stayed at the inn for the evening. I awoke in the morning to banging on the door and the naked corpse of the innkeeper’s daughter in the bed next to me.”
Sure do. As for your example, I could see it depending on the context. When it comes to long term travel over several days, its been a rule that if the party isn't soldiering on through the night, the last Exploration Round of the day includes the Rest period to shift to the next day, and the party makes whatever preparations during the round they need to do for that, which is where the Event could be triggered
If they're passing through a town and opting to just take up lodging, then your interpretation works out swimmingly as something to introduce after the Keeper confirms the day has shifted over.
The main thing is that you'd also have some additional context that you could incorporate, based on whatever it was you rolled for that got you the Event. For example, lets say you're playing a Bard type character. As the group is just renting lodging for the night, you're all free to just do whatever as opposed to setting up a campsite.
So you might opt to perform for the inn patrons, using your Performance skill to generate some moneys or to spread tales or rumors of your Parties deeds, and this would be what gives you the Event. You could easily elaborate on your Event as you did, but also include that you attracted the poor lass with your song or dance.
That invites other Players, and the Keeper, to build on it. Seeing as you're essentially introducing a murder mystery, the initial interaction with the group could be you playing out your panicked worry. Another player could introduce their event (Must have been the wind...look around?) and elaborate on what they heard in the night.
Perhaps, as the group keeps going, you end up playing out the interaction with the Keeper as the girl, framed as you recounting the events of the previous night, and you didn't actually manage to seduce her before you went to sleep. Now this is getting spicier.
And it continues in this way, until these scenes are all resolved, essentially meaning that everyone's contributed what they wish, and any questions are resolved or at least ignored in a satisfactory way. One player could opt to, either through their Event or just by their own, unprompted input, say it was a prank, and reveal the body as an illusion they created.
But then that prompts different outcomes; if the player wants to say that, they actually have to cast the relevant spell. Say they do so, but then they end up taking a Corruption, a really nasty one they can't afford to sit on when they can't convert it.
What can they do then? They could just take it and face the consequences of the prank, but if they dont want to do that, they could also take a Misfire instead, which spares them the personal consequences, but kicks the ball over to the Keeper to do something with the effect. Oops! The party now has a corpse that looks like this girl. What do you do?
So, while your offer, more or less, might not be accepted at face value, stuff still spins out of it. There is the possibility of you being the only one who brings anything, but I think that mostly comes down to context, as always. If your group has a mission in mind, there's probably going to be some natural resistance to chasing a distraction compared to just meandering around willy nilly.
But at the same time, there's a pretty obvious difference between wanting to get through the distraction and just not engaging with it at all, and thats when we'd have to talk about it, because either your offer broke the game tone (this is supposed to be Happy Qwesting Time not Horrid Murder Time), or the group didn't know where to go with it.
The latter is fortunately part of the responsibility of the Keeper to always ensure there's some feedback going, but the former is when we'd have to make some adjustments out of the game.
Ideally though you wouldn't run into these issues too often. The group would have agreed on tone ahead of time, and ultimately the freedom in Events is that you can opt out of them entirely. Like the game its a player driven system, and most should be able to pick up on the vibes of the group whether or not to inject something really spicy into your adventures.
The few times its happened for me its usually just been because we were all zonked out and tired, and that point it was usually wise to get ourselves into a labyrinth if we wanted to keep playing; while Events happen in dungeons (i call them Discoveries in that context; Curiosities whilst Rambling in big cities), the context makes them less intellectually and emotionally taxing to engage with. Much of the time its less, oh jeeze a murder, and more, yay, more murder to do!
