Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheAlkaizer" data-source="post: 8678259" data-attributes="member: 7024893">My understanding of what he describes is as follow. Obviously, this is tainted by my style and limited experiences.Players will sometimes have long-term goals. But most of the play action in a session is directed towards shorter-term goals. We often seek to achieve short-term goals in the most direct way possible. We're not interested in convoluted solutions (even though sometimes what we think is direct ends up being convoluted). The reality is that going from short-term goal to short-term goal makes for interesting beats, but together they don't necessarily make for an interesting story or arc.A lot of players, especially newer ones (post-critical role) are interested in a variety of elements of the game, but if they invest time in a campaign that will last, they want a memorable story and some good memories to take home. The DM, in the elements he prepare, in the rulings he does, in the behaviors he encourages or discourages at the table has a ton of power over the shape that a long-term campaign can take.And thus, while the players are focused on their shorter-term goal, you can weave elements in a way where it creates interesting reversals of situations, dilemmas, challenges and hopefully create a more meaningful story than just an anthological series of quests. If you have players that come with detailed backstories like the characters in Critical Role, they're actually giving you even more power as a GM. They're saying "this is important to my character, he might seek or try to avoid this. I don't know what will happen, but I want this to be important". Where, when and how you weave it or introduce it can have a ton of effect on the story created.And all of that has little to do with agency. I'm also a hard defender of agency as the core element of roleplaying games. But like most topics, I've disagreed with some definitions of agency.I think it was actually about the new Critical Role short series that's set before a cataclysm. I read some posts that said that the players had no agency because everyone knew that in the end, a catastrophe would happen and they had no way to stop it. Sure, if what the players wanted to do was to stop it and if there was some implicit suggestion that it could be stopped, it'd be robbing them of their agency to make it so it couldn't be stopped. No matter what you do or try or come up with, the outcome is fixed. But you can absolutely have some unavoidable event that's the backdrop of a more personal story. It does not rob the players of agency, even if they get affected by it; because it's not their main goal. They don't direct most of their decision making towards avoiding it. It's just interesting to see them have adventures and solve more personal endeavours while this event is happening.Having a campaign happened during the failing weeks of an empire (like Rome) or during a large plague (like the black death) would make for unavoidable situations but very interesting contexts for players to exercise their agency.</blockquote>

Verification