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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6594188" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think the classical answer would be that the PC is, in the fiction, influencing the guard to abandon his post. This is a 'Naturalistic' situation, there is in-game causal relationship between the action taken by the PC and the resulting outcome. Why is the player not allowed to influence whether they arrive in the nick of time? They ARE! However the 'Naturalist' agenda restricts player influence to things which are within the causal agency of the character, and NOTHING ELSE. The only allowed avenue of interaction with the game for the player is the character. If the character can't 'go faster' to arrive in time, then the player has no other agency. He can't petition the DM or expend some resource or assert some other rule of the game to achieve 'being there in the nick of time'. Obviously rules systems cannot prevent players from TRYING, and this is one of the weaknesses of the DM-centricism inherent in the Naturalist agenda. The players can always threaten to go play in another game, buy the DM a pizza, argue eloquently, etc, all of which undermines the DM's agenda. One of the properties I perceive in Naturalism is that it is always going to be extremely difficult to say how exactly any given situation advances the agenda. The goal is very diffuse. Its claimed that the whole game will be 'better' in some sense because 'everything flows naturally', but nobody can actually pin down any specific point in the game and show concretely how that works. Contrast this with gamism, I can pretty much say what will or will not make a more interesting or better game. I might be WRONG about that, and it may differ for different styles of player of course, but there are some pretty good guideposts, and making good highly-playable fun games has become rather a science over the past few decades. Heck, you can take a college course of study in it.Likewise a narrativist agenda has some fairly solid guideposts as to what advances it. The idea is to make an exciting and engaging narrative. At any point in play you can utilize some, again somewhat subjective, criteria to say "yeah, this will be more interesting than that." I think the end result is that the naturalist agenda simply hasn't been as much as recognized, let alone really designed towards. Certainly [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] will tell you he knows how to further it, but I'm not sure to what extent even he really knows what works best. To me at least, it feels very murky and subject to failure.</blockquote>

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