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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8661074" data-attributes="member: 86653">Sorry that I don't preface every post with the complete list of games I've ever played to allay your suspicions. Here's a thought. You could start a thread where you demand everyone on the forums posts every game they've ever played just so you can check to be sure when they disagree with you. I'm sure that would work. Of course that's self-reporting, just like your assertions that you've played these games. Your claims are just as valid as mine. Any chance we can permanently skip the bit where you feel the need to question other people's geek cred whenever they disagree with you? It's boring, really.Of course you are. Because I disagree with you. And because I disagree you cannot believe I have read or played or run these games. How's the sequence go: If you disagree with me you must not have read it, if you've read it you must not understand it, if you claim to understand it the fact that you disagree with me proves you don't understand. It's the same thing every time. It is a salient point. Sorry you disagree, you must not have read the same PbtA games I have. Or you must not have played or run them as much as I have. Or...you know...we can both be real gamers and just have a disagreement.Because it's true. As seen from the example in the thread. One PC pulls a gun and the whole group is referee-fiat captured as a result. Removing the agency of the PCs to resist that capture in any way. That clearly causes problems with several posters' sense of agency. It's because the difference in resolution that some agency is removed. If the characters were real people in a real world facing that situation, they'd be able to do something about it. At least try. But PbtA games have a lower resolution, zoom out, etc and you lose granularity. You lose some agency as a result. It's not necessarily bad, but it's a bit weird to pretend it's not true.So? The players control their characters. The referee controls the world. Conflicts aren't resolved until both sides decide they are, something forces one side to relent, or one side ceases to exist.That's the point. The PC don't want the conflict to resolve this way, they want to fight it...but they can't. Their ability to fight it...their agency...is removed and the referee simply declares something to be true that the characters reasonably would be able to act against.Right. Up to a point. Players can make meaningful choices from a finite, curated list of moves. Anything not directly related to those is either out of bounds or up to the referee. PbtA certainly pushes things towards drama, I'm not claiming otherwise. But it does so by removing agency. You have to skip over agency to hard frame a scene. You have to skip over agency to make a sequence-of-events move in response to a failed player move.A player rolls a failure on some check, now the referee gets a move. The referee picks hard or soft, say hard. The referee picks from a list or makes one up. The referee then spits that hard move out into the fiction...without the players being able to do anything about it. This is why I always start with soft move, to telegraph terrible things about to happen rather than just spring something on the players. It's such a cool idea that I basically stole it and use it to run all my games.A separate example but shows the same thing. A player fails a move, the referee makes a hard move, separate the party. Cool. What form does that take? A wall falls between them. Okay. Sweet. Now, if you've played any RPG for more than five minutes, you know you'll have a table full of players shouting at you about all the things they're going to do to prevent this from happening before you can finish the sentence declaring the wall falls between them...or you have players gripe about how they wanted to do something but you won't let them. But nope. The wall falls, the party is separated. What agency do the characters have in that event? None.</blockquote>

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