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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9263418" data-attributes="member: 42582">In relation to your last point: am I right in thinking that player agency, in your design, mostly consists in responding to, and &quot;manipulating&quot; via the game mechanics, elements of the fiction that are introduced by the GM and are under the GM's control?Further to the above: this seems to be a system which puts most of the fiction under the GM's control. It's not clear to me how this fits with player agency.A more technical question is, what is the point of the dice rolls? Why does the GM, in writing up the Act, not just decide what those time intervals are?What if the players don't want to play their PCs as a party, but as a group of (perhaps interacting) individuals?What if a PC is not an adventurer but (say) a wizard like Yara in REH's story Tower of the Elephant? Yara had a reputation, but not one earned via adventuring.I'm not sure why physical actions are being favoured here. I mean, the knife-vs-shouted threat thing seems to be about proximity of the threat rather than physicality of the threat.But why should the offer of coin always be more effective than, say, a profession of undying love, or an offer to swear service to another? I guess I'm not following your implicit theory of human nature that's baked into your rules.I guess the overall thrust of my questions is: your rules seem to rest on some pretty strong presuppositions about (i) how the gameworld works, and (ii) how play will work. I think you could make your rules, and your approach to design, clearer by spelling out some of those presuppositions rather than leaving them as an exercise for the reader.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9263418, member: 42582"] In relation to your last point: am I right in thinking that player agency, in your design, mostly consists in responding to, and "manipulating" via the game mechanics, elements of the fiction that are introduced by the GM and are under the GM's control? Further to the above: this seems to be a system which puts most of the fiction under the GM's control. It's not clear to me how this fits with player agency. A more technical question is, what is the point of the dice rolls? Why does the GM, in writing up the Act, not just decide what those time intervals are? What if the players don't want to play their PCs as a party, but as a group of (perhaps interacting) individuals? What if a PC is not an adventurer but (say) a wizard like Yara in REH's story Tower of the Elephant? Yara had a reputation, but not one earned via adventuring. I'm not sure why physical actions are being favoured here. I mean, the knife-vs-shouted threat thing seems to be about [I]proximity of the threat[/I] rather than [I]physicality of the threat[/I]. But why should the offer of coin always be more effective than, say, a profession of undying love, or an offer to swear service to another? I guess I'm not following your implicit theory of human nature that's baked into your rules. I guess the overall thrust of my questions is: your rules seem to rest on some pretty strong presuppositions about (i) how the gameworld works, and (ii) how play will work. I think you could make your rules, and your approach to design, clearer by spelling out some of those presuppositions rather than leaving them as an exercise for the reader. [/QUOTE]

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