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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6862572" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with this too, but to me this just reiterates my point upthread about varying play styles.If the aspiration for play is to create a character - including, perhaps, a weaker-than-default character - and then see what happens, the exercise of agency is in designing that character. The rest of play isn't about agency at all, but finding out what happens. If, in play, the GM reduces the character's weaknesses, then that's just part of what happens. (And drives home that such a game is GM rather than player driven.)If the aspiration for play is protagonism, then the idea that it is an expression of agency to reduce the mechanical capacity to impact the fiction verges on the self-contradictory.Related to these variations, I think, is something else that I'm not 100% clear on but seems to be a definite theme in some posts on this thread: the idea that it's virtuous for a player to renounce mechanical capacity to impact the fiction, and that it is a personality flaw (or, at least, not a virtue) for a player to aspire to impact the fiction via the mechanics. It's a type of lauding of passivity.It reminds me a bit of <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Ron Edwards on ouija-board roleplaying</a>:How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power. Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors . . . Rarely, another person participates and (horrors!) actually overtly moves the planchette, or discusses how it's being moved. That person is instantly ejected, with cries of "powergamer!" and "pushy bastard!"In my experience, the way to reliably get dramatic play is to have players prepared to push their PCs in dramatic directions (that is, to overtly move the planchette). To do this, they need mechanical agency.I'm also reminded of this passage from <a href="https://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/itoolkit3.html" target="_blank">Chris Kubasik's "Interactive Toolkit"</a>:Characters drive the narrative of all stories. However, many people mistake character for characterization. Characterization is the look of a character, the description of his voice, the quirks of habit. Characterization creates the concrete detail of a character through the use of sensory detail and exposition. By "seeing" how a character looks, how he picks up his wine glass, by knowing he has a love of fine tobacco, the character becomes concrete to our imagination, even while remaining nothing more than black ink upon a white page. But a person thus described is not a character. A character must do. Character is action. . . .  This means that the best way to reveal your character is not through on an esoteric monologue about pipe and tobacco delivered by your character, but through your character's actions. But what actions? Not every action is true to a character; it is not enough to haphazardly do things in the name of action. Instead, actions must grow from the roots of Goals. A characterization imbued with a Goal that leads to action is a character.Characterisation of a PC, as set out by Kubasik, is passive. It doesn't involve the player actually impacting the fiction. But until we actually see the player establishing and acting on a goal for his/her PC - not just lamenting the death of his/her father, but actively pursuing it - we won't have a dramatic arc. And this requires the tools to act within, and upon, the fiction.</blockquote>

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