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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9080729" data-attributes="member: 6690965">This is the precise reason I've pushed to divide narrative and ludic agency. Depending on the implementation of narrative agency (FATE points being a prime example), you can get into a situation where the gameplay decisions narrow (or lead to trivial optimization cases) as the narrative choices expand. A game with fewer possible action declarations may have more space to string them together in different ways, with different decision points to reach a goal than a game with broader action declarations does. Ludic agency requires a certain amount of space and limitation between a starting board state and a victory condition, which can easily be collapsed down to a single point of resolution as the scope of action declarations expand, or in some cases the opposite, as evaluation becomes impossible because the game state changes too dynamically in response to player actions.Players in a game of Iberian Gauge have less agency than players in a game of 1817, but both those games are about the same thing (building publicly traded rail networks and amassing wealth) and no player has any authority in either game over what the game is about. There are simply fewer, more constrained actions available in IG than 1817 that have less impact on the board and fewer possible paths to victory. RPGs don't escape questions of gameplay just because they also contain storytelling and worldbuilding and all their unique features over other kinds of games. Agency isn't an irreducible quantum; agency to do what, in what field? Those different fields impact each other.</blockquote>

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