Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 9085280" data-attributes="member: 5142">FWIW, I don't think that the problem is some hypothetical other person you are imagining denigrating your favored game on this basis. Instead, I personally think that this reflects your own belief and values that more player agency is better and that it exists as moral good that should be maximized. You would like to believe that you are maximizing player agency. However, when you are confronted with the idea that other roleplaying games may have more player agency than the games you prefer, you perceive it as a threat to your belief system, wherein you claim to value player agency and therefore desire to maximize player agency.Yet instead of seeing the value of how restricting player agency in key areas enhances your play experience, you become upset that your game preference could hypothetically be perceived as having less player agency than those games that exist outside of your preferences.  Again, this is because your own choice to see player agency as a moral good or simply in terms of more player agency is better. Because if you choose to believe that more player agency is better, then any roleplaying game or viewpoint that has a more expansive view of player agency would carry for you the value judgment that your game is inferior. That possibility is unacceptable to you.However, your solution to this perceived threat then becomes to deny that any player agency outside of your play preferences is a form of player agency at all! This is where I and others take umbrage, because I do believe that a player's agency as part of gameplay entails more than the declarations that they make for their player character in the game fiction.At least that's my personal reading of the situation.You go around so many threads to parade the idea to other posters talking about the direction D&D is taking that "new is not always better." I personally don't see why you can't do something similar with player agency and adopt the mantra, "more agency is not always better." And I would agree with you there because like with the former, it's a more defendable motte position than what is likely your more controversial bailey position.However, the actual argument you made earlier just seems like a null point for me. I would like to think that I have I made my stance on this issue pretty clear <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/what-is-player-agency-to-you.698831/page-21#post-9081156" target="_blank">here</a>, and [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] likewise put forth a similar view <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/what-is-player-agency-to-you.698831/page-58#post-9085230" target="_blank">above</a>. I have no interest in denigrating other games on the basis of agency as a moral good. I don't think or believe that more player agency is always better. Instead, I think that it's important to recognize how the restrictions on player agency can improve the play experience of some preferences, styles, and modes of play. The amount of player agency that I may want is not a constant; instead, it depends on the tabletop roleplaying game I want to play, what I hope to get out of it, or even who I am playing it with.My own partner seems to prefer games with less player agency than likely you or I do. They play video games for story that is revealed to them, and I think that they approach TTRPGs with a similar preference. They don't like having to pro-actively pusue their own goals in the game. They like adventure paths with story. I don't think less of them for their game preferences. I'm past the point of judging people who prefer adventure paths. I'm not judging my partner for their TTRPG preference for less player agency, and I honestly hope you aren't either. Otherwise, we will have more serious problems.It turns out that it's something that can be learned through a simple Google search:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furphy" target="_blank"> furphy</a>.</blockquote>

Verification