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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9107828" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As long as the criticism is granted...but it sounds, below, like it's not.If this was supposed to have a point, I'm not getting it.Except that that's not at all what's being said."I want to have a loving relationship, except that I want it to be actually a loving relationship, and not simply someone faking expressions of love and care so they can get something from me." It's a reciprocity, not just a feeling in my head. The feeling in my head is an extremely important part. The status-in-the-world--that the feelings are sincere and reciprocated--is equally important. Without both things, it fails. Without me actually feeling love for another, it would be pointless. Without the feelings being reciprocated, it would be false and hollow--and would hurt to find out after a long period of believing it was true.Feeling love and that I am loved is, absolutely, unquestionably critical. Actually being loved--and loving in return--is equally critical. They are individually necessary and jointly sufficient.No. It's not. It's not actually having any influence or control. Believing you have influence or control does not mean you actually do have such influence or control.Did you make choices which actually did influence (or even control) the state of play, outside and separate from the fiat declarations of anyone else?If yes, you had agency (influence-and/or-control) over those things. If no, you did not. That's Maxperson's binary. Since this can occur both in many different events, and in many different forms, however, it is possible to have "more" or "less" of it in the macro aggregate, even though it is at the micro scale a binary. "Events" would, for example, be the difference between getting to choose what class, race, background, etc. you play, vs getting to declare what adventures are worth having (rather than pick from a list provided to you, or submit adventures for approval and processing.) "Forms," by contrast, would be things like having influence or control over fundamentally different kinds of things, for example agency (influence-and/or-control) over the personal actions, attitudes, and priorities of your character (my understanding of the term "character agency"); agency (influence-and/or-control) over the goal(s) and parameters of the gameplay (my understanding of the term "player agency"); agency (influence-and/or-control) over whether, and how, the game features themes of sex, abuse, or mind control (what I would call "content agency," addressed with tools before play like "lines" and "veils," and tools in-play like the X-card and O-card); and possibly others.Games which offer more events of agency (influence-and/or-control) over something are preferable, to me, to those which offer fewer. Conversely, those which primarily falsely present situations as offering me agency (influence-and/or-control) over something are completely unacceptable, to the point of actively raising my ire, should I discover this is the case. I don't like being deceived, and doubly so with something like this where such deception is literally never required.I consider it charitable to assume that a given table will, sincerely and not falsely, offer as many events of agency (influence-and/or-control) as feasible, with a generous definition of "feasible." And, as seems relatively(?) uncontroversial, both a "(neo?)trad" game and a "narrative" game will offer all the same events of agency (influence-and/or-control) of the form(s) compatible with the former's design. However, per other posters in this thread, the form often referred to here as "player agency" (which, again, I understand to be influence-and/or-control over the goals and parameters of play) is not only absent, but desirably absent from such "(neo?)trad" gaming. These other posters are in fact gratified by the fact that events of the player-agency (influence-and/or-control) form are not present--ever, if possible.Hence, "narrative" games offer all the same character agency (influence-and/or-control over) events as "(neo?)trad" games, but they also offer a further, additional set of events of player agency (influence-and/or-control.) What other term should be used, then, but to say that the former offers more agency (influence-and/or-control) than the latter--both in terms of individual events (since player-agency, influence-and/or-control, events can occur in the former but not the latter) and in terms of general forms (since the payer-agency, influence-and/or-control, form is present in the former but not in the latter.)This is not, at all, to say that it is universally better to offer more forms of agency (influence-and/or-control) than fewer, nor that it is universally better to offer more agency (influence-and/or-control) events than to offer fewer. I enjoy FFXIV, for example, which has essentially no player-agency (influence-and/or-control) at all, and sharply limited character-agency (influence-and/or-control).They felt love. But they weren't in a loving relationship. They simply--mistakenly--believed that they were. And that is what is actually analogous here. It's why your example player felt betrayed when they realized that their feeling of agency (influence-and/or-control) did not actually correspond to the reality of the situation. Why it stripped their past experiences of value when they learned that nothing they chose actually had any influence upon or control over the results; those results were always spindled, folded, or mutilated into being whatever the GM wanted them to be. They just were very good at faking the appearance of such influence-and/or-control.Just as, sadly, many people IRL are very good at faking expressions of love--and thus there are quite a few one-sided relationships, where one person is using another. A person doesn't feel betrayed because they have a crush and then, later on, realize that that was just infatuation and not actually love. People absolutely do feel betrayed when they expressed love and thought someone reciprocated it, only to later find that that reciprocation was false. They still felt the love they felt for someone else--but the relationship was not there, even though they (at the time) believed it was.</blockquote>

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