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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9109795" data-attributes="member: 82106">Its an honest and I think fairly straightforward expression of beliefs/experience with play that I can understand from long experience with trad play as well as some nagging dissatisfaction with its character that I had 'back in the day'. I think a lot of this just comes down to having experienced basically one paradigm of RPG play and looking at the whole problem from that one perspective. For a good 20 years that was pretty much the only perspective I had. You get discussions around agency in the terms you get them, because nobody in the discussion has conceived of the sort of alternatives that are presented today in narrativist games and were not really articulated until at least the mid 1990s in any significant form (and really not fully elucidated for a few years after that). So, if I only envisage a game where the GM is the origin of all fiction and defines the entire state of the world outside my character's skin, and the overall focus of play, the possible plots and participants, locations, etc.; where the focus of play is ON those things, exploring them, manipulating them, etc. then the only kind of expression that said player CAN articulate is one similar to what you have described. That is they won't articulate a divergence of agenda into the realm of controlling the focus of play because they simply have not experienced the possibility of that kind of game. VERY rarely people will escape from those sorts of mental constraints! I mean, [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] has shown examples from 1977 Traveller of a part of the rules which envisages a kind of player-directed focus in one small area (Streetwise skill use), and I'm sure we can describe others (I think its fair to cite the game 'Toon' as being pretty open to this kind of thing). I remember we used to play a game called Gangster! where we hit on the idea of the gangsters pretty much just inventing criminal enterprises and describing how they worked, making up corrupt cops and whatever else was required to describe it. That was probably not the way the game was written, but we came up with that, though oddly we never thought to apply similar techniques to, say, D&D. In terms of GM scarcity. I don't know if there's any inherent scarcity of GMs capable of running narrativist play or not. IME it is a less burdensome sort of role than trad GM, as it generally requires vastly less prep and whatnot. I mean, sure, maybe there are different skillsets involved and some people will not be good at both. I think its hard to say, and given the propensity of the hobby to be highly conservative in matters of play style I think this kind of question simply hasn't really been explored that much. PbtA/FitD based games are fairly popular these days though, so I tend to think its less about a dearth of potential GMs and more about visibility. Most people equate RPGs with D&D, so it has most of the focus and sales, and is very likely to be what people get used to playing.</blockquote>

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