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What is player agency to you?
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<blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 9117689" data-attributes="member: 16586"><p>A player does not just make a Circles check to get X to happen. They must declare a credible action that could possibly result in say finding their brother in the city based on established fiction about their brother and the city. Part of the reason why someone would want to run a game with a mechanic like Circles checks is because they don't want to engage in the sort of fine-grained world building or extrapolation from world building to determine where NPC X is at Y time and/or play through scenes of a player character going from place to place searching for a particular NPC. They just can't be arsed to.</p><p></p><p>When I am running more traditional games, I tend to play most of this stuff fairly fast and loose myself.<em> I look for X person in their usual hangouts </em>or sometimes <em>even I go looking for X</em> is generally enough to get things moving. More often than not unless someone is trying to not be found the scene just happens. Sometimes they might have other stuff going on in which case I make it clear so players can investigate because for the most part these sorts of physical logistics are a lot less interesting to me than NPC relationships, what they are up to, etc.</p><p></p><p>I think it's most useful to assume a GM wants to be running the game they are running. This might not always be the case for more mainstream games like 5e, but it is assuredly the case for games like Burning Wheel. Part of the reason why one might prefer to run a game like Burning Wheel is because they are emphatically interested in exploration of player character beliefs and are emphatically not interested in logistics and extrapolation from detailed world building.</p><p></p><p>There's a particular context for these rules. That context includes a game where the GM is intended to be more focused on thematic concerns than on detailed world building. When you are running Burning Wheel you are like framing scene after scene of adversity. It requires a lot of creative energy and mental bandwidth to be doing that sort of on-the-fly scenario design. You don't have the bandwidth to also be dealing with those sorts of discrete logistics.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Campbell, post: 9117689, member: 16586"] A player does not just make a Circles check to get X to happen. They must declare a credible action that could possibly result in say finding their brother in the city based on established fiction about their brother and the city. Part of the reason why someone would want to run a game with a mechanic like Circles checks is because they don't want to engage in the sort of fine-grained world building or extrapolation from world building to determine where NPC X is at Y time and/or play through scenes of a player character going from place to place searching for a particular NPC. They just can't be arsed to. When I am running more traditional games, I tend to play most of this stuff fairly fast and loose myself.[I] I look for X person in their usual hangouts [/I]or sometimes [I]even I go looking for X[/I] is generally enough to get things moving. More often than not unless someone is trying to not be found the scene just happens. Sometimes they might have other stuff going on in which case I make it clear so players can investigate because for the most part these sorts of physical logistics are a lot less interesting to me than NPC relationships, what they are up to, etc. I think it's most useful to assume a GM wants to be running the game they are running. This might not always be the case for more mainstream games like 5e, but it is assuredly the case for games like Burning Wheel. Part of the reason why one might prefer to run a game like Burning Wheel is because they are emphatically interested in exploration of player character beliefs and are emphatically not interested in logistics and extrapolation from detailed world building. There's a particular context for these rules. That context includes a game where the GM is intended to be more focused on thematic concerns than on detailed world building. When you are running Burning Wheel you are like framing scene after scene of adversity. It requires a lot of creative energy and mental bandwidth to be doing that sort of on-the-fly scenario design. You don't have the bandwidth to also be dealing with those sorts of discrete logistics. [/QUOTE]
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