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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7333066" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes, they do.In [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s example, the players' knowledge of the cart is practically zero, their knowledge that they've pushed it over much the same, and their ability to ascertain and manage the consequences in any sort of proactive manner very close to zero also.The sequence of play he describes for us is: GM narrates situation; players declare some fairly banal actions to deal with the immediate situation; GM tells herself a whole lot of stuff about the setting and its development; GM narrates another situation for the PCs (eg the Duke's men arrest them for facilitiating the assassination attempt). Where did the players have agency there? As in, where did they get to make meaningful and significant choices about what the game would involved?All I can see is that they pushed a button of the GM's which was, from their point of view, essentially random; and then the GM told them some more stuff that likewise, from their point of view, was essentially random.In Lanefan's example, the player action was to intervene in a fracas about which they knew nothing of its significance or its perpetrators. The PCs acted. But what did the players actually do, in the game? They triggered the GM to work out a whole lot of fiction for herself.I'm not arguing that this is good or bad, fun or not fun. (I have my preferences; they're not secret; but they're just idiosyncracies about me.) I'm trying to actually identify what the play consists in: who makes what sorts of decisions, what sorts of "game moves", and how do these affect the content of the shared fiction?In Lanefan's example, all the important moves seem to be made by the GM, and many of them in secret. The players don't seem to have made any meaningful move at all: they didn't have any intention to bring about all the changes that the GM actually made to the fiction in response to their action declarations for their PCs.I don't want to challenge this at all.</blockquote>

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