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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7344244" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't see how this is different in any fundamental way from my description: the goal of play is to make moves that will trigger the GM to relate/narrate the relevant bit of fiction which is (actually, or at least notionally) recorded in his/her notes.The "diffused" agency that you describe here is, as best I can tell, the capacity to choose between narration-triggering moves. Depending on past such moves, the players may or may not have a sense of how different such choices are likely to trigger different narrations (eg a past move may have yielded a rumour, which suggests that the map is actually lost in the cave and not in the study at all).The capacity to influence the sequence of narrations (and perhaps whether or not they occur at all) isn't agency over the content of what is narrated. That is, it's not agency over the content of the shared fiction.That is not going to be true, in general.Eg the very first scene in my BW game presented the PC whose goal was to find magical items to help him free his brother from balrog possession with a chance to acquire an angel feather. The "challenge" in the scene was to determine the nature of the feather, whether it was worth trying to buy, whether instead to try and steal it, etc.In my 4e game, the most notable constraint on fictional positioning is the tiers of play ie 1st level PCs simply can't be framed, in any meaningful way, into direct conflict with Orcus. Instead it's undead and cultists. When the PCs were finally ready to confont Orcus, it wasn't hard (in mechanical terms) to establish the relevant fictional positioning; though they had to make some story choices which involved risks.The purpose of framing in "player-facing" games <a href="https://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">is pretty simple</a>: One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. . . . The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.How this should all be paced, and how to choose what sort of framing to start with or to progress to, etc, is all completely contextual.If a player stakes discovery of the map, and fails, that is losing at a move in a game. That is actually quiet different, I think, from the GM stipulating failure. I don't see them as "pretty much the same" at all.A long way upthread I said that a game run in accordance with the "standard narrativistic model" can suffer if the GM's framing is weak or misjudged, so that it fails to provoke choices as it is meant to.I don't really see how that bears on the issue of player agency: the problem with such a game is not that the players have no agency, but that it's boring and so they have no reason to exercise it.You keep equivocating on the word "fiction". I have not asserted that fictions (= stories) don't exist. I have asserted that fictional things - fictions in the sense of imagined entities - don't exist.Novels are real. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a real thing, a composed story. But Sherlock Holmes is not a real thing. He doesn't exist, and he exerts no causal influence on anything (although in the story he is imagined to do so). Asserting otherwise makes it almost impossible to analyse processes of authorship.To reiterate - deciding, as an author, that character X has killed the orc you just mentioned is no different from deciding that character X has found a map in the study you just mentioned. I just proved it, in fact, by writing the two sentences! The process was the same in both cases - conceiving of a change in the fiction, by introducing a new event (a killing, a finding of a map) that links character X to the previously mentioned element (the orc, the study).It's only by treating the authoring of a killing as if it were actually a killing, and the authoring of the finding of a map as if it were actually a discovery, that one would be led to think that they involve different processes of authorship.But that would be a confusion; the same sort of confusion that leads to things like the suggestion that a GM deciding how a fictional person responds to an imagined threat is a realistic model of how an actual person might actually respond to an actual threat.</blockquote>

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