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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7345721" data-attributes="member: 82106">I know this discussion has moved on rapidly and I'm 9 pages behind now, lol, but I think there IS a point here that you're kind of papering over.There are INFINITE possible responses to the narration of the DM, that's in fact what characterizes an RPG more than anything else (aside from the particularization of being assigned one specific character) is the open-ended nature of the interactions between the characters and the DM/fiction.In other words, while 'Caves of Chaos' (B2) is a pretty cut-and-dried sandboxy location-based adventure (IE you describe where you go, certain things will be there, you interact with them) you can still do a ton of different things. For example, you could simply brick up the hobgoblin's tunnel. Now, maybe that plan won't work, there are many obvious ways it could go wrong, but the scenario that results WILL be completely different from the scenario that results from entering the cave and trying to clean it out in the fashion most likely expected by the module's author. Beyond that, the scenario, as published, doesn't in any way help you to figure WHAT will happen when the PCs try to brick up the hobgoblins. Will they all muster and pour out of the cave at once for a huge battle in the open? Will they snipe at the PCs from the dark shadows? Will they beat their wardrums and signal willingness to pay the ogres 500gp to come over from their cave and slaughter the PCs? We just don't know. The players don't know either; much like they don't know what will happen when the King is assassinated in a previous example. Its a complex situation. Now, some GMs might resolve it effectively by thinking up every obstacle to the plan and throwing it at the party. Others might simply let the players express their desires to build a wall, and let the hobgoblins be walled in, big deal, right? OK, now some new thing will happen, maybe related to that, maybe not, depending on what the PCs do next. I guess what I'm saying is, there's less 'air' between the two kinds of play in many cases than is being acknowledged. It depends on the GM and the players, and of course you can use 'Pemertonian' principles to run B2, although it isn't exceptionally well-adapted to that there's certainly enough embodied within the setup there to cater to a fairly wide variety of player agendas given the genre and whatnot. In other words I think, in practice, if you could go back to 1975 and play with EGG in the Kitchen you'd probably have a decent amount of agency, though maybe not so much until you established some creds in the dungeon crawling skill game.</blockquote>

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