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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7352087" data-attributes="member: 82106">But this is, again, IMHO, a very dicey proposition indeed. Given the vast number of possible ways that different NPCs could know things, and the possible relationships between them, even in a setting where the GM has created a lot of detail, it beggars the imagination to believe that you can judge on any other basis than narrative/aesthetic concerns who knows what. I mean, yes, that means you can play each NPC in terms of what they know and don't know, relative to others, but you're not really constrained in terms of what that is, nor can you really reason about it in any causal way beyond some very trivial "this is common sense" possibilities (IE my ally probably knows my plan kind of thing).  I don't think this observation is relevant. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s point is that the GM would be deciding EVERYTHING in that situation, yet your definition of player agency considers the players to have 'agency' of some sort. As I said in an earlier post yesterday, I think this is confusing fictional PC agency with real player agency. The later can be completely lacking, or exist to whatever degree, and the former can be complete. I can imagine a game where the PC's actions are totally unconstrained, and yet the player makes no meaningful decisions at all. Consistency with fiction isn't even related to this. As to what is a 'good' or 'bad' game, that's totally a matter of taste.Well, you have to posit some sort of motivation or goal that makes your character interesting enough to play. I mean, if you want to just play the town drunk who sits in the bar all evening and never does a thing is that really something anyone would bother to do? Its OK as a hypothetical, but its really sort of a 'spherical cow' kind of a thing.Its a reasonable question. My reaction is that surely the 2nd PC's goal will have some effect on the family farm! This might create tension between the two, or their aims might be aligned. There's still the question of what might happen 'in the middle' to keep them both hooked, but I think there are likely a range of threats to the farm which cover all levels. The first PC might also 'grow' in terms of her ambitions, so that once she saves the farm then she saves the town, the barony, the kingdom, and eventually the whole of creation! This would be a VERY 4e-type of conception of heroic story arc.Likewise the character with the grandiose plans probably doesn't start with that as their main focus. Clearly they're not out there god-killing in episode one. In 4e terms they're going to spend heroic tier maybe struggling against the evils of the current faith (at least as they perceive it), and maybe in paragon they overthrow the kingdom's religious institution and institute the new one, and in epic they deal with the repercussions of that leading up to a necessary war against the 'old gods' or something like that. Because, if you examine how things work in the real world, any given effect has many complex causes, and these causes are themselves interrelated in complex ways because they share earlier causes with other things, and each other. The point isn't that you care about them, but that you can pretty much decree anything and construct some causal process that is compatible with that outcome and your initial world state. That state and that outcome are simply not tightly enough constrained to bind you in any appreciable degree. Go back to the example of the sword being swung at the orc. I can create an almost unimaginably large number of narratives which describe an equally large number of outcomes to that act which are all plausible. Thus the idea of 'causality' in the fictional world isn't ACTUALLY binding on the GM. It doesn't form any meaningful constraint on the narrative he can describe at any point, and it has almost no value to the players as a means of predicting what will come next. All that we are left with is narrative sensibility, genre tropes, table conventions, and a willingness to stick to whatever rules the game may present which apply in a given situation. Fictional causality is powerless, it has no teeth, it is an illusion, nothing more.</blockquote>

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