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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7355151" data-attributes="member: 16814">Again, I think the issue here is your choices to limit your analysis to things you define as supporting your playstyle, like defining agency in respect to the content of the shared fiction.  Even this definition is a bit vague, as you haven't clearly defined it at all.  Using Eero's concepts, it's pretty clear that you accept that the DM has authority over backstory, in that the players do not have any ability or very limited ability to author backstory.  You've repeated that you don't play games that allow players to author backstory by fiat a number of times, so it seems this is where your head is.  So, then, you're correct that you don't define agency with respect to the shared fiction as the ability to author new backstory - that's the DM's job.  Instead, it seems that what you really mean is that the DM has not predefined where the story goes, as in, there is no plot the DM is following.  The play generates the plot through play, thereby giving the players agency over the shared fiction because they help generate the plot of the story through play.  But this kind of definition applies to many kinds of DM-facing play as well -- my play example above had the players generating the fiction through their play, I had no notes or plot developed at all, just some prepared combat stats and a map.  Yes, they received new information from me, either about elements of the map or the combat statistics, but I didn't provide any plot.  In this sense, the 'notes' of the GM don't interfere with the kind of agency you're talking about, but you continue to say that it does.  I can only surmise that when you say 'secret backstory' you don't just mean framing notes the GM uses to provide a scene for play, but also a presupposed plot the GM is using to corral play.  If that's the case, you could have skipped a few hundred posts by being up front about that.  If that's not the case, well, you still haven't clearly explained your position.  That may be because you've defined your terms by the way you play and not by an overarching philosophy.  You keep referencing Eero's works, but I don't see anything there that defines agency the way you do.And, speaking of Eero and how you define agency, it would appear many of the things I've said about the different kinds of agency and how their achieved by the different playstyles lines up with some of Eero's thoughts.  At least, in GNS theory, DM-facing play appears more gamist, and scratches gamist itches that narrativist play cannot, while narrativist play cannot scratch gamist itches.  Not that I'm a big fan of GNS theory, but it has some uses, and this may be one of them:  by defining agency as strictly a narrativist concern, you've excluded (perhaps intentionally) gamist creative agendas from that definition of agency.  However, in doing so, you've also excluded your definition of agency from gamist definitions of agency -- how can I win in a narrativist game, for instance, for the GNS definitions of winning in RPGs?So, by co-opting a narrow definition of agency and not being upfront about what it doesn't cover, you've introduced a confusing discussion where those that use a broader definition of agency (or a different one) are being met with you claiming that agency is increase in your style of play and decreased in theirs.  A true statement if you use your narrow definition, but not in the general sense of agency.  Given you've been very careful to state agency in terms of the shared fiction, I think this distinction is known to you, which means you've decided to not clarify this point intentionally, either because you failed to understand why it caused confusion because you have trouble stepping to the other side of the argument to see the confusion or because you wanted to make a superiority claim in a manner that was obtuse and hard to counter.  I prefer the former.ETA: there were some malformed quote tags in pemerton's post that I quoted that caused formatting issues with this post.  I've removed the tags and the material from my previous post that slipped in with the tags to make this more readable.</blockquote>

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