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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7357593" data-attributes="member: 82106">I mean to 'play with the agency of the character'. Advocacy isn't really relevant here, although presumably a character is a vehicle for the player to express some sort of desire about what she wants to play. I would call 'actor stance' (I haven't really used these terms) to be 'playing in first person', but in my discussion first person isn't really material either. What is material is that the player is taking, within the game world and its fiction, the characteristics, the AGENCY (ability to do things in the game) of the character. This is what you mean by 'no meta-game' presumably.As with [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], I find it odd that anyone would assert that players bound to character stance have the same agency WRT the fiction as one's who don't live within that limit. Beyond that though, Pemerton's point includes that a player CAN be entirely in what I call character stance and STILL exercise agency over the fiction, and that this is a common method of play. I think it is what most of us are really debating about here. You, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION], et al often maintain that you take into consideration player motivations, desires, suggestions, possibly even to the level of players establishing fictional elements via making checks (IE I search for a secret door and one shows up if the search is successful) in some cases.I think there's an unbroken continuum in a practical sense from my 'spherical cow' endless random maze where all decisions are pointless, on up through Arnesonian (poor guy gets shafted on credit too much) dungeon play, to various degrees of GM establishment of and utilization of fixed backstory and hidden positioning, on up through all the degrees of GMs cooperating with players to put the elements they want into the story, finally on up to formal scene framing (standard narrativist model) play, and into formal systems of player authorship, and finally unconstrained group authorship. In this context I think it is reasonable to get back to the original discussion of world building (which I would generalize to most GM pre-authored backstory and setting). As you approach the Standard Narrativist Model level of player agency is there a different role for world building than there would be in say a dungeon crawl?</blockquote>

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