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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7358776" data-attributes="member: 42582">I believe that [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] is making a point about degrees of player agency over the content of the shared fiction, and perhaps more generally over the "direction and shape" of play (to use a metaphor).I don't see how it refutes AbdulAlhazred to say that "the assumptions of play are not aligned." That's the point! A player of snakes and ladders who tries to choose which squares to move his/her piece into has "misalgined" his/her assumptions of play. But that doesn't mean that players of snakes and ladders have some sort of different, snakes-and-ladders-type agency. It just helps us see that snakes and ladders is a game free of player agency - whereas there are other games in the neighbourhood (eg backgammon) that do involve player agency.And if someone comes along and says, "Well, when we play snakes and ladders we exercise all this agency over how we roll the dice (with a cup, with lots of shaking, over the shoulder, whatever)" or "We exercise all this agency in how we count out the squares" how is the person who said that backgammon has more agency than snakes and ladders meant to respond? I mean, backgammon players can do that stuff too if they want - but they may not bother if the play of the game itself has sufficient agency to hold their interest!As we relax the constraints on snakes and ladders to make it more like backgammon, then attempted moves that once were "misaligned" become apposite. That's precisely because we're introducing agency into the play of the game.Of course any illustration by analogy has its limits; AbdulAlhazred already acknowledged that by calling his a "spherical cow". But the point is still there: in the scenario he described player agency over the content of the shared fiction is minimal at best. The fact that players may manifest their agency in other ways, or over other elements of the RPGing experience, doesn't change the basic point.<a href="https://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">The Czege Principle</a> is the empirical conjecture that "it’s not exciting to play a roleplaying game if the rules require one player to both introduce and resolve a conflict."What AbdulAlhazred has described does not violate the Czege Principle: he is positing that the GM has framed the PC into an endless indiscernible maze; and the player decares "I search for a secret passage to take me to the land of the Yuan Ti." That is just the play of a RPG!To be honest I find it interesting, and potentially quite telling, that both you ( [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION]) and [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] look at perfectly ordinary action declarations in response to GM establishment of the situation - like "I'm in place X - the maze - and want to be in place Y - the land of the Yuan-ti - and so search for a secret passage from X to Y"; or "Enemies have broken down the door to my redoubt, and I want to escape, so I search for a secret escape tunnel" - and see violations of the Czege Principle!You are treating the principle as supporting a prohibition on players' freely declaring actions that would resolve their current predicaments - ie as a licence for railroading!</blockquote>

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