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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7358918" data-attributes="member: 16814">This is a bit vague.  My understanding is that the GM is supposed to frame scenes that bring the player agendas into crisis, which isn't the same thing as framing things the players are interested in.  The form of the crisis is the invention of the GM, not the player, and only loosely follows player interests in that the crisis formed attacks some part of the player's agenda.  The fact that all scenes are supposed to place the player agenda into unavoidable crisis is the bit that I'm actually talking about.  The defense that 'well, it's still the player's agenda' doesn't really defuse the point that the players lack agency to mitigate or choose the crisis they're forced into.Again, this is analytical. I think that there's a lot of fun in games that do this, that constantly bang the drum on crisis and make the players make hard choices.  But, it that fun does come as some costs -- it's not all free lunch.  And, when discussing agency, I think it's okay to acknowledge that it is a zero-sum game because we all can't have total agency in a shared space -- we also have to share the agency or it's not a shared space.  How we share that agency is useful, but not when we're denying that agency sharing occurs and try to claim that one style has more agency than another in total.  This is why I've tried to be so clear about how [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has defined agency for his discussion.  Under that definition, the agency over what's added to the fiction and how is more broadly given to players and taken from the DM in player-facing games (by definition of player facing, I'd argue).  However, this doesn't mean that some other agencies aren't given back to the DM to compensate.  The agency over pacing, for instance, seems to be a big concession -- players in DM facing games tend to have much more agency over pacing than in player facing games because crisis is an emergent function of DM facing games while it's a focus in player-facing games.  Players in player-facing games cannot avoid or mitigate crisis by slowing down the pacing.  Players in DM-facing games have less agency to introduce new fiction to overcome crisis.  This is because they have more agency in pacing to mitigate and overcome crisis.  Much of the discussion about resting in 5e is really about how much agency the players have over pacing and how it can trivialize many elements of the game that the DM uses to advance to crisis.  So, this isn't something that's new, even if it's not normally discussed in terms like 'agency over pacing.'</blockquote>

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