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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7359594" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, one point here strikes me instantly. There's a huge difference between the pacing at the table, and the pacing in the game world. Its perfectly feasible to run a game where a character mostly does his own thing and only meets up with a few crises where his interests are threatened. The rest of his life could be just plain boring, but we're not going to play through that, so it doesn't matter. I'm not saying this is 'the answer' to what your saying, but just to put it out there, the PLAYER is the one playing from crisis to crisis. And yes, the GM is going to threaten the character's interests, and thus ENGAGE the player's agenda. However that doesn't mean that character accomplishments are simply going to be open to constant threat. In fact [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] mentioned that several times, the sort of 'no regression clause'. I would give the example of the fighter's castle. Its not cool to keep constantly taking it away and forcing the player to endlessly win it back. It would be more cool to Frankly I think the type of agency you talk about is like apples, and you are stacking and counting those, and we're over hear talking about oranges. While the numbers of apples and oranges might not be totally unrelated, I do not think they constitute a zero sum relation. 'Control of the narrative' itself may be zero sum in that there's only so much narrative produced, but even that isn't really a very good model because its not a one-dimensional situation, there are elements of content, quality (and consider this has multiple definitions, think WotC style 'player types') and quite likely a number of other dimensions here. I don't take this as proven, or even self-evident. TBH I don't really take it as very coherent, as again I don't know what 'pace' we're talking about. Is it the pace of play at the table, or the pace of events in the narrative? I know of no principle of the Standard Narrativistic Model which states that character's must be hammered with a blizzard of attacks on their interests at every moment. They might well progress in stately and serene fashion about their business, and we only pick up their story at those points where it becomes interesting. I'd also question the idea that everything must be a crisis like "your house is on fire!" or something like that. If a player's agenda is "build a trading empire that lasts 10 generations" (I'm thinking OA with its clans and such would be fun for this) then a 'crisis' could simply be "some new guys sail into port with cheaper goods!" and what happens next. Or "you meet a ship captain who tells tales of a fantastic island full of valuable spice you could buy very cheaply, but you'll have to risk a lot money on equipping an expedition, and risk being arrested, because the king has forbidden trade to that island!" or something like that. You don't need to be flinging burning flaming death at the PCs every day of their waking lives. That's crude.Meh, I think what you're talking about, really, is player input, in game as the character, into a 'logistics game'. This is what 5e resting is about, calculating when it is advantageous to stop and recoup ones resources. 5e seems to feel this should be in the player's hands, though there are issues with that design. I don't think those issues are about agency though. In fact I'd say ONE of the issues is actually stemming from LACK of player agency, that the GM has to resort to 'plot costs' in order to create a dilemma for the players, should we rest or press on? Mechanically the answer is, 100% of the time, REST! I suppose this was also somewhat true of 4e, you can only really balance resting's mechanical benefits against narrative effects of doing it.</blockquote>

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