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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7374122" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is bizarrely backwards.There is no clue. There is a chance for the player to commit - or not, if s/he is feeling weak or cautious. For instance, given that the PC has an Affiliation with a sorcerous cabal, it would be easily open to the player to reach out to a contact and learn what sort of reputation - if any - this peddler has.It's a weird conception of agency where (i) we know that what the player is interested in includes items that have the possibility of being useful in confronting a balrog, and (ii) it's judged a burden on agency to present the player with situations that speak to this desire, while (iii) it's considered an increase in agency to make the player jump through essentially GM-driven and mediated hoops (is there a sage? is there a shop? who knows where angel feathers might be sold?) before we actually get to the core moment of play.Again, this is all weirdly backwards. You're saying that the GM increases agency by saying choose from these things I'm offering rather than here, engage with this thing that you've shown you care about.The other bit that's biazarre is that you increase choice by saying "You're in the town" raher than "You're at the bazaar" - as if your playuer has all the town choices pluys, once the PC gets to the bazaar, all the bazaar choices. Buit by the time (say, half-an-hour of play) your PC gets to the bazaar (or the sage, or whatever), guess what! - my table has been playing to, and the player at my table has made choices (what to do about the curse, who to ask for work, what to do about spotting the vendor of the cursed feather lurking in Jabal's tower).Tight scene-framing doesn't reduce choice. It just means that the choices more often egnage dramatic need rather than are simply requests for the GM to download setting information.Integrating the goals of multiple players is an important matter in player-driven RPGing. Both [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] and I have posted about it at some length, over multiple posts, upthread.But (1) you don't address this matter by giving all agency to the GM. And (2) the gameworld at large is not a participant who can be slighted or harmed by player :"selfishness". It's just a metaphor for GM authorship!As choice situations in a RPG, the fictional setup in the second is no more limiting than the first. Given that the bazaar is in a town, the player whose PC is framed into the bazaar has all the same action declaration options vis-a-vis the fiction as does the player whose PC is framed into the town - but in addition, the framing speaks directly to his/her PC's dramatic need.But - to go back to the "choose your own adventure" motif - agency over the content of the shared fiction is not established simply by the fact that in the fiction, the PC has choices. If the content of all those choices is established by the GM, and if the significant outcomes of them are primarily a function of GM authorship of unrevealed backstory (as in your example of the mage who charms the spy and therefore but unknown to the player allows the attempt to be made on the life of the duke), then the player is not contributing very much to the content of the shared fiction.It's not an issue of permission. It's an issue of what's the point. If the plaeyr wants to play a Raven Queen devotee, and the table is in the middle of an exciting sequence dealing with the plots of some Orcus cultists, what does it add to play to tell the players that their PCs come to an intersection?That doesn't increase choice, for the reason already described - if I'm not wasting my time on that, I'll instead be framing a situation which invites relevant choices (eg the Orcus cultists are trying to bring the PC's friend back to life as a zombie).The only answer I can see is because - for whatever aesthetic reason - one prefers RPGing to consist in the GM telling the players stuff that is independent of player exercise of agency in respect of the content of the shared fiction.And there could hardly be a clearer example of my point. This is the player being told a story by the GM, about a city that the GM has made up, or is making up. All the player is doing is triggering the GM to tell him/her stuff!</blockquote>

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