Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7378656" data-attributes="member: 29398">His point, as I understood it, had nothing to do with narrative control specifically.I'll try to put it in my own words: different games - including but not at all limited to RPGs - each give players a certain amount of agency within that particular game as defined by that game's rules; and while in many games the players can choose either to exert less agency than the game rules provide or to exert what they have badly (though either is almost always a suboptimal thing to do) they can never choose to exert more; and if they do they are cheating.In chess I have the agency to move my pieces as the rules allow, one per turn.  If I try to move two per turn I've cheated by exceeding my agency.  Chess does not allow me to exert no agency (i.e. skip my turn) but it does allow me to exert it very badly by making a series of meaningless or flat-out awful (or randomly determined!) moves on my turns.In most normal RPGs the game rules give me as a player the agency to - within the rules - roll up whatever character I see fit to in a mechanical sense (stats, race, class, etc., depending what the dice or other char-gen system give me to work with) and then give it whatever personality I feel like.  Those rules also then give me the agency within the game to:- play that character within the fiction as presented (inhabit its persona and interact with the game-world on that basis)- play that character mechanically (roll the dice, track its h.p., etc.)- advocate for that character (state its actions)- reasonably expect the DM to play in good faithTo go beyond this - e.g. by playing someone else's character or falsely tracking its h.p. or demanding that stated actions that are impossible succeed anyway - is exceeding my agency, and may quickly veer into cheating if it's not there already.In story-now RPGs the agency expands to include some control over content of the fiction along with the other things noted above.  Whether or not this is a good thing (and by extension, whether or not the story-now concept overall is a good thing) is probably the root of this whole debate.Lanefan</blockquote>

Verification