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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7407939" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know why you say that I am. Even in the post you replied to, I said that that is obviously the prerogative of people to play as they like.I do wonder what the point is of emphasising that agency consists in the player being free to declare actions for his/her PC - because that is true in any episode of RPGing at any table in the world (isn't it?), and so doesn't seem to identify any very interesting feature of various approaches to RPGing.I assume by "PCs" you mean players? Ie the players are free to declare actions for their PCs.I would be very surprised if there were any episodes of RPGing in which that was not true. What would it even mean to "play" a RPG if you were not free to declare actions for your PC?With respect, I think you are projecting something onto my posts that isn't there.I can look at your game, or anyone else's game, and see how much agency occurs in it of the sort I care about, and then express a view about that. The fact that you don't measure your own game by my standard doesn't stop me doing that. Given that you are defending an example - namely, the forcefield example - in which the player obviously does not have unfettered agency over the content of the shared fiction (because the GM has already determined that the shared fiction can't include an unobstructed jump across the ditch), I would think it is obvious that you favour a game in which a burden on the sort of agency I care about is par for the course.Your relativsitic contention, that no one is allowed to apply their standards to something that someone else enjoys for different reasons, is not applied in any other field of entertainment. To give a very trivial example from another entertainment medium: I have a good friend who dosn't much like violence in movies. She applies this standard even to movies in genres where violence is expected, like gritty thrillers and action movies. There is nothing surprising about doing that - it's how she works out what films she might or might not enjoy. It's hardly to the point that films she would rather not see, because too violent, might - by the standards of their genre - be considered only mildly violent.Similarly, in describing what sort of RPGing I enjoy, I point to the features that are important to me. That you don't care to evaluate your own RPGing by reference to those standards doesn't bear on what I'm doing.</blockquote>

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