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<blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 7412476" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>Because they are not a passive audience. They are free to interact with it in a way that is probably the closest I've felt to actually being in the thing itself. The players affect the world through their characters, but they still can affect it. And not in a 'choose your own adventure' way, but in a 'it feels like you are really there' way. The role of the GM is to mediate that (not to give them a tour of his or her world, his or her story, etc). But to adjudicate what the players try to do. I think you are minimizing the impact player actions and words can have on the world here. It is a different approach but it is still very much a question of agency. The difference between a movie and an RPG as we are describing it, is the characters have agency. In a movie they don't. They do whatever the writers and directors want them to do. This is the central problem people encountered in the 90s during the storyteller wave. And there were lots of answers to the problem. One was to go back to a more free and open approach, that played to the strengths of the medium (the strength, at least in my view, is the characters are free to do what they will). If you remove GM railroading, and give the GMs tools to manage unexpected developments (particularly through solid wolrdbuilding tools), it can work out great. And it is pretty much all about agency.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="Bedrockgames, post: 7412476, member: 85555"] Because they are not a passive audience. They are free to interact with it in a way that is probably the closest I've felt to actually being in the thing itself. The players affect the world through their characters, but they still can affect it. And not in a 'choose your own adventure' way, but in a 'it feels like you are really there' way. The role of the GM is to mediate that (not to give them a tour of his or her world, his or her story, etc). But to adjudicate what the players try to do. I think you are minimizing the impact player actions and words can have on the world here. It is a different approach but it is still very much a question of agency. The difference between a movie and an RPG as we are describing it, is the characters have agency. In a movie they don't. They do whatever the writers and directors want them to do. This is the central problem people encountered in the 90s during the storyteller wave. And there were lots of answers to the problem. One was to go back to a more free and open approach, that played to the strengths of the medium (the strength, at least in my view, is the characters are free to do what they will). If you remove GM railroading, and give the GMs tools to manage unexpected developments (particularly through solid wolrdbuilding tools), it can work out great. And it is pretty much all about agency. [/QUOTE]

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