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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9774844" data-attributes="member: 4937">That I don't think is true.  We both see agency in some way as being about the players being able to make meaningful choices.  We differ in how we approach the idea that a choice is meaningful.You are saying well, "Their choice constructs the narrative so its obviously a meaningful choice."  But I'm saying, well, their choice isn't constructing the narrative in any falsifiable manner, so really all that is happening is the GM is creating the narrative entirely based on his own feelings.  I am not saying that you are the sort that takes all the player's agency away from them, but if say I was the sort that wanted to do that, playing the game the way you play it would make it a lot easier for me.  GMs give up authority in one of three manners.  Either they share narrative authority ("Here, create some fact that is true about this world that I can't overrule."), or else they bow to established fiction ("This is already true so I can't overturn it."), or else they submit to the outcome of fortune ("The dice are in control.").  As far as I can tell, you don't do the first two at all.  Your theory is that nothing is true until you say it, which means you are never really beholden to established fiction.  And in particular, you seem to make no differentiation between mechanics that are tied to the fiction or mechanics that have no relation to the fiction or which create the fiction.   That leaves you only submitting to the dice, but only in the sense that in this exact moment the dice say the players fail or succeed, but you as a GM have full ability to interpret what that means ("A motorcycle comes into existence!").  This is from my perspective no real check on your ability to fully control the narrative at all.  With no ways to share your narrative authority, you run a GM centric game in which you are in full control.  The players give you idea prompts or they act as random number generators to prompt your story, but it is essentially your story.  It could be a fun one, but agency as I see exists only as minor aesthetic of play.My definition of a railroad is, "Do the players have meaningful agency."  Your definition of a railroad is "A preplanned series of encounters."  I grant you that a preplanned series of encounters can be a railroad, but not that something isn't a railroad just because it isn't.  I do think you probably are trying to give the players as much agency as they can have within your process of play, but from my perspective as a player that's not a lot.  As I said, if I was inclined to railroad my players the easiest way to do that was prepare nothing and always just respond to what they do.  Schrodinger's Dungeon is the most powerful railroading technique available.Consider a case that we've already considered, picking from three chests to find the magic ring.  This is a meaningful act only if the ring is already in one of the chests.  If the ring doesn't come into existence until I open it, you are in the same position as a con artist who can put the shell into any cup he wants only after I choose.  If I have no reason to believe the ring exists until I open the chest, it doesn't matter which chest I pick.  I will always only be right because you decided at that moment if I was right.  But if you at any time before I choose a chest write down where the ring is, then there is a sense in which my choice can be right or wrong.  That is, there is now a sense in which my choice has meaning and your choice as the GM has been negated.I got so angry watching that game.  I don't even like Wil Wheaton, but I felt so bad for him in that game.   That constituted player abuse and was some of the worst GMing I've ever seen.  I'm not sure what you picked up on because there were a lot of things wrong with that game, but one of the things I picked up on was just how random cloud cuckoo land the world they were playing in was.  Any action could lead to any outcome whatsoever, at the GMs whim.  I think the worst moment for me in the game was when they beat the bad guys trivially and then the GM improvised that the bad guys clothes animated and attacked them.  This is straight up victory negation, where the GM feels his encounter turned out too easily and the PCs won to easily, and instead of going "good job" the GM fudges something to rob them of their victory ("More orcs arrive!", "The bad guy just got 30 more hit points!").  In effect, a roll that said "success" was turned into a roll that said "failure".   That's one of the many problems with improvising things on the fly.</blockquote>

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