eww, my cats murdered another poor little lizard and ripped it in half

and decided to leave it in the hallway

@JoshuaAslanSmith Yes, well. Obviously each user will adjust the comments to suit themselves, so it won't be a universal sameness. But I am hopeful it'll help provide a baseline.

@trogdor Secrets of Cats tells us that so long as the lizard stays there, the house is protected against a particular kind of enemy.

Secrets of Cats doesn't tell you how creepy it is that they keep doing this

I think that's part of the spell's power.

I wish they would just kill snakes

but they do not do this thing

so, I was reading Jack Lesnie's answer re: foreshadowing:

and it made me realize something -- a large part of my issue with RPing storyline villains is that I rule out foreshadowing, basically -- I see it as a "hand tip" to the opposition, and that's bad in my book.

@Shalvenay ponder the world of fiction, if a plot point isn't properly foreshadowed, it does not seem believable, but if it's overly done it feels telegraphed

@waxeagle that's the thing -- I want to create situations where the observer is forced to deal with the cognitive dissonance of the unbelievable, sudden transition

@waxeagle or in other words, to me, reality doesn't foreshadow

@Shalvenay it often does, at least in some ways. You get a bill, and a past due notice before a service is turned off.

You usually have some kind of warning (even if it's subtle or you don't notice) that certain things are going to happen

now other things, like say earthquakes aren't particularly foreshadowed or foreshadowable in reality, though they often are in fiction

@waxeagle for passive things like that, yeah -- Reason's swiss cheese model holds. but an active adversary is a whole another animal.

but fiction is typically written from a backward looking perspective, which means that more foreshadowing is available. RPGs are similar, the DM is outside of time to some degree

@waxeagle whereas, my model of persistent world play doesn't respond well to that "stepping out of time" if you will

yup. Though for individual sessions or plot lines you may be able to do so

@Shalvenay I think you might get a kick out of reading Gary Saul Morson's Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time.

@waxeagle more generally though -- I find myself in a situation where I basically denigrate all emotional goals in favor of intellectual system/worldbuilding

It's all about the sort of thing @waxeagle is describing. It uses Russian novels like War and Peace and Anna Karenina as a baseline set of examples, but it then goes into how narrative time is a real-world viewpoint that many MANY people and societies throughout history engage with meaningfully and usefully.

@Shalvenay ah yeah, you can't lose that. Remember how interesting the interlude session we ran the other week was? That was largely emotional goal driven. And a whole lot of that was set up with a quick side conversation with Gruber.

(I don't agree with all of his conclusions on an objective level, but it's a fascinating and revelatory read anyway.)

@waxeagle the question is -- how do you get it back once you've lost it? especially when losing your sense for emotional goals has also caused serious trust problems with other players

@Shalvenay ask your players :)

find out what they think their goals are

and then see how you can develop specific plots to get closer to them

@waxeagle they've been uselessly vague so far for the most part :/

they say they want good stories and to have fun, but don't go into detail on what their notion of "good" is -- either that, or the conversation devolves into an argument :/

also....I'm afraid part of my agency problem is that I'm not aware of the social cues re: agency

It took me a very long time to be able to express my gameplay goals with any specificity, and I still struggle with it frequently.

also -- on a semi-related note -- I find myself with a wacky problem -- my planning horizon seems to be longer than most RPers, to the point where I need to ask about how a plot is intended to work in advance of when it is to execute in order to grant the players involved the proper level of agency

A lot of groups struggle with mismatched expectations about how long a particular element will endure, be it a plan, a villain, a battle, a campaign, whatever.

@BESW not endurance, planning window

basically, I need to start planning well before most other players do, and take other players' input into account then instead of having to try to read agency-social-cues because I don't read them well at all

or does player agency require that players be able to influence plots "in the heat of the moment"?

Agency is not clearly defined.

@BESW basically -- if you want to influence my plot, you have to do it when I'm still in the planning stages, otherwise you'll risk confusing me without very clear IC and OOC communication of what you're trying to do

@Shalvenay have you tried explicit cues of agency? like plot points in fate?

@waxeagle you mean fate points?

@Shalvenay yes, I think cortex might call them plot points

@waxeagle ah -- when I dabbled with FATE -- I ignored the FATE point economy completely, because I had no idea what to look for when handing them out or redeeming them

@Shalvenay I can't speak with any authority on the system, but as I understand it, it's a way for players to have an impact on the game world in an explicitly called out way. This would provide the kind of in the moment agency without making you rely on implicit and easy to miss cues

@waxeagle yeah -- I've only DMed FATE, never actually played it

also, what are the social cues of player agency? is that something that's rather group-specific, or are there some general things I should be looking for/looking to apply?

@Shalvenay "social cues of player agency" is something you might have to unpack. "player agency" is not a concept that has social cues attached.

social cues of what related to player agency exactly?

@doppelgreener cues that you are being given agency over something

@Shalvenay I don't know that there are really cues for that. You're more likely to get a perceptible response if players lack agency and notice. Usually they don't be too happy about it - but people express that in different ways.

@Pixie I mean that someone else is giving me agency over something in their plot

Blargh. This new mobile chat has good features, but I hate that everywhere your finger lands, it's something clickable.

Or focusable, rather. Deselecting is difficult, and accidentally selecting stuff all too frequent.

@Shalvenay As for that, hmm. I'm still not sure there's a lot you're going to be able to perceive. Asking what you want to do, IC or OOC, is one sign, assuming they take your answers seriously. But for me, it comes down to a general sense of being able to have a character make choices and affect the game world regularly.

@Pixie alrighty then

If you feel like it doesn't matter what you do, or like you cannot take varied courses of action without drawing ire, you may have a lack of agency on your hands. But then, sometimes actions are blocked not because they deviate from a predetermined course but because there's a scope of actions the game is intended to include or focus on. This is reduced agency, but intentionally reduced.

It's less railroading and more zooming in on actions that are, say, believable (for whatever boundary someone's suspension of belief has been given) or harmonious with desired tones or themes.

@Pixie yeah, scope of the game seems to be my biggest problem