The Culture: Agency Is One Of The Fires That Cleanse The Hobby

Tabletop RPGs, being a fantastiv adventure wargame form, are a medium of agency.

Agency (Noun): "The capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power."

In simpler terms, you are a shot-caller. Your man acts in your stead to execute those decisions. This is literal Principal/Agent Relationship dynamics in an ideal form.

And it is here that the vast majority of people completely fuck things up.

One True Agent

One of the lesser-verballized rediscoveries that the Bros accomplished was to break a variation of the One True Party fallacy. "One True Agent", as one should have intuited, is the refusal of a principal to have more than one agent at a time.

Strict Timekeeping, 1:1 Time, etc. have all worked together to shatter this fallacy by forcing the issue: either a principal employs a new agent while his previous one is unable to work, or he does not participate in events--losing out on all the opportunities that come up--until that time elapses.

For some reason, Tourists and Cargo Cultists find this emotionally threatening.

But the players are not the worst offenders. Those running for them usually are, because one of the necessary elements of Cargo Cult play is to take Agency out back and beat it to death with a spiked dildo. Can't have Le Epic Campaign if players are principals and therefore they, not the Referee, determines what happens.

Naturally, fixing this means applying another recovered practice.

Okay Boss.

There is no reason for why players should not be running entire organizations, from a small gang to entire multi-planar empires. Because a player's attention cannot be everywhere at once, he is required to delegate (even if his primary agent is a "godlike cosmic being" or some such) and delegation means taking control of secondary agents from time to time as circumstances require.

A player's primary agent should be able to be The Boss. This allows that player to stick his nose elsewhere, playing another man, as events develop; maybe that sudden military campaign out of Pippakinstan took you unawares, so you only have one double-agent among the Cappippis to monitor the situation and you--the player--got to make due for now. Or maybe your man is leading the invasion of an entire galaxy, so when it's time for a decisive battle you switch to playing Grand Admiral Halsey from his flagship Mahan and then go to the head of the commando team infiltrating the weaponized Ice Moon Baltar to play that out.

What's the connecting thread? You, the player, ARE THE ONE IN CHARGE! You decide how things go, not something dictated by the Referee or someone else overstepping their bounds (e.g. the designer or publisher).

Which means that if your play sessions are two hours of meaningless bullshit where nothing happens because you never get a chance to make a command decision (i.e. to exert agency), you did not play a game! Yes, this fallacy afflicts some fantastic people, and it is sad. (Hint: You'd get bigger audiences by having players play properly.)

Your decisions have to matter, for good or ill, or they are meaningless and the game becomes a boring and pointless waste of time. Players have to earn their wins and suffer their losses to make the entire thing worthwhile, as so many Bad Gaming Stories show without telling the slow and witless.

Agency is also, at this time, the biggest advantage this medium has over all alternatives. Cultists disdain it because Wrongthink, and Tourists are NPCs so they can't even conceive of it. Start pushing this hard, and enforcing both rewards and punishments, and you'll clean things up fast.

Macris gets it. It's why ACKS is so good that it's getting an upgraded edition soon. You could too, but then you'd have to admit the Bros were right and become a Bro.

Cromwell is a classic for a reason. WATCH IT!

No Narrative bullshit can get results like this. In gaming terms, this is two players, playing different characters, dealing with the consequences of one's failure.

Narrative logic cannot achieve this result. It is anathema to its premises. Only proper play can deliver these results- and only proper players can achieve them.