thread: 2011-02-07 : Grammatical Voices
On 2011-02-09, Josh W wrote:
Vincent, it's interesting that as someone not as interested in focusing on assigning authority, you get irritated by people taking the agent out of sentences.
Picture this, instead of saying by ___, by ___ at the end of those passive voice sentences, you stick do it once for a whole class of actions. Tada, assigning authority!
The plus point of doing it this way is that you don't flag it up, so people are less likely to go into turf wars about it. The other advantage is that it allows a nuanced border, so instead of people guarding their character sheet like hawks (or equivalent possesive weirdness), it's expected that some times someone will borrow it for a sec to write down specific things, or check other things.
In fact, rigorously sticking to specific by-action actor-declaration nulifies the problem of abstract large-scale authority declarations; players can't have turf wars because the turf is explicitly marked as "belonging" to whoever it does, and changing it is a rules hack, full stop.
On the flip side, it's probably good to abstract out that stuff at one stage during design to check who you're giving what to.
