Quote Originally Posted by Cheesegear View Post
Okay.

Based on the narrative, their character, party dynamics and what the player wants to get out of the game; A player uses their agency in a specific way.

The DM knew that that player - or entire party - would use said agency in that specific way, and is already prepared for that eventuality (i.e; I knew you would do that, lol). Or maybe starts authoring new content based on how the player used their agency, so that when next session happens, they're still on the author's tracks...Just not the same tracks they were on last session. 7 days is a pretty long time. You can come up with something between sessions.

The player - or party - used their agency...
In the exact way that the DM knew they would, and is already prepared.
If you look at the discussion about mindset, it resolves this somewhat. I think it may overlap well with the distinction between outliners and discovery writers.

If as a GM you intend to anticipate (or determine) what the players will do before they've encountered the scenario, and prepare with that in mind, then even if the players do something different you're approaching the game from an authored mindset. This maps to the 'outlier' style of writing, where you quickly map out ways things could go, and then the act of play is filling in the details in that existing framework, but the shape of future parts of the framework is decided first before the shape of present details has been determined.

If as a GM you intend to discover through play what the players will do and use that to inspire an in-the-moment reaction to that, you're approaching the game from an emergent mindset. This maps to the 'discovery' style of writing, where you write the details sequentially in order to find out for yourself what will happen.

In both cases, the 'past' is already written, and having written the past doesn't inherently belong to either mindset alone. That can include things like 'deciding what NPCs are out there and what they want', 'deciding what's on the map', etc. Of course if you write the past with a mind of bringing about a particular future, that's an authored mindset to take. And if you write it with a mind of, say, asking the questions you think you have the least ability to predict the players' responses to, that's an emergent mindset. It's not whether you did influence things, whether you were surprised, but rather - are you treating being surprised / seeing what the players do as something that happens which you might have to deal with, or are you treating it as the goal?

So if a GM happens to guess what players will do, that can be consistent with either mindset. The question is how they relate to that ability to predict - 'do I use the ability to predict to detail events that haven't happened yet?' or 'do I instead detail things in the present/past which will help inspire me as to how to react?'.

E.g. 'the players are likely to talk to the barkeeper, so I'll have him be the one to have seen something skulking around last night to make a plot hook for this quest...' - authored attitude. 'The players are likely to talk to the barkeeper, so I'll detail a bit more about his family and history and activities the last few days' - emergent attitude. The former is creating an outline of a sequence that has yet to happen, whereas the latter is adding detail about what has already happened that will inform the bartender's dialogue, reactions, etc.