Upon reflection, I think I consider people whose behavior I have trouble modeling/predicting (roughly those smarter than I am) as PCs and the rest (including myself, unfortunately) as NPCs. However, sometimes I get surprised by NPCs behaving in an agenty way, and sometimes I get surprised by PCs behaving predictably, including predictably wrong.
The expected action of someone more agenty than oneself, when confronted with certain situations, is to take an action which falls into the category “all others”.
When they pick “repeat the same course of action which just failed”, it is surprising that they picked a predictable response, rather than a response not contained in the predictions.
Upon reflection, I think I consider people whose behavior I have trouble modeling/predicting (roughly those smarter than I am) as PCs and the rest (including myself, unfortunately) as NPCs. However, sometimes I get surprised by NPCs behaving in an agenty way, and sometimes I get surprised by PCs behaving predictably, including predictably wrong.
Is this a clever “paradoxical” description of what happens that I’m not quite parsing, or is it just a contradiction?
The expected action of someone more agenty than oneself, when confronted with certain situations, is to take an action which falls into the category “all others”.
When they pick “repeat the same course of action which just failed”, it is surprising that they picked a predictable response, rather than a response not contained in the predictions.