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The point has always been that the more the DM flatly decides the less agency the players actually have. If a rule doesn't do what it says it does solely because the DM so decides that is a pretty explicit removal of player agency. It is absolutely reasonable for the people playing the game to...

Do the rules say so? What I see is "You can secure an audience with a local noble if you need to." There's been argument as to what "local" means but nothing as that's written says anything more about anyone cooperating than the fireball spell description does.

Why is the character seeking the audience different from the character casting fireball? The rules are both written as "this happens."

Looks pretty good to me. I quickly found myself wanting a longer log of past rolls but my unstructured usage might have been exceptional.

GM prep and player agency needn't be at odds but that's not anything like their never being at odds. How'd you feel about a region where Second Wind didn't work? Or where monks couldn't use ki/discipline?

No one who has read any other post of yours about GMing would be at all surprised by anything you say in this one.

I think "the default is to get one" is consistent with "the player can reasonably expect to get one." I also think that if the player doesn't know about the reason it's worth considering it's not a very good reason.

I think that in the case of the Noble background feature the DM needs to have a very good reason to flatly deny it. That doesn't mean the audience needs to happen right this instant when it's maximally convenient for the PC.

People who've played the same games can I think pretty reliably compare experiences in and with those games. If one wants to talk about a given game it is in my experience helpful to have at least read it and more helpful to have played or run it. It is at least occasionally useful to have...

This does seem to be the root of it all.

If one is attempting to analyze someone else's description of something one has not experienced or read then what one is analyzing is not the thing but someone else's report of it. It's like trying to analyze a novel by reading a review of it.

If one has not at least read a game one cannot analyze it in any way.

I am not convinced it's possible to think critically about a game if your lens for looking at it doesn't correlate to how it mostly actually played. One can certainly read a game and decide to give it a pass but that isn't the same as critical analysis.

They also seem likely to devolve into people describing a style of play that doesn't exist at the typical table playing Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark.

It is possible that "being able to choose the published campaign" is not what people mean by "agency" or by "theme and style of the campaign."

The list was not intended to be exhaustive but every item in it has more agency than the one before.

It's been possible to run every edition of D&D I've played the way you describe. It's how we played 1e and 3.x and it's how we're playing 5e. We skipped 4e because reasons but I have no doubt it too could be played this way.

We've never used BIFTs in our games nor have we ever used Inspiration. We treat alignment as an optional vague descriptor with no mechanical effects.

The question isn't whether you have agency. The question is how much agency you have or how much you have agency over. Your theory seems to indicate that having agency over one thing is the same as having agency over three or four things which seems palpably false. It seems to me that if you...

If you could provide a starter link for this I would be grateful.