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And it can actually do maths correctly!

That, in fact, is still random. That you can gauge the odds doesn't mean it is not random. This nevertheless results trauma happening in completely random situations, unless you just stop resisting anything once you have spent just four of your nine stress. And I think they realised that this...

I genuinely have no idea. I don't have time or brainpower to decipher your post at the moment. But ultimately whenever a decision about the fiction (content, outcome, etc) is dictated by mechanics, instead of decided by any of the participants, then that decision has been outsourced to the...

The stress from resistance is random, and by my understanding you need to commit to it before you roll, so you do not know whether it gives you trauma or not. You can get up to five stress from one resistance, so it is hard to gauge whether you can "afford" it.

Yet you have previously advocated for rules that take away that control via social and personality mechanics. Though of course if you like to play such low agency games there is nothing wrong with that. I think they could have rather significant amount of agency. For example I think "real...

Agency over the character's psyche and also resulting dramatic beats. I think the moments leading to it were perfectly sensible. And I had no issue with my character taking trauma as result of that scene, that ended in a cold-blooded murder and dramatic revelation of regarding my character's...

Yeah, though I think all those are subsets of agency. And this is what I have said before in these agency discussions. Agency over what? It actually is not terribly helpful to discuss whether game has more or less player agency in some absolute sense, it is far more useful to discuss over what...

I don't offer them as universal solve, only as potential one. But that human element certainly is what is unique to RPGs. (For now, we all will soon be replaced by unfeeling bots that fake humanity convincingly enough.)

All I can say that in the actual situation I alluded to earlier, I felt that my agency was honoured by the GM acceptance of setting aside the rules a bit so that the fictional situation could unfold in satisfactory and logical manner and had we not done so I would have felt that my agency was...

Look, I was not one true waying, that was what the OP was doing. If you don't want the GM to do that, then don't play that way. But my point was that doing so is not intrinsically antithetical to the player agency. And you are again talking about the "gameable space" and I have already said...

Right. The GM is right there where the fiction unfolds, reading the room and having their finger on the pulse of the events. That is why I gladly give them the final say over a distant rules writer, no matter how skilled, who is not there.

No. In my example, it was primarily me, the player, who felt that the coherence of the fiction would be violated by strictly following the rules. In a sense that if GM gets to decide certain things, then the player cannot be deciding them. But the same happens when you outsource the decision...

I don't agree. For instance in this case it is unclear to me who "de jure" would even have authority to grant the exception, if anyone. In practice I asked for it and the GM agreed. Was it a GM decision, or a group decision? Unclear, and didn't really matter. Now for the sake of clarity, I think...

Perhaps. Maybe. I'm not sure actually... Like yeah, it makes certain logical sense to view it like you say, but given that substance of the game is fiction, not rules, I feel inflexible rules can sometimes limit agency in uncomfortable ways. Like recently in our Blades game we had a situation...

RPGs are not like "any other game". They are collaborative creative exercises with some rules as scaffolding. It is art, not science. And that is no way a player can exercise agency. To say it is not, is obviously a biased attempt to twist the definition of player agency. "Rules" that are...

@bloodtide I don't think you know what "sandbox" means. It definitely doesn't mean that the game world is player authored (or even co-authored) quite the opposite. The GM creates an expansive and detailed world (the proverbial sandbox) for the players to play in. The player freedom comes in the...

I think meaningful choices are at the core of the agency, and I think the OP correctly identifies, that this requires certain level of predictability and coherence. However, in comparison to some other games like chess, I believe there happens a category error. For most games rules are what the...

My long-running D&D campaign is rather sandboxy. The setting even has a massive desert in middle of it! What I wanted from this campaign was pulpy sword and sorcery adventures, instead of one long fantasy epic with overarching plot, so this lead to more sandboxy approach. There are of course...

Indeed. At that point the last surviving humans probably have more pressing concerns than the copyright.

Yes, it indeed could happen that a GM overrides a rule in manner you do not like. Now in a game where everyone is on the same page this is unlikely to happen, but still. But what it also means, that the GM can override a rule to allow your character to do something that would make sense in the...