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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8137155" data-attributes="member: 82106">Nobody is saying that the players are necessarily spectators, you're kind of excluding the middle here. What I would say is that player agency is improved when the game is DESIGNED to make room for it. One of the problems when discussing D&D specifically, and this is exacerbated when someone calls it 'normal', is that D&D didn't start out this way.D&D started out as purely an almost wargame-esque crawl that involved skilled play ONLY. So, yes, the players had agency only to control their PCs within the limits of what the PCs could do or know. The DM OTOH was absolutely limited to what was on the map, key, and wandering monster table. ANYTHING the DM produced outside of that, or ANY time they fudged a roll or deliberately judged a situation based on their own agenda and not an honestly neutral standpoint, was illegal in that game. Now, DMs still had a lot of leeway, and players really limited agency, but the players DID have that protection! The DM wasn't allowed to sic a wandering monster on them just because he thought they were being putzes, or because his favorite NPC was going to get offed, or whatever. It happened, but all of that was bad DMing and it was pretty well stated, certainly the 'culture' of D&D, including articles in SR/The Dragon, talked about it. But then 2e came along and just told the DM to become a 'storyteller' and stop worrying about the rules so much. Meanwhile the players were given nothing, they were expected to simply continue to inhabit OD&D's dungeon crawl aesthetic with no change. The fact that the OD&D aesthetic included "hide the numbers from the players" just made it even worse. You could run 2e by the book and simply utterly make up everything as DM in any way you wanted. Not that this was usual, but the game, and subsequently 3.x and 5e offer no better situation for the players as a guarantee. I simply offer that this is a poor situation and we can design games better than that. and more relevant to the OP, playing the way 2e tells a DM to run a game is pretty likely low agency, but clearly we all don't agree on what that means...</blockquote>

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