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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8137905" data-attributes="member: 42582">I have played games in which I (as a player) had created my character purpose, and the GM was not really interested in that. Thinking of one particular 2ned ed AD&D campaign, the GM had in mind a different purpose for my character (which was the same as the purpose of all the other characters). It ended up as a trainwreck. It's interesting to unpack a little bit why and how the trainwreck took place, I think it relates to your comment about establishing various aspects and trajectories of the fiction.A more general or abstract point, which reiterates what I and [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] have already posted upthread, is this: getting to choose what my PC attempts seems like the baseline for playing a RPG. Without that, I'm just listening to the GM's monologue.Choosing what my PC attempts is a way of manifesting my choice of my PC's goal. But it's only meaningful in that respect if success is on the table. If I declare that my PC joins Darth Vader, but the GM then deploys and manipulates fiction and/or mechanics to make that fail (eg uses alignment-type rules to decide that my character is now an NPC under the GM's control; has Darth undergo a sudden revelation or conversion so that joining him doesn't mean joining the Dark Side; simply declares sorry, you can't do that), it turns out that I didn't really have agency at all - I was not able to control my PC's actions in the way that mattered to me, and as a consequence was not meaningfully able to choose my own goal.The same pattern can emerge if my goal for my PC is to find a spellbook to enhance her mastery of magic. If I declare I'm looking for the wizard's tower that I believe is around here somewhere in circumstances where nothing contrary to that has been established in the shared fiction, but then the GM deploys and manipulates the fiction and/or mechanics to make that fail (eg by fiat declaring, sorry, there are no towers around here) then again it turns out that I wasn't really able to control my character's action in the way that mattered to me. Again, my attempt to choose my own goal was thwarted.In the 2nd ed AD&D game that I mentioned above, the GM's goal for all of us, as a group, was to resolve a complicated prophecy. The prophecy took the form of a series of verses. As a group of players we spent a lot of time and effort trying to interpret those verses, coming up with conjectures about how we (the PCs) and our actions fitted within them.I think this shows, in a sense, how little can be required to accommodate player agency. Even if, as here, the GM was the primary author of the most salient backstory - ie the prophecy - and of the situations we encountered (many of which were straightforward 2nd ed D&D stuff - humanoid lairs, a lich, etc), it was still possible for the players to exercise agency by making sense of our actions, and our personal goals for our PCs, within the context of that backstory and those situations, by fitting it all into the prophecy.There are player-agency-oriented RPGs that are intended to work a bit like this. For instance, Prince Valiant assumes a default backstory of Arthurian legend, and by default in that system the GM establishes the situations; but the players are entitled to impose their own goals for their PCs onto those situations (typically those should be knight aspirations, of course!) and the GM rolls with that. Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic also works if the GM presents the situations, but the players choose what they do with them in accordance with their PC milestones (which are that system's formal statement of PC goals).What went wrong in the AD&D game I played in was that the GM simply could not let go. Not only had he set up the backstory, and was he framing the situations: he decided by fiat, in his own mind and without even sharing with us the players, what the prophecy-relevant meaning was of each action that we took. So from our point of view everything was arbitrary and meaningless.The campaign melted down.I think this shows that we can't talk about system purely as mechanics - we also have to look at techniques of narration of consequence, and the principles that guide the application of those techniques.</blockquote>

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