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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8137948">Thanks!When you say agency, just because this has come up in this thread and we are debating without getting back to how it ties to what you want, do you mean it in terms of the players being able to make meaningful choices within a setting and adventure you are running, or do you extend that to include stuff like what some of the others are talking about, like giving them power to control the narrative itself (i.e. is this agency through their character, or is this agency the player can exert on the world itself). I would say, when it comes to agency two things matter here: do the players actually have agency, and do the players sense the agency that they have. I think that can become illusionism (though I do think that itself is a loaded term) if you are improvising and you are not giving serious consideration to the players actions and factoring those into your decisions. Ultimately what needs to happen if you are on the improv side, is you need to make sure you are factoring in their choices. I think a lot of that is going to come down to how you make your decisions about what happens as a GM. Something that might help, which I incorporate into my games, is to be conscious of moments during play where it is clear to you that how the players react to something is going to matter. Ultimately your players know half the answer to this question and you know the other half. Basically if they do something unexpected, do you honestly consider where that will lead to, and honor that, or do you try to steer things back towards what you've come up with on the fly. And when you are improving and responding organically to what the players do, are you really giving consideration to what they decide and saying okay, here is where that would lead to. I realize it can get murky when you are improving. Something that helps me, and I probably mentioned this already, is to take a living world approach, where I treat my NPCs as fully fleshed out and independent characters as the PCs. If the PCs do something unexpected my NPCs react to that in  a way that I think fits their personality. This has led to all kinds of interesting chemistry in the game, and it is still highly situational, so fits in with a more improvisational style. We've had characters end up proposing marriage to their nemesis for example, and its led to campaigns going in quite unexpected directions. Again I think  this boils down to: do you feel your players have agency in the game and do they feel they have agency in the game.</blockquote>

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