Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8138985" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Sure, I would agree. A railroad is a way that agency is taken away. But there are also people who are perfectly happy to play in a railroad game. And even those players may have some agency; they may not be able to deviate from the path, but they may be able to decide something like using stealth or diplomacy to bypass a monster, rather than just fighting it. It’s a spectrum. So then what are the upper limits of that spectrum? What would you say is an example of a high agency game? This is a relevant point. And I think that the kind of extreme authorship by players that you’re talking about shifts the game into (?) or toward (?) something else. Something like Microscope or Fiasco, maybe. I’m not saying that there can’t be or shouldn’t be restrictions on player authority. Just that there are degrees, right? Just like with the character level agency you guys are talking about is not absolute. There are times when stuff your PC does is not actually up to you, or where the options available to you are limited. This is still true with more narrative based elements. No one’s advocating for players to be able to craft anything they want whenever they want. So let’s say your GM asks you if your group would rather have him run an adventure path, or a more sandbox style game. There will be constraints on agency in each game, likely of different kinds, but still constraints. If agency is the ability of the player to determine the course of the fiction, one of those will likely offer more agency than the other. Then if you added the ability for players to determine some of the contents of the fiction beyond just what their characters do and say, that’s also more agency.</blockquote>

Verification