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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8150661" data-attributes="member: 42582">The player answers (for his/her PC): I do X.Concrete example: in one of my recent Traveller sessions the "scene" was closed doors in an ancient alien pyramid complex. The X was I concentrate on them to use my psionics to open them. This was from a PC who has a psionic strength rating, but no psionic abilities, and who believed strongly that the pyramid complex was designed to enhance psionic power.How is this action declaration resolved? According to the module I was drawing on, that action declaration fails. There are only two ways to open the doors - via strength, or via a control panel.So in effect the player is presented with an A or B or C choice - open the door using strength, open the door using the control panel, or fail to open the door. Maybe we can add a couple of extras: blast the door with a plasma gun, or use plastic explosives on it, and it will probably "open".But what about the attempt to use psionics? This is - in my view - the crunch point for player agency, because this is the point at which we have potentially competing conceptions of the shared fiction. Whose gets to prevail?This is also why this ongoing debate about dice is super-weird to me. The dice aren't in themselves a source of agency. They're a technique for choosing between competing suggestions as to the content of the shared fiction.I my Traveller game I set a check and had the player roll. It succeeded, and the door opened and I rolled to see the number of psionic strength points lost. From memory I also imposed a light wound (1D) to reflect the strain/exhaustion.This established that psionic are able to open those doors. If the player had failed, it would have been an open question whether that was because it can't be done, or because the PC wasn't able to do it on this occasion.Stepping back to the bigger picture, this is very like the discussion about PC desires and goals: that players establish these for their PCs is pretty much a baseline (unless the game uses pregens). Just like saying what the PC tries to do.Where the discussion about agency becomes interesting - because we now have a way in which different RPGs are different - is when we consider who gets to decide whether it is feasible to actually take up those goals in play or who gets to decide whether it is feasible for that action declaration to succeed. If the GM is the one making all those decisions then the game is one (i) that I think clearly involves less player agency than if those matters were otherwise, and (ii) that I personally would characterise as a low-agency game. Because, just to reiterate, even in a railroad the player can do things - set goals, and declare actions - that you say mark out the important boundaries of player agency.</blockquote>

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