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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8151555" data-attributes="member: 16814">It is a meaningful choice, because the player determines not just the action, but the success result of the action.  They also get to choose how that action is performed.  This step is different form D&D where the GM determines what the check is.  Here, the player does.  The GM then sets the risk and effect.  Effect is a measure of how much towards the player's intent this action will go --  usually you have standard effect, but you can have lesser effect, and great effect. Rarely you can have no effect (but the player has resources to improve this). These are constrained by the nature of the current fiction and the action you've declared -- the GM is not free to do whatever, and it's obvious if there's Force being used here.  Then the player can choose to bring additional resources to bear to alter the dice rolled, the position and effect, and so forth, usually by paying a cost or accepting more risk (you can improve effect by a step by worsening position by a step).  This entire loop is entirely player driven, and centered on what the player finds important about the scene or score.  The GM only has authorities to choose to call for a check, then set position and effect (subject to player modifications using the abovementioned resources), and any failure results or complications.  Everything else is on the player. This looks nothing like D&D play -- I run both, and can absolutely say this.  [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] runs both, and he can chime in as well.Of course it's not entirely objective, but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary, either.  What's challenging is what the game is about -- it's usually blindingly obvious when you need a check, and good guidance is that if you're not sure, let it ride until you are.  The goal of the GM is to bring honest adversity to the PC's lives, and it's not hard to see when to do this.  If you're coming from a D&D background, though, it appears hard because you're still evaluating according to the wrong paradigms -- the kinds of things that happen in a Blades game don't look like normal D&D -- there's usually not choices about which way to go at T-intersections, for instance, because that's not something that the players are putting at risk.  That kind of thing is a function of GM driven games.Nope.  I mean, it's right there, three times, you could look.   The painting was introduced by the GM as color.  The player did make it important, though.  If you're thinking that having the ability to make a thing important to the play of the game isn't agency, though, then I have no idea what definition of agency you're operating under -- it clearly doesn't value making a choice that is meaningful because choosing what's important to play is straight down the middle of that.</blockquote>

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