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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8157094" data-attributes="member: 6785785">The game I have the most experience with is D&D. Over the past five years, D&D 5E has made up the significant majority of my gaming. I absolutely am not coming from without. I understand what 5E does and I’ve made some very strong attempts to understand why. Very often, these discussions have helped with that considerably. My 5E game likely allows for more player agency in relation to the fiction and the direction of play therein than a typical 5E campaign using one of the published adventures does. I make some pretty strong attempts to make sure that’s the case. But that doesn’t mean that my 5E game allows as much player agency as my Blades in the Dark game. They are simply designed differently and function differently, and Blades actively seeks to put the agency in the hands of the players, while 5E largely puts in in the hands of he GM. I am not putting down my 5E game. I love my 5E campaign. I don’t think this is accurate. If the players are attempting X, and he GM considers everything in the fiction and then says Y happens, that is not giving power to the players. It is giving power to the GM. You even described it as such a few posts ago. Giving power to the players would mean that the GM either agrees that X happens (by saying “yes” as you mentioned earlier) or else letting the dice decide through the understood mechanics of the game, and then letting those results stand.I don’t see how what you’ve described is “liberating” to the players. I can see how it may be enjoyable. I may play in such a game and have a great time. I repeat, it is not a matter of trust. I go back to the idea of opposing plausibles....I as the GM have an idea of how the NPC will react to the PCs’ request. You as the player have an equally plausible idea about how the NPC will react. If these competing plausibles are considered, and the answer is to go with the GM simply because that is their role in the game, that’s not enabling player agency. It may be a perfectly fine and acceptable way to play the game....as I said, I understand the idea of “GM as referee”.</blockquote>

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