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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8162784" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here are two examples, one from actual play and the other from actual film.A player establishing truths about the fictional setting which are not just truths about bodily motions performed by his PC: In my 4e D&D campaign that ran to 30th level (and that has been on hiatus for 3 or 4 years now due to one player's unavailability in that time), there was one PC with a significant access to rituals and a strong Arcana skill: the invoker/wizard. There was another character who had limited access to rituals and a modest Arcana skill: the sorcerer.Quite often the player of the invoker/wizard would tell the table, speaking as/for his character, how magic worked in the (imagined) world of our game, and what sorts of actions would or wouldn't make sense and would or wouldn't be possible. Sometimes he would to do this as part o framing his own action declarations, or in preparation for framing them. Sometimes he would do this to inform or even correct the player of the sorcerer.The invoker/wizard PC had a feat that gave a bonus to checks involving rituals. As written by the designers, I think the word "rituals" was meant to encompass the formal game elements falling under that label. But the player of the invoker/wizard - ie the same guy who would set out his theories of how magic worked - would decide if any given check he was making that was related to his PC's manipulation of magic counted as a ritual, or not, and would apply the bonus accordingly.This caused no problems in 7 years of gameplay. I don't recall any particular time when there was disagreement - eg by the player of the sorcerer - but if there was we must have resolved it pretty straightforwardly, given I can't remember it.I consider what I have just described to be a manifestation of player agency. I am also very confident that it supported rather than hampered the player's inhabitation of his PC (given that he was playing a PC who, by the end of the campaign, had an Arcana bonus that would rival most gods' let alone any mortal's). My own view is that the gameworld would not have felt more "real" to that player if, instead of him playing as I have described, I as GM provided all that information about what was possible using magic via second person narration.A film with a "chance meeting": In the film A Knight's Tale, Heath Ledger's character William Thatcher is jousting in disguise as a noble knight. He is found out, barred from jousting, and put in the stocks.Prior to this, at a joust fairly early in the film, he has met and befriended Prince Edward. When he is in the stocks, Prince Edward turns up and announces to all assembled that his personal genealogists have looked into William's ancestry and while he seems to be of humble origins in fact he has noble ancestry. This lie from an important friend means that William is released from the stocks and able to joust again.What RPGs have the capacity to produce a scene like this other than by sheer GM fiat? I can think of two that can do so easily: Burning Wheel, using the Circles mechanic; and HeroWars/Quest, using a check made on a relationship.In Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP that sort of social connection could (in various ways) contribute to a dice pool used to reduce or eliminate an In the Stocks complication, but I don't think it would be straightforward to have it play out in the particular way it does in the film (ie the Prince telling a lie that changes the character's status and thereby achieves his freedom). Prince Valiant has the concept of a Rescue episode, but these are GM initiated, not player initiated. It also has an Escape Bonds special effect which a player could trigger by spending a Storyteller Certificate, but the closest that gets is that a tool might be smuggled to the player. It doesn't allow the player to stipulate that a particular NPC turns up. (Once the GM has decided that the NPC turns up, Prince Valiant does have a system - a Presence check - that could determine that the NPC tells the lie to help the character.)If there are RPGs that could handle this other than via GM decision-making that I'm missing, I'm very happy to be corrected.Now, is a RPGing experience going to be better if such a scene happens in virtue of GM decision-making rather than player action declaration? To me it doesn't seem so. Is a RPG system better if it doesn't permit such episodes to occur? Again, to me it doesn't seem so.</blockquote>

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