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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8165423" data-attributes="member: 42582">You are framing meaningful choices in the dimension that [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] calls tactical (running, hiding, bargaining, luring away). Perhaps with a little bit of bleed into the strategic (depending what exactly is involved in helping others get away from the dragon).Now in my experience of D&D play many of those choices are not actually meaningful, because the resolution is purely GM-decides, and so the real action is not imagining and responding to the fictional circumstance but rather trying to intuit what the GM has in mind as the solution to the problem. This is because D&D has traditionally had a fairly narrow suite of action resolution tools. (4e being an obvious exception, though even 4e might struggle with your dragon scenario if the PCs are low-level and the dragon is not.) For instance, in AD&D there is no mechanic for resolving I hide from the dragon (the only hide mechanic in AD&D is thieves' hide-in-shadows ability, and dragons automatically defeat that ability at least within a certain radius), and there is no very robust mechanic for resolving I run from the dragon. Bargaining and luring away go straight to GM decides.There are other systems that have more robust resolution tools. But that doesn't address the point, which I think [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has most recently made in this thread: why am I engaged with this dragon at all? This is the dimension that [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] calls protagonistic. If there is some dramatic or thematic explanation for that, then the question of "meaningfulness" is answered at that point without needing to elucidate tactical possibilities. Whereas if the answer is nothing more than because that's what the GM decided today's fiction would be about, then we're back in the situation where it is the GM who is deciding what matters.Most serious academic discussions of autonomy and choice tend to take the view that autonomy depends upon a sufficient range of (potentially) valuable choices. What counts as sufficient is context dependent, obviously, but here's an example that I think most scholars would say does not permit genuine autonomy or choice: Do as I say or I will kill you!, from a person who does have you in their power and so can kill you if you don't do as they say.But in any event, I don't think anyone in this thread is claiming to have identified one additional choice that will move a RPG from a situation of no player agency to some player agency. In my case I've talked about degrees of agency ("high" or "low"). And I think I've made it pretty clear what my basis is for making those judgements of degree.Going back to your dragon example, a game could be something that even you would recognise as a railroad and yet permit at least some of the sorts of tactical choices you point to in relation to the dragon (eg hiding vs luring or distracting vs running away). Would that make it a high-agency RPG experience? Not in my view.</blockquote>

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