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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8166485" data-attributes="member: 82106">IMHO this has nothing to do with agency. The dragon is an obstacle to the player's accomplishment of some goal (either fictional PC goal, or perhaps 'table goal' like 'have a super rich character'). Obstacles are there to simply create choices. Without them there is no meaning to the game at all. This is why the Czege Principal exists too, because there are no obstacles if you have power to simply declare them non-existent or overcome. Without obstacles/Czege there is just free-form 'table talk', which might be RP but has no real character as 'game' to it. At that point things like drama and tension cease to really happen at the table, though they might show up in a transcript of the session (IE read like a novel). This is why I continue to argue that all the discussion of 'character level agency', BY ITSELF, is not very meaningful. It can become meaningful to a degree where obstacles exist and choices about how to overcome them and what costs to pay in doing so, are partly choices made by players. Now, some of that, as yourself, [USER=5636]@estar[/USER], et al have stated, is perfectly feasible for a GM to put into player's hands within the fiction (IE do you go right or left? Where the players have some information that distinguishes the two 'wet and moldy smelling', vs 'dusty with fresh tracks'). The GM could also offer up 'hard choices', and such. OTOH I think there's a difference between the above and what narrative systems offer, and I do call it another aspect of agency. Now, maybe [USER=5636]@estar[/USER] reaches this level by pure dint of being extremely sensitive to what his players ask for, but the more fixed nature of the fiction would IMHO put some pretty hard limits on that. Having run these sorts of games for roughly the first 20 years of my GMing career that was what I found was one of the issues. This is why a game like DW offers 'more agency', because the entire shape of the game, how the world itself works, can be built up in such a way as to 'work for the players'. And this working isn't in the form of 'gimmy' power gaming, it is at the more interesting level of simply engaging what is found to be most interesting during play.</blockquote>

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