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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9641535" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I came a little late to this, but I think it's probably best to start from the first post.I think this is a bit redundant (any rule that is not inviolable is not a rule), and in light of the rest of your post, I think is slightly insufficient.Firstly, I don't actually think knowledge is necessary so much as knowability is; there are entire genres of games that are defined by the player discovering rules, or working with incomplete rules knowledge. You could make a case that completely lack of knowledge precludes agency, as the first move in such a game might be made truly randomly, but incomplete knowledge of a knowable system does not preclude agency when acting within it. Choosing a sequence of moves that will, for example, provide information that can be used to logically deduce how an unknown rule works is an expression of agency.Secondly, "can rely on" is the part I find insufficient; I would use a stronger "can leverage" formulation. A race game wherein I can advance a fixed amount every time I press a button meets your formulation, but does not possess agency. The player must be able to do something with the rules that brings them closer to achieving their goals than some other thing they could do. Agency requires the player be given meaningful choices towards achieving their known goal; that is, they must be able to play badly and well, making choices within the rules structure that bring them closer to or further away from that goal.Thirdly, and possibly just an expansion of my second point, missing entirely from definition is an evaluation of whether player choices produce variable results. A game with trivial optimization cases could be said to possess player agency, but not a ton. Tic-Tac-Toe technically allows the player several choices, but the strategy is transparent and renders most decisions pointless. It is a quite low agency game.And that bring us to the final point your definition (and subsequent post) doesn't cover: agency is not a binary state, it's a spectrum. What you've called several times "games without player agency" below conflate games with low player agency and things that are not functionally games.On this point, I agree wholeheartedly, but draw very different conclusions. I would argue that allowing players to set their own goals and evaluations of those goals is definitional of the RPG form: play continues after goal evaluation, players can set new goals after their previous goals become impossible or are achieved.You're conflating the most constrained kind of adventure path play here with everything that happens in D&D, and that's annoying but beside the point; if this is a constriction on agency, then no form of gameplay outside of the RPG could possibly possess it. When I sit down to play 1846, I immediately cede any authority over the game's goal, which always will be to accumulate the most wealth before the bank breaks. Is there some process by which Tom Lehmann setting the goal of play without being at my table preserves my agency but my proposing to my players they might like to stop a plot to murder their beloved queen does not?Your claim is too strong on multiple fronts. Not controlling the goal of play does not preclude a player from having agency (indeed it must not, or no other form of game could possible include it), and further accepting a goal proposed by someone else is not a diminshment of agency either. In the classic plot hook scenario, if a player agrees to a proposed goal, it does not matter whether it originated from the GM or not.What you're proposing here is possibly a desirable attribute in a game, but it can't be associated with agency in the way you are.I actually have no disagreement with this point broadly, though I point towards a very different set of emerging design criteria. It's a failure of design to leave the GM writing resolution processes in the moment, which is routinely enabled by treating the need to do so as a freedom instead of a burden.You're still smuggling in "player set goals" as a necessary component of agency again here, which I'll note is outside of your initial definition and apparently unique to the RPG. You also seem to be keen to expand that to a broader claim that "players set goals without any input from the board state" which I also don't see the necessity of.This section is largely irrelevant. Not being able to decide the precise conditions of the board state has nothing to do with a player's ability to act on it. Offloading a bunch of decision making about what the board looks like to the GM is simply one means of solving where that information comes from. You pointed out earlier you could achieve solo play doing the same thing with a series of tables, some games use fixed scenarios that players attempt to navigate using known rules and so forth.The problem you're pointing towards is that a GM could maliciously use their deciding power to render all player decisions unimpactful to the ultimate evaluation of their goals. The classic "rocks fall, everyone dies" is the most obvious example, or the adventure path with a false choice, left or right will both lead to an ecounter with a bugbear being the more insidious version we call railroading. What doesn't follow is that a GM must do this if they're responsible for creating the content that makes up the board state. Personally, I find the diversity of possible board states that having a GM capable of simulating those questions of weather and people and wall thickness allows is worth the risk.Mostly the risk here comes from the GM's overlapping responsibilities; GM as worldbuilder, GM as animator of NPCs, GM as adjudicator of rules, and the most frustrating for me, GM as designer of last resort. Ideally those last two should need be invoked as little as possible or not at all, and the GM should treat all of these roles as professionally separate responsibilities that do not impinge on each other. I'd quite like to see a game that completely separates the first two into two different people.I'm abridging the rest as I don't think you have any new claims in the next few sections. Fundamentally, I think you're trying to paint agency as more binary than it is, leaving out the space of strategic decision making and adding some RPG specific concerns about player goal setting that I don't think are represented in your initial definition.</blockquote>

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