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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9641780" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here's what the OP says:From this account of agency, we can then ask questions like:*How, in a RPG, can players establish goals for play? Gygax, in his PHB, gives one account (in the section on Successful Adventures). Luke Crane, in the Burning Wheel rulebook, gives a very different account. *How are player action declarations, aimed at achieving those goals, to be resolved? Are there ways of doing this that don't just involve the GM interposing their own agency? The classic D&D rules for forcing open doors are one example; Burning Wheel provides a different example.There are other examples too, from other RPGs.And some of the answers will depend on the intended scope and focus of play. Gygax's D&D, for instance, simply has nothing to offer for someone who wants the focus of their RPGing to be around small-scale, emotionally intimate, character interactions; Burning Wheel does. Burning Wheel has little to offer players who want their goals to focus on close "exploration" and overcoming of a GM-mapped-and-keyed puzzle space. Gygax's D&D does, although experience has shown that it is a design that is vulnerable to agency-reducing perturbations: what counts as fair in a classic dungeon is, I think, very sensitive to local group norms and actual prior experiences of play together.</blockquote>