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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 9641850" data-attributes="member: 7025508">RPGs are not like "any other game". They are collaborative creative exercises with some rules as scaffolding. It is art, not science.And that is no way a player can exercise agency. To say it is not, is obviously a biased attempt to twist the definition of player agency."Rules" that are required is that the GM gets to describe the fictional situation, the player gets to describe what their fictional character does about it and the GM describes how it alters the situation. That's rules for functional RPG for you. And the player is doing deciding what their character does in the fiction, which in turn influences what the GM says next, thus affecting the fiction again. This is obviously the player exercising agency over the fiction.Like Wittgenstein says, there is not one concrete definition of "game." It cover a range of very different activities. By focusing of the rules in RPGs, you are eliding what actually makes them unique. Like when we talk about the events in our games, we mostly talk about the fiction. And you can have a perfectly sensible (if somewhat incomplete) account of the events of the game that does not mention any rules, but you really cannot do it other way around.This indeed sound terrible, and very low player agency. Yet, you probably have played games with similar or even the same rule system, where the GM still had final say, decided outcomes, decided what to frame next etc. where the experience nevertheless was not like this and you had much more agency? Which to me goes to show that the agency does not derive primarily, let alone solely from the rules.</blockquote>

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