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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9641937">The GM isn't doing this in a vacuum. Just like when a filmmaker makes a decision about cause and effect in a movie, or what feels dramatically appropriate, they make that choice knowing it is going to be judged by the audience. And players are right there in front of them. You know instantly when you have made a choice that the players find illogical. And everything in most RPGs isn't purely up to the GM. That is a straw man. The GM is expected to defer to rules, unless there is a very good reason to do otherwise, and doing this still requires player buy in (if you are the kind of GM who just arbitrarily overrules the dice because you personally don't like outcomes for example, you won't have players after a while). I think here you are equating narrative control with agency and to me that isn't what agency is. Also when you use terms like authorship, I feel like it kind of glides over what is actually going on here. A GM isn't simply narrative a story to the players. It is an extensive back and forth, with the GM responding to player input, relying on rules, and expected to make decisions and rulings that make sense to the people playing the game. But when we say someone has agency, we never really mean, that they have some kind of ability to shape reality around themselves. If we did then characters with supernatural abilities would always have the most agency in books, and I think often times those characters feel like they have the least, because there is less actual character to them. I think for most players when they say they have agency, what they mean is the ability to say "No, I am not going to go to Castle of Graven Swamp and plunder its ruins, instead I want to go north east to Tarna and see if the the House of Skulls is looking to hire assassins". That agency can arise fully in a system where the GM is the one telling the players that House of Skulls is a thing, and determining what happens when they north east to Tarna and telling them what they see when they get there. As long as you have that back and forth, and the players are able to say no, take initiative and ask question to get more information, that is agency to most people. And while it might be interesting to be able to write something on my sheet the GM has to incorporate into the flow of events, I don't think that feels like it would add agency to my character. It would give me a little control over the direction of the campaign as a player, and that might be worth discussing, but I feel like that is different from agency (at least the way I think of agency).</blockquote>

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