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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9662279" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think I disagree with much of that - except perhaps in some cases of extreme skill differential: I don't think I really have very much agency when I sit down to play chess with even a competent club player, given that they will just completely clean my clock as I have no serious grasp of what counts as good play for chess. (I say this based on experience - the last time I played against a competent club player, it really would have made no difference had I rolled dice to move my pieces rather than made the choices that I did - I was so utterly out of my depth that it is almost a stretch to say that I was playing.)So I think you may have misunderstood me.What I'm trying to get at is that a marker or manifestation of agency in a game is that it permits a player/participant to us their authority to direct, control or at least guide how other players/participants must then exercise their authority. So in chess, by positioning my pieces in certain ways I can control how you exercise your authority to move your pieces. That's how I push towards mate. In bridge I can control how you exercise your authority to play cards from your hands, by choosing what to lead, whether to play under or over (and thus determining how the lead shifts), etc.And RPGs can permit this also.But some RPGing is undertaken in a way that doesn't permit this: I can exercise my authority as a player - say, to describe what actions my PC is taking - but that exercise of authority doesn't then have any impact on how the GM is able to use their authority. Or in other words, the GM can do more or less whatever they like with their move, regardless of what move I make as a player.I regard the sort of RPGing described in the previous paragraph as very low agency. I also think that it's rather common.My reason for mentioning Gygax in particular is not to connect agency to skill, but rather to point out that he does not advocate for the sort of low-agency play I've described. Rather, he is envisaging a rather intricate way of setting up the game, which means that the players do have the capacity, via their moves, to control or at least guide the GM's moves. And this is what makes "successful adventures" (Gygax's term) possible.And I think this is worth noting, in my view, because for reasons to do with the culture and history of RPGing, a lot of the low-agency RPGing still - at the surface level, at least - uses some Gygaxian techniques (map and key, for instance, seems to remain a very popular technique). But the low-agency RPGing does not deploy the rules and procedures that Gygax presupposed in his essay, and thus despite some resemblance in respect of techniques does not permit the same sort of exercise of player agency as the Gygaxian model does.</blockquote>

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