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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9065331" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I think that often when it comes to RPGs, there's fuzziness around the idea of player agency. It's likely due to several factors, but there are two that seem most relevant to me, and I think they're connected. First, I don't think the simple act of taking part in the game... the ability to play... is enough to constitute agency. In an RPG, this entails declaring what your character does. This alone should is a bare minimum, and its presence isn't sufficient to establish agency. Too many people seem to think this is enough to establish agency. It's not. Second is the perceived need to separate character knowledge and player knowledge. This is something that generally doesn't exist in other games. In almost any other game, you're a participant in the game, and so you know what's going on, what may happen at any time, what you are allowed to do, what the stakes are... and so on. There may be information that you're not privy to... let's say like an opposing team's playbook in football, for example... but the range of possibilities are known. You know what the other team can do, and you likely know their strengths and weaknesses. Look at almost any other game other than pure games of chance, and the player is aware of the odds and the stakes and so on. In chess, you can literally see the entirety of the board... yet you can still miss an opponent's move, or be unable to stop it. In poker, there are cards that you cannot see... but there are cards you can see, and you know what's in the deck, and what cards are likely, and so on... you have the ability to act in an informed manner.That's agency. Being able to actually play the game, just as you'd expect in almost any other game. Apply this weird restriction to any other game, and you immediately see it. If you could somehow limit the knowledge of participants in other games so that they could not know the opponents' strengths, or could not know what cards are in the deck, or were not allowd to know how many yards they had to get to make a first down, or what inning it was or how many outs there were... such restrictions would be considered awful for the state of a game. Yet people do it in RPGs all the time. This whole "meta" angle really needs to be dropped if you want to promote agency. Simply share information with the players. Let them make informed decisions. They are players in a game... let them be so. I know this often leads to cries of "RP is more important than the G" and "role play rather than roll play" but that's all garbage. Role playing is not diminished by sharing game information. If you want to allow agency, you have to empower players. And as with any other game, they need to understand the circumstances, odds, and stakes at any point of play. If that's not something that appeals, then you're not interested in player agency. And this is before we even really get into the mechanics and processes of play. Sharing information with the players so that they can then use that information to make meaningful decisions is the first step toward actual agency.</blockquote>

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