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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 9123682" data-attributes="member: 6993955">So even when I quote the OP and having read most of the thread, I still don't really get the point of the question. I'll set aside the variance on the tables for a second. Agency indexes the extent to which the game honours player decision making in an authentic and diegetically impactful ways - so player decisions matter, they change things, the game state responds in ways that makes sense. To 'reduce' player agency you would need to lower the extent to which player decision making has authentic and predictable consequences. The random versus more designed options outlined above don't seem to make that grade. The players are making a very common RPG choice - fast and dangerous travel versus slow and safer travel. Whether or not the consequences there are designed or randomly determined if the general set of outcomes matches the information the players had to make the decision then their agency hasn't been lowered. As caveat, 'matches' here is a pretty broad idea and would depend quite a bit on specifics that the example doesn't provide. That said, there's a bunch of nuance involved as well.If the random tables, especially the 'dangerous' one the extent to which the route was described as dangerous, then maybe that counts. Or the two tables aren't different enough, that would probably count too. To come back to my last point above, the idea of matching consequences to decision making is a matter of having what happens stay inside the range of 'what makes sense' based on the very specific situation the decision was made in. A quick decision made in haste carried less need to match the information that influenced the decision. However, the more the players know, or the more they find out about those routes, the more the consequences need to honour that informed decision. Generally though, I don't think that well designed random tables have any impact of player agency, although it is perhaps trivial to say that badly designed random tables are the opposite.</blockquote>

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