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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9622440" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with your first para, and for that reason don't 100% agree with your second.A player can choose to play a low-agency character. That is what I did the last session where I played my Dark Elf in Burning Wheel - the agency (in the sense of the active agent in the fiction) was with the other PC, the evil necromancer Thoth.; But that doesn't mean that I as a player lacked agency. The relative lack of agency of my character was a manifestation of choices I made - eg to go to the street outside the home of the Elven ambassador, and hope that someone would come out to talk to me (in play, a Circles check that was likely to, and did, fail, with the upshot that my PC was approached by guards who moved him on); and to let Thoth boss me around (but in play, doing the things Thoth wants my PC to do still has me making decisions about intent and task, spending artha on my rolls, etc).So I think that the player/character divide is absolutely basic and fundamental to saying anything meaningful about this; but once we keep that divide in mind, we can say that my character was, in the fiction, a low-agency character (using the same sort of analysis as you apply to Buttercup in The Princes Bride); but I wasn't a low-agency player!</blockquote>