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<blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9555853" data-attributes="member: 7026617">It isn't, but I think its far from universal, and there are some problems with it if taken too far.&nbsp; As I've noted before, I've seen people who outright claim that if you don't have a completely open sandbox type situation that its not really a roleplaying game.&nbsp; There's at least fairly well-known person on this board who, if not in this bucket, is pretty close to it.&nbsp; That's because any game that constrains the situation, essentially tells the players that certain decisions are, functionally, off the table; if they make them, at least that character will be removed from play; the GM is not going to run a separate game for the one player who wants his member of the police squad to go rogue.(I realize you've acknowledged social constraints as a limiting factor on this before, but I just did want to note the degree to which that is viewed as acceptable varies considerably).So the question is, how &quot;meaningful&quot; does the decision making need to be maintain agency?&nbsp; If you've got a railroaded game, but one that within the bounds of the tracks the players are allowed to interact with each other and NPCs, potentially changing some elements of how things play out even if they end up at the same destination, does that count?&nbsp; If not, I suspect you've potentially excluded a pretty fair number of games out there from being RPGs, and I'm not talking about ones that are structurally different, but just how they're run and accepted they're going to be run, including probably a lot of adventures (where getting too far off the path breaks the adventure, and there's thus a lot of passive or even active encouragement not to do that).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Thomas Shey, post: 9555853, member: 7026617"] It isn't, but I think its far from universal, and there are some problems with it if taken too far. As I've noted before, I've seen people who outright claim that if you don't have a completely open sandbox type situation that its not really a roleplaying game. There's at least fairly well-known person on this board who, if not in this bucket, is pretty close to it. That's because any game that constrains the situation, essentially tells the players that certain decisions are, functionally, off the table; if they make them, at least that character will be removed from play; the GM is not going to run a separate game for the one player who wants his member of the police squad to go rogue. (I realize you've acknowledged social constraints as a limiting factor on this before, but I just did want to note the degree to which that is viewed as acceptable varies considerably). So the question is, how "meaningful" does the decision making need to be maintain agency? If you've got a railroaded game, but one that within the bounds of the tracks the players are allowed to interact with each other and NPCs, potentially changing some elements of how things play out even if they end up at the same destination, does that count? If not, I suspect you've potentially excluded a pretty fair number of games out there from being RPGs, and I'm not talking about ones that are structurally different, but just how they're run and accepted they're going to be run, including probably a lot of adventures (where getting too far off the path breaks the adventure, and there's thus a lot of passive or even active encouragement not to do that). [/QUOTE]

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