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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9849972" data-attributes="member: 18">I'd agree with this, though I think one can easily overstate how different that story is for each person.I mean, I don't think that's necessarily true. Because I don't think there's the hard contradiction between player agency and story-like elements in all cases, especially because, as you point out, a lot of more recent RPGs let the players make the game more story-like, but often that also increases player agency, rather than decreasing it.I think the most "story-like" (as played through) RPG adventures tend to be what people refer to as railroads, and to feature a lot of "cutscenes" where the PCs are onlookers who can't really influence anything, and those absolutely remove player agency and make things more "story-like". But stuff like a PC being able to spend a meta-resource to have a plausible NPC suddenly make an entrance to a scene or something - that makes things feel more like a story without, I would argue, diminishing anyone's agency (including the DM). Also a lot of DM abilities to do that same are similar - spending Fear to do things in Daggerheart, if you're doing it right (and the game does explain how) rarely diminishes player agency or detracts from what they've done, but can make things more story-like and dramatic, very easily. However, it is freeform so the DM is absolutely capable of derailing "the story" too with that kind of thing. I've seen DMs derail their own stories before, intentionally and otherwise.Also, particularly well-designed adventures (Mothership has a lot of these) can feel very like a cool story even though they're not railroading you particularly hard. I think space horror as a genre is particularly easy to make feel like a story as so many RPGers are familiar with it (more, I would argue, than are actually, genuinely, honest-to-god familiar with fantasy as a literary or movie/TV genre) and tend to instinctually lean in to genre tropes or see situations in terms of genre tropes.I do think whether the players lean into or away from the genre of the RPG/adventure, and understand that genre and its tropes can often make a big difference as to how "story-like" an adventure/scenario is. Also whether the characters themselves can jive with the genre or whether they clash with it. Some people take issue with how modern D&D has embraced all classes and species and so on, in settings and adventures as well as rules but it does mean that the older issue one saw in 2E and to some extent 3E where the colourful bunch of weirdo PCs clashed massively thematically and stylistically with the narrow assumptions and vibes of an adventure is much less often an issue.All that said, possible the most enjoyable Mothership adventure we ever did (actually a mini-campaign) was absolutely a total mess story-telling-wise, and would totally impossible to write down in any way that made it make sense (the DM tried for the first few sessions but then gave up!). And that was down to player agency - and the dreaded basically-at-will time-travel. Once serious frequent time-travel gets involved it's very hard to tell a compelling story even in conventional media. But it was totally chaotic fun.</blockquote>

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