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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9559240" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not incredulous about that. Stories, when told well, evoke emotions.But they are not normally the emotions of a protagonist. They are typically sympathetic or aesthetic emotions of various sortsSure. A lot of people also can't ride unicycles - I mean, I know that I can't! (Even though I'm a pretty experienced cyclist.)But I don't know what that is supposed to tell us about player agency.I don't really know what this means.Upthread, you referred to "player agency to solve a mystery". Where the mystery is not an actual mystery - the players aren't actually detectives - but a fictional mystery, like a whodunnit or similar.If this is a species of player agency, then we could also talk about player agency to view a map, or draw a map. Or player agency to solve a riddle. Or player agency do any number of other things that might be associated with the sort of fiction generated by RPGing.When I think about player agency in the context of RPGing, the sort of agency that I find salient is agency in respect of the shared fiction - and, given the asymmetric game roles that are typical in RPGing, for a player that normally means agency to establish what sorts of goals can be meaningfully pursued by my PC as a protagonist, and what sorts of opposition will occur, and thus what is at stake for my PC in play. That's pretty broad, and thus encompasses quite a range of RPGing, but there is some stuff that it excludes - namely, GM-driven play where the GM determines the goals (eg via "adventure hooks") and/or the opposition (the poster-child for this is the quest-giver who is really the villain - who would ever have anticipated such a shocking turn of events?!?! - but there are many less heavy-handed ways in which GMs decide the opposition) and/or the stakes (most often, at least it seems to me, GM's decide this by reading it from, or extrapolating it from, their notes).The RPGs that I enjoy the most don't limit player agency of this sort, and others that I enjoy generally don't limit it much - eg I've found that it is not that hard to use Classic Traveller's patron generation system and random encounter system in a way that doesn't involve the GM unilaterally deciding the opposition and the stakes.This I don't really get. A typical feature of good stories is that the events of the story pertain to, and reflect upon, the protagonist. This doesn't make stories contrived (except in the obvious sense that they are deliberately authored). It just means that the stories are about something and someone.</blockquote>

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