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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8012911" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know what you mean by the dice decide.The main role of dice that I know of in a RPG is similar to what [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] has pointed to: if a player declares an action for his/her PC - ie puts forward a candidate narration of what happens - the roll of the dice determines whether or not that action succeeds, which is to say whether or not that narration comes true.The GM deciding what happens is the GM making all the choices about narration, perhaps taking suggestions along the way.I don't see how those two things are comparable in the degree of agency they give to the player. To me, the first looks like the playing of a game, where dice are rolled to work out who gets to decide what happens next. The second one looks to me like a person telling a story.It's the difference between (i) staking things on a coin toss, and losing and (ii) having no chance of getting what you want.I think those are quite different things.I'm not sure what this means. The setting is a work of fiction. It is authored. So are you saying that you author bits independent of what the players have their PCs do? That's not uncommon in RPGing, though not essential - a few weeks ago when I ran a session of Wuthering Heights the setting was independent of the PCs only in the sense that it was mid-to-late-19th century London and so at one point we looked at a map to see how long it would take to get from Soho to the Thames.But all the details that mattered - the bookshop, the socialist reading group, the prison, the prisoners, the salient NPCs - were established by us as needed to make play happen.But anyway, if what you mean by the setting has an objective existence outside the PCs is that you author bits of it independent of what the players have their PCs do, how does that relate to players' action declarations for their PCs? [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] is asserting the following: if you use that GM-authored fiction as a basis for deciding that player action declarations that are unobjectionable from the point of view of genre and established shared fiction, then that is a burden on players' agency. Because there are effects tbat they can't haveon the fiction not for reasons to do with genre, nor to do with what has already happened in play, but because the GM's unilateral conception of the fiction is given priority.I'm not sure what you mean by "let[ting[ the PCs flail a little" and also by "mak[ing] mistakes".This seems to imply that there's something the players ought to be having their PCs do, but they don't know what it is ("flail around") and do something they oughtn't ("make mistakes").When I RPG the story goes interesting places - see eg <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/prince-valiant-actual-play.672702/" target="_blank">this actual play report from Sunday's session</a> - but that doesn't involve the PCs or the players making mistakes and flailing arouind. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they fail. That's what action resolution mechanics are for.</blockquote>

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