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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8013099" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't understand what you mean by "the dice determine the outcome". Can you give an example?All the examples of RPG mechanics that I'm thinking of at the moment involve a player declaring an action for his/her PC and then using the dice to find out whether or not the action succeeds. So it is as [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] has said: if the player wins the dice roll s/he decides what happens (because his/her desired change in the fiction comes true) and if the player loses then the GM decides what happens.I guess there's one exception I can think of: at least on one interpretation of the relevant rules, in AD&D and Moldvay Basic the GM should roll a reaction roll to establish the starting attitude of NPCs and monsters encountered whether or not the players have their PCs initiate interaction. That is not a mechanic that gives players any agency - it is a device the GM uses to randomise the framing of the situation. But that can't be an example of what you have in mind precisely because it is not about action resolution. As I just said, it's about framing.Someone somehwere has probably played a game of D&D where this was not true, but I think it's pretty typical.But it doesn't answer any of my questions. You're talking about the content of the fiction. I'm asking how is that fiction authored? By whom? And how is that authored ficiton used in subsequent adjudicaitons of declared actions?But now you're just assuming that players dont have agency. From time-to-time I GM games that take place in the "real world" - Cthulhu Dark and most recently Wuthering Heights. The players as much as me get to express views over what can be done in the real world. Eg in one of our Cthulhu Dark sessions the PCs had taken control of a tug boat and the player who knew the most about tug boats told us what could be done with it.In my games set in non-real worlds - eg my 4e game - the players also help decide what can or can't be done. Eg in that game it was the player of the invoker/wizard who generally took the lead in deciding what was possible to be done with magical effects.This is why - multiple times upthread now - I have emphasised that establishing constraints of genre and fictional positioning can be a matter of negotiation and consensus, in which the players exercise their agency as participants in that process. It need not be unilateral GM authority.And the fact that it can be negotiated is a reason for distinguishing it from action resolution procedures which, in the traditional RPGs that I play, are not about negotiation but rather involve rolling dice to see whether or not the fiction unfolds as the player is hoping for his/her PC.As I just posted in reply to [USER=6795602]@FrogReaver[/USER], the definition of player agency that you posit here is uninteresting because in every RPG players have it. It's not something that varies.[USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] has made it crystal clear that by player agency he means the ability of the player to change the state of the shared fiction. Given that, in a traditional RPG, the way a player changes the shared fiction is by declaring actions for his/her PC and then having those resolve, the connection between player agency and action resolution procedures is not coincidental.If a player can't change the shared fiction; if all s/he can do is prompt the GM to make such changes by describing what it is that his/her PC tries to do; then what is the role of the player in the game?</blockquote>

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