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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8016439" data-attributes="member: 7016699">So, leaving aside the fact that I'm not a skilled Magic player--I never learned how to draw the right cards ... ;-)In baseball (and sports in general) there's a saying: "That's why they play the games." It usually comes up in broadcasts when there's an upset--especially if said upset involves unlikely on-field events. It seems apt here.What you're describing sounds like the win-probability analysis that I see in baseball (and that so often seems to be wrong, but that's less relevant, and probably comes down to my shrinkology and not the models). It would be a shame if baseball (or any other sport) resorted to using those instead of playing the games, because of all the chaotic interactions; OTOH, if they knew that was how wins would be determined they could plan for that and build for it. This isn't entirely unlike knowing your GM as a player, and knowing how they're likely to rule.In TRPG play, what you're describing isn't quite what I'm describing, or what I think [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] was describing. We're talking about the GM deciding the outcome isn't in doubt, which in the win-probability world would mean a win probability that was exactly 100% or 0%. That said, I won't deny that not being allowed to roll might diminish the perception of agency, especially if the result was negative. (While the GM deciding on success might do just as much to reduce actual agency, I suspect most players would be less likely to complain.)You haven't seen my dice at work.To answer your question more seriously, I think what you're describing shows that the player in Blades in the Dark has many explicit ways to shape the odds--what seems to me like adjusting the fictional framing, though I may be misunderstanding what you and/or others have meant by that. In a system that is entirely GM Decides, any of that would have to be through persuasion of the GM. This is less mechanical and less guided by rule, but it's there. I mean, people play diceless systems and don't complain there's no agency there (at least, that I know of--the closest I think I've come is a session or two of Prime Time Adventures, which looking back I don't remember dice being involved, but it was more than ten years ago and my memory is foggy).My position would be that a player in a D&D 5E game that I was running, playing a rogue trying to do something analogous would have other characters to provide buffs (same as the Lurk), would have similar freedom in describing their actions, and would have good knowledge of the odds (because at my table Proficiency lets you know the DC of an Ability Check before you roll); they wouldn't have the ability to hurt themselves to improve the odds (the Stress economy), but they might be able to describe their actions so that they have Advantage on a relevant roll, and they might have the Lucky Feat or some other mechanic that gives them the specific ability to reroll bad rolls. So my position is that the player at my D&D 5E table would have a similar amount of agency--and the only thing I can think of that is explicitly GM-side there is setting DCs for rolls. The only difference in capriciousness I see is that a d20 is swingier than a d6.</blockquote>

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