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<blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8017153" data-attributes="member: 7016699">I'll address this backward (sorry). Yes, I believe it's possible for a GM operating in bad faith (or from bad premises--I'm not insisting on bad intentions, here) to &quot;say yes&quot; in a way that negates, or undoes, or denies player agency. &quot;Pretty sucky&quot; sounds like an understatement. Bad GMing doesn't require malice.As to the former: Yes, that's what I mean, but before the resolution gets to that point, there's the determination of appropriateness, possibleness (urk), and so forth; it's my understanding that if a proposed action doesn't meet those tests, there's a &quot;no.&quot; That doesn't really seem different to me from a DM in D&amp;D 5E (I really wish there was a game we both liked and played enough to be able to talk about the same game, don't you?) operating in good faith to determine when an Ability Check can't succeed (or, I guess in principle, can't fail).As a side point--this is probably not super-relevant and I won't be upset if you ignore it--in the games I've played or read that were more ... explicitly about giving players agency in the fiction (mostly Fate; I've read the SRD for Blades in the Dark but haven't and likely won't play it) seems to me to have a clear trade-off, where the players get more ability to affect the fiction directly, outside of their character's capabilities, in exchange for the GM having more explicit ways to reduce their agency over their character. This seems to go with what's been said upthread about there only being so much agency to go around (as I understood it).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="prabe, post: 8017153, member: 7016699"] I'll address this backward (sorry). Yes, I believe it's possible for a GM operating in bad faith (or from bad premises--I'm not insisting on bad intentions, here) to "say yes" in a way that negates, or undoes, or denies player agency. "Pretty sucky" sounds like an understatement. Bad GMing doesn't require malice. As to the former: Yes, that's what I mean, but before the resolution gets to that point, there's the determination of appropriateness, possibleness (urk), and so forth; it's my understanding that if a proposed action doesn't meet those tests, there's a "no." That doesn't really seem different to me from a DM in D&D 5E (I really wish there was a game we both liked and played enough to be able to talk about the same game, don't you?) operating in good faith to determine when an Ability Check can't succeed (or, I guess in principle, can't fail). As a side point--this is probably not super-relevant and I won't be upset if you ignore it--in the games I've played or read that were more ... explicitly about giving players agency in the fiction (mostly Fate; I've read the SRD for Blades in the Dark but haven't and likely won't play it) seems to me to have a clear trade-off, where the players get more ability to affect the fiction directly, outside of their character's capabilities, in exchange for the GM having more explicit ways to reduce their agency over their character. This seems to go with what's been said upthread about there only being so much agency to go around (as I understood it). [/QUOTE]

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