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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9250833" data-attributes="member: 42582">If choosing what colour pantaloons a character wears is important to a player, than taking that away might upset them. But it would be rare, I think, to characterise choice of trouser colour as an important manifestation of player agency in RPG play.When I am GMing White Plume Mountain, of course the players take seriously their choice of which corridor to go down, as they know (even if they are choosing mostly blindly) that this will determine what it is that their PCs observe and/or encounter.When I am GMing Prince Valiant, they don't worry about distances and directions per se - those are not relevant to game play. The last time issues of internal architecture arose, it was resolved like this:The players do, as their PCs, sometimes have places they wish to go to, but the travel is resolved via GM scene-framing, just like any other event in the game. When the PCs wanted to travel from Britain to Constantinople, various episodes of travel were resolved, together with events along the way; and we all looked at a map I have photocopied from <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/275813/the-new-penguin-atlas-of-medieval-history-by-colin-mcevedy-illustrated-by-david-woodroffe/" target="_blank">The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History</a> to help coordinate, in a general way, our shared sense of time and place. But the map didn't determine the events, except in the sense of providing me with background colour: the PCs took over a Duchy in France, travelled by sea to Italy where they escaped the clutches of a treacherous noble, and were forced by inclement weather to land on the Dalmation coast and finish their trek overland. In that trek, they met Huns in the hills, and then ancient, restless dead in the forests of Dacia, before travelling along the Black Sea coast to Constantinople.To describe this as the players' agency being "reduced" in comparison to the play of White Plume Mountain would in my view be a misdescription, reflecting a failure to grasp the different processes of play in each game.</blockquote>

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