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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bill Zebub" data-source="post: 9545891" data-attributes="member: 7031982">I probably chose the wrong word with "artificial".  Sure, it's always artificial to turn the complexity of real life into game mechanics.What I really meant was whether it's "real" agency or "illusory" agency.To cite an example, in The One Ring's (1e) rules for Journeys, there is a very flavorful, Tolkien-esque subsystem for resolving mid-Journey events.  Players each take a role (Hunter, Guide, Look-Out, etc.) and then use those skills to overcome the challenges.But...they aren't really "using" those skills or making decisions.  The GM ("LM") rolls dice to determine the nature of the challenge and which of those roles it targets, and then one of the players assigned to that role makes a skill check, and on a failure that character suffers the designated penalty.  There's no "here's the situation, what do you want to do about it?"  It's just "You have to make a skill check or lose 2 Endurance."  There is absolutely zero problem-solving or decision-making.  It's...well...board-gamey.  (Unsurprising, since the designer made his name designing board games.).That's what I call "illusory" agency.The part in bold may absolutely be true.  I'm definitely not talking about roleplaying, or acting, or being convincing, and still all of the above may absolutely be true.  It can be risky and scary to suggest ideas in front of a group.And I would love to find ways to encourage those sorts of players to put themselves forward more and to share their ideas and be creative.  To learn to be ok with that risk.But I, personally, don't want to make the game more algorithmically dice-dependent to cater to that tendency.(As a side note...and this is not directed at you because I genuinely don't remember what you've said on these other topics...it seems to me this is, in some ways, a matter of 'inclusivity'.  I would be very curious to see a mapping correlating what various posters have said on this particular kind of inclusivity, compared to what they have said on other inclusivity topics: orc/drow descriptions, racial bonuses, safety cards, etc.  It would be interesting to see if some people use an inclusivity argument in one context, but take a "if they can't hack it they should find a new game" stance on other topics.)</blockquote>

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