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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8738872" data-attributes="member: 6696971">[USER=6690965]@Pedantic[/USER] , Don't have time to engage with your post, but just one quick thing and clarifications:1)  This is your depiction of high agency:  "Agency is when you have an ability to force the game state to change in a known and specific way and you can leverage that to your benefit. High agency mechanics state declaratively what happens as a result of your action. In D&D's history spells have traditionally been very high agency, and skills have (when they've existed) tended to be low agency (and more so, if there's no way to push yourself off the RNG to achieve a given task, or we're using automatic success/failure rules on 20/1)."Your position seems to be that serial exploration and sussing out the dynamics of a GM's attempt to naturalistically model and derive a hugely complex imagined space (like a biome...like a social system at scale) + granular task resolution mechanics + getting the GM to decide in your favor ("playing/gaming the GM") when a conflict is over vs when its still in the balance (because this is always governed by GM decides in these systems) is higher agency than Blades in the Dark.  I just can't fathom how you would come to that conclusion given what you've specified above (this is assuming you understand all the intersecting mechanical levers and gears of Blades, Player Best Practices, the game's ethos and you and your GM played the game skillfully and with fidelity to all the aforementioned).  Hence, why I'm of the opinion presently that we should table that discussion for now.  I mean, I know the words you're saying...I can read them.  They just don't land with reality for me so that tells me that our orientation to the above statement you've made and "how that translates to the process of play and architecture of system" is a crazy distance apart.I agree with your first sentence in the quoted above.  I would probably subtly disagree with the rest of it, but only subtly.  I would say that:(a) agency very much depends upon the agenda of a game (therefore it will deviate depending upon the game).(b) you can think you have tactical agency/strategic agency when you actually don't (because the GM basically has "Calvinball Rights"/veto and something else is happening beyond you onboarding all the tactical/strategic elements of a true and vital system and making skilled moves to affect the gamestate in a desirable trajectory)(c) even if you have tactical/strategic agency in very particular moments of play (and abridged in others), such as combat, you may be completely deprotagonized (possessing no actual protagonasim agency) because the subject matter of the game isn't about PC dramatic needs evinced by the players and mediated through system...its basically about GM story or setting tourism or one of the GM's characters (eg Strahd in Ravenloft whose dramatic need is the nexus of play)(d) skillfully employing your OODA (observe > orient > decide > act) Loop requires a firm understanding of your decision-space and of the prospective consequence-space downrange of the decision-made and how effective one action is vs another and the opportunity cost and strategic through line of exhausting/employing one resource vs another (if play entails such a thing)...and that requires deeply understanding the specific game in question (including ethos and all of the intersecting mechanical parts and the incentive structures/feedback loops for advancement vs attrition...and this gets complex because in some games ablation of character is desirable so this must also be folded into your decision-tree) + a very skillful GM + a very transparent and highly function conversation between involved parties (because your GM + PC build + game engine are your UI, so you need to understand the imagined space and gamestate possibilities through the lens of these converging things).Blades in the Dark and Torchbearer are probably the two highest Skilled Play games I've ever GMed (and that entails agency in the way you're expressing above).  So that tells you how far apart we are.2)  CLARIFICATIONS:a)  Yes, Eagle's Flight and not Overland Flight (I was just subbing "the thing you're doing" for "the name of the ritual).b)  In the above example I was instantiating two different declarations at the initial obstacle and what that contrast would look like.  It wasn't Eagles Flight AND Shapeshift into an animal and use the Encounter Power Spirited Wind.  It was instantiate (i) the action declaration of using the Ritual Eagle's Flight and achieving 1 or 2 Successes at first obstacle framing (pending Nature check) vs (ii) the action declaration of shifting into an animal form (this is just color in this case...if you have a Feat that gives you increased movement or expend a power that grants you additional movement rate, I'd bump that +2 for Spirited Wind up to +4) and then employing the Encounter Power Spirited Wind to nullify the gently undulating terrain of snaking reed bogs around meadow rises and then failing on the result to achieve a consequence.  So effectively, you're talking about these alternative gamestates post first action declaration:GAMESTATE:  Success 1/2 (autosuccess due to Ritual but 1/2 pending Nature roll) vs 0 Failures +100 Coin spent and new obstacle framing post-traversing of the reed bog/meadows.vsGAMESTATE:  Success 0 vs 1 Failure + Spirited Wind expended + 1 Healing Surge lost and consequence framing while still in the reed swamp/meadows.</blockquote>

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