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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 9071902" data-attributes="member: 6795602">IMO.  Players don't care about actual agency, they care about whether they feel like they have agency and different players have different thresholds for this and even different areas they may notice it more than others.1.  Players need some level of knowledge about the world in order to make decisions and without that will feel a lack of agency.  It sounds like your expectation is that they learn about the world through trial and error and then after sometime they will learn the nuances around how you typically run your games and rule in them.  If players are all on board to learn about the world that way then great!  But such a style is going to directly cause some to feel a lack of agency.  As someone said earlier, there is a belief among many players that the character should understand the world more or less and that such knowledge should be imparted to the player by the DM.  For such players if they aren't seeing you providing the characters understanding of the world then that's going to cross over their threshold.2.  99% of what is obvious to the DM is not obvious to the players.  The players don't actually know what you've put in your world for flavor and what for importance.  They can investigate some things, but if they keep on hitting the flavor pieces that go no where then you've just conditioned your players to ignore all the other potentially interesting and important bits.  Your ratio of interesting lore to immediately important info may very well be the problem.  If the whole group is wondering when combat is going to happen then that's a sign of boredom (if it's just 1-2 players then they may just be combat muffins), but if most all then not enough interesting is happening.  Whether that's their fault for not playing the way you want them to or you for not DMing more to their playstyle, you are likely the only one that can fix it.  Either engage them before the next game and suggest they will have more fun and more interesting stuff happen if they engage those details and make sure interesting stuff happens when they do, or just change your style so that most of the intersting stuff happening is of immediate importance and leads to conflict/problems, where combat may be necessary or at least one possible solutoin.  But either way, you are the starting step toward solving this problem.</blockquote>

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