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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9087881" data-attributes="member: 42582">I am struggling to follow this.In RPGs, sometimes when a player declares (speaking as their character) I do X then X becomes part of the fiction. In a lot of D&D play, action declarations like At the T-intersection, I turn left rather than right or I open the north door, not the south door work like that: the action declaration means that the character is going left, not right; or is mucking about with the north door, not the south door. I have never heard it suggested that these are "meaningless" action declarations, or that they are negations of player agency, prior to this thread.In fact, the whole OSR approach to designing dungeon maps (Jacquay and all that) rests on the premise that those sorts of action declarations are highly meaningful and are high agency.In most versions of D&D, there are spells which do not require any sort of check to be successfully cast. For instance, in most circumstances casting Passwall just permits the player to declare the hole in the wall to have been created. Or suppose that a PC is on the floor of a room with a very high ceiling, and wishes to get to a ledge right up near the ceiling: the player can declare I cast Dimension Door (assuming it is one of their memorised spells, or on a scroll, or similar) and declare that they teleport up to the ledge and - lo and behold - it happens. In 5e, as I read the rulebooks, the action declaration by a player with the Noble background I seek an audience with the local potentate works similarly to those pedestrian examples - it elides time and space a bit more than the dungeon navigation action declarations, but the upshot of the action declaration is that the audience takes place.Prince Valiant permits these sorts of action declarations if the player has, and spends, a Storyteller Certificate. <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/prince-valiant-actual-play.654732/" target="_blank">In one of our sessions</a>, Sir Morgath (a PC) was jousting with Sir Lionheart (a NPC), self-proclaimed greatest knight in all Britain. Sir Morgath's player was of the very strong (and sound) view that in an opposed roll of the dice Sir Lionheart would easily defeat Sir Morgath: so he cashed in a Certificate and elected to Kill a Foe in Combat: as the player narrated it, when the lances of the two knights connected, the one wielded by Sir Morgath splintered, and a shard flew through a gap in Sir Lionheart's visor and entered his brain through his eye, killing him!That was not a meaningless decision. The fact that I, as GM, had no power of veto didn't mean the player had no agency. They had full agency, which they exercised, achieving the outcome they desired.As I posted upthread, this argument that players getting what they want via fiat declarations is at odds with agency, or the exercise of agency, is a dead end, and it baffles me that anyone is putting the argument.</blockquote>

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