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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 9091102" data-attributes="member: 16586">Agency is not in itself a virtue. One of my personal favorite roleplaying games is Quietus, a game that focuses on melancholy horror. It's a game where players have fairly agency over the outcome of the game. The deck is stacked against their characters, and they will likely die or at the very least narrowly escape death but be fundamentally broken by their personal trauma.I don't think it should be controversial that different games, different tables of the same game, different scenarios and even different PC builds experience both different sorts of agency and differing amounts. One example that is common in D&D is the town game versus wandering vagabond games. In a wandering vagabond game PCs are mostly disconnected from the setting, often find themselves as fish out of water with no real knowledge of their surroundings except what they are able to scout out. In what Luke Crane calls the town game player characters are deeply entrenched in a community and their adventures are all connected to addressing threats to the community or building connections with the surrounding areas. Player characters have allies they can depend on, often are members of factions with real power in the setting and have a high level of knowledge about the environment surrounding their community.</blockquote>