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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 9091388" data-attributes="member: 5142">I would not go as far as to say that the D&D is "low agency," but I would potentially say that in comparison with some of the games in discussion, D&D tends towards "lower agency" with its players. There may be a myriad of reasons for that, and some of those reasons for that have been fairly self-admitted, like in the below:Since I feel that you may need the reassurance: there is nothing wrong with that or your gaming preferences. It is what it is.Here is where I think that there is nothing wrong with saying that some games afford less agency to their players than others. I think that comes part and parcel with saying that "the games are different and take different approaches to agency." Sometimes that naturally means less player agency and sometimes that means more player agency. When some people talk about ways that players could have more agency in a given game as in other games, it's abundantly clear that other people would dislike those things.One problem that I have with these sort of discussions, however, is this sense I get that some people want to pretend that their preferred games (typically however they prefer running D&D) have as much player agency as other games while also talking about all the ways that they intentionally restrict player agency as a GM or how D&D doesn't afford the same degree of player agency as other games. In my opinion, trying to depict these comparisons as "apples and oranges" seems like a cheap way to avoid scrutiny or comparisons of player agency between or within games entirely.Again, I think that it's fine to say that you run a higher agency game for D&D in some key areas, but that you also intentionally restrict player agency in other areas, such as authority over the fiction outside of the action declarations of the player characters. Even if this does not inhibit the sense of player agency for you or most people - who likely don't care either way or bother posting their strongly held opinions on online message boards - it definitely does restrict player agency. I do not believe that my only agency as a player is restricted to the action declarations of my player character in the fiction. My reason for this belief is the simple fact that there are other tabletop roleplaying games where my agency as a player does exist outside of this artificial boundary.This trend appears as if it will only continue if the playtest previews of Critical Role's Daggerheart is any indication.</blockquote>

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