NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9100330" data-attributes="member: 6785785">A hook. To reel the players in. A mystery is (traditionally) established ahead of time by the DM. Clues are created to be discovered so the players can solve the mystery. Why are the characters exploring the ruins/forest? Why did the GM create this place? What purpose does it serve? How does exploration work as a game? How do the players engage with that part of the game? How does the GM? We need to know all this kind of stuff to really understand the situation. At its most basic, it sounds like the GM created a location for the players to have the characters explore, which doesn’t scream player agency. One of the biggest areas of agency in D&D also involves the most dice rolling. I don’t think dice rolling disrupts agency. The agency to not have agency? [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER] posted earlier that all the time he spends DMing means that when he plays, he doesn’t want the burden of high creativity to be on him. He doesn’t want to have to drive the game like he does when he DMs. The post sums up agency nicely. Driving the game or being along for the ride. There’s nothing wrong with driving. There’s nothing wrong with being a passenger. We may prefer to do one or the other. That preference may vary depending on many factors. I don’t think anyone would disagree with this, generally speaking. Much of this thread, to me, seems like people who enjoy being passengers trying to say that being a passenger is the same as driving. Because they’re not. They’re just preferences. They’re things about D&D that people might enjoy. Why are you taking the positives that D&D offers (per the thoughtful post by [USER=6816042]@Arilyn[/USER] ) and trying to make them all examples of agency? Not everything positive is an example of agency. I played in a game of Delta Green last night.  I loved it. There was a cool mystery the Handler set up, with a lot of historical elements. He had lots of pictures and even some songs that he shared at appropriate times which really suited the era. It was a very fun game. It was low on player agency.  We were following bread crumbs left by the Handler to reveal the scenario he’d created. That’s what the game amounted to. And it was great.You can like D&D for all the things [USER=6816042]@Arilyn[/USER] listed. Many of them are the reasons I like D&D, too. And there are certainly more. But that doesn’t make those things examples of player agency.</blockquote>

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