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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9108479" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've posted actual examples, including a discussion of how - in GMing an ongoing game of Classic Traveller - I made certain sorts of decisions as a GM to try and step up the degree of player agency in play.I don't think anyone has engaged with that example.This prompted two thoughts.(1) Why is a RPG worse if it involves less agency? By almost any measure, playing a module like the classic DL railroad involves less player agency than carefully working through Tomb of Horrors in class D&D poke-every-square with a 10' pole play, using flying thieves on ropes and summoning monsters to enter the rooms first, etc. The former is like being told a story in a particular medium and getting to chime in from time to time with colourful contributions; the latter is like solving a particularly tedious crossword puzzle really slowly.Obviously there's going to be no universal ranking here: but speaking just for myself, I've played CoC railroads that were far more fun than properly working through ToH.(2) Not far upthread the topic of realism has come up. I've been in many discussions about realism in RPGing where interlocutors have never read or played games like Harn, RM, RQ, C&S or the like, which are the "realism"-oriented reactions to D&D as a fantasy RPG. I find that those discussions can be quite frustrating, as people who are not familiar with what is possible within the RPG form make assertions about degrees of possible realism that treat D&D as a norm in that respect.I think that discussions about the topic of agency can have similar problems. If someone has little or no experience of RPGs that are deliberately designed, using techniques that are innovative compared to the 1980s/90s mainstream, to increase the degree of player agency over the shared fiction, then their conception of what is possible in RPGing may often reflect that unfamiliarity.</blockquote>

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