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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8254693" data-attributes="member: 42582">Then you'd be wrong. I've run many games with little prep and some with no prep.<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/cthulhu-dark-session.653231/" target="_blank">Here</a> <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/cthulhu-dark-another-session.658931/" target="_blank">are</a> <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/played-some-wuthering-heights-today.672161/" target="_blank">links</a> to games I ran with no prep. The first two were Cthulhu Dark. The third was Wuthering Heights. All went very well: the PCs were created, starting situations were envisaged, events unfolded as imagined by the participants and guided by the action resolution processes; and in each case a satisfying resolution was reached which no one had any anticipation of when we started.Player agency is eminently possible in games that don't involve skilled play in the way you describe it. The skilled play that you describe is that of overcoming a problem or a puzzle. For instance, in my Classic Traveller game the players (via their PCs) confronted a problem: how do we get through 4 km of ice? The answer was fairly straightforward (and deliberately so on my part as GM, as I tend to downplay the role of that sort of problem-solving in my RPGing): use our starship's triple beam laser to blast it away!But player agency can manifest in many other ways besides coming up with solutions to problems. Changing the fiction is the most generic form that player agency takes in RPGing, and not all changes to the fiction are solutions to problems. When my Burning Wheel characters encountered Evard's Tower that was a manifestation of player agency (given that I was the one to come up with the idea that the tower was in the general area and hence apt to be found) but it wasn't a solution to a problem. It was the cause of some though!</blockquote>

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