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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7346220" data-attributes="member: 42582">My point was that they're not hiding any backstory. There is no hidden backstory, no unrevealed fiction, in your example. What the GM and Mary are hiding is that the thief in question is Mary's player character.As far as I can tell, the only interesting thing about the episode you describe is that the NPC is, in fact, a PC. Mary is the one who has sent that up - so she is not a bystander, she is the instigator of the whole thing - and the players don't actually know what it is that it is interesting about the scene. It's an in-joke between Mary and the GM.The fact that the players can declare attacks against Keyes strikes me as really neither here nor there. Presumably they could have declared attacks against the people in the bar, too, or gone on a rampage in the town committing arson on all the buildings and taking on any NPC who tries to stop them. But if that's the measure of agency, then every RPG grants every player unlimited agency. When I refer to "agency in respect of the content of the shared fiction", I've got in mind more than just declaring actions more-or-less at random until your PC is killed.Having an infinite range of ways to provoke someone else to author stuff doesn't mean that you have a lot of agency.I've bolded what I think is the key phrase in your post where the point I've just made is hidden: the players need the GM to help bring it to life. There are a very large variety of techniques available, across the corpus of roleplaying games and roleplaying approaches, to a GM who want to "help the players bring it to life". Some of them are more conducive to player agency than others.Your example, upthread, of a GM establishing a whole lot of unrevealed consequences playing out "behind the scenes" and resulting in the PCs (and, thereby, their players) suffering consequences which the players never contemplated, intended or deliberately put into play in the game, illustrates the point. The players took advantage of their freedom to make moves in the game. The GM helped them "bring it to life". But what agency did the players exercise? None that I can see. All the significant choices were made by the GM.</blockquote>

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