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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7383022" data-attributes="member: 42582">PCs don't declare actions. PCs just do things.Declaring actions - a concept that I think has its origins in wargaming, and is the counterpart to the boardgame notion of making a move or the cardgame notio of playing a card - is something done by real people who are sitting around a table and playing a game.The player who knows that there is no hope of finding a holy sword at the market is, of course, free to describe what his/her PC is doing however s/he likes. The player of Trog is free to do the same thing. But neither player is actually engaging an action resolution process. It's all just colour. This speaks directly to agency. Telling players that any action can be declared while (more or less secretly) resolving that some will automatically fail, undermines, it doesn't further, player agency in the context of a RPG.This is a completely separate point.I could write on my PC sheet "Wears a purple hat". If, subsequently in the game, my PC turns up at a town where the GM has decided that all purple hat wearers get free board and lodging with the mayor for a week (so fond is said personage of stylish headgear!), well so it goes! But that doesn't mean that I declared an action for my PC "Don purple hat so as to get free board and lodging." This is just the GM making decisions based on the established fiction.The same applies if the GM decides that a trickster god flies the arm-flapping PC to the moon. This is not the outcome of any PC action declaration to that affect - it's the GM authoring some fiction following from the player's description of what his/her PC does.Now it's true that there are many GMs, especially D&D ones in my experience, who think that all playes ever do is describe what their PCs do, and it is always up to the GM to actually decide if anything flows from this. (An exception is in relation to combat - it's generally regarded as very controversial for a D&D GM to treat "I attack" as simply a description that the GM is free to narrate new ficiton around, rather than an actual action declaration that invokes a particular set of mechanics.)This is not the case in any of the RPGs I play, however, all of which have an actual notion of action declaration that applies in a range of non-combat as well as combat contexts.</blockquote>

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