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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7786018" data-attributes="member: 6775031">One thing that this article doesn't touch on is how the concept of player agency may differ from character agency.In a traditional RPG, the agency of the player is limited to what their character can do. Whether or not something changes within the narrative, later on, depends solely on what that character is capable of doing within the game world. Can you stop the orc army from taking over the elven stronghold? That depends on how good your character is at fighting, how good your character is at negotiating, and your approach. If you succeed, then certain NPCs will be alive where they otherwise would have died, and you generally have a different state of affairs. That's real character agency within the world.Some newer games, which could also be classified as RPGs if you're being generous, introduce an additional concept of extra-character player agency - the ability for a player to influence the outcome, beyond what their character is capable of affecting within the world. If an army of orcs is heading toward the elven stronghold, a player might be able to spend some meta-game resource in order to ensure favorable weather, or to conveniently find some secret orders left behind by an orc spy. The player has some amount of agency over what happens, even if their character isn't directly involved.To answer a question posed in the article, this is a type of a player agency that many designers (and players) will not want to include in their games, because the context of an RPG is that you're making decisions through the lens of the character. We don't play these games to see what happens, or even to influence those events, but rather to experience the world through the limited scope of a single person living in that world. Giving agency to the player, outside of that scope, would ruin the experience.</blockquote>

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