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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 7787856" data-attributes="member: 20564">Player agency can happen at a lot of different levels.  There are mixes of agency and railroading at different scales that are worth examining.  Let me give two contrasting examples.Example 1:Players have a wide variety of plots and hooks in front of them, and pick what they want to do. But if they, for instance, pick the optional raid on the red dragon's lair it will pretty much ultimately lead to an encounter with the dragon. Sandbox world, railroad adventure.Example 2:The players are beseecheed by local authority figures to help deal with a rampaging dragon when they return from an adventure. No other plots or hooks are given. But the characters have plenty of ways to try to deal with it - arming NPCs, ambushing it when it hunts from one of the several seperated herds / flocks, go after it in it's lair while it's sleeping, hunt up a local hag who could use divinations to figure out where to intercept it soonest. The ways to solve the adventure are wide open, but dealing with the dragon is railroaded.(Note these aren't exclusive, just examples of mixes.)An case like the first can bring even a module into a sandbox world, where following the meaningful player choices leads to a few sessions that are rather linear. The other is the opposite, with campaign arcs set by the DM but lots of immediate-feedback agency on how to accomplish the tasks.Personally, my campaign arcs twist all over the place based on what the players do - nothing I have planned is true until it hits the table, and players make a huge impact on it, and by campoaign end it resembles nothing I thought of before the start. But even there, there's some railroading. When the want to pursue a specific grand ritual and there's only two locations to get one epic component, they can pick which one they want to infiltrate but the fact that they are going to go after one or the other sooner or later is not really in question.</blockquote>

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