Annalise

There is a narrative tension that lives at the center of most table top RPGs. It haunts us from the product lines that started at TSR in the 80s and continue to be churned out by its various successors. Some games have tried to fight against it, but few have succeeded.

The tension I speak of lies between player agency and setting agency.

You see it in the millions of words written about settings. It appears in the tightly tuned adventures that are designed to tell the author's story. You even see it in the rules, showing up in page after page of Game Master advice.

All of these things stand in opposition to player agency. They stifle it, and worse, the predominance of it creates difficult habits to break. The kind that drives people to apologize for not "creating a better story" at the table.

Hell, the very concept of a Game Master creates a power dynamic that makes those habits as difficult to break as smoking...