a live document that will eventually contain all my thoughts on player agency
more than a decade ago i cared so much about player agency in rpgs that i scoured the internet, saving literally every blog post i could find that spoke of it, until i collected a folder of nearly 200+ links. i collecting anything and everything about player agency, thoughts on it, the purpose of it, the tools in our hands to grant agency and the reasons we would take it away. 5 years later, in 2020, nearly half of it had evaporated in the advent of personal blogs disappearing into the ether-net. 6 years later, i have pretty much forgotten the spoils of that research.
so obviously now is the best time to speak about it.
obviously.
to sum it all up, agency is the player's ability to receive consequences for their actions
i don't know when 'consequences' was actively thrown into the dialog mix for agency, but there's a divide between pre-2010 discourse and 2017 when suddenly 'consequences' seemed to be the accepted answer everywhere.
prior to all this, there was much discussion on the players being able to choose to do whatever they wanted, and to want to do whatever they wanted. but as it pertains to the medium of rpgs, the players ALWAYS have the ability to do and want whatever they wanted—to want, to choose, and to decide is to exist as a human. the problem however then is the GM's ability to facilitate, to RESPECT, that.
if a GM chooses to deny you your actions, they've taken away your agency. if the GM has the world ignore your actions, they've done the same.
a long time ago i used to have a player that regularly asked for weed trick rolls/checks. and whenever i allowed that, it was always disruptive, but i know she enjoyed the attention of disruption, as long as she was on the stage. after a session or two of this, i simply answered "yeahup, your weed roll is great. cool tricks" and moved on in a blink. despite enabling and allowing her to do whatever she wanted, i robbed her stage time, robbed her of the world caring about her or responding to her—i robbed her of her agency.
you can give the players everything they want, and they'll still feel robbed of their agency.