New to Sly Flourish? Start Here or subscribe to the newsletter.

Avoid Removing Player Agency

by Mike on 23 June 2025

The excellent chapbook Adventure Crucible by Robin Laws, describes several "fun ruiners" for fantasy RPGs at the end of the book. I talked about fun ruiners in my series of articles on Adventure Types beginning with Dungeon Crawls.

There are many ways a game can go bad – more than we can fit into a single article – but many of them come down to a single issue – removing player agency.

Players want to do stuff. They want to use the tools their characters have to interact with the world. When circumstances in the game (or our own choices as GMs) take those tools away or remove their decisions, players can't do as much as they hoped they could do. That's the removal of player agency and it can take many forms.

Here are a few examples.

Sorry, You're Stunned

Stunning and incapacitation of any sort can definitely be a fun ruiner. In combat-heavy games like 5e, players already don't get a lot of time in the spotlight to do their cool things. When we remove an entire round from them, we might eat up 20 minutes where they can't do anything at all. Not being able to do stuff in an RPG is a drag, even if it makes sense.

In the Lazy DM's Companion I offer an alternative choice characters can make:

A character can also choose to break this effect at the start of their turn by taking 4 (1d8) psychic damage per two character levels.

This is a way for players to choose damage over incapacitation if you choose to add in this optional rule. You can use this alternative for any effect the characters might want to break free from. Now that removal of agency is a choice they can make.

That's Not How This Chase Works

Sometimes we plan scenes in our games where the characters are intended to act a certain way. Chases are one example. I've seen published adventures that remove many ways you might want to interact in the chase. You can't use misty step and punch the running bad guy in the face. You get exhaustion if you try to dash (even though that doesn't happen anywhere else in the game). In some adventures, like Waterdeep Dragon Heist, even if you manage to grab the MacGuffin early in a chase, it literally won't work for you.

If the characters obtain the stone earlier than expected, it proves uncooperative and tries to separate itself from the party as quickly as possible, refusing to share any knowledge with characters in the meantime. The stone tries to take control of anyone who attunes to it, triggering a conflict (see “Sentient Magic Items” in chapter 7 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide). If the stone fails to take control, it can’t try again against that character until the next dawn. If the stone succeeds in taking control of its owner, it orders that character to deliver it to whichever location sets into motion the sequence of encounters discussed in this chapter (see “Encounter Chains”).

You're going through that chase, damnit.

You're All Captured and Your Stuff is Gone

Being captured sucks. Losing your stuff sucks. Often such capture is completely contrived. You never stood a chance. Some adventures force the issue by pitting the characters against an overwhelming force. Then you find yourself in a cage and all your stuff is taken away. That's a loss of agency. That stuff made characters cool and now they don't have it. Getting it back isn't fun. You're only back to where you started.

The only way I've seen this work well is in the adventure Out of the Abyss which starts you imprisoned. This adventure start doesn't remove agency because you didn't have any to begin with.

Taking away magic items or character capabilities may seem like a cool idea but it takes away player agency. I remember a high level 4th edition adventure that removed all character powers except at-will powers. No player went through the trouble of picking all their cool character abilities only to be put in a situation where they can't use them.

Avoid Removing Player Agency

These examples aren't unique. They're actually pretty common – especially among newer GMs who think capturing characters and taking away their stuff is going to be fun only to realize too late that their players hate it. These examples are also only three of many ways GMs might accidentally (or purposefully) take away character agency.

Be aware of the danger of taking away character agency. Know the fun taking agency away sucks away from your players. Players want to see their characters do cool stuff. They want to watch their characters use the tools they have to interact in the world. Don't take those tools away. Lean into them.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

I was sick this past weekend so there wasn't a new episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast).

I posted a YouTube video on Legendary Resistance Alternatives.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Ensure you get a group consensus on big decisions.
Ensure the players work together when negotiating with NPCs.
Clarify the characters’ primary goal and group bond in your session zero.
Pool damage and combine attacks together to run dozens to hundreds of monsters at once.
Offer choices with story and gameplay clues so players can make informed decisions.
Mix a few big monsters with lots of little monsters to let characters use big areas of attack options and big single target effects.
Call on individual players, particularly quiet players, when playing online. Players often fear talking over one another and more talkative players can hog the spotlight.

Share this article using this link: https://slyflourish.com/avoid_removing_player_agency.html

Subscribe to Sly Flourish

Subscribe to the weekly Sly Flourish newsletter and receive a free adventure generator PDF!

Sly Flourish's Books

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only by including the following statement in the new work:

This work includes material taken from SlyFlourish.com by Michael E. Shea available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

This site may use affiliate links to Amazon and DriveThruRPG. Thanks for your support!