On social media I’ve seen some recent RPG discussions about “player empowerment” or games that “give more power to the players”. This is especially common in discussions that involve comparing the nebulous category “Story Games” to other types of RPGs. Frequently this involves something that is difficult for a player to do in Game A being easy to do in Game B. The problem with calling this “empowerment” is that it usually maintains the expectations of Game A as the basis for comparison and fails to take into account treating Game B on its own terms.

For example, if the difference between Game A and Game B is that the scope and scale of the fictional action is simply more grandiose then the difference may be largely cosmetic. Is there a huge difference between Indiana Jones dodging a rolling boulder and Superman dodging a hurtling meteor? If we’re comparing between games, couldn’t a case be made that we should be comparing the Indy-to-Boulder relationship to the Superman-to-Meteor relationship rather than just comparing meteors to boulders or Superman to Dr. Jones?

Another way that this “empowerment” question gets discussed is when players in Game B can make any of the choices they can make in Game A, plus more. A frequent example is when games include explicit “Narrative Control” mechanics, where players can simply cause events to happen in the fictional world whether or not they are directly caused by a character they control. This is often described as having more “player power” than games where players influence the world through the actions of their characters. But, again, there’s a strange oranges to apple-cores comparison happening here: this may seem “powerful” from the perspective of D&D where such things are only the province of high-level magic like the Wish spell, but if a game is designed such that this type of action is commonplace and unremarkable, is it really “powerful” to do that? Is a Monopoly player who can acquire land from the very beginning of the game more powerful than an old-school D&D player who needs to get their character to name level before pulling off a similar feat?

Because it’s so frequently unclear what a “fair” way to compare “power” between games is I’m skeptical that it’s a useful lens for gaining insight into how games work. It seems to have a lot of rhetorical weight, though, so it gets employed frequently in RPG arguments.

Aside: I think the distinction that gets blurred when games use explicit “narrative control” or “declare a fact” mechanics can be an important one. If a game “exposes the facade” of the fiction by employing a mechanic that draws attention to the arbitrariness and artificiality of the fiction it can make it harder to use it as a shared foundation of play. Similarly, when the mechanics and procedures of a game are made to seem inconstant and ephemeral by lots of fudging or on-the-fly game design they’re also less able to serve as a shared foundation. Not all games need to use those things as the shared basis of play, but all games need some shared basis to function, and many RPGs use those.