"Max, I'm going to put it simply: If you have deliberately chosen and created/used mechanics which keep players from engaging with the story for arbitrary reasons, you have prevented them from engaging with the story via mechanical limitations. That's not a semantic differentiation, that's not a subtle shading, it's simply true. My point is that by and large, that kind of mechanical architecture works to stifle the creativity of the players and stomp all over engagement with the story. That may be what you want! There's certainly stories in which playing up the relative helplessness or focusing on the limits of choices that the characters have within the context of the experience is exactly what you want to do. A lot of survival horror plays on those themes, and gets a lot of mileage out of mechanics to control how much ammunition can be expended in a given encounter (typically extremely little, giving rise to feelings of pressure and stress). Mechanics which talk about randomly..." - Alexander Williams