system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Wheel Of Time] If ta’veren are made by the Pattern, why do people constantly say they can change it? Isn’t this just predestination?
gpt
This is explained in the books.  Free will exists.   The pattern allows people to make their own decisions and wave them into the pattern.    But only so much.  A farmer who decides tomorrow to become King is almost always just SOL.  Unless there is a Ta'veren involved

It chooses to make a ta'veren when it needs to.  Their choices are both more limited in that the pattern has twisted fate around them, but the scope of change their decisions create in their life is far greater than that of a normal person.

More, a Ta'veren causes the fate of other people who have crossed their path.   Their fat e is sharply altered, the array of choices before them greater.

&#x200B;

Finally, the worlds accessed by the pillars show that alternate patterns exist.  There are worlds of could have been.  There, events different than the one we follow play out.  We only see one example one of a damaged and fading world where Trollocs won centuries ago.   

Like Fixed Points in Dr Who, the pattern has fixed points.  Yet everyone has different destinies in front of them to chose from.  

One explicit instance when Rand meets the monarchs of the borderlands in a place where he cannot channel.  They slap him and ask him a question, and have been given a prophecy to slay him if he cannot answer true.  The pattern has prepared at least two paths for him.  One if Rand had given up and turned to the Dark One.  One in which he embraced the light on the summit of the dragonmount.   And it left the monarchs the choice to try to slay him or not either way he answered.

The What If tales in Randland occurred, we will just never know them as the narrative we has is built of the choices people there made.