What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't give my NPCs fantastic abilities just because, and I allow players leeway to do things outside the set rules if they seem reasonable. Also, NPCs even if they have different options than the PCs available to them, usually have far fewer total options, so I don't think my NPCs have greater agency than PCs. The PCs will have more feats, magic items, spells, skills, etc. to use than I do with my NPCs.

Well, its a bit incoherent to talk about 'NPC Agency' to start with, but you and I didn't start that... I will take it as it is meant and just say that in terms of 'agency' here that the NPCs have a lot more 'options'. Heck, the GM could just add reinforcements to their numbers at any time! Lets see the players do THAT! (I mean sans some magic or something that they already have available).

Nor can the objection 'where did the reinforcements come from' hold any weight. Not when we've already heard all about how GM's can extemporize and that content generated on the spot is indistinguishable from content pre-authored. This is just a small example of how the GM has a vast agency that players in a game of the sort you espouse simply do not have, at all.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That would be an example of what I would call a lack of player agency. The GM decides what is best for the story.

Another way to look at it is, we're comparing PLAYER agency, the ability to change the course of the way things go at the table (IE in the procedures of the game) vs 'PC Agency', the freedom of the PC to act in certain prescribed ways which don't introduce new fiction. Because PCs are fictional, their agency is also fictional, and thus not real, and doesn't accrue to the players (any more than the PC's gold does).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don’t know if it’s so clear cut. Do you only define player agency by the ability of the player to author fictional elements? What about when the players do something that creates a boring story? What about the other examples I discussed?

To pull just that bit out of my post and comment on it out of context seems pretty lousy on your part.

I think that in, at least [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s case, agency isn't quite defined like that. He's not letting players simply decree fiction, like you can't just say "my character pulls the Wand of Orcus out of his backpack and slays the high priest with it!" (unless it was already fictionally established that he had said wand). Its more about the player's agenda being the thing which the fiction addresses.

So, when the player wanted to conquer the world, that was his agenda, his character met Vecna and was offered a chance to take a step in the direction of achieving his goal. In other words the player said "I want to conquer the world" and in the fiction of the game "conquest of the world" became an activity which was being pursued by the player's character.

It may also be that agency is expressed in generating fiction by means of a check, like "I roll streetwise to see if I can contact Vinny the Weasel, my fence." Maybe if the check succeeds then Vinny will be established to be in the area, otherwise the GM could presumably say "you don't know any Vinny" but would instead probably resort to "he's in prison now..." or something like that. This is a more contingent kind of player authorship which is treated as an extension of a character ability (a player resource). Skills like Streetwise in 4e would essentially be worthless without this, and we can suppose from their existence at least a nominal idea that 4e intended this kind of thing.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The bit I quoted was what stood out in my first read through a long post. I was wanting to cut to that chase.

Well I would hope you might see how frustrating it is considering you removed the larger context.

I did say that I would not allow a player to introduce the solution to a major goal in such a mundane way. Would you allow that in your game? If the characters are looking for the pieces of the Rod if Seven Parts, would you allow the player to place it in some random kitchen through a Perception check?

If so, it doesn’t sound like a compelling story that’s being crafted. If not, then how do you handle it?

What about when the GM does something that creates a boring story?

Sure, this happens all the time. Everyone can fail to contribute meaningfully. It’s especially tough for the GM in many cases. But let’s say a game is very GM driven and it’s failing to engage the players all that much...isn’t this a problem that will likely be addressed? Won’t the GM realize they’re not that engaged? Or if not, won’t they simply tell him?

I think collaboration is the best way to avoid this, and in that I expect we likely agree. Lean on the other participants more.

As you yourself have stressed, it's not particularly helpful to focus on ideal cases. I am trying to talk about procedures for play. A rule that says "The GM can veto/block/manipulate-backstory-to-defeat any action declaration that will lead to a boring story is (in my view) a rule that is at odds with player agency over the content of the shared fiction. As I posted way upthread, it tends to reduce all player action declarations for their PCs to suggestions.

If, in a high player agency game, you're worried that you're going to get a lot of silly stuff like maps being found in kitchens, then my own advice - derived from a mix of experience and reading - would be to work on your framing as GM, and encourage your players to work on their PC building (especially to do with goals, etc).

In the first few weeks of my first RM campaign, one of the players - perhaps intoxicated by the player agency? - played his character as a type of anti-Jack-the-Ripper ie the PC would pick up customers looking for sex and kill them. As a GM I adjudciated this in a relatively light touch, off screen fashion - it's not at the core of what I'm looking for in a RPG, which is at least a little bit more 4-colour - and it was fairly clear from me and the other players that this was not what were especially interested in. The player himself realised that for those extrinsic reasons, and perhaps some intrinsic ones as well, he was probably better off coming up with a different sort of PC, and so we wrote out one characer and wrote in another.

But there's also the question of who gets to decide what's silly. In the BW game where I'm a player, my PC is a knight of a religious order has relationships with some family members, and has cooking skill. Of course there's no guarantee that any action for this PC will take place in a kitchen, but it wouldn't be absurd either.

In a player-driven game, the question of whether or not it's silly for important stuff to happen in the kitchen isn't a unilateral matter for the GM.

Well I suggested the veto power only in reference to a ludicrous example of Boromir and Sauron at Rivendell. I generally don’t think it’s wise for a GM to veto player ideas, but I do actually think that it is something within the GM’s ability. Of everyone involved, his role is unique.

To go back to the map...if the very idea of the map was introduced by a player in hopes of aiding the PCs in some way, I think that’s something else, and I explained that in my previous post. In such a case, I would not sinply dismiss this idea because the room description did not mention a map.

But hey, I think we’re going in c ircles and you’re obviously not interested, so I’ll leave it at that.

 

[Maxperson]

Well, its a bit incoherent to talk about 'NPC Agency' to start with, but you and I didn't start that... I will take it as it is meant and just say that in terms of 'agency' here that the NPCs have a lot more 'options'. Heck, the GM could just add reinforcements to their numbers at any time! Lets see the players do THAT! (I mean sans some magic or something that they already have available).

Nor can the objection 'where did the reinforcements come from' hold any weight. Not when we've already heard all about how GM's can extemporize and that content generated on the spot is indistinguishable from content pre-authored. This is just a small example of how the GM has a vast agency that players in a game of the sort you espouse simply do not have, at all.

Well, the DM and players have very different roles. DM agency is supposed to be different. That agency doesn't take away from player agency, though, unless the DM is abusing his power or makes a mistake.

 

[Sadras]

The problem, I think with some of the discussion, as the latest post by @pemerton suggests is not that there are diverging viewpoints on player agency, I think fundamentally we all are using the same definition, but some people believe that anything under a certain amount of player agency is tantamount to no player agency.

You seem to be agreeing with this rather rigid view of the term, given the below line.

Fundamentally, the players have no agency (freedom) but can be granted a great deal of agency (liberty).

I'm not trying to be difficult here, but I don't understand the point of this. I understand how @pemerton's style works, and that you can enact optional rules in 5e to give players that additional DM agency. For that matter , you can do it with any edition. It's just not spelled out in the game itself as an option in all editions.

What I'm trying to illustrate in the example is that if the player has the ability to inject fiction on that level (what you referred to as DM agency), more options become available to the player and so naturally this increases the number of action declarations he/she can make and is thus able to drive the story more directly towards his/her stated goal. i.e. an increased amount of player agency.

Another way to look at it is, we're comparing PLAYER agency, the ability to change the course of the way things go at the table (IE in the procedures of the game) vs 'PC Agency', the freedom of the PC to act in certain prescribed ways which don't introduce new fiction. Because PCs are fictional, their agency is also fictional, and thus not real, and doesn't accrue to the players (any more than the PC's gold does).

Agree.

 

[Sadras]

What about when the players do something that creates a boring story?

I'm not following you here, what does this have to do with the definition or degree of player agency?

I agree with you that the 'boring story' is certainly a risk attributable to anyone who is allowed to author the fiction.

 

[Sadras]

That would be an example of what I would call a lack of player agency. The GM decides what is best for the story.

The issue I have by making a claim like that is that it does seem you do not take the playstyle into consideration which is a callback I believe to Ovi's posts (chess vs checkers) and a conversation I shared with @AbdulAlhazred. .

Whereas in your game you frame the entire dungeon as a whole and then cut straight through to the room with the map, the other style is to frame the dungeon as a boardgame* which requires/challenges players to find the map in the dungeon while providing smaller framings (by the DM) for each corridor, hallway and room...etc

This is why I disagree with your premise in the OP as the boardgame style is still VERY prevalent today (in particular in D&D games) and this is clearly evident given the AP and modules which are being published by WotC.

EDIT: The type of player agency you require for your games is just not as important in the (for lack of a better term) boardgame style where fictional positioning of the map is done by the DM.

*using one of your analogies for ease

 

[Lanefan]

No take a step back from feats and abilities. As an author (DM) you can establish (create) history, relationships, allies, assign wealth, equipment, magical items even artifacts to your NPCs,

All true.

nevermind secret backstory knowledge which should expand the options available to your NPCs over that of the PCs.

Only so far as the particular NPC I'm running at that time has extra knowledge, if any.

Simple example: the vizier is secretly plotting to take down the king; both are NPCs. If the PCs talk to both, what they hear from the king will be in blissful ignorance of any such plot while what they hear from the vizier may well be tainted with that knowledge.

If done right (and I freely admit it isn't always) any NPC is only operating with the knowledge it would reasonably have in any given situation, and the DM has to thus constrain herself when running an NPC whose knowledge is incomplete e.g. the king, above.

For instance, a game in which every outcome of action declaration is decided by the GM based on what s/he thinks makes sense or would be fun would fit your description of player agency.

And also be a badly-run game, if the DM isn't being consistent with what she decides and-or isn't consistent with the already-established fiction.

It also relates to what I posted upthread, which I took @innerdude to be in broady sympathy with in a recent post: what you describes opens up the scope for a very big gap between playing the character I want to play, and what actually happens in the game.

This gap can happen in any game or system - the character I want to play just doesn't suit the party or the story, or violates the morals of the DM and-or other players, or simply can't be made (or made well) in that system.

I mean, I'm willing to bet that if I came into your game wanting to play a happy-go-lucky character without really a care in the world who just wanted to go out adventuring for the fun of it (I've played this one), that might not work out so well. Your game is looking for characters with well-defined goals and, dare I say, a certain amount of angst to them.

Side question that came up in a chat with a friend/fellow DM tonight: how in your game do you handle it when during char-gen or at session 1 two players present you with goals for their characters that are vastly different in scope and scale? For example:
- character one has placed lots of importance on home and family and thus its goal in life is to save the family farm from foreclosure (a nice, small-scale goal likely achievable at low PC level after not too many game sessions)
- character two is all about religion and has made its goal in life to completely change the faith of the entire realm from one pantheon over to another using means up to and including killing the currently-worshipped deities (a huge-scale goal likely unachievable until very high PC level and after years of play, and maybe not even then)

All this means is that pretending to talk to a mayor is different from pretending to fight some orcs. That's obvious. It doesn't prove that imaginary things make real things happen!

Speaking to the imaginary mayor causes real words to come out of my mouth which wouldn't come out were I not speaking to the imaginary mayor...

No, that's the point YOU CAN'T! Because each one of those events which you are discussing as 'in game fiction' is related to the others by way of the game happening at the table in the real world! They cannot be analyzed on their own.

This is also why my somewhat 'far out' comment about dependent origination is germane, because it points out that you cannot determine what was a chain of causality without understanding the TOTALITY of the context. In the case of an RPG narrative that totality simply doesn't exist.

Why do I ever EVER need to look at the entire forever endless chain of causality when all I'm after is the simple link or two or three between cause A and effect B, whether in fiction or in reality?

I don't at this point care what causes brought about A to begin with, nor do I care about what B might itself cause later. If something forces me to look at either of these, then I will; otherwise I'm happy not caring.

Lan-"it's too late at night to dig in to the rest of all this"-efan

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think that in, at least [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s case, agency isn't quite defined like that. He's not letting players simply decree fiction, like you can't just say "my character pulls the Wand of Orcus out of his backpack and slays the high priest with it!" (unless it was already fictionally established that he had said wand). Its more about the player's agenda being the thing which the fiction addresses.

Well, the map example implies otherwise, to some extent. If it’s bad for a GM to deny the introduction of the map through action declaration, then it stands that it is good to allow it. But does allowing it come with its own set of drawbacks?

This is what I’ve been trying to understand, but I don’t think that it’s been clearly addressed.

So, when the player wanted to conquer the world, that was his agenda, his character met Vecna and was offered a chance to take a step in the direction of achieving his goal. In other words the player said "I want to conquer the world" and in the fiction of the game "conquest of the world" became an activity which was being pursued by the player's character.

It may also be that agency is expressed in generating fiction by means of a check, like "I roll streetwise to see if I can contact Vinny the Weasel, my fence." Maybe if the check succeeds then Vinny will be established to be in the area, otherwise the GM could presumably say "you don't know any Vinny" but would instead probably resort to "he's in prison now..." or something like that. This is a more contingent kind of player authorship which is treated as an extension of a character ability (a player resource). Skills like Streetwise in 4e would essentially be worthless without this, and we can suppose from their existence at least a nominal idea that 4e intended this kind of thing.

Sure, I understand all that and I agree with it. I’ve no problem with any of this.