What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Sadras]

The role of DM is different than the role of player. It's the DM's job to create the campaign world, NPCs, etc. that become the backdrop for the collaborative story that is created through game play. Let's call it DM agency. The players aren't supposed to do things like that, other than to create the history of their PCs. Player agency isn't increased by giving players more authorial power. Their player agency is the same as in my game, but they are additionally granted some level DM agency.

I'm going to illustrate what I mean by using an example. We can stick to 5e and incorporate the Plot Points from the DMG which, if you agree, essentially provide this DM agency you refer to.

Your character wishes to seek an audience with a rather recluse noble-person. As a player you can come up with a wild number of possibilities for your character to achieve that goal. With a Plot Point (DM agency) you can expend it to establish that the noble-person's employee has a criminal history that you are privy to and upon exposure that employee would lose his job, perhaps be arrested or worse sentenced to death. Your character can now use that knowledge against him to coerce him to set up an audience with his employer.

 

[pemerton]

Allowing the player to simply produce the map in a kitchen is horrible from a story point of view, and I woudl not allow that at all.

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

 

[Sunseeker]

I'm going to illustrate what I mean by using an example. We can stick to 5e and incorporate the Plot Points from the DMG which, if you agree, essentially provide this DM agency you refer to.

Your character wishes to seek an audience with a rather recluse noble-person. As a player you can come up with a wild number of possibilities for your character to achieve that goal. With a Plot Point (DM agency) you can expend it to establish that the noble-person's employee has a criminal history that you are privy to and upon exposure that employee would lose his job, perhaps be arrested or worse sentenced to death. Your character can now use that knowledge against him to coerce him to set up an audience with his employer.

I think I wrote about this a while back: while things like Plot Points increase player agency, allowing (as some people call it) "stage setting" by the players, they are at least in 5E, an optional part of the game and therefore subject to DM approval.

Which is sort of the "trick" to player agency, (and always has been, in D&D at least) that D&D provides very little hard-coded player agency. 4E was probably the strongest on providing player agency and as I recall there was quite a bit of lament over "taking away power from the DM" or something. To 5E rolled that back and now player agency is largely in the hands of the DM, if the DM wants to give players brownie points the Dm and ONLY the DM has that power.

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

The problem, I think with some of the discussion, as the latest post by [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 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.

And as I think you pointed out, we can't have a healthy discussion like that.

 

[pemerton]

As soon as the player says he is a rogue that pulls out the wand and attempts to use it, that event has to happen in the fiction BEFORE you can roll the D20. If it doesn't happen inside the fiction, no mechanics are used to see the result because nothing happened to initiate those mechanics.

<snip>

The process goes like this. Declaration by player initiates the action inside the fiction

This doesn't make any sense. You write as if there are two things that are causally related - first, the player says that s/he is a rogue pulling a wand out a backpack; second, in the fiction a rogue pulls a wand out of a backpack.

But all there is is that the player makes the action declaration. That in and of itself establishes the fiction. We don't all sit around with our crystal balls waiting to find out if the player's action declaration will or won't successfully bring a fantasy world into being!

the skill and the wand do not exist in any usable form outside of the fiction. Outside of the fiction they are only mechanics that sit there like a lump. To get those mechanics moving and usable requires the in-fiction PC to do something.

There are two possibilities: the player plays the game; or an imaginary person makes the player play the game. I know which I think is the case!

Playing the game doesn't invovle using a wand. The wand isn't real; it's pretend. Playing the game does involve pretending that someone has a wand. That act of pretense is something that a real person does in the real world. The game rules are triggered by making various moves in the course of that pretense.

No one thinks that a school kid's stick is really a gun; or that the explanation for why another kid drops to the ground when the first kid says "Bang! I shot you," is that a bullet was fired. It's playing a game - a social process.

The social processes in a RPG are different - eg the rules for declaring "I take the wand from my backpack" are not structured around physical location and possessions as in a schoolyard game of cops and robbers - but the basic idea is the same.

The players write their own script. They have full control over their PCs words and attempted actions. What they don't control, and which has nothing to do with player agency, is the stage setting(game world) and the results of their attempted actions(unless they have an mechanical ability that gives such control).

As I've said, this is at best extremely modest agency over the content of the shared fiction.

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.

It also relates to what I posted upthread, which I took [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] 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.

What gives them agency is the ability to leave the paths and go or do what they want within the power of their PCs.

But they can't do any of these things. They can't find the map in the study if the GM doesn't allow it. They can't bribe a guard if the GM doesn't allow it. They can't meet a long-lost friend in the village if the GM doesn't allow it.

"The power of their PCs" is a red herring here. Because the power of a person depends primarily on the opportunities by which they are surrounded, and what you describe is an approach to play where that is all controlled by the GM.

novels don't have players directing where the story goes

But a choose-your-own adventure does. Nevertheless, the player doesn't have very much agency over the content of the shared fiction.

And if you think this is not a fair comparison, then tell me why not? If the players of a RPG cannot establish or influence what is actually written on the pages - if the opportunities that are open to them all depend on what the GM has written - then how is it different?

the fiction and reality kinda bounce back and forth in affecting each other. You're only looking at how reality affects the fiction.

That's because FICTION CAN'T AFFECT REALITY. Obi-Wan Kenobi didn't have any effect on Alec Guiness. Pretending to be Obi-Wan Kenobi did have some effect on Alec Guiness - eg it led him to say "Only a master of evil, Darth" - but pretending to be Obi-Wan Kenobi is something that happened in the real world, and did not involve any imaginary person.

If the fiction during that first session* leads, say, to a meeting with the local mayor then the words and actions of the players at the table are extremely likely to be quite different than had the fiction led to, say, a battle against a band of orcs.

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!

Social processes are required to get the ball rolling, to set up the initial foundation for the fiction (the players roll up characters, the DM builds a world and sets some sort of initial scene for the PCs to start in); but once the PCs start moving through the game world and doing things in the fiction then those actions and that fiction starts creating and-or modifying social processes at the table.

Were there no orc present in the fiction at that moment neither the action declaration nor subsequent roll would happen...

But all "orc present in the fiction" means here is that everyone at the table agreed to imagine an episode involving an orc.

There is nothing here but social processes. Agreements to imagine this and not that. Agreements that, under certain conditions, dice will be rolled, charts looked up, and new imaginings take place.

Consider the example of school ground play: it is not a soldier being present in the fiction that explains why the kid dropped. It's that the kid's friend was pretending to be a soldier and pretending to shoot. Playing the game is a social process.

 

[hawkeyefan]

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

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.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Fictional events matter, in an RPG situation, in two ways:

- in how they relate to and affect other parts of the fiction (cause: I accurately swing my sword; effect: my orc opponent howls and starts bleeding from a cut it didn't have a moment before)
- in what they cause real people to do outside the fiction (in-fiction cause: my character attempts to swing her sword again; out-of-fiction effect: I pick up a d20 and roll it)

And all of this comes well before we decide who is authoring any of this fiction, which was the reason for this thread in the first place.

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. There is no world in which it happens. The context, AT BEST, is so fragmentary and threadbare that we could propose almost any outcome to events and it would be equally plausible.

For example, in reference to the fiction you just created there any of 1000's of things could result from an attempt to swing a sword at someone. You could slip on a banana peel (sorry, patch of green slime!) and fall on your arse. Your blow could be deflected by the orc's steel collar. Your grip on the sword could falter (for any of many reasons). The sword itself could break (for any of 1000's of reasons). All of these things are possibilities (and I'm just naming things I can imagine that could happen which are reasonably mundane and plausibly could be part of a real-world narrative, aside from the target being an 'orc'). BUT we don't know enough about the game world, and EVEN IF WE PLAYED vs just this exercise of examples, we wouldn't know. We don't know how slippery the floor is, maybe an ogre hockered on the spot the character puts his forward foot last week and the character slips on it. That's the sort of thing the real world is made up of.

Now, what we CAN do, and what both you and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] are doing basically all the time as a GM, your constant function, is to simply make up these causes to explain the dice, or to engineer the fictional positioning so that the players continue 'on track' instead of wandering off into some place that isn't prepared for them, or, in Pemerton's case, to frame the next scene to address character needs and player agenda.

Nor did you really exclude the people at the table, you still had to refer to the guy rolling a d20 to make the narrative complete and totally coherent. If you leave that part out of your analysis you are really missing the whole nut of the entire thing!

 

[pemerton]

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

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

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?

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

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.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To carry it a bit further --- let's suppose that there's far more options available to "forward" the fiction than even that.

• The orcs immediately band together and go on a raiding rampage to a nearby village.
• The orcs are okay with it, because they didn't really like the taste of that water anyway, and can sustain healthful hydration from the demonic fountain that's spouting blood on Level 19 of the dungeon.
• The orcs are convinced that it was a sign from Gruumsh, and they should immediately evacuate the area.
• The orcs laugh and smile and eat apple pies together with their pet winter wolf, while wearing sombreros and stilts because clearly these orcs are acrobats.

Now of course the argument here might be, "Well none of those are realistic! None of those follow-up results seem to follow from the authored fictional cause!"

And this is true---but it doesn't change the fact that no matter what result is chosen by the GM, he or she is still the one authoring the fiction.

Now, see, my argument would be "there's no meaningful definition of cause and effect here because there simply isn't a complete world state to derive all the causal process from." You could think of it like any of the 1st three of your examples are plausible, but SO ARE ABOUT A BILLION OTHERS (actually the number is probably close to a googleplex of others, though some of them may be so similar that we wouldn't even distinguish them in fiction).

It is meaningless to say that one of those was 'caused' when we cannot distinguish it as being any more causally related to the initial world state or the PC's actions than any of the others. The whole notion is absurd!

 

[Maxperson]

This doesn't make any sense. You write as if there are two things that are causally related - first, the player says that s/he is a rogue pulling a wand out a backpack; second, in the fiction a rogue pulls a wand out of a backpack.

But all there is is that the player makes the action declaration. That in and of itself establishes the fiction. We don't all sit around with our crystal balls waiting to find out if the player's action declaration will or won't successfully bring a fantasy world into being!

Yes you do. It might take .0001 second, but you sit around until you all imagine the fiction that the declaration creates. The fiction comes after the declaration and nothing can progress forward without it.

Playing the game doesn't invovle using a wand. The wand isn't real; it's pretend. Playing the game does involve pretending that someone has a wand. That act of pretense is something that a real person does in the real world. The game rules are triggered by making various moves in the course of that pretense.

Playing the game involves using the wand inside the fiction. Without that in fiction use, there is no mechanic that is used.

No one thinks that a school kid's stick is really a gun; or that the explanation for why another kid drops to the ground when the first kid says "Bang! I shot you," is that a bullet was fired. It's playing a game - a social process.

You keep repeating this as if being social prevents cause and effect. If I walk up to someone and call him names, that's a social(or antisocial) cause that will generally have the effect of pissing that person off.

As I've said, this is at best extremely modest agency over the content of the shared fiction.

Right, but we aren't using the invented definition that you use. In your invented definition, sure, there's less agency. In the actual definition, player agency doesn't involve being able to alter the content without some sort of set ability to do so, like a wish or rock to mud or something. Your definition is basically player agency + DM agency in the hands of players.

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.

No it would not. At least not automatically. The DM is obligated to be as neutral as possible with his rulings. That's part of the social contract. If the DM is only doing what he thinks is fun, he is violating the social contract, being an asshat of a bad DM, and probably railroading the players, which is the opposite of what we are talking about.

But they can't do any of these things. They can't find the map in the study if the GM doesn't allow it. They can't bribe a guard if the GM doesn't allow it. They can't meet a long-lost friend in the village if the GM doesn't allow it.

First, they can do it because the players decide what they do, not me. Second, and this is very important, it doesn't matter in the slightest whether they find that map or not. If they find it, great. If they don't find it, great. There are other options they could take to find out that information, and I am often surprised by the ideas that they come up with. Maybe the decide to go find a seer. Maybe they look for a guide that knows the area inside and out. Who knows? Not me. That's up to them.

"The power of their PCs" is a red herring here. Because the power of a person depends primarily on the opportunities by which they are surrounded, and what you describe is an approach to play where that is all controlled by the GM.

But a choose-your-own adventure does. Nevertheless, the player doesn't have very much agency over the content of the shared fiction.

This is the real red herring here. You keep trying to convince us that just because the DM can be an asshat and railroad the game any way he wants, that he will.....and to the point where it's just a choose your own adventure. I don't know what kind of horrible gaming experience you had in the past with this style of game play, but it's not a part of my game or the games of other people here in this discussion. The decisions are not about what the DM finds to be fun, or even about what the DM wants. He's there to make reasonable, neutral and fair decisions. If he does that, the game will often go in directions that maybe he didn't want it to go, but oh well, the DM doesn't always get what he wants.

And if you think this is not a fair comparison, then tell me why not? If the players of a RPG cannot establish or influence what is actually written on the pages - if the opportunities that are open to them all depend on what the GM has written - then how is it different?

Dude. We've been telling you for a dozen pages how it's not like that at all, and how it isn't like that. If you don't understand it by now, our telling you another time isn't going to help.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm going to illustrate what I mean by using an example. We can stick to 5e and incorporate the Plot Points from the DMG which, if you agree, essentially provide this DM agency you refer to.

Your character wishes to seek an audience with a rather recluse noble-person. As a player you can come up with a wild number of possibilities for your character to achieve that goal. With a Plot Point (DM agency) you can expend it to establish that the noble-person's employee has a criminal history that you are privy to and upon exposure that employee would lose his job, perhaps be arrested or worse sentenced to death. Your character can now use that knowledge against him to coerce him to set up an audience with his employer.

I'm not trying to be difficult here, but I don't understand the point of this. I understand how [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'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.