AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I look at it this way: What Eero is talking about is an idealization and generalization. He doesn't talk about agency at all, and it isn't addressed, so you cannot use the essay [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] pointed at to support your point, it just EXPLICITLY does not do so.
To elaborate: Eero talks about games with a variety of possible agendas and sources of agenda. So if we were to analyze B2 in his terms, what we would conclude is that its source of agenda is the authors of the module. If it is addressing a player agenda it is because the players understood the nature of the material and agreed that it suited their needs. In other words, any player agency over the fiction was PURELY exercised before the fact, not during play.
During play the game system (Holmes Basic originally) doesn't provide for any explicit control of the agenda by the players. My copy disintegrated long ago and the text isn't available online, so I can't confirm EXACTLY what Holmes stated about the process of play, but it is pretty much in line with OD&D and Moldvay B/X in general tenor. Nowhere does it talk about agenda, the GM's job, at the table, is to adjudicate the action. The game contemplates, basically, a dungeon delve, and B2 follows that model, adding only a fairly minor side-element of RPing interactions with the Keep inhabitants and locating the Caves of Chaos, which are well under an hour's walk away.
Now, Basic D&D is a fairly 'open ended' system, the PCs are assumed to be relatively capable and able to execute most tasks which the players can envisage and describe, perhaps modulated to some extent by ability scores. Nothing within the text suggests that players have agency over the fiction, only that they have control of their characters actions (though there are various rules which can penalize or reward certain types of actions based on alignment, XP awards for 'in character' RP, etc.).
They don't have agency with respect to the content of the fiction! Whatever you call it, call it 'foobarium' I don't really care, the players DON'T HAVE IT in this type of play!!!!!! How can you still deny this?
Yes, he does. He has absolute authority to declare any action the PCs attempt to be impossible, to require any sort of resource expenditure, to have any sort of results or consequences which he feels like decreeing. His authority over the PCs is thus EFFECTIVELY almost absolute. He can't literally tell the player that his character just stabbed himself in the eye (well, actually TECHNICALLY even this doesn't appear to violate the letter of the rules of classic D&D).
See above: Any agency which the players are granted, and even agency which the CHARACTERS have in a theory of 'character agency' (which is what you're talking about) requires that the GM concur and allow the player to act. At best the player can direct his character to do things which game, genre, and table conventions normally delineate as being within his purview. Nothing is guaranteed, and I've played in any number of games where the GM suddenly asserted his authority and denied me the ability to do something which I considered perfectly reasonable and well within what I expected was my part of the game.
Now, I don't expect that in ANY game there will never be grey areas or differences of opinion about who gets to decide what, or exactly where the edges are of different areas of responsibility in the game. Still, players in 'classic' D&D can have NO absolute expectation of ANY authority at all. This is totally different from Story Now, where players are in charge of the whole agenda and thus directly influence and shape all the content.
Notice, this is a superset of what Eero was talking about. He's only talking about the PROCESS of Story Now, that a GM frames a scene according to an agenda, the players commit some stakes to resolving the scene, and the consequences of their success/failure produce dividends/costs and then form the input into the next scene frame.
You CAN play this type of game using the B/X rule set. Some of it will be incoherent to the model of play (wandering monsters for example wouldn't make a lot of sense in a Story Now kind of format, though the GM might utilize that mechanism as a form of content generation or something). Still, you could follow a player agenda, utilize ability checks to regulate player input to the fiction, utilize a 'no myth' scene framing concept for setting elements, etc. I expect that there will be SOME issues with specific spell mechanics, maybe certain class features, etc. but its not impossible to make it work. Its NOT the same as, and produces a very different relationship to the fiction, than classic play in something like B2.
In all realistic RPG play there are genre conventions and other restraints on the players ability to shape the fiction. Lets imagine a player has invented a character who's agenda is to become the mightiest paladin in history and wield a legendary holy sword. Is he going to find it at the market? No, this would certainly not be in keeping with the genre conventions of a sort of Medieval Knight's Tale sort of fiction, now would it?
So, what is the player going to encounter? He might go to the market square, with his agenda, but he's much more likely to encounter a young man of apparently humble birth but noble aspect, and end up with a squire! Later the squire might play some key role in the acquisition of said holy sword, in a scene far along later in the story. I guess another possibility is that the sword DOES appear at some early point in the narrative, but the character is rejected as not fit, or it remains 'buried in the stone' or something, requiring further adventures to fully attain.
This is all dictated by conventions and the dramatic needs of emergent story, and the realistic factors of running an RPG which is expected to be ongoing over a number of episodes. Perhaps the entirety of the 'holy sword' gets resolved in episode 1, the character is shown his faults (he makes a morally questionable choice in an attempt to get the sword for instance) and the player changes the agenda to something else, like "attain purity of spirit at any cost" or whatever. I mean lots of things can happen.
I'd just like to note that something like B2 (and ongoing campaign activity resulting from it or something like it) doesn't really support this sort of thing. The PCs are constantly immersed in a GM generated milieu. No element of play supports the idea of a player stating "I want to wield the legendary holy sword of Magilla!" It isn't up to the player to invent such a thing, he's got little expectation that any of the narrative arising out of his interactions with the setting will lead to this agenda being fulfilled, etc.
Nobody doubts, either, that great GMs the world over often built their techniques around recognizing these kinds of player agendas and incorporating them into their games. Certainly even early D&D had certain pre-recognized agendas, creating a keep, temple, or thieves guild for example. Often creative GMs incorporated a wider variety of these sorts of things, though in many cases they got caught up in doing it in ways that weren't very much like Story Now. In any case, TO THE EXTENT THAT THEY DID SO, they moved in the direction of direct player agenda over the fiction. They HAD TO! That is the way you address, the only pathway, that leads to the player's agenda becoming the focus of play.
Even the GM given the players leeway in his adjudications to build a wall across a cave in B2 is a tiny step in that direction, the first step on that road, but it is VASTLY different from the full up real deal. You can say "there is no difference in agency" but AGAIN, this relies on a definition of agency which does no work and has no real value because it is failing to acknowledge the very real distinctions between the two types of game.
