Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay

[FrogReaver]

The OP is, fundamentally, all about agency. We just started talking about resolution techniques first.

Completely Disagree. I talked a lot about how the situation was handled without need for any talk of agency. If anything, I'd say the agency discussion has distracted focus away from the OP.

 

[FrogReaver]

And so are the games themselves. This is just one of the flaws with 5E.

I want everyone to notice how this isn't just about discussing what's different about various games and ways of doing things. The ways certain games do things is actually thought of as being flawed. It's responses like this that convince me that most people that try to say a certain gaming methodology has less agency actually mean it as a slight no matter how many times they insist it is not.

 

[prabe]

I don't know what games limit the ability of players to declare their character's actions in a way that generates dislike. I'm happy to be told about them.

But I think that's a tangent for this thread. @chaochou introduced the phrase player agency to help talk about what was happening in the OP. And the issue with what is going on in the OP is not that the players were forbidden from declaring actions, but that they did not seem to be able to exercise agency over the fiction at a key moment of resolution.

All right. In principle--as in, it would seem to be to be by-the-book--a GM in Fate can place a Compel on a character whose player has no Fate Points, and because it costs a Fate Point to turn down a Compel, the player would have no way to refuse it--as I remember the rules, the player isn't even allowed to use that Fate Point in a check generated by that Compel. It is in principle possible for a Compel to be about a character's actions. (The example I saw floated was using a Compel to force a PC to steal something from their employer.) I can think of at least one player who violently dislikes that. (Hint: It's @prabe )

 

[Maxperson]

I think examining a commonly accepted D&D mechanic that takes away player agency over their characters actions will be a helpful exercise.

The Dominate Person spell. Why is this spell acceptable where non-magical implementations of reducing player agency over character actions tend to be found unacceptable? What is the difference?

The Dominate Person spell is an in-fiction method where a character loses control over himself. That is, in fictional terms such a character has no agency over himself. In other words, the loss in player agency over character actions corresponds to a fictional state where the character has lost agency over his own actions. That correspondence is what makes the loss of player agency over character actions acceptable for many people and the lack of that correspondence is what makes them find it unacceptable.

I think that we all fundamentally understand that things like Dominate Person(if magic were real), truth serums, etc., could take away our ability to resist what someone wants of us, so we are okay with those sorts of things happening to our PCs in the game. Someone talking to us, though, can't make us do anything without some sort of coercion happening. Nobody is going to be able to walk up and talk me into spending $20,000 on something I don't want, no matter how good they are, so we have resistance to NPCs or other PCs being able to do that to our PCs. That's the difference.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think that we all fundamentally understand that things like Dominate Person(if magic were real), truth serums, etc., could take away our ability to resist what someone wants of us, so we are okay with those sorts of things happening to our PCs in the game. Someone talking to us, though, can't make us do anything without some sort of coercion happening. Nobody is going to be able to walk up and talk me into spending $20,000 on something I don't want, no matter how good they are, so we have resistance to NPCs or other PCs being able to do that to our PCs. That's the difference.

Past experience in similar discussions informs me otherwise. You'd be surprised how often such things are trotted out as being equivalent in terms of player agency with no other substantial difference when compared with Dominate Person magic.

 

[Maxperson]

I want everyone to notice how this isn't just about discussing what's different about various games and ways of doing things. The ways certain games do things is actually thought of as being flawed. It's responses like this that convince me that most people that try to say a certain gaming methodology has less agency actually mean it as a slight no matter how many times they insist it is not.

What's really amazing to me, is that he is saying that describing things is the flaw, yet only attributing that flaw to D&D.

 

[FrogReaver]

All right. In principle--as in, it would seem to be to be by-the-book--a GM in Fate can place a Compel on a character whose player has no Fate Points, and because it costs a Fate Point to turn down a Compel, the player would have no way to refuse it--as I remember the rules, the player isn't even allowed to use that Fate Point in a check generated by that Compel. It is in principle possible for a Compel to be about a character's actions. (The example I saw floated was using a Compel to force a PC to steal something from their employer.) I can think of at least one player who violently dislikes that. (Hint: It's @prabe )

Thanks for the help, I only know what others choose to share with me about those kinds of games and so I'm hesitant to answer about them.

 

[Maxperson]

Past experience in similar discussions informs me otherwise. You'd be surprised how often such things are trotted out as being equivalent in terms of player agency with no other substantial difference when compared with Dominate Person magic.

Similar in that both would remove agency according to those people. Why one method of agency removal okay and the other not, though, is I think because of what I said above.

 

[FrogReaver]

Similar in that both would remove agency according to those people. Why one method of agency removal okay and the other not, though, is I think because of what I said above.

Well the problem is that the concept of an in-fiction action removing the agency being acceptable is rejected out of hand (or more accurately used a catch 22). That's why I introduced the concept of correspondence between what the characters fictional agency over his own actions and the players agency over that characters actions. The notion of that correspondence cannot be rejected out of hand because it's obvious and so it an be held up as a reason to explain why only certain in-fiction actions removing such agency are actually acceptable.

 

[prabe]

So, I think this might be a good time to examine the premises underlying the arguments. I know I, and I believe @pemerton, look at player agency as the ability for the player to make choices about and have the ability to realize these choices within the in-game fiction. To me, declaring actions for my character is just one way to do this. Using a non-PC centered tool is another way. Both achieve player agency.

That seems as though it is probably correct, though using meta-currency as a player doesn't feel to me so much like agency as narrative authority. I don't get to change the direction of the fiction, I just get to change the framing of the scene: I can use a Fate Point (and an Aspect my character has) to turn a random mook into my character's college roommate, but that doesn't define how the fiction progresses outside that scene. The Certificate @pemerton has mentioned in Prince Valiant, he's described as an auto-win, which seems different (and may be why he doesn't think of it as a metagame instrument/mechanic).

I think you, and please correct this if I'm off-base, are looking at the primary means of play being through the PC. This is why you see a large distinction between declaring PC actions and resolution of those and a different tool that doesn't involve declaring PC actions. The use of the term "meta-currency" seems to reinforce this. This is, after all, how D&D has traditionally played, so it's not surprising is a common point of reference, nor does it mean this construction is wrong. If that's how you want to play, and you have fun, then it's the best kind of right.

I've done some thinking about it, and I figure that it's my strongly-preferred way to play because I want it to be my character's story, not my story (multiplied by the number of characters/players). It's probably why using meta-currency feels so different to me than operating as my character--the difference between spending a Fate Point to edit an NPC and using a Charm Person spell, more or less. I suspect that makes sense to you. It also, I think, talks to your paragraph below, about tools in the toolbox, which I don't have any strong argument with.

However, when discussing the concept at a high level rather than from the within the frame of how you play, it's a stumbling block for understanding. I can't speak for @pemerton, but I certainly don't see use of a FATE point to add some fiction to a scene, or leveraging a Flashback in Blades as somehow special or set aside from declaring PC actions in pursuit of player agency. They're all just tools in the toolbox. There's nothing inherently special about declaring actions for your PC that elevates it to a higher tier of relevance. Granted, the focus of most RPGs is to inhabit a character, so it's certainly going to be an almost required tool in play, and often the most common tool. But it's not the only tool and it's commonality doesn't mean other tools shouldn't be considered equally in looking at how a player can make choices and realize those choices about the in-game fiction. Though this is usually via a character, it's not a required component to do this.

I'm not agreeing with this position, but I believe you have elucidated why it has been said that games that use such metagame rules aren't TRPGs--because they force the players to divorce themselves from their characters, to want something other than what their characters want, to act in the game differently from what their characters arguably should. That has the potential to open a can of worms, so I'm going to say again that it's not my position: I'm perfectly happy to call Blades or Fate or AW or any of the other games that have been mentioned in this thread TRPGs; I don't think they're really operating all that differently, and I don't see any point in defining the category so it only includes games I like.