A Question Of Agency?

[hawkeyefan]

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about above.

The less player-facing the game is, the more vulnerable it is to Illusionism (in precisely the way you described). This can be a feature or a bug depending upon what sort of experience people are looking for.

If you consider it a bug (either as a GM or as a player), then a game that is codified and player-facing is going to put you in an infinitely more secure position.

If you consider it a feature, then a game that is codified and player-facing is going to put you in an infinitely more insecure position.

A lot of it seems to be about the constraints that are placed on the GM. Games like Dungeon World or Blades in the Dark limit how the GM can act and expect the GM to adhere to very specific principles. These things are designed to remove the chance for Force to come into play.

On the other hand, D&D grants the DM almost complete authority, although there are some limits that are expected, and others that are suggested.

So for D&D to allow for a high degree of player agency, the DM has to essentially place constraints on himself. This requires some real discipline on their part, and also some real shifting of play focus and expectation.

I run a 5E game, and it’s very player driven. Not as much as my BitD game, but more so than standard 5E D&D tends to be. I largely run material that I come up with, based on what the PCs are doing at any given time, and in response to the fiction that’s been established.

For some reason (largely because the Chult location from Forgotten Realms was an important element in our game) I decided to incorporate the published adventure Tomb of Annihilation into our game. I thought it would be cool to do an old fashioned dungeoncrawl, especially since it could easily connect to our ongoing game.

It was disastrous.

Which is a shame because the adventure seems pretty good for what it is and what it wants to do. But it was simply a poor fit for our game. The clash in approach was too much. The adventure needed to be run in a way that I had not been running a game for some time.

 

[prabe]

I have never played a RPG where the players don't have their PCs do things. And don't have goals for their PCs beyond Hey, GM, here I am, throw something at me!

If I as the GM frame a scenario, and the players don't have their PCs interfere with it, I feel as though I should know beforehand what happens then. Maybe they're doing something in the same place and time, in which case it can happen around them; maybe they're going somewhere else, in which case it might have happened by the time they get back.

The bits that I've bolded reinforce my conjecture upthread, that you are simply unfamiliar with systems that have robust action resolution mechanics. And at least for my part we do not seem to be talking past one another - your posts seem completely consistent with familiarity with "storyteller-GM" style RPGing that I would associate with games like 2nd ed AD&D, White Wolf, CoC, and that seemed to be evident in a story hour your linked to in a thread some months (I think it was) ago.

What is evident in the play notes that I have--copy-pasta from the notes my wife takes at the table and types up and shares later--is what happened. She doesn't usually write up the mechanics of play, and I don't usually care to edit them in.

To the extent that we seem to me to talk past each other--and to be clear, I'm pretty sure it's not intentional on either of our parts--it seem/feels that you don't believe that I can read, e.g., Apocalypse World, and feel as though I as a player would have less agency than I would in a well-run (yes, that does a lot of work) game of 5E. I'm willing to believe that the experience of play is different than it looks from the book (and please don't ask me to read it again), but the game seems to want a very specific type of story which I don't like to emerge from play.

To go back to the bolded bits: in D&D combat, if a player - through the action resolution process - reduces a monster's hit points to zero by way of a sword attack, the GM does not get to decide how the world reacts to the PC's swing of a sword. The rules mandate that the GM narrate the monster being killed (or KO'ed, depending on the wrinkles of edition) by the PC's sword-blow.

Now just generalise that.

If the players succeed on action resolution, the GM is not free to decide how the world reacts. Rather, s/he is bound to honour the success. (This can't work if there is not an action resolution system that bears upon the matter at hand - see my post upthread about the weakness of onworld exploration in Classic Traveller as an example - but good RPG systems have good action resolution systems that cover at least the bulk of the action one might expect given setting, genre etc.)

This is why the sort of "unconscious railroading" you are positing is simply not possible in any system with robust action resolution.

In a D&D game, it is possible that killing an enemy will lead other enemies to act differently. I believe the GM is free to have them do so. Generalize that, and I believe the GM is free to decide how the world reacts to the PCs' successes. I don't believe that any kind or amount of prep can prevent unintentional railroading; I think avoiding it requires some care, and can be done by a GM who preps tons, and by a GM who preps next to nothing, and by GMs who fall between those two poles.

 

[Manbearcat]

A lot of it seems to be about the constraints that are placed on the GM. Games like Dungeon World or Blades in the Dark limit how the GM can act and expect the GM to adhere to very specific principles. These things are designed to remove the chance for Force to come into play.

On the other hand, D&D grants the DM almost complete authority, although there are some limits that are expected, and others that are suggested.

So for D&D to allow for a high degree of player agency, the DM has to essentially place constraints on himself. This requires some real discipline on their part, and also some real shifting of play focus and expectation.

I run a 5E game, and it’s very player driven. Not as much as my BitD game, but more so than standard 5E D&D tends to be. I largely run material that I come up with, based on what the PCs are doing at any given time, and in response to the fiction that’s been established.

For some reason (largely because the Chult location from Forgotten Realms was an important element in our game) I decided to incorporate the published adventure Tomb of Annihilation into our game. I thought it would be cool to do an old fashioned dungeoncrawl, especially since it could easily connect to our ongoing game.

It was disastrous.

Which is a shame because the adventure seems pretty good for what it is and what it wants to do. But it was simply a poor fit for our game. The clash in approach was too much. The adventure needed to be run in a way that I had not been running a game for some time.

Yup. This is absolutely true. Explicit instruction to "follow the rules" and "play to find out what happens" do a huge amount of work in those games. However, that isn't the only thing those have that make them that way and 4e is a perfect example of why a particular cross-section of D&D culture revolted against it:

* Intense codification of action resolution that is overt and heavily bounded. 4e maths were explicit and by level; Defenses/HPs/To Hit/Damage, Easy, Moderate, Hard DCs. Skill Challenges codified noncombat conflict resolution in the same way that Clocks in Apocalypse World (and Blades) does, both in terms of maths and procedures.

* Robust, thematic PCs that are encouraged to be bold by the system and the ethos.

* Player-facing action resolution, Rest cycle and Milestone mechanics, treasure-handling, etc.

* Quest Mechanics (this is your "Expressed a Challenge via" and Expressed your Beliefs, Drives, etc" and all the rest in Blades).

* It all...just works to propel play through snowballing conflict with the PCs as protagonists...no Force needed.

I'm sure that all sounds familiar!

Well, if you're either a GM or a player that doesn't like any of:

• Intense codification
• Player-facing mechanics
• The responsibility being put on the players to provide the energy to propel play through their PCs
• An environment that makes any application of GM Force extremely obvious

...well, you're not going to like 4e.

There are plenty of other reasons to not like 4e (they've been discussed ad nauseum and this isn't about 4e but rather constituent parts of system and their impact on play), but as it pertains to this thread and the subject at hand, those 4 are certainly big ones (with other downstream intangible effects arising because of one or multiple of them).

 

[zarionofarabel]

So...does that mean I'm railroading my players because I use systems that don't specifically give them the option of making up details of the campaign world???

 

[Manbearcat]

So...does that mean I'm railroading my players because I use systems that don't specifically give them the option of making up details of the campaign world???

Absolutely not.

Railroading is a very specific thing, but you evaluate it qualitatively, not quantitatively so the threshold can be difficult to pin down.

The way I think of the phenomena is like this:

* Force is a singular unit. Its an instance of play where a GM subordinates the outcome of a player's strategic/tactical/thematic decision (whatever the decision-point hangs upon) to their own will, wresting the imposition of the gamestate's trajectory from the player to the GM.

* Railroading occurs when Force is deployed sufficient to cross the threshold where the meaningful trajectory of play is wrested from the player(s) to the GM.

Letting the details of a setting/backstory mostly emerge during play can increase player agency or invest players with a sense of anchoring to and investment in the shared imaginary space. But that isn't always the case. Some people feel more anchored and more invested if the GM does that work.

HOWEVER, if a fundamental part of an actual system is letting certain details of setting/backstory emerge during play (eg action resolution mechanics or PC build components and/or advancement are schematically tied to this) AND a GM wrests control of this process in a moment of play, THAT is Force. If it passes the threshold then its Railroading.

But not all games work like that and hexcrawls require that hexes be codified tightly and with sufficient resolution so the game's most important decision-points that are tethered to that information can be navigated by players.

 

[Lanefan]

Oh we don’t argue about that kind of stuff at all. Our group long ago agreed to make our own canon for any pre-existing setting, using broad strokes for most of it, and picking and choosing what elements we want to include.

Sure you could have. Just tell the guy “forget what you learned in that video game.”

Believe me, this is not a player to whom one can say something like this and have it stick.

The PCs are inhabitants of the city, so they know their way around and no such map is needed. Now maybe the specific layout of buildings in a specific neighborhood, sure, they may not know that. But they know their way around just as anyone knows their way around their hometown.

Which is fine in the fiction, but to replicate that at the table I-as-player need a map so I can plan my approach and getaway routes, determine distances and-or expected travel times as best as possible, know where obvious fixed-site threats (e.g. the cop shop) are located in order to avoid them, stuff like that.

And I wouldn't want to just handwave this by the GM saying "your character knows all this", as for me it'd be far more fun digging in and having us work it out for ourselves...literally role-playing the gang sitting in a basement around a map plotting out these details for the score.

And if we really wanted to get creative, we could even try to locate our scores to form some sort of pattern on the map.

I don’t know....mistakes are gonna happen and that seems an easy one to correct, in the grand scheme. “Oops, guys the building is actually 800 by 300. My bad.” Problem solved.

At the very least this is going to be an inconvenience for the mapper, who will have already drawn the initially-narrated size on the map. (yes, we map things)

It's when mistakes lead to in-play consequences that wouldn't have happened had the mistake not been made is when things go right off the rails.

I mean if an error like that led to a PC death, I’d just go with the shorter length.

Which would most likely mean retconning that whole encounter and at the very least would invalidate all play that came after. As a player I'd be furious; as a GM I'd be embarrassed as all hell (and I speak from experience on both sides here).

 

[Lanefan]

I have never played a RPG where the players don't have their PCs do things. And don't have goals for their PCs beyond Hey, GM, here I am, throw something at me!

I have, as both player and DM.

Some players are simply more passive than others when it comes to trying to drive story. As long as they can role-play their characters without interference (other than occasionally being charmed or whatever), feel they have the freedom to try anything, and trust the DM to be able to seamlessly react on the fly if they do something unexpected, all is good.

Those sorts of players seem to not be interested in exercising agency, and so I don't think examples of play involving them are going to be very illustrative of what player agency looks like.

Thing is, you see agency as including far more than I (or, I posit, most people) do. Those players are very much interested in exercising agency but are also aware that their agency does not extend beyond their own characters except in unusual circumstances. This doesn't mean those players are interested in exercising (or even interested in having, in some cases) agency over the setting or the story within that setting.

 

[Lanefan]

Yup. This is absolutely true. Explicit instruction to "follow the rules" and "play to find out what happens" do a huge amount of work in those games. However, that isn't the only thing those have that make them that way and 4e is a perfect example of why a particular cross-section of D&D culture revolted against it:

* Intense codification of action resolution that is overt and heavily bounded. 4e maths were explicit and by level; Defenses/HPs/To Hit/Damage, Easy, Moderate, Hard DCs. Skill Challenges codified noncombat conflict resolution in the same way that Clocks in Apocalypse World (and Blades) does, both in terms of maths and procedures.

* Robust, thematic PCs that are encouraged to be bold by the system and the ethos.

* Player-facing action resolution, Rest cycle and Milestone mechanics, treasure-handling, etc.

* Quest Mechanics (this is your "Expressed a Challenge via" and Expressed your Beliefs, Drives, etc" and all the rest in Blades).

* It all...just works to propel play through snowballing conflict with the PCs as protagonists...no Force needed.

I'm sure that all sounds familiar!

Other than the last point, when put in those terms it also all sounds rather...prepackaged, for lack of a better term; or maybe...constrained. Or codified, though that's a label I tend to want to lay more at the feet of 3e D&D and other a-rule-for-everything systems.

It also forces players to interact with the mechanics much more than they otherwise might; and while some players might like this, others don't, as almost any interaction with mechanics usually comes at cost of immersion.

And, perhaps worse, it wants to very strongly suggest a particular style of play (goodly, heroic, non-gritty) and tends to fight against other styles a bit - which if I'm designing a system is the last thing I want, in that I'd ideally want my system to be flexible enough to handle anything with roughly-equal aplomb.

Well, if you're either a GM or a player that doesn't like any of:

• Intense codification
• Player-facing mechanics
• The responsibility being put on the players to provide the energy to propel play through their PCs
• An environment that makes any application of GM Force extremely obvious

...well, you're not going to like 4e.

My readings and conversions of 4e material* pointed strongly to the first two of these but didn't really highlight the latter two at all. The third one in particular must have been a later development during 4e's lifespan, as I don't recall seeing any more said about this in the 4e books* than in the books for any other D&D edition.

* - first-run DMG, PH and MM only, plus some adventures. I've neither bought nor read any later 4e core books, in part out of a sense of they ought to be giving me the game-as-designed in the first run of books and if they don't that's on them, not me.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Sure. That's why I posited, upthread, that low-player-agency games are pretty common in the world of RPGing.

I think on this, at least, @chaochou and I are ad idem.

Not saying that that you're doing this, but there are parts of this formulation that I feel might lead to the sort of dogmatism that I consider harmful for actually having a fun game. I.e. if one considers player agency to be desirable (valid) and any action that might reduce it to be axiomatically a problem (less so) and thus to be avoided, then that might lead to shunning perfectly functional methods. Like for example GM setting up quests and plot hooks is often desirable and this in itself doesn't mean that the players cannot initiate action unrelated to such prompts. I think that a huge part of GM's skillset is to gauge which tools work in which situation and completely throwing away some tools is usually not a good idea.

EDIT because this subsequent post of yours also seemed relevant to this:

The practical difference is huge, for me at least. As player and GM.

As GM: I am not interested in writing a plot in advance, or setting up a "quest" or "adventure". That's not why I engage in RPGing as my main creative outlet (outside of my work).

Then what do you do as a GM?

As a player: I posted upthread about my Burning Wheel GM who introduced NPCs who had no connection to my PC but were of interest to him; and how I (in playing my PC) ignored them, and used the tools at my disposal (ie action declarations) to shift the focus of the action back onto the stuff I cared about.

If your GM kept introducing content you were not interested in then they failed at reading you. Now here the system helped to mitigate this, but ideally the issue would be corrected at an earlier point, i.e. the GM learning to gauge better what the players are actually interested in.

One way to get better at GMing, or RPGing in general, is to do it.

But another way is to talk and read about it. Which is what these threads are for.

Before I read Ron Edwards's essays on The Forge, I hadn't been able to work out what it was that made my Rolemaster games good, and what it was that caused them to have moments of frustration. (Of course I could tell when I was being frustrated; but it was Edwards who let me work out why, and what techniques I could change or just let go of to alter that.)

Before I read @Campbell's posts on this forum I didn't appreciate the significant difference between how Apocalypse World works and how Burning Wheel (and other systems closer to it, eg Cortex+ Heroic; 4e D&D) work. Having learned that from Campbell has been a big help to me in running my current Classic Traveller game.

Etc.

Sure.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So...does that mean I'm railroading my players because I use systems that don't specifically give them the option of making up details of the campaign world???

As several people are reasonably pointed out (and which I originally kinda overlooked,) different systems handle agency differently and have differently codified roles for the GM and the players. I was working under assumption that you were playing more traditional GM-driven game. If you want the discussion to be more relevant to your game, then it might be helpful if you told what system you're using. Furthermore, I'd really like to know what actually prompted this thread. I mean what made you worried about the player agency? Are the players expressed some dissatisfaction about this either directly or indirectly?