A Question Of Agency?

[prabe]

My feeling about this is that something more important would be going on: If I present a situation to the players, and they don't engage it with their PCs, I feel that something has gone wrong at that point ie my idea was meant to be interesting, but it turns out that it wasn't!

I wouldn't worry about what happens to the fictional stuff I thought up that no one else at the table seemed interest in. I would try and come up with something that sparked more interest! If, down the track, in narrating some consequence or presenting some new situation it seemed worthwhile to pick up some aspect of my earlier idea that fell flat, well I might do that. At that point I might think about possible in-fiction pathways from then to now, if they seemed relevant.

You might not believe this, but that doesn't sound radically different from how I'd handle such a thing as a GM. When I'm pondering situations/scenarios, a large part of the thinking goes into getting from what has happened--including the PCs' successes and failures--to something else that can happen.

I'm not questioning your belief. But a game played in accordance with that belief will be one with relatively low player agency, because the players have no way to "lock in" outcomes.

I disagree. The rest of the world reacting to the PCs' success doesn't (or really shouldn't) change or negate the success. If they defeat a baddie in a permanent-seeming way, that baddie should stay defeated. If they (to use your example below) convince someone to their side, they should stay convinced.

Here's a contrast, taken from Dungeon World (p 68):

Discern Realities​

When you closely study a situation or person, roll+Wis. ✴On a 10+, ask the GM 3 questions from the list below. ✴On a 7–9, ask 1. Either way, take +1 forward when acting on the answers.​

• What happened here recently?​

• What is about to happen?​

• What should I be on the lookout for?​

• What here is useful or valuable to me?​

• Who’s really in control here?​

• What here is not what it appears to be?​

The GM is not free, if the player succeeds at this move, to make subsequent unfettered decisions about how the world reacts. Eg if the player ask who is really in control here? or what here is useful or valuable to me?, then the GM has to stick to the answer given. If the GM decides that Pup is in control, and then the player(s) (via their PCs) bring Pup around to their side, the GM isn't at liberty just to decide that now Pup's followers change their minds about their allegiance to Pup!

This is just one illustration of how robust action declaration can be a mechanism for players exercising agency over the shared fiction.

And if the PCs convince Pup to do something that weakens his followers' allegiance, I think the GM is behaving reasonably to have the followers become less loyal or shift their allegiance. The PCs have changed the situation, and the shared fiction; it's just changed (again) afterward--as situations tend to do.

 

[nevin]

If the players can't have permanant successes eventually they end up either wondering why they are there, or they start go CN on you because success doesn't mean anything. I've played in games where all my "successes" involved lots of innocent deaths. I was supposed to be happy I prevented a larger scale of death. DM got really confused that I just went CN and stopped worrying about NPC;s But to me they were just going to be used against me and then die. It was so predictable that it just wasn't fun. The DM thought that we'd learn how to be tough. The party just stopped caring because the more they cared about an NPC the more likely they were to be killed or screwed over. A party of hero's that can't make permanent changes for the better to the lives of the NPC's around them is pointless.

I also think DM needs to be very very judicous in messing with character's through thier followers and cohorts. Rarely and carefully used can be a great story line. If assasains show up every week and kill a few of them or every other game one of them turns on you for relatively small things, or everything about them is a pain , you risk flipping your players into me vs the GM mindset. That's not a good place for any game.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You might not believe this, but that doesn't sound radically different from how I'd handle such a thing as a GM. When I'm pondering situations/scenarios, a large part of the thinking goes into getting from what has happened--including the PCs' successes and failures--to something else that can happen.

It is different, though. I get what you're saying, but there's a pretty big gulf between a game where the GM considers such things and uses them to create more story (ie, GM driven) and a game where the GM is only ever reacting to player action declarations and the mechanical resolution of these. I have direct experiences, in that I still run (and enjoy) 5e, where even as I allow a much greater degree of input to the game the very nature of the mechanics and game mean I'm still in the drivers seat as GM, and I also currently run Blades in the Dark, where as the GM I'm just spinning off whatever the player actions and mechanics say. These two things deliver very different play experiences, even as I strive to make my 5e game much more open to player input and driving. Very different.

I disagree. The rest of the world reacting to the PCs' success doesn't (or really shouldn't) change or negate the success. If they defeat a baddie in a permanent-seeming way, that baddie should stay defeated. If they (to use your example below) convince someone to their side, they should stay convinced.

The argument @pemerton is making is that the very fact that the GM is not beholden to do so -- that it's, at best, the GM informally agreeing to do so -- means that agency is impacted. I don't necessarily agree -- you can run a 5e game in a principled way that maximizes agency, but you're going to have to agree to a set of table rules or social conventions that make it so; the game as written largely discounts player agency. And, while it's true an individual table or group can have quite a bit of agency, I think it's a fair evaluation to say that absent direct and independent action by those players, the baseline is low agency.

Honestly, I think that a symptom of low agency in D&D games is murderhobo-ism. If you evaluate any complaint of players behaving as murder hobos, you can find concrete examples of how agency is being abridged in ways that have pushed players into this play or habit of play.

And if the PCs convince Pup to do something that weakens his followers' allegiance, I think the GM is behaving reasonably to have the followers become less loyal or shift their allegiance. The PCs have changed the situation, and the shared fiction; it's just changed (again) afterward--as situations tend to do.

And, you're right back to the GM deciding how things work based on the GM's appreciation of the situation. If you, instead, follow the mechanical outcomes, then only a failure on a check that fictionally ties into the followers' allegiance could do so, and there's not any stealth action declarations that the GM is evaluating outside of the mechanics to deliver this failure. You don't have to ignore these events, no, by all means, do not do this. Just, instead of deciding unilaterally what the result is, call it out and either put it to a check or ask what the PCs are going to do to prevent this bad thing and put that to a check. I mean, if your goal is to maximize agency, which isn't always desirable or according to preferences. And it's fine if it isn't -- as I say, when I run 5e I definitely step on agency compared to when I run Blades, but then the games deliver different modes of enjoyment for myself and my players -- Blades is wild and emotionally impactful (it's like a rollercoaster), and 5e is much more tactical in nature. As I run for a bunch of wargame and boardgame lovers, it's not unsurprising that they enjoy this as well.

 

[prabe]

Honestly, I think that a symptom of low agency in D&D games is murderhobo-ism. If you evaluate any complaint of players behaving as murder hobos, you can find concrete examples of how agency is being abridged in ways that have pushed players into this play or habit of play.

I might come back to the rest of what you've said but I wanted to specifically call this out as, I think, a good insight into the murderhobo phenomenon. It hasn't been a problem in either of the campaigns I'm running*, but it's been a bit of a temptation in the one I'm playing in, which at least conforms (I think) to your comments elsewhere in the post about D&D being more variable, table-to-table, in the amount of agency the players/characters have.

*except in some narrow instances where something like "kill everything in the ruins of [place]" was one of the PCs' goals.

 

[prabe]

It is different, though. I get what you're saying, but there's a pretty big gulf between a game where the GM considers such things and uses them to create more story (ie, GM driven) and a game where the GM is only ever reacting to player action declarations and the mechanical resolution of these. I have direct experiences, in that I still run (and enjoy) 5e, where even as I allow a much greater degree of input to the game the very nature of the mechanics and game mean I'm still in the drivers seat as GM, and I also currently run Blades in the Dark, where as the GM I'm just spinning off whatever the player actions and mechanics say. These two things deliver very different play experiences, even as I strive to make my 5e game much more open to player input and driving. Very different.

"What has happened" in the game has been resolved mechanically. Every thing that has happened has changed the fiction, the vast majority (and here's where I suspect you'll say agency is being stepped on, because not all) of which are the direct result of the PC's actions. I have run before, doing little prep and just spinning off what the players did, and ... I got tired of it, and I lost my ability to suspend my disbelief enough to play, let alone GM, while running that way. I'm far happier running in what at least feels like a more consistent world; I suspect I'd be happier playing in one, too.

The argument @pemerton is making is that the very fact that the GM is not beholden to do so -- that it's, at best, the GM informally agreeing to do so -- means that agency is impacted. I don't necessarily agree -- you can run a 5e game in a principled way that maximizes agency, but you're going to have to agree to a set of table rules or social conventions that make it so; the game as written largely discounts player agency. And, while it's true an individual table or group can have quite a bit of agency, I think it's a fair evaluation to say that absent direct and independent action by those players, the baseline is low agency.

I actually don't disagree that the baseline level of agency in 5E is lower than either of us run it, but that's because the baseline style of play is going through an Adventure Path (even if WotC doesn't use Paizo's term for it), and agency is ... not strongly featured in that style of play.

And, you're right back to the GM deciding how things work based on the GM's appreciation of the situation. If you, instead, follow the mechanical outcomes, then only a failure on a check that fictionally ties into the followers' allegiance could do so, and there's not any stealth action declarations that the GM is evaluating outside of the mechanics to deliver this failure. You don't have to ignore these events, no, by all means, do not do this. Just, instead of deciding unilaterally what the result is, call it out and either put it to a check or ask what the PCs are going to do to prevent this bad thing and put that to a check. I mean, if your goal is to maximize agency, which isn't always desirable or according to preferences. And it's fine if it isn't -- as I say, when I run 5e I definitely step on agency compared to when I run Blades, but then the games deliver different modes of enjoyment for myself and my players -- Blades is wild and emotionally impactful (it's like a rollercoaster), and 5e is much more tactical in nature. As I run for a bunch of wargame and boardgame lovers, it's not unsurprising that they enjoy this as well.

Apparently the GM was able to decide that Pup was in control; I presume the GM is able to determine why. If the PCs don't find out about that--maybe they don't think to ask--I don't see how it impinges on their agency to have unforeseen consequences, especially on anything other than an uncomplicated success. And if they know about it and mess with it anyway, they can deal with the results.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Just a note about something that struck me as jarring: at one point Lanefan referred to an error in distance of 600' to 800', and it appears some others have referred to this as "minutia". Even on an in-character level I'd expect, no matter what the game system does in terms of movement, speed and so on, to be able to get an indication of size on those scales and expect it to stay the same. You have to have a really awfully zoomed out view of a game for that sort of difference to be considered trivial or irrelevant.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Just a note about something that struck me as jarring: at one point Lanefan referred to an error in distance of 600' to 800', and it appears some others have referred to this as "minutia". Even on an in-character level I'd expect, no matter what the game system does in terms of movement, speed and so on, to be able to get an indication of size on those scales and expect it to stay the same. You have to have a really awfully zoomed out view of a game for that sort of difference to be considered trivial or irrelevant.

That was me. Honestly, it depends entirely in the game you’re playing and what kind of play expectations you and your players have.

Not too long ago, I was a player in a Five Torches Deep game. This was a very traditional dungeon crawl style of game, and for that kind of game, measurements of the kind in question will matter.

In the 5E game that I run, this kind of thing may matter a bit from time to time. Generally speaking, we tend to simply rely on descriptors such as “a really big building” or “a very tall wall” and so on. If a player asks for specifics, I’ll likely ballpark it for them, as people would tend to do in the real world. Something like “it’s at least 50 feet tall, but maybe as high as 70”. This kind of stuff tends not to come up a whole lot. When there is a combat encounter, we generally use a battle mat, so they can count in squares, and we’re good.

For my Blades in the Dark games, it’s pretty much always abstract. On the occasions when measurements of this sort do matter and they come into play, they’re determined in play.

So I chose the word minutiae because for me, that’s almost always what it is. But yes, that will vary from game to game and from table to table, for sure.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It was just that the idea of something as much as a one third difference in distance with something that big seemed pretty odd to describe as "minutae" unless distance literally never matters at all, and that's pretty much the definition of "zoomed out" to me.

 

[Lanefan]

Apparently the GM was able to decide that Pup was in control; I presume the GM is able to determine why. If the PCs don't find out about that--maybe they don't think to ask--I don't see how it impinges on their agency to have unforeseen consequences, especially on anything other than an uncomplicated success. And if they know about it and mess with it anyway, they can deal with the results.

This is where I run aground to some extent: the inferred disallowance of unforeseen consequences or knock-on effects irregardless of the success-failure state of any given action: the GM isn't allowed to weave a behind-the-scenes backstory into things such as to explain what happens within the PCs' awareness.

This gets brought up in two ways, here paraphrased:

1. All consequences of both success and failure should be known before the player makes a roll.

2. Successes must be absolute.

I disagree with 1 in terms of it being an inviolate rule. Sure, often times the immediate consequences of a proposed action's success or failure are fairly obvious. "I climb the wall so I can scope out the ground behind" has a pretty clear success-fail state: you either climb the wall or you don't.

But other times, there's going to be unseen effects no matter what you do; the only difference perhaps being what those unseen effects will consist of. These are the purview of the GM. Problem is, in a situation where there is no backstory or setting she can't factor these sort of unforeseen things in (or if she tries it risks being awkward or unwieldy) because she doesn't yet know what they might be. It also works against any kind of mystery-solving game.

"I talk to the Baroness to see if she knows anything about the missing jewels". In a simple situation, either she knows something or she doesn't, regardless of whether this is pre-known through prep or determined on the spot by action resolution. But the advantage of a pre-prepped setting is that if the GM has in her background notes that the Baroness is a spy for a local Thieves' guild, an unforeseen consequence of the PCs speaking to her here (and successfully determining that she legitimately has no knowledge of the missing jewels) is that if she didn't know about the missing jewels before she does now, and can report that to her guild...which alerts the guild that someone's operating freelance in their territory; and consequences of this might rear up as suspicion or distrust the next time the party's Rogue approaches that guild for something.

I think this sort of thing is completely within the GM's purview and that the GM shouldn't be constrained from using these type of elements.

As for 2, even outright successes ought to be able to lead to headaches later. For example, a party of thief-y PCs plans a theft and executes it flawlessly - successes all round, not a failure to be seen. Does this mean there may never be consequences later, particularly in a game world with any kind of reliable divination magics? I sure hope not...

And there's a bizarre corollary people sometimes apply to 2 above: successes must be absolute but failures need not be. Why not go the other way around - failure is absolute but success isn't always - and thus make things a little harder on the players/PCs?

 

[Thomas Shey]

And there's a bizarre corollary people sometimes apply to 2 above: successes must be absolute but failures need not be. Why not go the other way around - failure is absolute but success isn't always - and thus make things a little harder on the players/PCs?

There's no intrinsic reason, but it should be noted some players hate it like hell. Its one reason no one locally wants much to do with PbtA games, which have a lot of "success, but..." results.