A Question Of Agency?

[Thomas Shey]

The math indeed is a bell curve with the basic distribution putting about 45-50 % of the outcomes in the Success w/ Cost/Complication range then 25-27.5 % on the tails (or about 2/3 success rate). Obviously as resources are brought to bear, you use your better score, you get help, odds will increase (and vice versa).

This is by design as you noted. Success w/ Cost/Complication is the snowballing engine, the primary content creator, the beating heart of the PBtA games.

That's actually a big part of the problem, I think, for some people; its not only that success-with-a-cost exists, its what the game wants to produce, so the mechanics put a thumb on the scale. Which means the vast majority of successes to them actually feel more like "mitigated failure", and that feels incompetent to them. They constantly want to aim for the unmixed successes, but relatively rarely get it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No it's not!

I'm going into my PDF files to find a D&D module with a plot-hook <looks in folder> - here's one, H3 Pyramid of Shadows.

Page 4 has, on the left hand side, an Adventure Synopsis:

Karavakos desperately wants to escape from the Pyramid of Shadows. . . . Karavakos has been sending visions of the pyramid, its location in the natural world, and promises of power associated with the pyramid. The adventure begins when the player characters encounter the pyramid and are drawn into its timeless depths. From that point on, Karavakos​

encourages the adventurers to destroy the splinters of his life force so that the power each possesses returns to him. With his power fully restored, Karavakos plans to perform arcane rituals that will set him free. . . . Presenting herself as an ally, Vyrellis guides the adventurers toward the Sanctuary of Light and urges them to destroy Karavakos—all of the splintered versions of him as well as the true wizard—and​

win their freedom in the process.​

​

Over the course of the adventure, the player characters explore the bizarre halls and chambers of the Pyramid of Shadows, fight its hostile inhabitants (including the splinters of Karavakos’s life force), collect the three keys needed to open the Sanctuary of Light, and finally face the true Karavakos in a pitched battle—with death or eternal imprisonment the price of failure. Along the way, Vyrellis also guides them to collect the splinters of her life force from the gemstones that hold them in hopes of restoring herself once she is freed from the pyramid.​

That's a plot, with NPC with pre-authored motivations and plans.

And the right hand side of p 4 has some Adventure Hooks:

If the adventurers experienced the events of H2: Thunderspire Labyrinth, then they discovered a map among Paldemar’s possessions.​

​

The map shows a glowing pyramid within a lush forest . . .​

​

OR​

​

Wherever the adventurers happen to be prior to the start of this adventure, a local wizard, scholar, or sage has been troubled by strange and compelling visions every night when he or she sleeps and dreams. In these dream visions, the tiefling wizard Karavakos appears to the dreaming mage and whispers about the power and secrets waiting within the Pyramid of Shadows. . . . The local wizard or sage is intrigued by the visions and anxious to claim the promised power. He or she is also suspicious of these dreams, and as frightened by the implications as he or she is desirous to fulfill the impulse to follow the dream.​

​

Hearing of the exploits of the adventurers, or perhaps knowing them as friends or colleagues or acquaintances, the wizard/scholar/sage asks them to look into this matter.​

There are some more like this on p 5.

The episode I described from my Burning Wheel session has nothing in common with this. There is no hook into the GM's pre-authored adventure. There is a series of action declarations by me, the player, for my PC and his sidekick, and the GM responds to those as the rules and principles of the game call for. Going in, neither of us knows anything about Rufus beyond what was in my PC backstory:

Thurgon’s father is deceased, but his mother Xanthippe (now 61 years old) still lives on the estate. So does his older brother Rufus (40 years old)., the 9th Count of Adir (although for the past 66 years that title has counted for little, having been usurped by others). . . . Although Auxol is now owned by servants of evil, the family continues to manage it. Xanthippe ensures that the estate serves as a bolthole for refugees. Rufus is sympathetic to their plight, but sees them ultimately as someone else’s problem. His interests are more mundane (it is fairly common knowledge that he has a 3 year old illegitimate son with a middle class townswoman).​

Coming out, we now know that Rufus is serving 'the master', who needs wine and that Rufus is ashamed and that Thurgon and Aramina could not snap him out of his shame, nor cow him into giving them some coin.

There is nothing like the structure of plot and plot-hook. This goes all the way back to @chaochou's post upthread:

You are overtly focusing the form over function. Of course plot hooks in a pre-written module that is meant to be usable by anyone who happens to pick it up will be presented differently than those generated by a GM who knows their players and characters. But here 'who is the master' and 'why is Rufus getting wine' are clearly plot hooks (albeit the latter barely qualifies) and in essence are not different than 'what are the orcs doing here' from my earlier example.

But all those things - like who the master is, why he wants wine, where Thurgon's younger brother has gone, whether or not his wife has gone with him - can be determined in just the same way as the encounter with Rufus was resolved: that is to say, as part of the back-and-forth of action declaration, action resolution, narration of consequences, and principled addition of further framing elements.

The GM, as part of the process of action resolution.

The discovery of Evard's Tower was (in the fiction) a result of Aramina's memory of tales of its presence in the area, and (at the table) a result of a successful check on Aramina's Great Masters-wise ability. The salience of Thurgon's mother is due to her being a Relationship purchased as part of the process of PC building.

You're merely obfuscating things under jargon. At some point a human being has to make a conscious decision about these things.

Upthread you used the phrases "narrator perspective" and "narrator stance". I made the point that, in fact, I never did anything but declare what my PC is doing - ie looking out for Rufus. Now you are talking about "narrative level power", by which you seem to mean action resolution that can produce outcomes that, in the fiction, are not solely under the causal influence of the player character.

As the example I posted shows, that sort of power does not require any distinctive "perspective" or "stance". And if players never have such power in RPGing, they will have very little or no agency. For instance, whether or not the Orc blocks my sword with a shield is not solely under the control of my PC. So if I can never influence that via action resolution, the GM is always free to narrate the Orc's shield block as a response to my action declaration I attack the Orc with my sword.


Now you are back to "stance".

There are any number of ways these things can be done. As I've already noted, Classic Traveller (1977) - that game well-known for its radical indie features! - settles the question of whether or not there is someone willing to sell illegal firearms at a good price via a Streetwise check. This doesn't require the player entering "narrator stance". It just requires the player to say "I put feelers out - who here sells illegal guns at a good price?" On a successful check, the referee provides the answer. (Classic Traveller is a bit weak when it comes to advice on the narration of failures, but this one seems easy enough: it could be anything from a visit by the local constabulary, to some toughs come to rough the PC up.)


That is how Circles work in Burning Wheel. That is how Streetwise works in Classic Traveller. That is how a paladin calling for his/her warhorse works in AD&D. It's not a very radical mechanic.

Being able to find out whether there is someone willing to sell weapons is a different thing than being able to dictate existence of certain things. And if the players can do that, they are considering things from narrator perspective. You have given them power to summon things into being, and they certainly are aware of that. The claim that true agency requires the players to have reality editing powers is rather extreme one. A lot of people wind such highly unimmersive.

I don't know. What system are you playing? What mechanics does it involve? What principles apply?

In my Burning Wheel game, a successful Great Masters-wise check established that Evard's tower existed nearby.

How? Who came up with the idea that the tower could even potentially exist? Who determined that Edward exist and that he would live in a tower instead of a Winnebago? Who determined which exact results of the dice result the tower being there and which would result something else? You're again just trying to obfuscate the decision making process under mechanical jargon. 'Action resolution mechanic' is just a mathematical construct, it does nothing unless a human being set the axioms for it.

The GM decided that, when we arrived there, a demon attacked - that's the GM's prerogative in framing,

That's pretty effective plot hook! The characters must instantly respond!

and given that (i) the successful check established that Evard is an evil sorcerer and (ii)

Same questions than with the tower. Who decided that it was even a possibility that Edward was sorcerer, or evil? Why are we rolling for that and not whether he is a peaceful florist? Where do these concepts come from?

Thurgon is a faithful knight of a holy order, it accorded with the principles of go to the players' evinced interests and concerns for their PCs.

Are you trying to say here that the GM (based on their knowledge of the PCs motivations) set up a plot hook for which the PCs would be likely to respond?

In the Prince Valiant game that I GM, the players decided to travel to the Holy Land to go on a crusade. I decided - using my prerogative in framing - that their ships had to land on the Dalmatian coast, so that the last leg was to be undertaken overland. I decided - again using my prerogative in framing - that they encountered the Bone Laird.

GM setting up an adventure or 'quest'. Yep.

The players decided to spend a fiat resource (Storyteller's Certificate) to find the locus of the Bone Laird's curse.

Players using the narrator stance.

When one of the players succeeded on a check to interpret the magical signs of that place, I narrated what they learned (not unlike Discern Realities in DW or Read a Situation in AW, which trigger GM narration). You can read the rest by following the link, if you like.

Pretty basic skill check resolution where the GM gives information relating to the adventure they have made.

In some approaches, of course, the system and techniques are more like that evinced in H3 Pyramid of Shadows - the GM decides everything in advance and the main thing the players do is declare actions to trigger the appropriate GM narration. This is RPGing with low player agency.

Attitudes matter more than the system though. You can easily have a high player agency game with a completely traditional system. It merely requires that the players are proactive, declare goals, take initiative; it doesn't require giving them reality editing powers.

 

[darkbard]

Attitudes matter more than the system though. You can easily have a high player agency game with a completely traditional system. It merely requires that the players are proactive, declare goals, take initiative; it doesn't require giving them reality editing powers.

Of course "attitude" matters. That's what accounts for @prabe's dislike for PbtA games (even though they haven't played any). But many here have been arguing for the significant role system takes in establishing relative agency; @hawkeyefan has been particularly painstaking in laying this out.

This is the point I alluded to above (and which @Manbearcat further expounded): our past experiences, which inform our aesthetic preferences, including "attitude," shape how we interact with a given system. But system architecture absolutely can be tailored to or fight against attitude, including player and/or GM primacy with regards to agency. Again, hawkeye fan, as well as @pemerton here more recently, have been particularly clear in providing examples of how that is so.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

You are overtly focusing the form over function.

Form determines function.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This it the reply I was looking for as this is where I expected you were coming from (hence the framing of my posts prior).

Two things:

1) This is D&D system-specific. Not all D&D provides GMs that level of authority. Moldvay Basic, RC, and D&D 4e do not and Gygax's 1e DMG calls for a much more neutral brand of refereeing (curating nonsensical outcomes or outcomes that are arbitrary and cheat the process of filtering skilled play from unskilled play...not curating outcomes that don't lead to (a) GM-preferred story or (b) GM-conception of what a will yield a "fun play experience").

I'd quibble with this definition of 1e. It is true, to a degree, but by the DMG I think even Gygax had reached the limits of what his original conception of participant roles and process could yield. So you run into a whole bunch of passages in his DMG where he basically advocates a kind of very hard 'enforcer DM' kind of role. It CAN be seen as 'gatekeeper of skilled play', but it VERY easily, even in his hands, becomes simply GM force. I think that, plus the understanding of the inability of the original 'Dungeon Master' role to produce a wider variety of narratives is what birthed 2e's horrible "just fudge it until you get the story you want" DM role.

Now if you're playing AD&D 2e (which started the curating outcomes and revising rules that don't lead to (a) GM-preferred story or (b) GM-conception of what a will yield a "fun play experience"), 3.x, or 5e (which adopted the AD&D 2e GM role and authority basically whole cloth), then you have that authority.

I'm assuming you're running D&D 5e and you're assuming the lead poster is as well?

2) "Because that's why there is a human being there to make these calls, I trust them to be able to read the situation, and adjudicate things better than any rule system alone could. And if I don't trust the GM to do that, then no amount of constraints placed on them will help."

You were concerned about dogmatism in TTRPGing upthread. Did this not strike you as dogmatism while you were writing it? You can't extend this principle to all of D&D let alone outside of that rubric to other games. Highly functional rules + great GMing advice + system constraints on the GM (through the holistic integration of procedures + system architecture + the game's ethos/agenda) can create games where (a) the premise of play is beautifully and consistently addressed and (b) the GM's authority and cognitive workload are simultaneously reigned in. So its fundamentally not true that constraints and great rules won't "help" <to achieve a consistently coherent and fulfilling play experience>.

Now, in a particular style of play this is true (the type that 2e and 5e promote; heavily GM-driven games where their conception of a fun/fulfilling time and a good story is made mandate through the authority the system grants them and the system architecture that consistently demands their mediation in, overwhelmingly GM-facing, action resolution). But that is only one style of play.

And now you are dead on, and why 5e to me is simply an uninteresting game design (and also why all we ever took from 2e was basically THAC0 and some updated class mechanics). For us 4e has evolved into a whole other level of D&D-esque gameplay. We have a lot of the fun aspects of the D&D milieu and narrative system architecture from top to bottom to go with it. 13a definitely tried to do this. I guess it is also a fairly successful experiment, not quite my style I guess

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah. I employ more traditional systems like Mythras, Ubiquity, and Far Trek.

I started this thread after an argument on a different forum made me wonder if I was robbing my players of their agency because I just make up everything right before I add it to the narrative.

I fell down a rabbit hole...

Honestly, D&D fell down a rabbit hole in 1989 with the publication of 2e. Though obviously people's understanding and adherence to the conceptual framework exemplified in 1e (and I would say also explicated fairly well, albeit in slightly different ways in the 'BASIC' set of products) varied and a lot of people didn't play in the way Gygax seemed to intend.

So, Gary basically outlines a game of what we would now call 'skilled play'. The basic structure is that the DM (and this term, DUNGEON MASTER is not arbitrary) builds a 'MAP' and a 'KEY', which explicates a complex series of challenges for a set of players (this can also be performed using a random generator, either entirely or partially). The DM's job from there is to act as a narrator, bringing the map and key into 3-dimensional life and providing additional sensory information as needed. The DM also acts as referee, adjudicating in a neutral fashion all situations which the exploration and/or combat rules don't cover, or which their simplistic application might produce ridiculous results. The DM is also expected to guard against 'rules exploitation' in which the player's find flaws in the mechanics in order to 'cheat the world' and get what they want in some unrealistic and (here we get into a grey area) 'unfair' way.

The 1e DM is NOT supposed to be aiming at 'creating a story', not supposed to railroad the PCs into his preferred situations, etc. He's simply supposed to stand by and referee neutrally as the players guide their PCs across the dungeon or hex grid (outdoors) encountering whatever is on the map, or perhaps dealing with wandering monsters, lack of healing, and dwindling supplies (the original game actually used AH's Outdoor Survival rules to adjudicate this part).

There are a few issues which arise in practice. First of all the DM probably wants to showcase his most fun tricks, traps, and nasty cunning challenges (all of these are 'fair play' in the skilled play paradigm of 1e). Often things won't go as planned, and thus the DM may be tempted to use a bit of force (illusionism usually) to 'set things straight'. Thus when the Elf doesn't roll well to find a secret door, maybe the DM fudges the outcome. Maybe his favorite NPC always escapes at the end of being beaten by the party, etc. too. This is where 'fun story' creeps in, because the simple 'skilled play maze' doesn't really lead to that. It can lead to a lot of fun annecdotes and whatnot, but you have to abandon that paradigm at a certain point, to a degree, to really make things like high level play 'work'. And then of course there is a constant incentive in this system for the players to undermine the game, because they are fundamentally 'playing against the DM'. This leads to another source and rationalization of pushback.

Gygax D&D doesn't lead to things that sound like Conan, or Beowulf, or even a lot like "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser". That was where 2e fell into the rabbit hole. It substituted a whole new set of incentives and admonitions, while removing a lot of the mechanical structure that made the dungeon crawl work in 1e (most people who played 2e never noticed this, they just carried over the older rules processes). 2e's formula is literally to discard the DM's 'fair arbiter' role and replace it with a 'storymaster' role, one in which the DM shapes the action of play and the trajectory of the game's narrative and fiction such that it reaches his or her predefined 'correct' outcomes. This is very explicit in the introductory material for 2e, where the DM is advised to alter die rolls and such. You can see this as just basically a codification of the tendency for 1e DMs to 'make sure the PCs see the interesting stuff' or even of Gygax's sporadic "DM as enforcer" admonitions. It isn't really though, it goes way beyond that.

The problem is, D&D was never given any mechanism, process, or even advice on how to make it actually work. A really skilled DM can kinda do that. They can listen carefully, prepare skillfully, and execute their agenda with a light enough hand and with an interesting and compelling enough narrative, to pull it off. At least for some subset of all players (which is probably a lot if you are really skilled, but NOT @pemerton ).

4e is the only point at which any attempt has been made to really come close to addressing this. It is hard to say exactly which elements of 4e drove Mike to develop 5e, I'm not convinced it was the "make a better narrative technique" part, but more the "make a better Euro Game" part (read what the designers have said about this, that was a primary goal, not "make it like an MMO").

5e just kind of gives up, and IMHO that makes it uninteresting. You could beat on it and make a game that uses a lot of 5e's mechanics that would play more in the way I'm talking about, but why bother? There are plenty of games, including 13a and 4e itself, that already do it. Plenty of non-D&D-likes that do it MUCH better.

 

[hawkeyefan]

If there's no in-fiction evidence to go by (e.g. they're trying to sneak across ground they've had no way of pre-scouting and thus they've no idea what the ground is like or what might be met there) then they ain't gettin' no DC nohow.

Why not? Just give them the DC. Then they are making informed decisions.

And for the record, it’s okay to not give them the DC. It’s perfectly valid. But it leaves the players with less agency than if they did have the DC.

I think @prabe has hinted downthread at a corollary question here: while success should clearly be honoured in the moment, for how long does that success remain valid?

Until something in the fiction happens to make it so. Not just the GM deciding “it’d make sense for this sage that they convinced to work for them to betray them now” because the GM can just as easily decide “this sage they convinced to work for them still remains totally loyal to then because he knows what the alternative would be”.

You point to logic...and yes you may perhaps be able to justify the GM’s whim in the fiction. But that doesn't mean it’s not the GM’s whim.

Now, if the PCs treat the NPC sage poorly, or something similar happens, then sure, the door to betrayal is open.

But to resort to “well, unbeknownst to the PCs the necromancer reached out to the sage and promised him power if he betrays the PCs” is absolutely sidestepping any kind of player agency.

And again, it’s fine to do that if it’s the preferred mode of play....but you can’t say that there’s a high degree of player agency going on.

To me, if plan A has stalled out it's on the players/PCs to come up with a plan B and try that; and if no plan B suggests itself then abandoning whatever it was they were trying is also always an option.

Sure, I get that, and largely agree. However, my preference doesn’t make it a universality. Others may not like letting a game stall out like that.

I agree with this statement as long as it's applied when 'success' is rolled and not when 'failure' is rolled.

Well, I think it’s best when there is clear degrees involved. But I’d also say that there are certain systems or genres where the fail forward approach makes sense. Pretty sure the main one I can think of is the Gumshoe system used for Trail of Cthulhu and some other games. Given the investigative nature of the game, it makes sense to have a means to proceed with the investigation even if the players don’t succeed at every step.

This isn’t turning a failure into a success, as you describe it. It’s more about imposing consequences of the failure that manifest in another way. So if the players fail to find the clue, it’s not that they never find it, it’s that it takes them far too long and by the time they get to the library (where the clue pointed them) the professor has been killed. Had they succeeded in their attempt, they’d have arrived in time to possibly save him.

My experience with these games is minimal, so I’m sure others can offer more and correct any inaccuracies on my part, but that’s a kind of quick sketch of that kind of play.

Which is fine for someone who's reading a book; but for someone trying to play a character in a game setting, having things happen non-sequentially kinda butchers any idea of one thing or action or decision leading to the next.

It simply doesn’t. Just like when you watch a movie, and a flashback happens, you’re able to process it. You fold what you’ve learned from the flashback into the ongoing fiction, and proceed with this new understanding.

It doesn’t do what you’re afraid it does.

they're trying to resolve in the fiction is binary; being one of 'either A happens or it doesn't' or 'either A happens or B happens'. The guard sees you or she doesn't. You lift the boulder or you don't. You push the door closed first or the Orc pushes it open first. You hit the opponent for damage or you don't (so yes, combat to-hit rolls go here).

So a roll may be binary....you hit or you miss. But if you look at the entire action, very few will be so simply A or B. Don’t separate attack and damage rolls....look at them as the entire action.

Most actions have plenty of room for degrees of success. You jump and don’t fall into the chasm.....but you don’t make it all the way to the other side, and now you’re scrambling to climb up onto the ledge. Etc etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Great post. That is exactly how my memory banks have ordered the period of late 80s through the 90s as well.

It is funny, because by the early 90's I was long since out of college and been working a few years. No longer had any kind of contact with any 'gamer community' (and there really wasn't a FLGS, you had to go 50 miles to get to a game store). V:tM and all had no impact on us, we didn't know any of this was even going on as a 'thing' in games (I do remember a few people talking about LARPing, which we just thought was weird, we played laser tag instead). So, when 2e came out, it was just sort of bizarre and difficult to understand why someone would be so dumb as to write a bunch of crap into D&D that clearly didn't belong! I think we basically took the 2e DMG/PHB combat and class mechanics chapters and forgot the rest of it even existed. I suspect, at the time, I didn't even read most of the material, as we just considered it "low quality."

Not to say that none of us were cognizant of issues with 'story play'. This was the era when I created a GARGANTUAN sandbox plus meta plot. Every single thing that was going to happen during the envisaged campaign was plotted out, and I imagined the various scenarios in which the PCs would, or would not, reshape the flow of events, complete with statistical models that defined under which conditions various military actions and whatnot would produce different results, Battlesystem scenarios to play out battles that the PCs might get into, etc.

It really just wasn't that interesting, because of course D&D doesn't really provide the driving process that would guide play into a set of activities that engaged with the player's/PC's agendas. I mean, we had a fun game, but most of all that material simply became clearly irrelevant and a waste of time within a few sessions. I guess, however, I can credit 2e with breaking things enough that we had to figure out how to fix it... lol. There were definitely a few approaches to that! I especially recall my best friend, who simply became Railroader in Chief. You could be 100% certain that ever scene of every game would play out to his design, no matter what. He was just so awesome at creating a fun story and was so talented at creating distinctive characters and situations that it didn't matter. I suspect that was sort of the V:tM ideal, and probably what the people who invented that game came from. Of course it failed miserably for us mere mortals.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The GM has to create a lot of NPCs, they have to create events that happen independently from the characters, they have to create a lot of naughty word. This by necessity creates 'plot hooks' and 'adventure opportunities' or 'quest', and it would be weird to pretend otherwise.

Do they? I don't do this. OK, maybe I have some canonically established locations and NPCs in my long-running D&D-esque game world that I can use, but they're simply props. I mean, I don't need to determine anything before some players start developing an agenda and need scenes to interact with. I might even have some idea of meta plot, but if so I will make it pretty explicit to the players and it will be generated, or at least shaped, in a fashion that caters to their interests/agenda. At most I might be said to be in charge of what falls within the acceptable genre conventions for the milieu.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Do they? I don't do this. OK, maybe I have some canonically established locations and NPCs in my long-running D&D-esque game world that I can use, but they're simply props. I mean, I don't need to determine anything before some players start developing an agenda and need scenes to interact with. I might even have some idea of meta plot, but if so I will make it pretty explicit to the players and it will be generated, or at least shaped, in a fashion that caters to their interests/agenda. At most I might be said to be in charge of what falls within the acceptable genre conventions for the milieu.

So unexpected things never happen? The players do not come upon things that they didn't know about before? The people they meet are just blank robots with no motivations or goals?

Like I think I get what you actually mean, you let the players dictate the direction and generate things around that, right? But that still requires creating a lot of stuff that will have an enormous impact on how the campaign ultimately unfolds.