A Question Of Agency?

[Crimson Longinus]

But this is THE WHOLE WAY classic D&D has worked, since Gygax day 1, see? This is not some small "people thing", this is THE ENTIRE STRUCTURE OF HOW D&D (except 4e, sort of) HAS BEEN DESIGNED. It is INTENDED to work this way. Its not some minor nit that gets addressed at the table. Sure, highly conscientious and skilled DMs and players can negotiate past this, but why isn't it just better to design a game from the ground up so it isn't going to happen? There are VERY few players in RPGs where they aren't interested in addressing at least some stuff that THEY care about.

I mean nothing is stopping a D&D GM from recognising what the players want and then focusing on that. You don't need to have rules for it. Like for example here it seems to me that it should be pretty apparent that you care about that stronghold, so tying content to that would have been pretty obvious (content other than burning it down!) Now perhaps the GM didn't wan to run the sort of game where the characters are overtly focused to one location, that's fair. But they could have just told you that when you drought up the idea of the stronghold in the first place, or even better it would have been expressed in session zero that this is a game about roaming adventurers that don't stay in one place for a long. And yes, you of course can have rules for all of this, but you don't really have to.

In a DW game, I'd have just set myself on an agenda of building that freehold at the edge of Greenvale. Once I built a stronghold, it would have required AT LEAST the imposition of a doom (with all attendant need for PC failures in adventures and prior signs and signals) in order for it to become at risk! Nor were the participants in this game inexperienced or anything like that. D&D simply doesn't help you here, and even sometimes actively thwarts such attempts. I posit that, people's resistance to change aside, something like DW's approach is just objectively much more likely to produce good results. I think this comes back to @Manbearcat's assertion of not having ever heard the "complicated success is failure" meme before. It often feels like these memes just arise in response to any suggestion that there are ways to improve RPG play beyond 1977 levels of technique. It really feels like stubbornness a lot of the time.

Sometimes it just feel that people want to have rules to protect them from bad GMs, but I have hard time imagining that it will ultimately be a satisfying solution for that particular problem.

 

[pemerton]

it might seem obvious that the GM fudging would decrease the player agency, but if player declares an intent, and the GM fudges the dice so that the player's intent is fulfilled, then how was the players agency harmed? It could even be argued that it was enhanced...

I would argue that this GM is confused. Why is s/he calling for a die to be rolled if s/he is going to ignore the result? Just say yes!

The effect of calling for a roll, but then - covertly - conferring success in any event, is to hide from the players what is actually going on at the table and to obscure how the fiction is being established. That is classic illusionism. And is in my view clearly a burden on the players exercising agency in the play of the game.

While I see your point, DM's make mistakes, sometimes you realize in the middle of the combat that it was a mistake.

if I screw up and throw a monster at them that they can't possibly damage in a situation where they can't run away, dropping some of the monsters special abilities that the party doesn't know about so the fight can possibly be won would be taking away their agency. I'd argue it would be giving it back.

This is a system issue. In my view it shows weakness in the mechanics and also weakness in techniques.

story trumps dice. Sometimes to have a good story you have to fudge a roll or two in the course of a game.

If DM isn't allowed to adjust as the game goes on he's irrelevant and shouldn't be there. Might as well play a video game.

To be blunt, these remarks make me think that you're not familiar with RPGs beyond some version or variants of D&D (probably 2nd ed AD&D, 3E and 5e) and that you've never played a RPG where the GM frames situations but does not just choose the consequences.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If you think it is not "logical" or "natural" that a fantasy gameworld should contain wizard's towers built by notorious wizards, well, that's on you!

I'm sure it is logical for such things to exist. But the player being able to decide where such a thing is is a clear use of a narrative level power.

A game in which the player of the cleric learns about the gods only by asking the GM or making checks to learn the GM's notes; in which the wizard learns about other great wizards and their towers only by learning what is in his/her notes; is probably going to be a low-agency game.

Nope. It simply is one where the players generally do not operate from the narrator perspective.

 

[pemerton]

That's resolving an encounter (or a situation) not solving a problem. The "problems" I had in mind were more what are on the MC's Fronts, and--it seems to me--complications would accrue so quickly and in such large amounts that those Fronts would tick to their conclusion/s without the PCs being able to do anything about it.

From the AW rulebook (p 143):

Countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive: when something you’ve listed happens, advance the clock to that point. Prescriptive: when you advance the clock otherwise, it causes the things you’ve listed. Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer makes sense, just scribble it out.​

So the designer certainly doesn't agree with you. And I really don't know what your perception is based on.

Player moves for actually changing the in-fiction situation include Going Aggro, Seizing by Force, and Seducing and Manipulating. (The fact that these are all oriented towards other people tells us something about the game: the action is focused more on people than on things - the latter are of mostly instrumental interest).

Of course if the GM sets aside the outcome of action resolution then the GM might do whatever s/he wants with the clocks and the fronts - but that just takes us back to the previous conversation. Which does reinforce my impression that you seem not to appreciate the significance of robust action resolution processes. That is how players in an AW impose their will on the fiction.

Whereas you seem to be thinking that the way players deal with problems is by having the GM hold back. That is a technique that I see as paradigmatic of low-player-agency RPGing.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I would argue that this GM is confused. Why is s/he calling for a die to be rolled if s/he is going to ignore the result? Just say yes!

Perhaps they were willing to accept most of the potential outcomes but not that specific one (for example a monster crits with a powerful attack second or third time etc.)

The effect of calling for a roll, but then - covertly - conferring success in any event, is to hide from the players what is actually going on at the table and to obscure how the fiction is being established. That is classic illusionism. And is in my view clearly a burden on the players exercising agency in the play of the game.

I mean sure, it is really unimaginative form of illusionsim. I'm personally not a fan of fudging. I prefer better illusions.

This is a system issue. In my view it shows weakness in the mechanics and also weakness in techniques.

Sure. Fudging is a kludge, a band-aid. But if one uses it to fix issues that crop up very rarely, then it could be argued that it is not worth the effort to come up with a better fix for the problem.

 

[prabe]

So the designer certainly doesn't agree with you. And I really don't know what your perception is based on.

At this point, I'm not sure I do either. I do know that reading AW made me actively angry, and that I'm not going to read it again, so I suppose you'll have to do without an answer here. I genuinely apologize.

Of course if the GM sets aside the outcome of action resolution then the GM might do whatever s/he wants with the clocks and the fronts - but that just takes us back to the previous conversation. Which does reinforce my impression that you seem not to appreciate the significance of robust action resolution processes. That is how players in an AW impose their will on the fiction.

If you mean "appreciate" to mean "understand" you are incorrect; if you mean it to mean "enjoy" or "prefer" you might be correct, primarily because you seem to consider "robust action resolution processes" to mean explicit game mechanics that allow the players to alter the fiction in ways outside of what their character could accomplish in the fiction, whereas I believe "action resolution" involves things the characters actually do.

Whereas you seem to be thinking that the way players deal with problems is by having the GM hold back. That is a technique that I see as paradigmatic of low-player-agency RPGing.

And here we skidding back toward an unproductive conversation we had a while ago. I believe that the way the players have the characters solve problems is by having the characters do things.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So far, I'm willing to presume that @hawkeyefan (among others) is genuinely baffled by my feelings/preferences on success-with-complication, and trying to figure them out.

I was more responding to the defining of the term "agency" in his reply to me than that

 

[pemerton]

OD&D certainly had awfully limited mechanical support for anything else, barring some rules about morale and henchmen.

OD&D has combat resolution mechanics (either Chainmail or the "alternative" combat mechanics), which allow players to do more than just declare the bodily movements their PCs make.

 

[Lanefan]

Not to invalidate your tastes, but I haven't really experienced the feeling of "partial failure" as a player when dealing with complicated success games. In fact, a lot of the fun for me as a player comes from these moments of complicated success. For example, if I try climbing a wall in some games like D&D, my only options are often make it fully or fail to climb. But complicated successes add twists to the outcome, sometimes with decisions to make. I can make it up the wall, but there may be a cost: e.g., I alert the guards below or the guards are waiting for me at the top. Or maybe I drop my family heirloom or weapon while climbing. Or maybe I have to make a choice: do I make it up stealthily but lose the gold I'm stealing or do I keep the gold but alert the guards? Or even do I try saving my family heirloom or the gold? You may view this as a "partial failure," but to me it's a success. I feel successful as I ultimately get what I wanted from the action: i.e., I make it up the wall. I may not make it up the wall smoothly or with the gold, but I do successfully climb the wall. But complications and costs for success drive the narrative forward for me as a player in new and interesting ways outside of binary success and failure states. It results in new fictional situations that my character has to deal with, and that's fun for me.

In large part I agree with this.

Where I run aground is trying to square "success-plus-complication" with "fail-forward", as they seem to me to be basically the same thing under different names; only one is mitigating success (which, all other things being equal, makes the game harder on the players/PCs) while the other is mitigating failure (which makes the game easier).

Given the choice, I think I prefer success-with-complication.

Hmmm...I don't think it's that far removed, for example, from the relatively common use of a critical fumble in d20 games. It's often a point where you don't know what the outcome will be or how the GM will adjudicate it. And one of the oft floated criticisms of critical fumbles is that they often don't honor the competency of the PCs or humiliate them in some way.

It's a valid criticism.

That said, it's one which I roundly ignore in favour of the humour value and occasional in-game chaos (or tragedy!) fumbles can lead to.

IME, however, soft/hard moves triggered by failures and complicated success in PbtA/FitD/Fate games more frequently flow from the fiction than critical fumbles and the like in D&D. Again, all IME. If I am rushing into battle with goblins triggering Hack and Slash and I get a 7-9 success, then I likely know what some of the potential outcomes could be: e.g., I take damage from the goblins in the exchange, I get surrounded by goblins, or maybe running into the goblins now leaves my young ward defenseless. The outcomes are fiction-bound.

This is one thing that would bug me: that things are resolved at such a high non-granular level rather than digging in and sorting out the details, both in combat (as shown in the quote) and in exploration. It strikes me as a design very much geared toward a 'hurry-up' style of play, as if the game expects players (and GMs) to want to rush through any one scenario/adventure/campaign in order to get to the next.

Not my cup of tea.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This is what I call playing a RPG. Assuming that we are interested in whether the play of a RPG involves more or less player agency, defining agency as simply the baseline act of playing seems like it will be unhelpful.

I don't think this is the definition of playing an RPG. Many, many groups and many modules don't allow you to freely operate in the setting. This is one of the reasons agency took on as a term (it was picked up by players frustrated with railroading and overly linear adventures). So I don't think agency here is being being defined as the baseline act of playing. I do think what you are talking about is a thing (empowering the players to shape the narrative). But I think it only muddies the waters when that is folded into the agency debate. Maybe it is narrative agency. But when I talk about agency, and when I see it used in most discussions, it is about giving the players freedom to explore, set goals, interact with who they want, pursue what interests them and not railroad them. It isn't about giving them powers that in a normal game are assumed to belong to the GM. If you want players to have those powers, fine, that is fair. But I don't find these discussions at all fruitful when a term like agency is used to float in that concept (i.e. "So you say you like agency? Well surely you must also like giving players the power to shape the plot because that is also clearly a form of agency"). I think it is obvious in most of these discussions, when we get to that area of debate, this isn't what people are meaning by agency.