A Question Of Agency?

[prabe]

Which boils down, if I'm reading this right, to you simply want to succeed more often; frequently outright, sometimes with complications.

There's way to take that which are charitable, and others which are not, but either way I somehow don't think you'd like my game very much.

I have come to believe that, while I deeply respect much of how you (and I presume your table) approach your game, you are probably correct. OTOH, it's plausible we could both be surprised.

 

[Lanefan]

I honestly don't think there is a real conflict in these definitions, though. Freedom to operate freely in the setting is a manner of agency. Narrative authority by players beyond declaring what their characters do is another manner. A further manner.

I'd say that allowing a player to declare actions for their character is almost the baseline level of agency, and if it is absent then likely something has gone very wrong.

Games that allow players to more definitively shape the fiction than just that baseline of declaring actions allow more agency. I don't even really see how this is up for debate.

The debate is whether that agency is warranted.

It seems that because the conversation largely assumes agency is a good thing, that any reduction of it is a reduction of good, and no one wants to admit that their game is less good......so they insist that their game has all the good. All the agency.

My assumption is that as agency increases a point arrives at which said acengy is no longer warranted, and therefore not good. For me that point arrives when players' agency goes beyond their own characters (and obvious outcomes of their actions) and starts affecting setting elements which are the purview of the GM.

Example: players being able to create setting elements out of thin air on a successful action declaration = unwarranted agency.

I can understand this, and I've done it myself, although more so in the past than I would today. Because it absolutely is reducing the players' agency. If the fight is too easy....then the fight is easy. Let the results stand. I get the idea of trying to preserve the status of a threat that's been built up, but the game isn't about preserving my ideas of what it is about.

If the encounter is too hard.....then maybe they need to approach things differently than trying to fight? Maybe they need to negotiate or run away?

Typically, the GM would only do these things if they had an expected outcome, which could even be something like "after a difficult battle, the PCs emerge victorious!"

Agreed here. Fudging is generally bad; and if the players aren't allowed to do it the GM shouldn't be allowed to either.

I don't think that your definition of success can ever really exist. I mean, in D&D the PCs want to win the fight with the evil necromancer and his undead minions. Ultimately, they do win.....but it took some resources, and no one emerged unscathed. Would you say that they failed to win the fight?

I feel you are applying the concept of success far too broadly. I mean, my PC wants to jump the chasm. That's his goal, and that's what the roll is for. In the case of BitD and most PbtA games, the roll is also folding in several other rolls (the kind typically made by the GM in D&D and similar games) into that roll.

My view is that such a high-level non-granular resolution system mixed with a desire for a binary end-result is where the problem lies. If all those sub-rolls actually took place, each on a more-or-less binary level, then the macro-result might end up looking like success-with-complication (or fail-forward) but the integrity of each binary success-fail point within that sequence would be maintained. Example: combat.

To me the obvious solution is to take the time, break it down, and do the sub-rolls - even if the system tells you not to.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Oh, sure, there's flexibility, but if you play everything zero-myth it feels to me as though everything is sorta indeterminate, with no fixed points for the PCs use for leverage.

I think this is actually a part of the reason why some players don't like having the narrative level control. They want to have the illusion that the setting is something 'real' that exists outside of them. Being able to edit that reality instantly breaks the illusion. I mean the GM knows it is naughty word and made up and probably in flux and the players actually know it too, but they don't want their attention to be constantly drawn to it. They want to pretend to be real people in a real world that exists independently of them, as fictional as it all may be.

 

[Lanefan]

So, what the character jumping from one building to another is to make the distance, land safely, and not attract attention.

That's three separate goals for one action; to me that should prompt three separate rolls: using D&D terms it'd be a Strength roll to make the distance, a Dex roll to land safely, and a Stealth (or equivalent) roll to not be noticed.

Most of the complications I've seen proposed for a complicated success on that jump check have been to either have that character land badly (and get hurt) or get noticed; both of those feel like failure to me.

A fault of concatenating everything into one roll.

 

[pemerton]

It's interesting to me that the opposition to "success with complication" is described as denying some inherent measure of player expectation --- "As defined by the rules, my dice roll plus modifiers was high enough to succeeded at my action declaration, and should therefore succeed."

For RPG play, the nature of success is ALWAYS constrained/framed by the fictional state in which the action is attempted. From where I sit, it seems a bit . . . odd, I guess, to complain about a rule system that specifically indicates that complications will be introduced. A GM is given full ability to introduce complications ad hoc, at any time . . . but having it hard-coded in the rules is somehow badwrong?

<snip>

For example, in some groups I've played with, @hawkeyefan 's example of more guards stepping from the shadows with drawn swords would be decried as a "foul", because the GM should have allowed the players/PCs to make an attempt at noticing those guards first. It's a specific type of group social contract, where the GM is only ever allowed to introduce risk in a fashion such that the players have some ability to mitigate it. If you're coming from that narrow view of play, I could see how introducing complications feels like a GM "cheat code", because old-school dungeon crawling is all about "smart" play allowing the player to eliminate risks.

Again, this goes back to @AbdulAlhazred's point - that "the way things happened to be done by Gygax in the mid 1970s" is treated as a hard norm for RPG play.

This is from Vincent Baker's blog:

When you're roleplaying, what you're doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they're actually true or not.

So you're sitting at the table and one player says, "[let's imagine that] an orc jumps out of the underbrush!"

What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush?

1. Sometimes, not much at all. The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment, and everybody else just incorporates it smoothly into their imaginary picture of the situation. "An orc! Yikes! Battlestations!" This is how it usually is for participants with high ownership of whatever they're talking about: GMs describing the weather or the noncombat actions of NPCs, players saying what their characters are wearing or thinking.

2. Sometimes, a little bit more. "Really? An orc?" "Yeppers." "Huh, an orc. Well, okay." Sometimes the suggesting participant has to defend the suggestion: "Really, an orc this far into Elfland?" "Yeah, cuz this thing about her tribe..." "Okay, I guess that makes sense."

3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" The thing to notice here is that the mechanics serve the exact same purpose as the explanation about this thing about her tribe in point 2, which is to establish your credibility wrt the orc in question.

4. And sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing. Wave a stick in a game store and every game you knock of the shelves will have a combat system that works like this.​

To undertake clear analysis we need to set aside assumptions about "what's normal" in RPGing, and look at who enjoys credibility/authority over some element of the fiction, how contests over this are resolved, etc. Eg in "skilled play" dungeon crawling, the GM has total authority over pre-play creation of fiction (ie drawing the map and writing up the key) but during play it is expected to be mediated through wandering monster checks (the "having-an-orc-show-up" roll).

I think for some players its important to their experience that all of this (except for combat?) be concealed during actual play - so that eg the GM throws the wandering monster die in secret rather than taunting the players with it; or complications are just introduced by the GM through "free roleplay" rather than paced and constrained by check results. Because concealing something from X isn't very consistent with X exercising control over it, those concealment practices tend to push towards low-player-agency RPGing.

 

[prabe]

That's three separate goals for one action; to me that should prompt three separate rolls: using D&D terms it'd be a Strength roll to make the distance, a Dex roll to land safely, and a Stealth (or equivalent) roll to not be noticed.

If you look at the conversation @hawkeyefan and have had, that's one more than I'd use, but it's not wildly different thinking, IMO.

A fault of concatenating everything into one roll.

In this circumstance, I agree. There might be things where you don't want or need all the rolls rolled (which is a preference and not a right/wrong thing), but I don't believe this is one.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I am sorry @hawkeyefan (Re: Agency), but it really just feels like you are trying to define agency so that it perfectly fits the play style you want to advocate for. And since agency is being seen as a good thing (even a moral good I would argue as some are talking about it), I don't think that is a good way to have a discussion about this term (when it is clearly being used to mean very different things by these two posters). We have already had this discussion actually about agency and narrative versus more traditional approaches. I don't think it is worth diving into again. But I do think people trying to control the language in order to advance their preferred play style is a big reason these discussions often break down or end in tears

EDIT: Just to add here, I think it is a much better approach for you to talk about 'narrative agency', which sounds like a good term for what you are describing to me. But I don't think most people take character agency or player agency in RPGs to mean an ability to shape the narrative or plot. Certainly some might, but to me it seems like a play style concept is being loaded on to an existing term, to get people to agree with that approach. If you like narrative agency, that is fine. There is clearly an appetite for it out there, and the more clear you are about that as a play style approach, the more people you will win over to it. But I think this business of getting play style preferences into things by stealth is something we should really abandoned on both sides of these debates. It isn't good for the hobby, it isn't good for discussion and it just makes people hostile towards play styles they might otherwise enjoy.

I don't see player agency as an objectively good trait, honestly. I like it and prefer it, but that's my taste. There are plenty of people who enjoy games with low agency. One of my buddies occasionally runs short 3- 4 session Call of Cthulhu games for us. These by their very nature allow for less agency than what I'd typically look for in a game.....and yet I really enjoy them. It's because he weaves history and mythos lore in interesting ways, and puts forth an interesting goal for the PCs. There is a plot for us to engage with, although how we do so is fairly open. But we can't just disregard it and go hunting for mythos creatures in the forests of New England....we need to engage the core scenario that he's come up with.

I think I'm being very clear and I don't think I'm putting down anyone's play style. There's nothing worse about a game that has less player agency than another game has. It just means they are seeking different goals, or trying to evoke different play experiences. What makes a game better or worse is when it does or doesn't do what the participants want.

In regard to what player agency is.....it has nothing to do with character agency, because that isn't something that gets exercised at the table, but is instead wholly a fictional element of the game, the same way the character's appearance is.

Player agency is about how much say the player has, right? About what? About the game. The game is what? A conversation that establishes a fictional world. So the more say the player has about the fictional world, the more agency they have. The more ways that they can steer the conversation, the more agency they have. That's just the way it is.

Certain games allow for more agency on the part of the player. That's how they are designed. There are also ways to change existing games to increase or decrease the amount of agency they allow the players to have.

But agency in and of itself is a subjective thing.

 

[Lanefan]

Note how DW is normally meant to start 'in media res', so it is quite possible the PCs are in the middle of the Gnatbite Swamp in scene 1.

Grrrr.... As a player the first words out of my mouth would be some version of "Why are we here, how did we get here, and why - if we don't need to be here - didn't we go around?"

If the Ranger says "what is the quickest way out of the swamp?" the GM would respond "I don't know, what is the quickest way out." and the player would be expected to respond "Oh, the Shadow Hills are just a couple miles to the north."

30 seconds into the game and we're already into the realm of co-operative storytelling rather than in-character role-playing.

Fine if that's what you want but for pity's sake own up to the fact that this is what you're doing.

 

[pemerton]

We can debate what those are. Maybe I am wrong on the specifics. But I think you can say "this is how people normally play D&D".

I wasn't a fan of 4E so I can't really comment on what the norm was in that edition.

This thread is in General. It's not about D&D exclusively, or even in particular. And I note that even your "normal for D&D" appears to exclude 4e D&D.

The idea that is being described as "normal" - ie that the GM is the sole determiner of any fiction beyond the bodily motions of the PCs - is in my view not actually normal (if it was, skills like Gather Information couldn't work) and is a dogma and shibboleth that seems to have crystallised (as best I can tell) sometime in the first half of the 1980s.

It can be tracked across editions of Classic Traveller, where the 1980s revisions introduce text that was not only absent, but was implicitly contradicted, in the 1977 version.

My impression is that a lot of actual play in the 1970s was far more relaxed about player-introduced content I've got in mind things like the famous "baby balrog" in one of Gygax's campaigns; and even the shift from OD&D being very relaxed about players making up new character types - like balrogs - to Gygax's DMG being sternly against it. And Gygax is still relaxed about the matter in his discussion of stronghold-building (from his DMG, p 93):

Assume that the player in question decides that he will set up a stronghold about 100 miles from a border town, choosing an area of wooded hills as the general site. He then asks you if there is a place where he can build a small concentric castle on a high bluff overlooking a river. Unless this is totally foreign to the area, you inform him that he can do so.​

The difference between this and the Great Masters-wise check made to establish that Aramina truly recollects the location of Evard's tower is that what Gygax describes is (i) more informal, and (ii) not gated behind a player build decision (ie spending points to develop Great Masters-wise). But there is no difference in terms of whose ideas are establishing the content of the shared fiction. Just like Dungeon World, it is an example of "drawing maps but leaving blank spaces" and then looking to one of the players to fill in those blanks.

What puzzles me is that no one seems ever to have thought the passage from Gygax worth mentioning, except for me! Whereas something basically the same but made more overt as a feature of playing other systems generates all this debate and discussion about "narrative perspective" or "narrative stance" or "narrative power".

I'm certainly not Gygax's number-one advocate, but I think that his rulebooks demonstrate a clear sense of the dynamics of player agency for the sorts of games he was running, although - like @AbdulAlhazred - I don't think he'd come up with a perfect set of tools to solve all the problems.

 

[Aldarc]

A fault of concatenating everything into one roll.

Feature not a flaw.

I may respond to your earlier post tomorrow, but it's bedtime in Euroland.