A Question Of Agency?

[Thomas Shey]

I can't say that I really understand this partial success discussion. Partial successes/degrees of success are just a perfectly natural thing and any system should support them to certain extent as they happen in real life all the time. Like in that jumping example not quite making it and ending up hanging from the edge of the roof instead seems like a perfectly possible outcome. Now if these mechanics 'create' completely new fictional elements that might not be even directly related to the thing the character is doing, then I can see it rubbing some people the wrong way. Like if a failed jump check caused new guards to 'spawn' etc.

Well, its partly a side topic, and turns on whether the baseline on the "succeed" side is "success" or "flawed success". For better or worse, some people don't respond well to the latter.

This has been brought up because at least most of the PbtA games used, essentially, "success with complications" as their default success; you can get more unmixed success with a good enough roll, but the system kind of doesn't want you to most of the time, because the "complications" drive ongoing play. And I can quite see how people really focused on player agency can (not necessarily will) see this as having an attempt to limit their agency baked right into the rules.

To what extent this is true varies apparently on the particular incarnation of the *World game and of course there's the big unresolveable debate about how many people react positively or negatively to that, but that's why its a subportion of the thread.

 

[Lanefan]

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

And is also an extreme interpretation of the stances of others, which is of no help to either clarity or dialogue.

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.​

Two things to note here: one, this is a specific exception to the otherwise-established baseline where setting parameters are under the purview of the GM; and two (and more important), as per the bit I bolded the GM still has to give permission and retains veto power. If memory serves, however, once the GM does give permission the player then gains some narrative control over many elements of that hex other than just the stronghold itself, subject to GM veto if abused.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Rather depends on whether the person using that phrase was using it as a substitute for "physical actions". If so, the combat system can very well be read in that line.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The debate is whether that agency is warranted.

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.

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

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.

Unwarranted? 'Problem lies'? See, this to me is really loaded language! I would say that any process, action, or situation which removes agency from a person lessens that person's personhood. It makes them subject to another in some way. It is never warranted unless it can be justified by some other good. This is the fundamental tenet upon which the idea of the virtue of human freedom rests!

Now, we're playing games, and I am kind of sitting here writing this with a light heart. I certainly don't think anyone is being oppressed in playing an RPG, but I don't think I need to justify player agency, I think others need to justify denying it a lot more!

Nor is something like bundling moves along with checks, IMHO, a 'problem'. I suspect it just defies ancient D&D convention, and that raises the hackles of the defenders of tradition! At the end of the day I have not observed anyone play DW (for instance) and complain about that. What I HAVE seen is a lot of veteran RPGers who have a very hard time wrapping their heads around anything but D&D and its analogs. Deep ingrained ideas of how these games are played have to be surfaced and dispelled. Often the symptom is an unwillingness/inability to actually take hold of the added responsibilities introduced by this kind of play. Players fail to volunteer information, act on bonds, and have difficulty expressing goals beyond responding to the GM's cues. Luckily there is almost always at least one player who gets it (or hasn't played an RPG before and thus lacks this mindset) and they can kind of just take the lead and treat the others a bit like henchmen for a while until they learn to assert themselves. Usually even the most hidebound at least do well with class moves, which usually are pretty direct. Things turn out well, mostly, but it can be an interesting challenge. It is like watching someone regain their power of sight for the first time in years, it takes a while to learn to use it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Apocalypse World / Blades in the Dark and their respective offspring very much work against the idea that a key goal of play is to eliminate risks.

I'll go as far as to say that I believe the ability to at least reduce risks is expected by the majority of players in most games. Whether that's an old school view (I don't think so, personally) is something of in the eye of the beholder.

 

[Lanefan]

I can see that may be a concern. I don't know how true it is. The players can leverage things in lots of ways. They can determine these points themselves.

To me that almost sounds like a cheat code: "Hey, we have problem X here but if we invent and use leverage-point Y we can blow past it at no risk or cost". And so with one player-spoken sentence the problem Goes Away.

This takes away all the intrigue of determining whether leverage-point Y exists, whether it's accessible to the PCs, and whether they can put it to use...all, it seems, in the interests of allowing the fiction to develop faster.

It's as if the specific design goal is to make the game more appealing to those with short attention spans.

 

[innerdude]

Nobody is saying that the players are necessarily spectators, you're kind of excluding the middle here. What I would say is that player agency is improved when the game is DESIGNED to make room for it. One of the problems when discussing D&D specifically, and this is exacerbated when someone calls it 'normal', is that D&D didn't start out this way.
D&D started out as purely an almost wargame-esque crawl that involved skilled play ONLY. So, yes, the players had agency only to control their PCs within the limits of what the PCs could do or know. The DM OTOH was absolutely limited to what was on the map, key, and wandering monster table. ANYTHING the DM produced outside of that, or ANY time they fudged a roll or deliberately judged a situation based on their own agenda and not an honestly neutral standpoint, was illegal in that game. Now, DMs still had a lot of leeway, and players really limited agency, but the players DID have that protection! The DM wasn't allowed to sic a wandering monster on them just because he thought they were being putzes, or because his favorite NPC was going to get offed, or whatever. It happened, but all of that was bad DMing and it was pretty well stated, certainly the 'culture' of D&D, including articles in SR/The Dragon, talked about it.

But then 2e came along and just told the DM to become a 'storyteller' and stop worrying about the rules so much. Meanwhile the players were given nothing, they were expected to simply continue to inhabit OD&D's dungeon crawl aesthetic with no change. The fact that the OD&D aesthetic included "hide the numbers from the players" just made it even worse. You could run 2e by the book and simply utterly make up everything as DM in any way you wanted. Not that this was usual, but the game, and subsequently 3.x and 5e offer no better situation for the players as a guarantee.

I simply offer that this is a poor situation and we can design games better than that. and more relevant to the OP, playing the way 2e tells a DM to run a game is pretty likely low agency, but clearly we all don't agree on what that means...

Mostly to clarify for @prabe --- Just so you know, when @pemerton first started talking about a lot of these principles / play style, I bounced off them hard. It felt like total anathema to what I knew, what I thought should "work" in RPG play. Especially because he was using them in context of D&D 4, which I positively despised at the time, and didn't think it was worth my while to even consider them.

It took a long time for me to really grok what he was talking about --- how to push play into areas that allowed more player control over the fiction, how it was possible to let those player-generated elements become more central to play, how to frame the fiction to better support it, etc.

At that time, I had only ever played D&D --- some B/X, BECMI, and 3.x. I had zero other frame of reference. I've since abandoned D&D entirely (have literally played 2 sessions total of a d20-based system since 2010) in favor of Savage Worlds, but even Savage Worlds is still very much a "traditional" style action/resolution style RPG. Granted, in my opinion it plays a lot like a fast-and-loose but incredibly fun take on BECMI, but it's still got more in common with D&D as a general task-resolution framework than say, Fate or Apocalypse World.

It wasn't until I really started branching out into other "stuff" that it started to click on what these new-fangled "indie" systems were pushing toward.

One main reason you'll get so many strong responses to your posts is because of what @AbdulAlhazred notes in his quote --- D&D has never, not once, explicitly directed players/GMs to consider techniques like the ones being espoused outside its original breeding ground. There's an information void, where D&D players are often not aware that there's even an alternative point of view to consider, let alone that it might actually produce a gameplay style they'd like better if they gave it a shot.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Feature not a flaw.

Eh. There are both virtues and problems in rolling multiple axes of resolution into one roll, and which it primarily lands in depends on what your priorities are there. At the very least if you want the mechanical process to tell you which ones succeeded at and which ones failed and not either lockstep them together or throw it to the definition of an outside party, it complicates how you have to make your resolution roll. That doesn't mean I think having more than one thing resolved with one roll is an intrinsic evil (separating out "makes the jump" and "isn't injured" seems to me to be perverse and asking for the laws of probability to make everything worse) but doing so isn't an unmixed blessing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think well-GMed Cthulhu is the poster child for enjoyable but low-player-agency RPGing.

Traditional (rather than action-) horror games in general honestly.

 

[Lanefan]

In my Burning Wheel game I tell the GM "I'm looking out for Rufus as we ride through the outskirts of Auxol." Then I make a Circles check. This is pretending to be a real person in a real world. The dice throw makes it independent of me.

In the same game I tell the GM "Aramina has studied the lore of the Great Masters. She thinks that Evard's tower is somewhere arond here." Then I make a Great Masters-wise check. This is also pretending to be a real person in a real world. The dice throw makes it independent of me.

It's independent of both you-as-player and you-as-character if Evard's tower is already noted on the map as being in location X.

It's the same as if I-as-real-person find myself in a strange city looking for, say for whatever reason, a Walmart. I've good reason to suspect there's one around here somewhere, but my act of looking for it doesn't materially change where it is: assuming half-decent perception on my part my act of looking for it is going to succeed solely on the basis of where I happen to be at the time in relation to its location.

To me it seems pretty in-character to remember something. As I posted upthread, I have experienced amnesia, for about a week-and-a-half. Having to rely on someone else's second-person narration to learn what it is that you know is not typical. Nor is it terribly immersive.

If the hills are shown on the map then as both player and character I've no real excuse for not knowing they're there.

If that area hasn't been mapped (yet) it's on me as player to ask (not tell) the GM whether there's hills there; and if she throws the question back in my lap IMO as GM she's abdicated her responsibility over setting elements, which immediately starts me wondering what other responsibilities she's going to evade as the game/campaign goes on.