A Question Of Agency?

[Thomas Shey]

Also, without bothering to quote Manbearcat, I think there's indeed some halfway strong psychological loading on who rolls the dice in a given situation in many cases.

 

[pemerton]

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

CoC is the only one I know.

I would add - I don't think that GM-driven, player-participation is the only way to have fun playing a Cthulhu-esque game, though I certainly think it's what CoC itself is best for.

I've run a couple of Cthulhu Dark one-shots over the past few years and it works very well for player-driven no-myth RPGing.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I'm curious why you think "who rolls the dice indeed doesn't matter?" Can you elaborate?

I meant doesn't matter for the outcome. It of course might psychologically matter a bit.

Do you also believe that player-facing systems and GM-facing systems have no impact on the overall aesthetic of play and the psychology of "participants set at <some degree of> tension (one group is advocating for their PC/group goals within the premise of the system...while the other party's role is to place opposition/obstacles to their goals so skill can be tested and/or story can emerge/PC nature can be revealed)." Even if you have the most beautiful trusting relationships possible, a referee and a player are purposely going to have tension (though they aren't at cross-purposes, there is, by fundamental nature, tension) because of their respective roles. The question is how is this tension navigated/mitigated (there are several ways it can be done that don't just offload it onto social contract).

I can't say that I would be sure what you're getting at here... Psychologically rolling the dice makes you feel like 'you're doing something' so in that sense systems which consistently couple the player rolling the dice with their character doing something are probably more engaging and immersive, even though the actual odds would remain the same. D&D's passive AC for example isn't ideal from that perspective.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Except this ignores the issues of things like railroads, linear adventures, GM fudging, etc. These are all obstacles to agency. In a lot of these threads, when people invoke agency, they mean their ability to move and act freely in the setting. Taking that, and saying "well maximum agency only occurs when you have narrative control" I think is almost a form of equivocation to get people to sign onto a play style when it is done in this way.

I think 'agency' where you have no guarantees and are always ASKING for something is at best a lesser sort of agency. In a game where the rules start with "rule 0, the GM can fiat anything." and then follows with a process where the GM is at least assumed, 'normally' as you put it, to narrate all facts about the world, that agency can be no more than 'bodily' in any real respect.

Yes, of course, the GM can even undermine the player's 'bodily agency' by making the choice of which door you open or which way you walk be utterly meaningless and lead to the same conclusion (and of course lesser degrees and sort of this). The fact that this sort of thing is almost always frowned upon and that the OP actually asked about it specifically in view of wanting to avoid it, says a lot. So I think all we have there is 'common ground' where we all have set an acceptable baseline (and I admit also that most of us have probably bent on this at times for whatever social reasons, or desire to experience certain games or whatever). So, yeah, there are 'degenerate states of little or no agency', but is there a point to even cataloging them, except as a gallery of shame? Not really.

 

[pemerton]

@innerdude, you should try (or at least have a look at) Burning Wheel! It's mechanically much heavier than DW (and I don't know Ironwsworn, but given your sketch of play upthread I guess it's heavier than that also). But it absolutely emphasises clarity about the shared fiction, and the stakes; and if the GM doesn't just "say yes" it bundles everything into one check which either succeeds as the player wanted, or fails with the outcome to be narrated by the GM having primary regard to the player's intent for his/her PC.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Is it going to be manifestly unhelpful to answer "To a degree"?

No, not unhelpful. What I was getting at is that games where the players do not have narrative level control during the play* are in a sense like the real life, where we AFAIK have no such control either.

*Though unlike in real life in most RPGs the players have narrative control when making their characters and signing up for the campaign premise. (And a high possibility that their GM is less of a dick.)

 

[pemerton]

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 some of us absolutely have experienced it back in the day!

 

[Lanefan]

... it could equally be valid to have the GM frame the check as follows:

GM: "You can definitely accomplish the jump across the chasm to the other side of the battlement. However, it's a decent distance, and you're going to have to exert some energy and moxie to make it across without making noise. There's guards posted all along the battlement, and there's absolutely a risk of being heard if you make that jump. What do you do?"

Player: (Probably asks if they can mitigate the risk of being heard, if there's some other plan of action that doesn't result in alerting the guards, etc.)

GM: "Based on the situation and your proposed action --- leaping across the chasm --- there doesn't appear to be much room for error. If you're skilled enough, maybe you can do it; otherwise, your proposed action is definitely going to incur some risk."

Player: (Declares they go through with it).

GM: "Okay, you're triggering an 'Overcome Obstacle' move, using Agility. Make your roll!"

Result: On a strong hit (i.e., full success), no problem; player is on the other side without calling undue attention. On a weak hit (success with complication), player leaps across but can't do it skillfully enough to avoid the extra trouble of alerting the guards.

How is that meaningfully different than calling for two separate rolls?

Significantly, in that with two separate rolls the PC could, for example, completely blow the jump but in falling, fall quietly thus nobody notices anything. Or on a weak hit, the PC could be left clinging to the edge of the roof having only barely made the diatance but again have been lucky in that this didn't make much noise...yet.

Concatenating it into one roll closes off result options that would otherwise be quite valid.

 

[pemerton]

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.

No, because resolution of player attack declarations determines not just the actions of the character but also the actions of the opponent (eg whether or not they are able to bring their shield to bear to defend against the PC's attack).

Part of the rationale of a system like RuneQuest is precisely to separate out the attack action (roll the attacking character's offensive weapon skill) from the defence action (roll the defending character's weapon parry or dodge skill), thus brining the resolution process more into line with the in-fiction causal processes.

Pulling back to a bigger picture - one of the strange things about this thread (and some of its friends and cousins) is that because there are few or no participants who play high-simulation games like RQ, RM, etc, D&D's combat mechanics get treated as some sort of "player narrative power" baseline even though there is a whole genre of RPGs - the aforementioned RQ, RM etc - which are inspired to a significant extent by hostility to the failure of D&D's combat mechanics to pick apart the various causal processes that D&D bundles up into a player's attack and damage rolls even though they depend on choices made by and actions performed by the defender.

I should add - I have GMed hundreds, probably thousands, of hours of RM, and have played it and RQ and similar games a fair bit as well. So someone telling me that the D&D combat mechanics don't involve the player's attack roll determining what it is that the defending Orc does or doesn't do is jut not credible. Because I've played systems that I chose to play precisely because they prised apart that thing that D&D gloms together.

Perhaps ironically, Burning Wheel also is much clearer on this than D&D: we don't have to extrapolate what the Orc does from resolution of the player's action declaration but have clear action declarations, resolution of the positioning context, etc.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Absolutely.

And it could, without problem, have just stayed there. But...

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.

And here's the big mistake, pointed out in clear fashion. 3e took it further by pushing a lot of previously-hidden rules to the player side, which didn't help anything and, in part, led to a still-ongoing era of player entitlement.

The game IMO still hasn't recovered from this original 2e mistake and probably - given recent design direction - never will; and that's sad.