A Question Of Agency?

[pemerton]

I think @Crimson Longinus was asking about you-in-real-life-in-Australia pemerton rather than pemerton-as-RPG-player.

Those are the same people. When I play RPGs I do so in real life, in Australia.

When I talk about playing Burning Wheel, I'm talking about something that actually happened. I didn't just imagine it.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Because you still need to engage with people's preferences here in the wild whether they're able or willing to engage with their reasons or not.

This is the issue to me: I GM probably 95% of the time, and have a relatively flexible set of expectations when I don't. So it doesn't really matter what I feel about this. It very much matters what my players do, however, and I've seen enough of this to believe this is an area where a fairly strong reaction to some of this exists. So I get to engage with it whether someone else thinks their preferences here are incoherent or not.

Catching up to the thread, but wanted to comment on this (my preference is to read to the end and then engage).

I really don't need to engage with people's preferences in a discussion about how games work. Games work how they work regardless of preference. Preference might be to select a specific approach, but that doesn't, in any way, mean I have to engage the preference if I then talk about how that approach works. It's fine to like a thing and find a game that does that thing, but when you're entering a discussion about different approaches, sticking to your preference and making that the topic engaged is detrimental to the intent of the discussion.

 

[Ovinomancer]

And most of the people who talk about that are going to be preselected for people who find it a useful design feature, and thus presumably not hostile to it. I've never suggested that isn't relatively prevalent--in fact I mentioned it clearly is because of the popularity of PbtA games--but you can absolutely have a large populace of X while still having a large populace of hostile-to-X, and this is an area where I don't believe there is any practical way to say the latter is a small populace when there are a very large number of games that don't do it (at least in an obvious way, to address your other argument) so they're already well served.

I imagine that if one wanted get a better idea of the population in question, one could post a poll on the topic.... That would be an excellent way to generate some counter-evidence.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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).

Its still, in the broadest sense, a physical action; the fact they interact with another character to resolve the result doesn't change that. (I also personally think the way OD&D handled defense was so limited that in practice, any amount of skill on the opponent was more embodied in their hit points than anything about the attack roll).

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.

They are, but as someone who probably has run more RQ and RQ derivatives than anything other than the Hero System over the years, I'm not actually convinced separate defense rolls, at least as RQ handled them, are necessarily the best way to go; they do have the virtue there's a second dice roll present on the part of the defender, but that's only relevant to the degree active engagement with the dice as a defender matters to someone (and to make it clear, it absolutely can, but even in those case I'm not sure two independent rolls for attack and defense are the best way).

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.

I think I'd argue that, simply because D&D (at least in the forms commonly seen) have so little of their defense that is actually character rather than gear dependent that its virtually nonexistant. And no, I don't mean that as a compliment.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Absolutely.

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

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.

Well, largely because a rather large number of people don't consider it a mistake.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Catching up to the thread, but wanted to comment on this (my preference is to read to the end and then engage).

Its an excellent habit and I wish I had the patience for it. I'd look less like I was spamming hell out of everyone as I respond piecemeal.

I really don't need to engage with people's preferences in a discussion about how games work. Games work how they work regardless of preference. Preference might be to select a specific approach, but that doesn't, in any way, mean I have to engage the preference if I then talk about how that approach works. It's fine to like a thing and find a game that does that thing, but when you're entering a discussion about different approaches, sticking to your preference and making that the topic engaged is detrimental to the intent of the discussion.

Whereas except in reference to how people as groups respond to techniques, I find a discussion of approaches hollow, and often, effectively, self-congratulatory.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I imagine that if one wanted get a better idea of the population in question, one could post a poll on the topic.... That would be an excellent way to generate some counter-evidence.

It only modestly helps because of the preselection of people who even bother to use a board like this, and then those who bother to respond to polls. Its probably slightly better than those who will engage in extended discussion, but I doubt meaningfully so since the primary gate of "people who bother to use game related fora" is upfront there. That's not a big population on a whole, and likely skims off whole classes of potential respondents.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The debate is whether that agency is warranted.

In what way? Generally? Or in a specific game? The answer will very according to the game, and to what's the desired experience, and personal preference, of course.

But generally, it's probably a good thing to have different games that work in different ways.

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.

That's not really a concrete example. It's kind of a boogeyman, isn't it?

I don't think that many games allow players to create setting elements out of thin air. Yes, some games allow the players to introduce fictional elements as part of play, but there are rules and/or techniques that are involved.

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.

I agree with the first paragraph, but not with the second. I think you should always consider what a game is telling you to do and why, and changing that only makes sense if you have a really compelling reason to do so.

 

[hawkeyefan]

As a side note, one of the most powerful things I discovered in playing DW (and again reading through Ironsworn) is the notion of having clarifying questions/conversations around EXACTLY what is happening in the fiction. What is the player's position in the fiction? What's nominally at risk for them? What's their status relative to those risks? The idea that it's my job as GM to give the player the clearest possible view of their position resonated strongly with me.

This is a great point, and one that I don't think I focused on enough in all my ramblings in this thread, but which is key to players making informed decisions.

 

[hawkeyefan]

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.

No.

It gives the player points of connection to the world. It gives them the ability to help say what kind of story they want the game to be.

To give a specific example so that you don't think I'm some short attention simpleton....tonight I just finished a session in my group's new campaign, which is a super hero game based on the Blades in the Dark rules. The setting is one that I've loosely designed, the details of which we are establishing through play.

One PC has a background of "Criminal" in that he used to be a criminal before seeing the light and deciding to try and be a hero. The exact details had not yet been established. So in tonight's game, when the team ran afoul of some enhanced street gangs, the player asked if he could use his past as a criminal to shed light on the local gangs. We decided that he was a one time member of one of the gangs, and so he had some basic details at his disposal.

So he leveraged some backstory to hep with their current situation. Nothing he did was some kind of predetermined thing of mine as the GM. He came up with it, and asked about it, and then we talked it out, and established the details. Now it's a part of his character's backstory.

How do you see this as a cheat code that somehow invalidates any risk or cost? It's simply not the case.