A Question Of Agency?

[Bedrockgames]

Yo


I believe that these are both forms of agency. I think perhaps it’s a matter of degree, but they’re both factors of agency.

Hence why a game that allows both is granting the players more agency.

I agree they can both be considered forms of agency. I just am pointing out that giving players the power to shape the setting, won't feel like you are maximizing their agency to everyone.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Hence why a game that allows both is granting the players more agency.

As far as I can tell, this is the only point you and I really disagree on. I think because for the types of players I described, it would be seen as diminishing agency. I would agree that for some people it will increase overall agency. But this is, to me a pretty important way it isn't as simple as agency increasing across the board the more places you give players control. And the way I was using agency, I meant it pretty much as freedom to play my character in the world. If I tell the GM he or she is taking away my agency, I don't mean that they are failing to give me narrative control of the setting, I mean they are doing something like railroading or not really considering the choices the players are making in the game and where those choices ought to lead to.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That’s fine. I do think that largely this conversation revolves around preferences.

If I were to rephrase what you said above to the below, do you see this is a a fundamental change that no linger means the same thing?

“But my personal preference generally is that if a GM is available, to reduce player agency and have the GM take charge of the world outside the characters.”

I don't agree with this, because...

I believe that these are both forms of agency. I think perhaps it’s a matter of degree, but they’re both factors of agency.

Hence why a game that allows both is granting the players more agency.

I don't agree with this. I think... I'm pretty sure I just don't see agency in the same way than you do. I try to explain. If you get to define both the conditions, and the reaction to those conditions; define both the question and the answer; then, yes, in a sense you have more freedom. But I wouldn't say that you necessarily have more agency. Agency, at least in the context of a game, is making meaningful choices, and I feel that it is the limits that make the choices meaningful. You respond to something external, and this makes your responses meaningful. If anything that limits the player's freedom is seen as reduction of agency, then ultimate agency would be achieved by removing the rules, the dice and the other players as all of those limit the player's freedom. And I'm not sure that this would be a reasonable or useful definition of agency.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Some of this is that there are classes of IC or Deep IC players who consider any real alteration of setting not "within their character" and part of their purview. This isn't sharp edged because there are some practical questions about what part of the character's definition is dependent on GM design and what part is within the player's (not character's) appropriate control. Whether someone considers it appropriate to define, for example, their character's family and history is one of those idiosyncratic things its hard to point at any strong trends one way or another about.

(There's also people who consider their character's background even being a significant factor in play a distraction and generally anathema, but like the people who think any constraints on what characters are expected to do within a game beyond their coarse mechanical limits is making it "not an RPG", I kind of reserve the right to roll my eyes at them and move on.)

 

[Ovinomancer]

It relates to certain kinds of risky behavior. The fact is, characters who do not take certain kinds of caution at least in some game systems simply aren't in that system long, and as such are unlikely to be selected by players who understand the system in the first place, because they'd like, well, their characters to be around for a while.

As a simple example, a Mythras character other than an extreme hyper-skilled one (and maybe even that) who runs into a situation where he's extremely likely to be multi-teamed is, like most RQ derivatives, suicidal. As such, barring extremely unusual circumstances, no one who's familiar with the system is going to run a character prone to doing that unless they consider them a throwaway. Its just pointless. The system actively discourages it too much.

Sure, no questions, but this doesn't at all illuminate the difference you've asserted. That different characters exist, and that players choose characters according to the game their player, is fairly trivial. The choice is unrelated to the method of portrayal.

I did not say a better story. If you go back you will not see the word "story" used at any point there. I said a more interesting depiction. If you don't understand the difference here, and how it relates to what you quoted, I don't know how to respond to you.

Apologies for the misquote, I trusted my recollection. I believe my question withstands the correction, though. In the quote I provided, Actor stance is divorced from the choice of action and is, instead, defined as inhabiting the character and portraying it faithfully with that choice. IC, on the other hand, is both a decision framework AND the portrayal framework. And, after the decision is made, I don't see any daylight between doing your best to portray the character with that decision made. In other words, Actor stance overlays IC stance (again, I find this stance incoherent in conception, but for the sake of argument) indistinguishably, but IC bolts on the decision process as well while Actor stance explicitly doesn't determine how the choice is made.

Frankly, after reading the background on this, I think this framework is trying to do to much with the inspiring though experiment of considering the different inputs into a play or movie. That was the Author, Director, Actor, and Audience. It's not a great comparison to RPGs (and, to their credit, this is mentioned explicitly in the discussion) but there was an attempt to move these concepts over and refine them. The piece you're citing as your point is based entirely on this conversation (also linked from the RPGA website) and it's clear there that there's a lot of disagreement even between the originators. And, I think this is shown in the bolt-on IC and Deep IC stances, which aim to shore up the weaknesses in their Actor stance taking more from the stage, where actors have little choice over their character's choices but still have to emote them. In RPGs, a player makes those choices and then portrays them. How this is done doesn't mesh well with a stance defined as unconnected to the decision process. IC was added to try to accommodate some of this, but really is just a paean to an ideal rather than a functionally usable term or concept to analyze play.

 

[hawkeyefan]

All I have been responding to is there being push back against there even being a distinction between these things (where the player narrating hills into existence is treated the same as a character swinging a sword to kill an orc).

I took all that more as challenging the common assumptions. @pemerton is being a bit provocative perhaps, but it’s because he has something to say.

There are games that don’t see a distinction between the types of actions you’re talking about. So if that’s the case, then it’s true that there doesn’t need to be such distinctions, and their existense and or use is solely a matter of preference.

For the record I don't play 5E. Mostly I play my own games, sometimes I play savage worlds or variations of OD&D (and I am often playing one shots of a variety of systems).

Well this is just me going to 5E as an example. Even I assume things about how prevalent D&D is.

I agree they can both be considered forms of agency. I just am pointing out that giving players the power to shape the setting, won't feel like you are maximizing their agency to everyone.

Maximizing may not be the right choice. But a game that has the basic character control level of agency that you’re mentioning....I’m free to have my PC go where and do what I would like him to....and then also adds the ability fore as a player to shape the setting in some way....isn’t that adding to the amount of agency I have as a player?

This is where I get confused because it seems this is where people just don’t want to admit that their chosen game has less agency than another. But why not?

I love Super Mario Brothers. I love Grand Theft Auto. If I love Super Mario Brothers more, that doesn’t make it have the same level of agency as Grand Theft Auto.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I love Super Mario Brothers. I love Grand Theft Auto. If I love Super Mario Brothers more, that doesn’t make it have the same level of agency as Grand Theft Auto.

This is actually a perfect example to illustrate where I and, where I believe, Crimson, are coming from. What about Excite Bike? The agency you describe above is about your ability to do things in the setting. In grand theft auto, it feels like more agency to me because I am not forced to only go left or right, and I can interact with the setting however I like (a game like Shenmue was also great for this sense of having agency in a living world). In excite bike you could customize the track in all sorts of ways. Now that was a lot of fun (I think I preferred designing tracks to playing excite bike) but it didn't give me more agency. More agency would have been the ability to drive off the track or run over people in the stands.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I took all that more as challenging the common assumptions. @pemerton is being a bit provocative perhaps, but it’s because he has something to say.

It is only causing me to not want to listen in that case

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, no questions, but this doesn't at all illuminate the difference you've asserted. That different characters exist, and that players choose characters according to the game their player, is fairly trivial. The choice is unrelated to the method of portrayal.

I think at this point you've associated a partial side-comment with something about my point about stances, and they aren't particularly related. My point regarding that was a default assumption that a character is at least largely motivated to some degree about self-preservation is kind of a reasonable baseline in any game where character death can be anything but an unusual rarity.

Apologies for the misquote, I trusted my recollection. I believe my question withstands the correction, though. In the quote I provided, Actor stance is divorced from the choice of action and is, instead, defined as inhabiting the character and portraying it faithfully with that choice. IC, on the other hand, is both a decision framework AND the portrayal framework. And, after the decision is made, I don't see any daylight between doing your best to portray the character with that decision made. In other words, Actor stance overlays IC stance (again, I find this stance incoherent in conception, but for the sake of argument) indistinguishably, but IC bolts on the decision process as well while Actor stance explicitly doesn't determine how the choice is made.

Notice my example included three options that are all faithful. They are all legitimate responses to an a decision in the context of the character. My claim is that, barring perturbation by exterior events (or the player just being in an unusual headspace for any reason), an IC Stance player will chose the one that seems most in-character for the character. An Actor Stance character may not, because he's also interested in the effect of his depiction, so within that range he may choose the less in-character (but still within its range one) that seems a more interesting depiction..

Frankly, after reading the background on this, I think this framework is trying to do to much with the inspiring though experiment of considering the different inputs into a play or movie. That was the Author, Director, Actor, and Audience. It's not a great comparison to RPGs (and, to their credit, this is mentioned explicitly in the discussion) but there was an attempt to move these concepts over and refine them. The piece you're citing as your point is based entirely on this conversation (also linked from the RPGA website) and it's clear there that there's a lot of disagreement even between the originators. And, I think this is shown in the bolt-on IC and Deep IC stances, which aim to shore up the weaknesses in their Actor stance taking more from the stage, where actors have little choice over their character's choices but still have to emote them. In RPGs, a player makes those choices and then portrays them. How this is done doesn't mesh well with a stance defined as unconnected to the decision process. IC was added to try to accommodate some of this, but really is just a paean to an ideal rather than a functionally usable term or concept to analyze play.

Eh. As it was developed in time, I think the distinction I'm making above is perfectly sound. The IC (and especially Deep IC) proponents were big into the idea that taking outside concerns into consideration was either anathema (the Deep IC ones) or at least undesirable (the IC ones who weren't Deep IC). Actor doesn't have some of the bigger picture elements that could be in play for Author or Director, but they still have concerns that cannot be described as entirely in-character/in-world in basis (and honestly, Audience always struck me as the odd man out of the bunch, though as I've noted I always thoughts the lines between them were blurry anyway. That doesn't mean I don't think they're a useful framework to talk about where people draw the lines on how they chose to play a character (as was the concept of Token play, which seems to have fallen off the conceptual stage there, but that's what happens when concepts are evolved over a period.)

 

[hawkeyefan]

As far as I can tell, this is the only point you and I really disagree on. I think because for the types of players I described, it would be seen as diminishing agency. I would agree that for some people it will increase overall agency. But this is, to me a pretty important way it isn't as simple as agency increasing across the board the more places you give players control. And the way I was using agency, I meant it pretty much as freedom to play my character in the world. If I tell the GM he or she is taking away my agency, I don't mean that they are failing to give me narrative control of the setting, I mean they are doing something like railroading or not really considering the choices the players are making in the game and where those choices ought to lead to.

Sure, I would agree. A railroad is a way that agency is taken away. But there are also people who are perfectly happy to play in a railroad game. And even those players may have some agency; they may not be able to deviate from the path, but they may be able to decide something like using stealth or diplomacy to bypass a monster, rather than just fighting it.

It’s a spectrum.

So then what are the upper limits of that spectrum? What would you say is an example of a high agency game?

I don't agree with this, because...


I don't agree with this. I think... I'm pretty sure I just don't see agency in the same way than you do. I try to explain. If you get to define both the conditions, and the reaction to those conditions; define both the question and the answer; then, yes, in a sense you have more freedom. But I wouldn't say that you necessarily have more agency. Agency, at least in the context of a game, is making meaningful choices, and I feel that it is the limits that make the choices meaningful. You respond to something external, and this makes your responses meaningful. If anything that limits the player's freedom is seen as reduction of agency, then ultimate agency would be achieved by removing the rules, the dice and the other players as all of those limit the player's freedom. And I'm not sure that this would be a reasonable or useful definition of agency.

This is a relevant point. And I think that the kind of extreme authorship by players that you’re talking about shifts the game into (?) or toward (?) something else. Something like Microscope or Fiasco, maybe.

I’m not saying that there can’t be or shouldn’t be restrictions on player authority. Just that there are degrees, right?

Just like with the character level agency you guys are talking about is not absolute. There are times when stuff your PC does is not actually up to you, or where the options available to you are limited.

This is still true with more narrative based elements.

No one’s advocating for players to be able to craft anything they want whenever they want.

So let’s say your GM asks you if your group would rather have him run an adventure path, or a more sandbox style game. There will be constraints on agency in each game, likely of different kinds, but still constraints.

If agency is the ability of the player to determine the course of the fiction, one of those will likely offer more agency than the other.

Then if you added the ability for players to determine some of the contents of the fiction beyond just what their characters do and say, that’s also more agency.