We can talk about techniques until we are blue in the face, but if our principles are not locked in vagaries of technique are meaningless. Are players prepared to play genuine protagonists with compelling dramatic goals like they are driving stolen cars? Are GMs prepared to provide honest adversity? At the end of the day what matters most when it comes a player's ability to make decisions that have an impact on the fiction is a shared commitment that we are playing to find out what happens. Everything else is window dressing.
I would be more than happy to address questions of play techniques once we are on the same page about the goals of play, but until then it is all empty posturing. Either we are committed to following the fiction or we want to guide it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to play a more guided experience, but we should be able to talk about that openly without shame.
These days I am far less interested in playing these word games. I am not super interested in philosophical underpinnings of agency. Taking the conversation there misses the point which is how do we play games where the actions players take for their characters produce meaningful change in the fiction. Let's talk about that.
Going to quote this post (which I agree with) because it relates to what I'm about to throw together.
Agency is a discrete thing.
Its not terribly helpful to jumble it up in a collage of several other things such as "immersion/suspension of disbelief", "persistent setting vs (the perception of) Schrodinger's x", and any number of other things. Agency is the quality that a participant possesses (or not) to move a gamestate from
here to
there. It is about the
trajectory of play and who holds sway over it.
A game of American football has referees, football players, football coaches, the elements (if outdoors) and the ruleset itself. At any given transition from one gamestate to another we can evaluate who was mostly responsible for that transition. As we evaluate the game's overall "trajectory arc", we can evaluate who was mostly responsible for it. We can also evaluate if there are moments in play where agency is wrested from the players/coaches because of a either/or/confluence of refereeing or ruleset or elements issues. Example (I apologize to those of you who aren't terribly familiar with the game):
Its 3rd and 17 (this is converted at about 7-9 % in the modern NFL) and a referee calls a brutal, ticky tack Defensive Holding call that could literally be called about 75 % of the time when a Cornerback is Pressing/Rerouting a Wide Receiver at the Line of Scrimmage. Defensive Holding comes with an automatic new set of Downs and a 5 yard Penalty. This swing in play is ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS. If this call is arbitrary (and this absolutely happens in NFL Football), we can trivially say that the competitive integrity of this moment was completely compromised because the agency of the players on the field was wrested from them by bad officiating. A lot of times, these kinds of bad calls have huge impact on the gamestate and they reverberate throughout the rest of the game.
There is no immersion, no persistent setting. There is only gamestate, its transition, and the trajectory of play henceforth. We can evaluate this.
The exact same thing happens in a Moldvay Basic Pawn Stance Dungeon Crawl w/ FighterBob09 and MaggieWizard01 (etc). We don't have to have anything resembling "immersion" or "habitation of PC" (etc). We can tropily move through play with people saying silly things in cartoonishly archetypal format based on their character class and everyone having a chuckle while we find out if the players are skilled enough to navigate the dungeon and extract a lot of treasure. Its still TTRPG play.
Players are Searching for a Secret Door > finding it > Listen > Search for Traps > in a sequence of play. There are multiple ways that the Referee could screw this up that wrests agency from the players and compromises the competitive integrity of that sequence (which, like above in the NFL Football example, it will likely have ripple effects because of the positive feedback loop of dungeon crawling):
* Poor description of the situation/scene.
* They could lose track of Turns spent and the relationship to the Wandering Monster "clock" (which could help or harm the delve effort).
* They could forget to assign dice to the Demihuman (1/2 result vs 1) in the Listen pool for the PCs.
* The party Dwarf has a 2 in 6 chance to find the Trap, the GM rolls behind the screen, and gets a 2 but fudges it and tells the player they find no traps because the crawl has been going surgically for the PCs thus far and the Referee wants to introduce some adversity.
None of that has anything to do with PC habitation or immersion or persistent setting/objective backstory. Its about the impingement or wresting of agency from the players (to the GM) and the impact on the integrity of the crawl due to the Referee's "misplay" (lets call it).
Yes, you or your table may not like
systemitized thing x because you feel it negatively impacts your particular mental framework when it comes to playing that game...but smuggling your disposition relative to
systemitized thing x in game y doesn't tell us anything about its impact on gamestate movement.
Finally, characterization/pantomiming is NOT inherently agency
This seems to be another thing that gets unfortunately pulled into the orbit of discussions on agency. Characterization does not inherently have anything to do with the movement of a gamestate from
here to
there. Most general games have no characterization/pantomiming and there are plenty of TTRPGs that have little to no characterization/pantomiming - as I captured above w/ Pawn Stance dungeon crawling - or some participants not characterizing/pantomiming at all while others go full tilt. However, all games have a gamestate, gamestate movement, and how it is moved and who moves it.
A GM merely allowing you to characterize/pantomime your PC as a gamestate-neutral way of differentiating your character from Samantha's is offering you nothing in the way of agency. Characterize/pantomime your PC however you want, press the accelerator to the floor...it doesn't necessarily have any work to do with respect to gamestate movement and trajectory.
HOWEVER, IF characterization/pantomiming IS relevant to gamestate movement (eg if you pantomime/characterize well x will happen vs y happening - Pictionary and Charades is the non-TTRPG example of this), then there is a question of agency. HOWEVER (again), if this is a TTRPG, then we have to evaluate what the nature of action resolution is relative to that characterization/pantomiming and where the agency truly lies because lack of codification + GM mediation without any neutral arbiter (fortune resolution - dice/cards etc) having its say means that GM agency is invariably going to be high in such an arrangement.
That is enough for now, but the other thing I'm going to write about in the future is
not all games possess or afford the same kind of agency (eg - thematic/dramatic, tactical, strategic) to players. We should be able to talk about each discrete type of agency in a game and how design decisions and refereeing affects each.
