A Question Of Agency?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yet it far too often does.

The moment a player thinks the chance of success is better via dice than via roleplay, or the moment a player (or GM, for that matter) doesn't want to spend the time required for the roleplaying element to happen, either that replacement or a table argument is going to happen.

If those mechanics aren't present these issues never arise.

But again, ALL of this discussion is predicated on rules that define binary success and failure of the action described by the player.

If the rules instead describe the outcome of the INTENT of what the player is trying to have the PC accomplish, then the problem largely goes away! Instead of 'looking in the gazebo for the clues' and either finding them or not finding them (now what?) the player establishes that his intent is to perform the appropriate investigations in this area in order to achieve a crime solution (or at least advance the investigation). Then they would describe the things that they do, like 'search the gazebo'. If the intent is achieved, then the investigation advances. If the GM and the player want to 'noodle an answer' then we need descriptions of specific clues, and the deciphering and deciding where to go next is then left to the player.
Failure of intent could indicate finding a red herring, or some entirely other event (being kidnapped, meeting the Femme Fatale, etc.).

I really am not a genius at this genre, so I would personally go read something like 'Gumshoe' and see how they did it, but this seems like a viable approach that would work with basically the mechanics of most story games to one degree or another.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

"House rules", as used among RPGers, covers a wide territory.

In our 4e game, we agreed (under my leadership as GM) that the +1 to damage from Weapon Focus (? is that the right feat name) didn't apply when the weapon was used as an Implement for casting spells. This seemed like an obvious consequence of correlating the rules to the fiction. I think a year or two later the errata caught up with us and agreed. In between there were pages of debate about that feat and "weaplements" which was (in my view) ridiculous given that we're talking about RPG rules and not the tax code.

In our 4e game, the player of the Wizard/Invoker took the Sage of Ages epic destiny. That destiny has a range of abilities that - as written - work only with Arcane powers. We've always ignored that, allowing the abilities to work with all of the PC's abilities, both Arcane and Divine. There was not the least reason not to.

Those are "house rules" - one a precisification, the other an alternation - that don't make any difference to the "system" of how the game is played, but simply brought the rules for the fictional elements, in a game that is heavy on mechanically-specified elements of PC build, into conformity with what we wanted that fiction to be.

Deciding to ignore skill challenges, and treat skill checks in 4e just the same as one does in (say) RuneQuest, would be a completely different sort of house rule. It would be a fundamental change in the resolution process. The closest that we came to something like that was in the context of XP for quests - I would tend to treat quests as implicit in what the players were having their PCs do, rather than require them to be spelled out. In our particular case, that didn't seem to undermine any sense of focus or purposeful orientation in our play.

This sounds about right. I think we had a number of similar interpretations. There are a lot of 'flavor rules' in 4e as well, like Swordmages MUST use a sword. Why? We had one that used an Axe, this was perfectly fine. I guess we could have used the sword rules and just described it fictionally as an Axe too, some people did stuff like that.
We also basically ignored XP entirely. I used it as an encounter budget, but we didn't bother to add it up and use it for leveling. We just leveled up each PC when they reached a dramatically appropriate moment (or sometimes in downtime when the character seemed to be falling behind). I guess we did something like you did with Quests. We never really had to think about explicitly spelling them out, players had solid backstories and a pretty good agenda in most campaigns.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I really am not a genius at this genre, so I would personally go read something like 'Gumshoe' and see how they did it, but this seems like a viable approach that would work with basically the mechanics of most story games to one degree or another.

Gumshoe's big thing is you roll some skills and you don't roll others (there is more to the game than that but that is one of the key elements related to investigative rules). It basically says, and this a simplification, that you don't roll if you have a clue finding skill, you just get the clue (the mystery fun is solving the puzzle by putting the clues together). It is intended to avoid the problem of what happens if the players miss the clue and that causes the investigation to come crashing to a halt. It is a good system. I ran an investigative murder mystery built around Iron Maiden album covers as the theme. We had a lot of fun. For players where the finding of the clues is the point, it may be less fun. Depends on the group. Laws is generally quite good in my opinion. Even if I prefer a different approach sometimes, I always find his games enjoyable.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To the extent that romance is resolved just by everyone at the table talking, I don't see that that would be very satisfying - consensus fiction can be fine in some RPG contexts but doesn't tend to make for drama.

And this is a real point, either you violate the Czege Principle, or what, you have to look to the GM to decide everything by fiat? I'm not seeing that as a really satisfactory process... I guess you could assign another player to play the NPC (or maybe this is 'PvP' to start with, it could be). But then in the later case the principle is still violated, and in the former the assigned player doesn't really have any clear motive not to just give the other player whatever they want, outside of sheer perversity! Either way, it doesn't seem like there is a very good set of incentives there. Drama is certainly happenstance at best.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It is much easier to predict how a particular social scenario might go down, than to predict the result of a roulette wheel spin or a predict when whether a drive is going to crash on a given day. Further, the GM has access to information about the NPCs we don't have about people in diplomatic situations. He or she knows the motivations, background, private thoughts of the NPCs and that helps form a basis on adjudicating what a reaction will be. True I can't predict in real life how you pemerton will react if someone asks you to spy on behalf of the British Government. But the more I know about you, the easier that prediction becomes. And you certainly know yourself how you might react (and for all intents and purposes the GM is the NPC). So I just think this is leagues easier for me to run than off the cuff in a free form way, than it would be for me to run a car chase or combat. If this isn't how you approach play or if this isn't your experience, that is fine. But I really don't understand the aggressive dismissal of other peoples experience on this.

I think the fact that all of human society is built on top of fairly circumscribed roles and rules of behavior belies this. Certainly we are not terribly incapable of predicting the behavior of another individual (or ourselves) within a relatively well-understood context which is covered by these roles and rules. However, having been once or twice thrust into a situation that was not really covered by those, I will tell you that you are going to learn REALLY FAST how little you know about how people may react, or what sort of range of reactions are actually possible! People are complex, fickle, subject to a lot of biases and preconceptions, and not at all easy to predict. As soon as you get into behaviors involving more than one or two people almost all bets are off. I don't want to bring current affairs into a discussion here (rule of behavior) but surely nobody would have predicted what is happening in the world today, or the behavior of many public figures, even a few months ago.

RPGs generally involve examinations of what people do in UNUSUAL situations. You can certain RP and produce 'something', but anyone who thinks they can RP complex social situations and that the results will be 'true to life' (beyond perhaps being mildly plausible) is probably entirely wrong. Given that (N)PCs are mere fictional characters, all bets are off really! I'm not at all against RP, but even D&D's reaction table is rarely all that implausible!

 

[Thomas Shey]

So what? Role playing is kinda integral part of playing a roleplaying game! And that it in many situations doesn't matter terribly much which system you're using, underlines my point that rules are not terribly important.

I just have to note that unless you define "role playing" really broadly, token play seems to disagree with this assessment, and while perhaps not as common as it used to be, and one time it was relatively common.

 

[FrogReaver]

What many of us like is a playstyle where the only fictional thing we have direct control over is our character. We then indirectly affect the rest of the fiction via that character. This is the kind of player agency we prefer.

Those that dislike this traditional RPG playstyle have taken the term player agency and placed upon it a meaning incompatible with this playstyle. It now means direct control over the fiction - not just of your character - and so now they have accomplished describing traditional RPG mechanics as producing less “player agency” - which is most definitely a derogatory descriptor no matter how much they claim it is not.

I say we take back the term player agency so that it refers to what it has always referred to in traditional RPGs. A player’s agency over their character - which many of their touted “agency enhancing mechanics” actually get in the way of.

 

[Campbell]

I think the fact that a fair number of folks have visceral reactions to the social mechanics in games like Monsterhearts or Exalted Second Edition does not suggest that system does not matter. I think it suggests that it matters a phenomenal amount and they prefer their personal encultured systems.

I personally think it is fairly difficult to play out social situations in a way where we give up our social context and power structures at the table and substitute what's going on in the fiction. The right tools can help us embody our characters more fully because they help us feel the weight of our character's social reality. Help us to see Thurgon, Lord of the Iron Tower rather than @pemerton.

As someone who has participated in a fair number of LARPs this an even bigger deal there. Personal relationships often color these dynamics in ways that take away from the experience.

 

[Aldarc]

What many of us like is a playstyle where the only fictional thing we have direct control over is our character. We then indirectly affect the rest of the fiction via that character. This is the kind of player agency we prefer.

No one is trying to stop you from having those preferences, and considering the hegemony this approach over gaming, it's not exactly being threatened here.

Those that dislike this traditional RPG playstyle have taken the term player agency and placed upon it a meaning incompatible with this playstyle. It now means direct control over the fiction - not just of your character - and so now they have accomplished describing traditional RPG mechanics as producing less “player agency” - which is most definitely a derogatory descriptor no matter how much they claim it is not.

I say we take back the term player agency so that it refers to what it has always referred to in traditional RPGs. A player’s agency over their character - which many of their touted “agency enhancing mechanics” actually get in the way of.

This seems needlessly hostile, FrogReaver. I don't see what's wrong with simply acknowledging that one prefers a more restricted or particularized form of player agency. Why "go to war" about this issue? It makes you sound like you are scared about the mere existence of other games or preferences, which is absolutely silly.

 

[hawkeyefan]

So a lot of discussion to catch up on. @Bedrockgames I'll try and lump a few comments together in a way that makes sense.

This is not at all how I would describe it. The GM thinks of a murder that happened and all the people and places involved. figures out the backstory of that murder, what happened during the murder, and so forth. In answering these questions, the GM will come up with an initial list of things like what clues may be found where, but the GM still needs to weigh anything the party proposes against the mystery he or she has established (for example they may ask was there a groundskeeper on the premises that night and might he have heard anything). That is a detail the GM might not have thought of, but will need to decide (and my method for deciding it might be something like, is this the sort of place that would have a grounskeeper and what are the odds he was there at the time of the murder). Or the players may come up with a way to find a clue the GM had never considered, but it could be a method that would certainly reveal something based on what the GM has already established (for instance a GM who hasn't considered something simple like the phone records, and the players get the idea of coming through them). And in terms of solutions it is the same. I once had players surprise me by putting out an APB during an investigation to bring in their potential suspects. It was an obvious thing, but not something I had considered during my prep.

Describing this sort of thing as a single problem with a single solution seems very reductive (and a bit of a straw man)

I think this is fine if you're allowing that level of player input and not just shutting it down because it doesn't match the acceptable routes you've determined ahead of time.

Honestly, mysteries are really tricky, I think. In my opinion, it's really hard for the GM to not take a very strong hand in things. Which may be fine.....I've played in mystery type games and had fun.

That would take away agency because it makes my attempts to piece together clues rather pointless and not that meaningful. The movie clue doesn't really allow you to solve the mystery because it had like three optional outcomes that were effectively random. A major point of the mystery genre, even if you are just reading a mystery novel, is to solve the mystery as the reader. Clue didn't really allow me to solve the mystery because it never really decided who killed Mr. Body (it decided there were three possibilities and picked on depending on what night you went to the movie)----I realize once it was on video they reworked those into a sequence, but in the theaters, you got one ending. I have nothing against clue, it is a great movie, and I think that was an innovative twist that made the viewing experience a joy. But it isn't how I would structure a mystery adventure if my aim is for the players to be the ones solving the mystery.

The movie clue allows you to craft three different endings (and maybe even more, who knows?) based on the information presented in the movie. There's no reason that if that was a RPG that the players couldn't conceivable come up with one of the proposed solutions. If it's feasible and doesn't conflict what's been established, then why would it not be acceptable?

Now, I'm not saying that it's wrong to run it with a set culprit in mind. Just that if you do, you lose that flexibility, no?

Again I think the way you are framing this just doesn't capture what I think of as an adventure or a campaign, or a mystery. I never see the GM crafting a single problem for the players to solve. I don't usually have a single solution in mind. I usually see multiple ways an adventure can go and keep an open mind while the adventure is running. I am famous with my players for letting them 'beat' the adventure if they come up with an ingenious solution I hadn't thought of in the first ten minutes of play. Provided their idea makes logical sense, and things pan out, I don't care if the session lasts ten minutes or three hours. But generally in my games they are playing in a concrete setting with concrete NPCs and a world that is external to them. They can't just say there is a sorcerer from India in the teahouse responsible for the murders, because that isn't what happened at the teahouse. But they are free to approach that investigation from any angle they want (and they are equally free to ignore the teahouse completely, go to the nearby village and look for sugar merchants to start a business empire with).

This statement doesn't really jibe with your comment above about lacking a specific answer rendering things pointless and not that meaningful.

The solution is "the butler did it"; if that's the only end state to the scenario, then that's a limit. Again, this is kind of an inherent problem with a mystery as a scenario. Something that isn't a mystery isn't as locked in to having one solution, and therefore could be open to multiple means of resolution.