A Question Of Agency?

[chaochou]

I do not think of agency primarily in terms of the tools I have available, but if I am able to use the tools available to achieve outcomes not chosen by the GM or other players.

Exactly this - I phrased it earlier in the thread as being the one to create (and continually recreate) the purpose of my own character.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I've never LARPed with foam weapons etc.

Foam weapons are about as required part of LARPs as beholders are of table top RPGs.

I've played freedform RPGing with intense social interaction. What made it different from the case I described, and what @Lanefan, @Bedrockgames and (as I understand it) you are describing, are two things:

(1) The social interaction was between the players, each of whom had a character to play;
(2) The role of the referee was to move from player (or group of players) to player (or other group) and to whisper, cajole, interject etc so as to help bring it about that everyone was playing his/her PC to the hilt;
(3) The situation at hand demanded that a consensus or final resolution be reached, so that in some ways (of course not all) it was analogous to a game like Diplomacy. Once that position had fallen out of the interpersonal interaction, the referee did not try again to destabilise it. Rather, he narrated its consequences.

This is very different from the GM logically extrapolating how a NPC will respond to a player's advance on behalf of his/her PC.

EDIT having just seen this post:

The scenario I described above was in the neighbourhood of your PvP variant. It worked for the reasons I've described, which take it well outside the territory of "GM decides".

OK. I get this. in LARPs too majority of the interaction is between the players too, though GMs will generally play 'NPCs' (though that designation doesn't quite mean the same thing.) The GM played characters tend to be more of catalysts for the drama, vehicles for creating tensions between the player characters, or to move the situation so that the players have to react. And I think that this is a great use of NPCs in table top game too. Some of the best social interaction on RPGs that I've seen has been between the PCs. But ultimately I don't really see how the drama wouldn't work if the some of the participants were NPCs; ultimately they too are characters played in that moment by a human being, that human being just is the GM.

 

[Haffrung]

I think the real stylistic divide is whether it's assumed the players are there to explore the DM's setting, or is the DM there to facilitate the generation of the story being told by the PCs.

Basically, most traditional RPGs are sort of like open-world CRPGs (think like Skyrim), except the DM acts to allow the action to be more open-ended because we, as human beings, can generate new content on the fly. The DM states the environment and surroundings to the PCs, the PCs take actions in response to that environment, and the DM crafts a response based on the environment and any related rolls based on the PC's actions. That's the obvious path of a dungeon crawl, a story path game (like a module) is essentially an geographically unbounded dungeon crawl, and a sandbox is a story path game with procedurally generated environment changes.

The CRPG analogy is apt. One of the appeals of games like Skyrim is immersion. When people play, they feel like they’re in another world, braving the winds on a snowy ridge, descending a gloomy tunnel, coming across a ruined castle in the moonlight.

That immersion can happen because the world feels concrete. We know the world was created by artists and coders using software. But that knowledge fades away when the artifice is skillful and consistent.

Would that immersion be broken if you were able to manipulate the setting as you played - make the wind on the ridge die down, decide the tunnel led to a treasure vault, make a favourite ally appear in the ruined castle? I think for a great many people it would. Being able to manipulate the world would shatter the illusion that it exists beyond the immediate needs of the game session.

 

[pemerton]

On running mysteries in RPGs.

Upthread I posted this:

A few weeks ago I ran a session like this for my family - one of my daughters wanted to do a murder mystery for her birthday.

I adapted a murder scenario from an old Traveller module, and wrote up some characters (one for each other family member, plus a couple for their entourages, plus a small number of important NPCs whom I played). There was no action resolution in any mechanical sense - the players described what their PCs were doing, and who they were talking to, and I delivered up information as seemed appropriate (eg what they found if they searched a stateroom; what a NPC said if they spoke to him/her; etc).

This is an example of puzzle-solving: the players' goal is to acquire enough information to be able to infer to the hidden bit of my notes (ie whodunnit). It is a different experience from watching an episode of Death in Paradise or The Mentalist, as there is the first-person description element to it. But it doesn't really involve very much more agency.

(One difference from those shows is that they are scripted to try and occlude the audience's access to the relevant information, whereas in our murder mystery I was desperately trying to shovel information out the door. A better comparison might be to reading The Eleventh Hour.)

This was a GM-driven experience. The players' contributions were entirely saying where their PCs went (inside a starship where I as GM had already decided what the floorplan was, what - of interest - was in each stateroom, etc) and speaking as their characters.

We didn't use any mechanics. Predominantly physical actions were resolved via description with me saying yes to the task performed (I return from the Starlight Lounge to my stateroom; I look in the cupboard) and then just describing the upshot (OK, you're in your room; You see that in the cupboard there are two of each set of clothes).

Talking to NPCs happened by the players speaking to me in character, and me deciding what the NPC said in reply and then saying it. For scene-setting this was fine. When it came to interrogation of a key NPC I felt the weakness of this approach. The NPC in question was part of the conspiracy to murder, but the players hadn't worked this out and I wasn't going to have her just confess (thus defusing the mystery and ending the scenario). I am not a terribly good actor, and so performing evasiveness to some appropriate degree was not too easy.

The whole experience was fun enough, but it certainly didn't involve very much player agency! And for me it drew my attention to the limits of GM decides and narrates social interaction.

A very different way to run a mystery is what I've done in two sessions of Cthulhu Dark. In these sessions there was no pre-planned mystery. I worked with the players to establish opening situations and we played those through - using the (very simple) action resolution framework when "saying 'yes'" wasn't appropriate - with new elements being added into the fiction as an outcome of resolution and as I built up new framing. I kept a close eye on pacing, and at the end of each session used my power over framing to bring things to a head.

The stories were unexpected, a bit wacky, and there was plenty that was unexplained - no doubt because human consciousness is too frail to contemplate the truth!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Campbell's second post here sets out the reasons why, for me, "open world" or "sandbox" play does not necessarily support "this sort of agency".

If my PC's goal is to find spellbooks - certainly genre-appropriate in a standard fantasy RPG like D&D or Burning Wheel - and the GM decides that there are no spellbooks in the neighbourhood of my PC, then I can't achieve outcomes not chosen by the GM.

Assuming that there are spellbooks in the setting (and if there aren't the GM probably should have told this when you chose your goal!) you can still further your agenda. There are no spellbooks here, so where are they then? Where can you find information on them? How do I get to these places? What sort of measures I can take to increase my chances of securing these spellbooks when I finally find them? And sure, in theory the GM could stonewall you in every step (no one knows anything about spellbooks etc) but that of course would just be terrible GMing. If spellbooks are a known part of the setting, they must exist somewhere, information about them can be found and actions to acquire them can be taken.

If the GM treats my formulation of my PC's goal as a suggestion to include a spellbook in the neighbourhood of my PC, then - as I posted upthread - we are now in a situation where the player is shaping the fiction in ways beyond just describing his/her PC's desires and physical actions. As I posted then, because this is informal and implicit it does not give the player as much agency as more formalised principles, techniques and/or mechanics might. But that doesn't seem to mark any fundamental cleavage about who gets to shape the shared fiction.

The strength of the informal method is that it maintains the control of the reality of the game world within the confines of one noggin ensuring greater coherence. Furthermore, it allows most of the benefits of the narrative meta mechanics without the player actually having to bother with such. And as a lot of people find such mechanics at odds with their enjoyment, this is rather significant. It basically lets the player to pretend that the world is objectively and independently existing 'real' place even though that really isn't the case.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The CRPG analogy is apt. One of appeals of games like Skyrim is immersion. When people play, they feel like they’re in another world, braving the winds on a snowy ridge, descending a gloomy tunnel, coming across a ruined castle in the moonlight.

That immersion can happen because the world feels concrete. We know the world was created by artists and coders using software. But that knowledge fades away when the artifice is skillful and consistent.

Would that immersion be broken if you were able to manipulate the setting as you played - make the wind on the ridge die down, decide the tunnel led to a treasure vault, make a favourite ally appear in the ruined castle? I think for a great many people it would. Being able to manipulate the world would shatter the illusion that it exists beyond the immediate needs of the game session.

Sure, and that would be covered by the well-known 'Czege Principle', there is no drama when the same participant determines the parameters of conflict and it is about their character. No competently designed game which provides players narrative authority violates that.

I would go with something like "would immersion be broken if the player can request that a dungeon entrance be hidden somewhere in their region, so they can explore it?" This further assuming that such an element is genre appropriate and not conflicting with some other element of the fiction. As @pemerton's BW example of the tower is structured, this request would probably be in the form of an action by the character (IE recalling old lore, consulting a sage, or even possibly falling into a hole in the ground).

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The CRPG analogy is apt. One of appeals of games like Skyrim is immersion. When people play, they feel like they’re in another world, braving the winds on a snowy ridge, descending a gloomy tunnel, coming across a ruined castle in the moonlight.

That immersion can happen because the world feels concrete. We know the world was created by artists and coders using software. But that knowledge fades away when the artifice is skillful and consistent.

Would that immersion be broken if you were able to manipulate the setting as you played - make the wind on the ridge die down, decide the tunnel led to a treasure vault, make a favourite ally appear in the ruined castle? I think for a great many people it would. Being able to manipulate the world would shatter the illusion that it exists beyond the immediate needs of the game session.

Yes, this, exactly this, thousand times this!

 

[TwoSix]

The CRPG analogy is apt. One of appeals of games like Skyrim is immersion. When people play, they feel like they’re in another world, braving the winds on a snowy ridge, descending a gloomy tunnel, coming across a ruined castle in the moonlight.

That immersion can happen because the world feels concrete. We know the world was created by artists and coders using software. But that knowledge fades away when the artifice is skillful and consistent.

Would that immersion be broken if you were able to manipulate the setting as you played - make the wind on the ridge die down, decide the tunnel led to a treasure vault, make a favourite ally appear in the ruined castle? I think for a great many people it would. Being able to manipulate the world would shatter the illusion that it exists beyond the immediate needs of the game session.

Of course. but by the same token, many players feel their immersion is more aided if they can craft the story to fit the way the story is progressing in their imagination. I think some people prefer to be immersed in the setting, but others feel it more important to be immersed in the story.

 

[pemerton]

Foam weapons are about as required part of LARPs as beholders are of table top RPGs.


OK. I get this. in LARPs too majority of the interaction is between the players too, though GMs will generally play 'NPCs' (though that designation doesn't quite mean the same thing.) The GM played characters tend to be more of catalysts for the drama, vehicles for creating tensions between the player characters, or to move the situation so that the players have to react. And I think that this is a great use of NPCs in table top game too. Some of the best social interaction on RPGs that I've seen has been between the PCs. But ultimately I don't really see how the drama wouldn't work if the some of the participants were NPCs; ultimately they too are characters played in that moment by a human being, that human being just is the GM.

The first bolded bit is extremely consistent with what I posted.

As for the second bolded bit, it seems to me that the difference is that no player has to be neutral - each is able to play his/her PC at full throttle.. But if the GM is playing his/her NPC full throttle, how is the player meant to advance in the game?

This is part of what I like about mechanics as a GM: I can play my NPC to full throttle, and the resolution framework will tell me what the parameters are for that.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The first bolded bit is extremely consistent with what I posted.

As for the second bolded bit, it seems to me that the difference is that no player has to be neutral - each is able to play his/her PC at full throttle.. But if the GM is playing his/her NPC full throttle, how is the player meant to advance in the game?

This is part of what I like about mechanics as a GM: I can play my NPC to full throttle, and the resolution framework will tell me what the parameters are for that.

What is 'full throttle' and what is being advanced and to where?