A Question Of Agency?

[Aldarc]

But then we go back to determinism and free will. Ultimately do we really have any agency? But we like to pretend that we do, both in a game and in the real life.

I would rather say that it goes back to actual science of human cognition and psychology rather than more abstracted philosophic notions of free will, determinism, or agency, as ultimately those psycho-cognitive complexities that constitute the human condition will remain present regardless of our answers on free will.

But I don't think I would like that game. (Not issue with the sexuality aspect per se, my characters rarely would be place in either extreme end of the Kinsey scale.) I have my mental models of my characters, and sometimes they produce results that might surprise me. But when my mental model says one thing and the system says another that is super jarring and I hate that.

And that's what the game is kinda about: a deconstruction of those mental models. What you are describing is your mental self-image saying one thing but then your body/hormones/attractions (i.e., system) saying another, which is precisely the point.

I vaguely recall @pemerton describing something similar with either Prince Valiant or Pendragon in the vein of Arthurian Romance. Are we dealing with a story where Lancelot chooses his attraction to Guinevere and steals her affections away from King Arthur or, rather, are we dealing with a story where Lancelot is forced to deal with those (unwanted) attractions he finds himself harboring?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'd caution on that extrapolation - I've known a number of players who found me not supportive enough of their immersion, and they went looking for a different style of GM. It's one of several criteria upon which differences of preference self-segregate upon.

Which extrapolation would that be? That they're rare? Something can be rare and still show up in clusters.

Not every group goes for deep immersion. Indeed, I've had a group that prefered to play D&D 5E as a tactical minis game with connected fights. (I was so glad they were a 1-shot at the FLGS.)

Token play has always been a thing, even if it gets looked down on by a lot of people. There was a lot more of it in the early D&D days.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's meant to emulate teen monster melodrama (e.g., Twilight, Teen Wolf, etc.), but also "your changing body, hormones, and you." So you don't get control over what or who turns you on. You may think of your character as 100% Straight, only to find your character turned on in play by someone of the same gender. Or even think of yourself as 100% gay, but find yourself suddenly attracted to someone of the opposite gender. It's meant to capture the irrational and unexpected qualities of our emotions. You may want 100 percent control over what your character thinks and feels, but I think that reflects a control over our thoughts, emotions, and psyche that we humans simply don't naturally have.

I was very interested to see an attempt to capture that genre, but for any number of reasons its a game that requires the proper mindset for it to work.

Whereas Fate works for me as both a GM and player. I've been more a fan of Cortex as of late, but that's not a snub on Fate.

Fate is absolutely a lot of people's cuppa, and for someone interested in trying for a dramatist game, it seems on the face of it well designed. I just couldn't make it work for me, for much of the reasons Aramis Erak mentions above.

Ironically, Cortex worked for me better (probably because of the way its always assumed certain traits will apply, just a question of which one) and I find Stress easier to deal with regularly than Conditions, but even there in the long run I think it didn't feel like it had enough engagement from the GM end.

 

[Campbell]

Being a fan of the PC's is not about making their life easy. Quite the opposite. It's about investing in them and caring about them in the same way you would a character from your favorite TV show. It's about wanting to know who they really are when the chips down. It's about embracing the cool things about them and highlighting that. Most importantly it's about playing to find out what the characters will do when faced with hard choices. It's about letting the story of the game be about the player characters and playing to find out what they will do.

You subject the characters to honest adversity because you are a fan. You want the best for them and care for them, but to do them justice they need to face adversity.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

How is that a simple enough mistake to make? What even is the mistake? If the GM doesn't call for a check because s/he thinks there's nothing at stake, and the player doesn't call for a check because s/he thinks there's nothing at stake, or perhaps doesn't want to stake anything, what has gone wrong? What's the mistake?

If it turns out that the stuff in play starts to escalate, and in the back-and-forth between player(s) and GM it becomes clear that there is some conflict or crisis that is emerging, then at that point checks can be made.

I honestly have no idea what you think the "mistake" is that you're describing. Are you able to give an actual play example, where in a "say 'yes' or roll the dice" game the GM didn't call for a check but it was important and the GM realised that later and it mattered?

Remember 'Wrath of Khan'? "Two dimensional thinking, captain!" It is a 'mistake' in classic Gygaxian play to simply let the PCs bypass a 'locked door' (any obstacle). This smacks of going soft on them and letting play progress past some obstacle without testing the players ability against it. In this form of play such a thing is akin to the 'softballing' you describe earlier, and undermines the whole point of that mode of play.

Later, when play progressed into 'story telling' the process had to evolve. Because there were no longer necessarily specific obstacles on the map to be overcome, instead a structure of "the obvious course of the fiction" had to be imagined. So a sort of mythology grew out of the original GM referee role, that the GM could be a 'fair arbiter' of ANYTHING and that there was some definitive set of possibilities that could be discerned by the perspicacious GM that were "the logical possibilities." These became substitutes for the walls and doors and branches of corridor in the original model. Thus the ethos is that @Lanefan has concluded that you have 'bypassed an obstacle' which he has determined MUST exist within the fiction, and thus you have committed an error of GMing.

The logic of narrative play is not being applied, at least not consistently. It takes play and a bit of practice and study for people steeped in 'classic' and 'story teller' modes to 'get' the narrative fiction-driven approach. Frankly, there are no real 'right answers' in terms of what MUST be chosen as obstacles in this mode of play. That choice is made simply on aesthetic grounds, and for the sake of interest in exploring particular possibilities. This is not 'skilled play' which demands each challenge be met, nor DM-directed story telling play which demands that a set of narrative options developed exclusively by the GM for her own reasons be presented and treated as obstacles. Playing would dissolve these mismatches of conceptual framework, although I'm guessing that is unlikely to ever happen. More is the pity.

What you describe is exactly what happened in my Traveller game. No one was interested in finding out what might happen if Lady Askol didn't accept von Jerrel's lie, and so that issue wasn't put to the test.

The way in which this differs from fudging a dice roll has been explained upthread already:

(1) No dice was rolled;

(2) No system procedure was ignored or lied about - as I've posted multiple times, there is no when you tell a lie move/subsystem in Classic Traveller, and in our game we are extrapolating the Reaction rules and also using INT checks whereby I am calling for checks within a "say 'yes' or roll the dice" framework;

(3) As nothing has been staked, and nothing resolved, there is no finality here - just ongoing fiction that can be built on down the track (@AbdulAlhazred has explained this clearly over multiple posts);

(4) The player was a participant in the process and everything was fully transparent to him. This seems a particularly apposite difference in a thread about player agency!

And this is of course the point of very highest salience. The game was played in accordance to its principles and all participants explicitly got to have a say in what took place (or in this case didn't take place). There cannot be a question of 'force' or 'illusionism', nor of 'railroading' or 'fudging' since none of these things happened. Everyone agreed on what would (not) follow and at least one player had a chance to weigh in on it and make a check if they'd wished. Since "avoiding an obstacle" is not some sort of 'softballing' or failure of GMing in this type of game, necessarily, there's no abandonment of anyone's role at the table.

There have been multiple posts explaining why finality matters when "playing to find out" and why, in the episode of von Jerrel's lie to Lady Askol, there is no finality.

Well if you use a different set of techniques from "say 'yes' or roll the dice", "let it ride", "fail forward" etc then you might get problems. But they're not problems associated with the techniques I'm using.

And if you use a different set of techniques, whereby players can achieve finality without having to put it to the test, then players might not bother to put things to the test. To me that sounds like it might produce insipid play. But anyway that's not an issue for me as I don't use those techniques. I use the ones I've described in this thread.

What is germane here is that THIS IS ALL A COHERENT SET OF TECHNIQUES. Despite repeated attempts to debunk it, nobody is going to be able to do so. Its all been proven out over many years of play! I don't understand why every single discussion we have on this topic has to be an endless repetition of futile attempts to deny what is factually so. That narrative play is a functioning and comprehensive set of techniques (generally speaking, admittedly there isn't one single universal approach that exists in all games) cannot be refuted at this point. Why do posters continue to try to do that, instead of moving on to the central topic and sticking to that. There is NO need to have these discussions!

 

[pemerton]

Token play has always been a thing, even if it gets looked down on by a lot of people. There was a lot more of it in the early D&D days.

Agreed.

More than once (many more times than once) I've seen posters on this board saying that they can "roleplay" playing Monopoly. By which they mean, I think, narrate away or tell a story as they move their token around the board.

If this gets to count as roleplaying, it would be roleplaying with almost no player agency.

For my part, I'm inclined to the view that token play (or "pawn stance") doesn't cease to be that simply because the player of the pawn occasionally does some "characterisation and pantomime" (which I think was @Manbearcat's phrase upthread), if that narration and storytelling doesn't actually change the gamestate - the shared fiction - in any significant way.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Agreed.

More than once (many more times than once) I've seen posters on this board saying that they can "roleplay" playing Monopoly. By which they mean, I think, narrate away or tell a story as they move their token around the board.

If this gets to count as roleplaying, it would be roleplaying with almost no player agency.

For my part, I'm inclined to the view that token play (or "pawn stance") doesn't cease to be that simply because the player of the pawn occasionally does some "characterisation and pantomime" (which I think was @Manbearcat's phrase upthread), if that narration and storytelling doesn't actually change the gamestate - the shared fiction - in any significant way.

What about when a player allows their character conception to dictate the course of events rather than some sense of optimal play?

Do you think that token/pawn play cannot allow for meaningful roleplaying? Or just that it would take the players and GM some work to try and add some of it to play?

 

[pemerton]

It is a 'mistake' in classic Gygaxian play to simply let the PCs bypass a 'locked door' (any obstacle). This smacks of going soft on them and letting play progress past some obstacle without testing the players ability against it. In this form of play such a thing is akin to the 'softballing' you describe earlier, and undermines the whole point of that mode of play.

Later, when play progressed into 'story telling' the process had to evolve. Because there were no longer necessarily specific obstacles on the map to be overcome, instead a structure of "the obvious course of the fiction" had to be imagined. So a sort of mythology grew out of the original GM referee role, that the GM could be a 'fair arbiter' of ANYTHING and that there was some definitive set of possibilities that could be discerned by the perspicacious GM that were "the logical possibilities." These became substitutes for the walls and doors and branches of corridor in the original model. Thus the ethos is that Lanefan has concluded that you have 'bypassed an obstacle' which he has determined MUST exist within the fiction, and thus you have committed an error of GMing.

Right.

This is why I call it "puzzle-solving" or learning what is in the GM's notes (or in his/her head).

And also why it call it action resolution by reference to secret backstory - the GM draws upon unilaterally-determined and hitherto-unrevealed elements of the fiction (ie they are not yet part of any shared fiction) in order to determine whether or not an action declaration has a chance to succeed, and if it has a chance to succeed whether that chance is nevertheless less than certain with the consequence that a check is required.

The matter of uncertainty appears to be decided by the GM based on a combination of extrapolation from what s/he is imagining about the fiction, and a sense of not letting the players to "get away" with anything.

When play is unfolding in this way, it is hard to see that players are exercising agency. So if this is the principal mode of play, it seems that the game must be one with pretty low player agency.

There is at least one further practical matter around this. One way that this sort of play can become the principal mode of play is that it requires a lot of time at the table for the players to learn what it is the GM is imagining. To give a concrete example: consider the example from my Traveller game of there being no submersibles available on Zinion. This took a few minutes at the table to establish - the players declared their interest in the possibility and I decided (I think by fiat, having regard to the world profile) that there weren't any. (Maybe I rolled some dice?)

Now the players could have pushed the point by trying to use Streetwise to find an irregular/unauthorised/stolen etc submersible, but didn't. They let my call stand.

But suppose that we had spent many minutes or tens of minutes roleplaying out the PCs' attempt to find an available submersible, in circumstances where I'd already determined that there wasn't one. That would have been tens of minutes of nothing but "characterisation and pantomime". Maybe with an essentially irrelevant brawl or more serious fight inserted as eg the PCs upset someone with overly pointed questions in their hunt for what the GM has already decided can't be found.

That would be low-agency play.

there are no real 'right answers' in terms of what MUST be chosen as obstacles in this mode of play. That choice is made simply on aesthetic grounds, and for the sake of interest in exploring particular possibilities. This is not 'skilled play' which demands each challenge be met, nor DM-directed story telling play which demands that a set of narrative options developed exclusively by the GM for her own reasons be presented and treated as obstacles.

<snip>

Since "avoiding an obstacle" is not some sort of 'softballing' or failure of GMing in this type of game, necessarily, there's no abandonment of anyone's role at the table.

Again, fully agreed.

The relevant question is not did the GM go easy by letting the players circumvent an obstacle (an obstacle that exists only in the GM's unilateral conception of the fiction). As a GM I can always come up with more stuff for us to think about as we play, some of which will absolutely put the players to the test!

The relevant question is did I as GM squib the issue and allow everyone at the table to insipidly slide past what really should have been a hard moment. Which connects back to @Manbearcat and I talking about sentimentality and melodrama, and @Campbell just upthread articulating what it means for the GM to be a "fan" of the PCs.

I'm happy to plead guilty to being softer as a GM than (I suspect) @Campbell is! That's probably one thing that makes Prince Valiant appeal to me - melodrama is built into it! And it's why I tend to find BW a bit gut-wrenching, as player but even more as GM because it requires me to be hard!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And that's what the game is kinda about: a deconstruction of those mental models. What you are describing is your mental self-image saying one thing but then your body/hormones/attractions (i.e., system) saying another, which is precisely the point.

My mental image of my character is not directly the same thing than the character's self image. The latter is only a part of the former.

I vaguely recall @pemerton describing something similar with either Prince Valiant or Pendragon in the vein of Arthurian Romance. Are we dealing with a story where Lancelot chooses his attraction to Guinevere and steals her affections away from King Arthur or, rather, are we dealing with a story where Lancelot is forced to deal with those (unwanted) attractions he finds himself harboring?

And if that works for some people, great. It definitely does not for me. But relating to discussion of agency, a system dictating how the character must feel certainly is a huge imposition on the player agency. The character's feelings and motivations are the very core of the player agency.

 

[pemerton]

What about when a player allows their character conception to dictate the course of events rather than some sense of optimal play?

Do you think that token/pawn play cannot allow for meaningful roleplaying? Or just that it would take the players and GM some work to try and add some of it to play?

Your first sentence describes something that goes beyond token/pawn stance. It sounds like actor stance. But if the GM "reins it in" and the player, knowing/anticipating this, moves away from gamestate-affecting actions like I ride off into the sunset with the rescued prince to non-gamestate-affecting ones like I regale the rescued prince with tales of my love of pinecones then I feel we've moved back into a version of token/pawn stance with some set dressing laid over the top of it.

To answer your second sentence/question: ABSOLUTELY! But that's because I think RPGing, in the context of the games we call RPGs, is not about thespianism or characterisation/pantomime but rather is about the fiction mattering to the resolution of declared actions. And that can and does happen in pawn stance - eg when the player declares "I'll surf down the frictionless corridor of super-tetanus-spiked pits on the doors I've taken off their hinges" and then everyone debates whether the doors are big enough relative to the pits and how exactly this is going to work. I agree with @Thomas Shey that this is a genuine approach to RPGing which may once even have been predominant.

If you read the convention reports it's clearly the spirit in which teams at tournaments in the 70s approached the Giants adventures, and ToH.

Your third question seems (? I think - correct me if I'm wrong) to trade on a different sense of "roleplaying" closer to the inhabitation and presentation of a character through play. There was absolutely zero of that in the ToH tournament report I've seen. And I think I've conveyed why I think it's pretty insipid when it is just set-dressing over the top of pawn play ("Let me regale you with tales of <stuff that will have zero impact on the actual gamestate>").

When the inhabitation and presentation of the character can meaningfully change the gamestate - ie when there is player agency - then we've arrived at my personally favourite approach to RPGing. But not the only one possible. And probably not the most fun for everyone. I would suck as a participant in the ToH tournament, but I'm sure there were some players there who loved it.