A Question Of Agency?

[Crimson Longinus]

Its not 'dictated by mechanics'. Do you think some random dice roll tossed "Lust for the Queen" into the game? Of course not. This is agreed on as a part of the game through multiple channels. The participants decided to play a genre of game which included that trope. They decided to play with a set of rules which included a mechanism which could compel the PC's actions (or at least impact gamestate resolution in some way, we never clarified the exact mechanisms). The player then selected a type of character and role for that character which would put him in the way of this kind of event. He created some goal/belief/position for that character which would put something in opposition to that (IE that he is loyal to the beautiful Queen's husband, the King). None of this is arbitrary or capricious IN ANY WAY at all.

It would make just as much sense to call the wall of a dungeon arbitrary and capricious because it blocks your character from walking north. You decided to play D&D, go into the dungeon, etc. Now you are complaining about the walls? I am not needing any imagination, nor in any doubt of, how this would be received at the table...

Yes, they chose to play that game. Just like people who play games without narrative meta-mechanics that let them alter the fiction to have a secret door in the wall chose to play that way. Yet it didn't stop you from claiming that those games limit the player agency. So which is it?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yep


I think this gets into why agency over character thoughts and mental states is so critical to many of us. In the sense you describe above it’s weakly coupled. But there is a process in play where we determine what our character will do and we base these decisions quite often on our characters thoughts and mental state. In this sense it’s very highly coupled with everything that our character does in the fiction.

I think you can see from my previous post that I (at least, perhaps I can say 'we') don't consider any of this to be an imposition on my play. First there is no principle that says narrative games include compulsion of PCs actions (some games may, but so does D&D at times). Secondly, even if it did, I am not going into that without my eyes wide open.

And yes, you are building your 'salient actions' (ones that change things materially in the state of the game where rules and other participants can see it and act on it) based on your ideas of what your character thinks/feels/knows. Nobody is denying that! Nobody is saying that is unimportant. It doesn't seem to bear on agency though, per se. Not unless you believe there is no other agency in RPGs than imagining what your character thinks/feels/knows. I would find that to be a very odd theory!

Thirdly, in those cases where I have some authority in these games beyond what is granted in, say, Moldvay Basic, then I don't really see how that can possibly reduce my agency as a player. It certainly creates opportunities to play in ways that Basic cannot provide. Depending on the game, it might not work for some other things as well (IE Basic is pretty great at 'skilled play' OSR stuff, though I think you could imagine an OSR type game with narrative mechanisms in it). Overall I think it is useful to discuss these games in terms of agency, and I am still not seeing where they are lacking there.

 

[Aldarc]

Not unless you believe there is no other agency in RPGs than imagining what your character thinks/feels/knows. I would find that to be a very odd theory!

I think you just stumbled on the purest form of "theater of the mind" play right here.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think you aren’t going far enough down the rabbit hole.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say character thoughts and motivations are initially secret and may be revealed through play. Let’s let you play character 1 for the first half of the game and me play character 2 for the first half and then vice versa.

can I really play that same character if I don’t know his thoughts and mental states and what motivates him? I can in some sense but it won’t really be the same character. For most of the table it’s likely to be very obvious that it’s not the same character.

I don’t see how Something so unimportant to gamestate can drive something so noticeable.

or to put it in more gamestate terms. Those variables (motivations and internal thoughts) will lead the table to recognizably distinct game states in almost countless ways.

OK, but if those traits were so 'occult' that I could not distinguish them, then how are they so obvious to everyone else? Either they are obvious or they are not. Sure, when I take over Fred's character I might not end up playing out the adventure exactly how Fred would do it. That doesn't mean that what I do is implausible WRT his character! I mean, maybe I'm a dolt and I really don't 'get' this character, that's possible. Maybe I'm an arse and I decide to play the character in a different way on purpose. Maybe I just play the character in a way that seems consistent with what went before.

Beyond that, I would note, that having a set of actual salient attributes of the PC that help indicate/dictate the key parts of its character CANNOT HURT HERE, can it?

 

[Ovinomancer]

This is a fallacy. Of course agency can exist without roleplay, as it exist even in games that are not roleplaying games at all. But once the game contains roleplay, it becomes one of the things people can have agency over.

Let's examine this. Let's say we have two characters in the same game, Bob the Fighter the Third and Fynn'lan'zz, Keeper of the Golden Leaf, Peerless Warrior of the Seventh Kingdom. These characters have arrived at a T-intersection. The GM describes that down one hall, there's the echoing sound of lapping water, as if there's a large underground lake. Down the other hallway, a chill wind blows, and bits of rime stick to the walls.

Bob's player checks the character sheet, sees they have a potion of water breathing but not a potion of cold resistance, and says, "Bob goes down the hallway towards the water sounds." He does this in his normal voice.

Fynn'lan'zz's player says, in a haughty accent, "I recall lovely afternoons at the shore, the sounds of water all around us. These are some of my best memories of my family, and, as you know, family is everything to me! I most certainly will be investigating such a nostalgic happenstance. Tally ho towards the sound of water!"

Both characters are in the same game. They've made the same choice. They done it in different ways -- Bob's player didn't even bother to get close to in-character acting, while Fynn'lan'zz's player made the choice totally in-character. If, as you say, the option to roleplay exists means there's agency involved in doing so, which player has exercised the most agency in this scene? Let's assume the GM either cannot choose to gainsay this choice.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But you do agree it’s a gamestate. Which makes this gamestate example at odds with the definition I was using it to defeat.

it seems to me the problem is that a gamestate is just a state of the game (essentially all information needed to reproduce that game in the state you left playing it).and that to make it more meaningful than that requires either redefining the term or qualifying game states into further sub categories.

I think that I would call "One of the girls in the flower shop likes you." a pretty insignificant factor in an actual RPG. It might grow in significance, but in this case we already know that in this FF game, it doesn't. Sure, maybe you get free flowers now and then. That's fine and its fun RP and color. If we get to the end of the campaign and that's all it amounted to, I would not say it ever really became part of the overt state of the game. The GM probably didn't record it someplace. At best it might be a note on the back of your character sheet. Heck, maybe you narrate that after the zombie plague ended you went back and married the flower girl. That's cool! Maybe she formed an explanation you used to describe your RP of your character's determination to win. Its still pretty thin, it isn't actualized in any real sense.

Again, how would a mechanical set of 'teeth' for this be a bad thing? If it is SO trivial that such would be meaningless, it probably is too trivial in any sort of description of the game to really warrant being seen as significant, right?

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think you have perfectly adequately demonstrated that there are specific games which both meet @Manbearcat's criteria AND operate by traditional means. What is unspoken here is what went on at the table. At step 1 how was the objective of the game established, and was there a possibility for it to evolve in different directions depending on what was found in play? Are there no other things that the players could establish or discover that would violate the 2nd principle (everything builds off what came before). Is there any third possibility for the end state of the game, or is it binary?

In a traditional game the answers to my questions would be, respectively "No, what is to be found in play is fixed, this was established when the GM was handed the module 'Ravenloft'." and "No, nothing else can be found in play, the module defines all the relevant things. Anything else that is introduced is either irrelevant, or you are not playing a traditional module anymore.", and finally "No, the possible endpoints are pre-determined by the structure of the module. There may be some variation (who survives for instance) but the eventual outcomes are already a fixed set of possibilities."

Clearly none of these three answers would meet the principles of most narrative "indie" type games. So, we must conclude that, while a description of a specific fictional runthrough of Ravenloft can produce narrative that could come from either type of game, the actual PROCESS OF PLAY of a narrative game would be entirely different from a traditional game. This is the central tenet of my own thesis, you can achieve the same end result, theoretically, but you can't achieve the same game experience. I think most of us play for the experience, not some resulting fiction.

Well I think @Manbearcat 's three criteria do apply to more indie or narrative type games. I agree, it's a matter of process and HOW these things come about, but the fact that there is some kind of 1) goal of play, 2) events built on prior events through play, toward 3) some kind of resolution of the events is pretty universal. I think it applies to just about any game.

I took his approach of breaking it down this way to put all games on equal ground, and then examine how each actually does go about the process of getting from 1 to 3. In that sense, yes, some of the possibilities will be wildly different.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Let's examine this. Let's say we have two characters in the same game, Bob the Fighter the Third and Fynn'lan'zz, Keeper of the Golden Leaf, Peerless Warrior of the Seventh Kingdom. These characters have arrived at a T-intersection. The GM describes that down one hall, there's the echoing sound of lapping water, as if there's a large underground lake. Down the other hallway, a chill wind blows, and bits of rime stick to the walls.

Bob's player checks the character sheet, sees they have a potion of water breathing but not a potion of cold resistance, and says, "Bob goes down the hallway towards the water sounds." He does this in his normal voice.

Fynn'lan'zz's player says, in a haughty accent, "I recall lovely afternoons at the shore, the sounds of water all around us. These are some of my best memories of my family, and, as you know, family is everything to me! I most certainly will be investigating such a nostalgic happenstance. Tally ho towards the sound of water!"

Both characters are in the same game. They've made the same choice. They done it in different ways -- Bob's player didn't even bother to get close to in-character acting, while Fynn'lan'zz's player made the choice totally in-character. If, as you say, the option to roleplay exists means there's agency involved in doing so, which player has exercised the most agency in this scene? Let's assume the GM either cannot choose to gainsay this choice.

Bob's player used their agency to introduce an event 'Bob moves towards the water' and Fynn'lan'zz's player introduced events 'Fynn'lan'zz moves towards the water' and Fyn'lan'zz reminiscences about their past.' So in a sense Fyn'lan'zz's employed more agency as they used it in more ways and introduced more events in the game.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Bob's player used their agency to introduce an event 'Bob moves towards the water' and Fynn'lan'zz's player introduced events 'Fynn'lan'zz moves towards the water' and Fyn'lan'zz reminiscences about their past.' So in a sense Fyn'lan'zz's employed more agency as they used it in more ways and introduced more events in the game.

So, Bob's player used no agency to choose to not do this? Herein lies the rub. As far as agency goes, they're exactly the same, because the decision process or ancillary acting doesn't adjust the agency of making the choice, and as far as they go, they cancel out.

So, if in-character roleplay mostly cancels out with not choosing in-character roleplay, we're back to evaluating how the choice to go towards water is resolved -- do the players actually have a say in doing this, or is there another player (the GM) that can veto it?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So, Bob's player used no agency to choose to not do this? Herein lies the rub. As far as agency goes, they're exactly the same, because the decision process or ancillary acting doesn't adjust the agency of making the choice, and as far as they go, they cancel out.

So, if in-character roleplay mostly cancels out with not choosing in-character roleplay, we're back to evaluating how the choice to go towards water is resolved -- do the players actually have a say in doing this, or is there another player (the GM) that can veto it?

Yes, you can see it that way. So same way that if one of them had chosen that their character stays put, they would have used their agency to do so. It doesn't still change the fact that they're using their agency to have their character to do things, whether it was to go somewhere or reminisce about the past. Why you think that having the character move is a choice, but having the character reminisce isn't?