A Question Of Agency?

[FrogReaver]

THe dice are a result of a decision point. The agency factor of a die roll is at the following points:
Knowing the difficulty
Knowing one or more possible outcomes of the roll
then, based upon those, deciding to go ahead and roll.

There are several decision points to get to those three.
The GM must have a difficulty in mind
The GM should have an expected game-state change in mind tied to the roll. Often, this is prescribed (esp. in conflict systems), but at many times it is situational.
THe GM may have foreshadowed the roll
The Player may have requested a roll
the player may have a specific desired outcome, which, if they do, should be conveyed to the GM.

There's more than that. There is agency over declaring an attempted action and agency over the outcome of that action. I'm trying to be specific enough so that I'm not misunderstood when I claim dice take away agency. It's not the agency to attempt an action they take away, but rather they have removed agency over the outcome itself resulting in less overall agency as such situations get framed in this thread.

Agency on the roll evolves from having those.
Let's look at a few cases:

I like that you gave examples of different cases and your views on agency in them. I don't fully agree with all your assessments but I think that's a good way to proceed in this discussion.

• A blind, "Hey, roll a d20 and hand me your sheet" isn't a sign of agency... No agency here of the player, except for what was present in character gen.

I think it depends on what triggers the roll and what fiction has been established on the lead up. Player I'm going to go defeat the dungeon of traps. DM, upon entering, roll a d20 and hand me your sheet. *Though perhaps the qualifier of blind removes such situations but I'm not sure that's specifically how you meant "blind".

• "Hey, I need you to to roll a notice check, and there's a bad thing going to happen if you fail" Still no agency.

Again , that depends on the leadup. Would the player have gotten the notice check if he was doing X instead of being on the lookout for danger? If so he had agency.

• "Do you want to roll a notice check as you enter?" - implies a thing to notice. Player has some agency - look or don't.

Again, depending on the leadup, deciding to enter may have been agency or not. Choosing to make or not make a check might not be agency depending on what the consequences of doing so/not doing so are.

• "If you enter, you'll need a notice roll. Bad things if you fail." Fails the realism test, but has more agency.

Agency on deciding to enter which is coupled with the decision to roll. This reads as less agency to me. There's only 1 decision point.

• "now that you've entered, What will find you if you pass the notice check?" much more agency - the player now gets to pick the opponent (within reason.) on a success.

Presumably you had agency to enter and you have agency on what you encounter, but no agency on whether to make the check.

• "You have a bad feeling. What is triggering it?" pauses for answer. "If you enter, you'll roll for your ability to avoid being surprised." Still more agency, as now you pick the source of bad feeling and know that if you opt to enter, you'll roll vs surprise. What's not said is that you can choose other than to enter and yet still engage that threat.

No agency about having the bad feeling. Agency about what it is. Your agency to choose to enter and to make a roll to avoid being surprised are tied to the same decision point.

 

[Lanefan]

I stepped away from this thread for a few days (voluntarily) and now find I'm 20 (!) pages behind, so if someone's aimed any comments at me in the meantime and I miss them, I ask forgiveness in advance.

I don’t think this is remotely true. I don’t see how it even can be true, regardless of play style or GMing approach or what game you’re playing.

The PCs are significantly different from NPCs just by virtue of the fact that the game is about them. They’re the focus of each and every session. Most NPCs will appear once. Some will appear occasionally. Maybe a handful will appear with regularity. The PCs are the ones appearing in every single session. The game doesn’t exist without them.

No, but the world does.

If all the PCs drop dead, i.e. your typical TPK, does the whole game world grind to a halt? Not if the campaign continues with new characters...and as up till now those new characters were in theory NPCs lurking in the background, by extension PCs and NPCs work the same.

To me that’s a clear and fundamental difference that I’d expect would absolutely relate to the level of agency present in a game. If you can’t acknowledge that the characters played by the players are the stars of the show, then yeah, I can see how concerns in agency may arise.

And also, is you actually view a GM playing a NPC as the equivalent of a player playing a PC....then how is your entire GMing approach not in violation of how you expect your players to play?

How can you reconcile an approach that considers PCs and NPCs equally important, but expects the participant running the characters to do so with radically different expectations? Like, player knowledge should be limited to what the character knows as much as possible so that the player doesn't give themselves some kind of unfair advantage.....but the GM is expected to easily and perfectly separate character and GM knowledge to always render sound judgment.

Yes, and as a GM I freely admit this is a big problem. However, as it's not all that solvable the best I can do is work around it in good faith and hope for the best.

Well, no, that’s not the only way to handle it. Far from it. There are many ways to do so, plenty of examples have been given. Plus, if you simply accept that PCs and NPCs are fundamentally different, then none of this needs to follow.

If I was willing to blow up the concept of internal consistency then accepting this would be no problem. However, I'm not willing to blow it up.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Is that significant? I mean, first of all, OFTEN the effective choices are binary. You can 'fiddle around', but eventually you go left or go right. Maybe sometimes you effectively turn back. I don't think that, or even other possible choices, really undermines the whole 'state model' of how the game itself goes.

Yes. It is the single most significant thing about an RPG in my mind. When I first played, that whole "this is where you are: what do you do?" was like an explosion in my brain. The amount of freedom I felt to explore is one I have never experienced in any other medium. I've just never had the experience you are describing of feeling like it is a choice between binary things. I mean, maybe once in a while you are in a situation where there are two doors, but even then, you don't have to go through those doors, and there were all kinds of choices leading up to that moment. If you haven't experienced this, that is fair. Maybe your experience with RPGs and GMs is different from mine. But this is one area where I just can't see the validity of the argument being made because it is so contrary to what I've actually experienced.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That said, I think that players can make more strongly-worded, in-character declarations that can move toward state change. Suppose, for example, a player goes on and on about their sworn enemy, the Baron von Evilhoffer, describing in great detail some set of past events or feud between them. Then we start to get nearer to the mark of player agency --- but these are exactly the kinds of things that "traditional" D&D / GMs simply don't care about (literally from @Lanefan's own mouth --- doesn't care, nor have any interest in engaging in this sort of thing). To bring these kinds of more substantial agenda "pieces" into reality within the fiction, generally takes 1) total buy in from the GM and party, 2) a system that mechanically inserts these statements into the reality of the fiction (Dungeon World has dozens of these), or both.

I'm willing to accept that these sorts of agendas are perfectly possible to enact without mechanical support, it is just that IME getting that to happen is very uneven. I expect if I convinced some of you people that like to play games with these elements in them to GM 5e then our resulting 5e game would have some such moments, and that would probably go fairly smoothly. OTOH I can tell you from experience that MANY veteran GMs who are not philosophically opposed, at all, to this kind of play simply don't know much about it, haven't run games like BW or DW, or even if they have they haven't really internalized the concepts and procedures so as to be able to apply a version of them in a 5e game that lacks mechanical support for it. Especially since there will come points in play where strictly following the normal procedures of 5e will work against it, such that one is likely to either need a small house rule or at least alter standard procedure to some extent.

So, instead of running 5e, I run my own hack of what started out as 4e and is now its own game (and I'm doing a rewrite now which will TRULY not owe a huge amount to 4e, although it will still have some kinship in certain areas).

 

[Lanefan]

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.

I haven't determined from afar that the obstacle 'MUST' exist; the GM within that game has by his own admission recognized that it DOES exist. He then intentionally drew the game past it. I merely called this out.

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.

So, choice of obstacles is made on dramatic grounds rather than realistic grounds. This works (sometimes) for a movie, though I find it jarring there too when it's too obvious, but blows up much sense of realism in an RPG.

 

[aramis erak]

I think it depends on what triggers the roll and what fiction has been established on the lead up. Player I'm going to go defeat the dungeon of traps. DM, upon entering, roll a d20 and hand me your sheet. *Though perhaps the qualifier of blind removes such situations but I'm not sure that's specifically how you meant "blind".

Blind meaning, in this case, zero explanation to the player of what they're rolling for nor why.
It's about the absolute lowest agency case possible. You don't know what you're rolling, and if the system has expendables under player control, whether or not to use the expendables on it, nor why. Even if the GM has a pair of outcomes, the player has no agency other than what was in character gen.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I feel that perception is not an ideal area to examine agency as it very often is passive or reactive.

 

[FrogReaver]

Blind meaning, in this case, zero explanation to the player of what they're rolling for nor why.
It's about the absolute lowest agency case possible. You don't know what you're rolling, and if the system has expendables under player control, whether or not to use the expendables on it, nor why. Even if the GM has a pair of outcomes, the player has no agency other than what was in character gen.

You didn’t address how my dungeon of traps fits into that explanation.

 

[Lanefan]

These things could be meaningful in some ways, but play does not revolve around them.

My example of the fighters was a simple one. What I meant by it is: would the play of Steading of the Hill Giant Chief go differently if I were to play with one character over the other?

For me it sure would. If I'm playing Lanefan the high-volume kick-in-the-door gonzo guy my experience then and memories later of that module are going to be quite different than if I'm playing Astacoe the quiet practical think-it-all-through-first guy. (both of these are very long-career Fighters of mine who are still active now)

Doesn't matter that in either case we'd be more or less doing the same things (though very likely not in the same manner!) - the characterization differences would make it different enough. Throw in that each other player at the table might be making a similar choice, and you never know what you're gonna get.

And more importantly, would that difference be meaningful?

To me, again yes as noted just above.

Let me phrase this another way. When you think of “character driven play” do you mean that the characters are free to decide where they go and what they engage with?

Yes.

Or do you mean that play actually revolves around the characters?

Red herring. If the characters are deciding where they go and what they engage with (one assumes this is being done via a vaguely consistent in-character decision process) the play is already revolving around them.

Does the fiction feature the PCs or is it actually their story?

It's the party's collective story. Characters within said party often come and go as time passes, but the party continues.

Claiming as a player that my character's story is more important than that of the party is pure selfishness.

 

[prabe]

To bring these kinds of more substantial agenda "pieces" into reality within the fiction, generally takes 1) total buy in from the GM and party, 2) a system that mechanically inserts these statements into the reality of the fiction (Dungeon World has dozens of these), or both.

I think that buy-in is plausibly enough; in fact, I think mechanics to do this can lead to ... cheap (or cheap-feeling) results--something I've seen, myself.