A Question Of Agency?

[Bedrockgames]

It just seems that, as you’ve described it, most decision points for the fiction belong to the GM. Sure the players can go to this city or that area, but what they run into will always be what the GM wants it to be. How those elements respond to the PCs will be up to the GM. How social interactions will go is up to the GM, with perhaps some influence based on the player’s choice of description. And so on.

Just to take this one in isolation: this is an example of why terms like the fiction are a problem. But to answer as clearly: the GM controls the setting. The players have no control of the setting outside their character. So obviously anything that enters the setting is through the GM (though like I said, it isn't simply what the GM wants, there are plenty of tools, procedures, etc to help this process). But what happens is very much dependent on the players. The players decide what they do, where they go, and in this style they pretty much have free reign to go wherever they want. Like I said in my earlier example, if the party decides to start beating people up and stealing their money, that is where the campaign goes. Exactly how that players out will be a combination of player choice, the GM choice, luck of rolls, and concrete things like PC abilities (for instance a character with a particularly good non-lethal attack, is going to have a leg up in this particular endeavor). This is the kind of game where you very much are encouraging players to surprise you, and to work with those surprises. If the players decide they want to start a cult, that is what is going to happen. It is just the setting stuff (how the world reacts to that kind of choice, what challenges emerge) is in the hands of the GM. But there is responsibility there. You are not just unleashing your ego on the players.

 

[Bedrockgames]

When does the GM's work go from being draft to being finished?

When the GM decides 'this is set'

 

[Bedrockgames]

Why is it dismissive? Re-read your posts and @FrogReaver's post. It's a literal summary of what you both describe!

No, you are just describing part of what we are talking about, and framing it in a way that makes it sound less than thrilling.

 

[pemerton]

There's a lot of talk about sides in this thread, which is, to my mind, unfortunate.

I agree. Are @Campbell and I on the same side? Campbell doesn't care too much for scene-based RPGs, but I run a number of them (BW, Prince Valiant, Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP) and like them a lot. Campbell does sandboxing and players 5e D&D - neither is true of me. (I've GMed "sandbox" Rolemaster 25 to 30 years ago, but not with any great felicity.)

Which side is @prabe on? Prabe and I approach RPGing pretty differently but I don't feel our exchanges in this thread are very confrontational or sit on different "sides".

The notion of "sides" is trying to establish or impute conflict where there is none.

If the GM has the haunted mansion whether they go north or south, then the GM is running a setting that is less real than the kind I am talking about

The bolded sentence above is in no way shape or form anything that most participants in this thread would tolerate, as it's a pretty clear case of illusionism and railroading.

I had two responses to this exchange.

(1) @Bedrockgames and @FrogReaver both complain about others' terminology, their use of "agency", etc - yet here tries to own the notion of reality. Using it to mean authored in advance by the GM. Which implies that any "no myth" game per se lacks reality in its setting.

What is that meant to mean, given that we're all talking about imaginary things? Is it meant to tell us something about Bedrockgames's preferences and feelings? I think we're already well aware of those, from this and other threads. Is it meant to tell us how he thinks he would feel playing Burning Wheel? Is it meant to be a criticism of players of "no myth" games? My reading is some mixture of all three.

(2) Why does it matter whether the PCs go north or south? @Campbell not far upthread posted "Many GMs make the decision to focus on physical space and moving through it while not focusing much on characters as like people. I take the opposite approach."

In my Classic Traveller game, when the PCs travel on-world, I almost never care whether they're going north or south (contrast: whether they're going towards or away from a world's equator).

In our Prince Valiant game, we track the location of the PCs on maps of Britain and greater Europe, but I don't think it's ever mattered which compass direction they headed independently of some description like We go back to the beach or We set sail for Cyprus.

In a Prince Valiant session a little over a year ago, the PCs encountered the Bone Laird - the undead remains of an ancient Celtic ruler of a part of what today we would call Romania - while travelling from the Dalmation coast to Constantinople. I did not have the location of the Bone Laird marked on any map. The players had declared that they were undertaking the trip. I narrated them passing through a forest - hardly unexpected in that time (c 8th century CE) and place - and being confronted by the Bone Laird.

This was a straightforward exercise of GM authority over situation and scene-framing.

It is not remotely part of the point of RPGing in the world of Prince Valiant to see if - through cleverness or luck - your PCs can avoid encountering the Bone Laird. So whether the Bone Laird is in the north or the south of the forest is completely immaterial.

If you want to see how the players exercised their agency in that episode, you can read the link above.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As @hawkeyefan and @Ovinomancer have posted, it seems odd to describe this approach in which the GM has all this authorial power, and yet to deny that this authorial power has implications or establishes limits on player agency. I mean, two such limits have already come out at length in this thread: I as a player can't have a character recollect the location of Evard's tower unless the GM has already written that into his/her fiction; and I as a player can't have my PC's hope to meet his brother have any chance of coming true unless the GM decides to stage the encounter.

I don't think your memory argument is a very good one. You aren't really remembering anything. If something had happened in the game, and you remembered the location of the tower, sure. But just asserting your know the location, and calling that a memory, number one, it just isn't a memory. But number two, it isn't agency. But we've had that debate many times.

On the brother, I think agency is choosing to search for your brother, which you would be free to do in the kind of game I run. I don't think being guaranteed that you find said brother is agency, nor do I think you being able to set the terms of a successful search is agency, that is simply giving you 'authorial power'. What I will say is, the GM ought to seriously consider all your efforts to find the brother. It shouldn't be a matter of just arbitrarily making decisions. And there should be some mechanics invoked towards that.

 

[pemerton]

Mostly because of the condescending/dismissive tone it carries. Taken on its own, pemerton's description is more or less correct.

Why is it condescending or dismissive?

Whereas I assume that your many references over the years to "Schroedinger's ogre" and the like are neither.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As @hawkeyefan has noted, it also seems odd to describe a process of play in which a significant part of the player-side experience is declaring exploration-type actions that trigger the GM to reveal his/her hitherto private/secret fiction, and yet to react so strongly to the description of that as RPGing-to-find-out-what-is-in-the-GM's-notes. I mean, yes, sometimes those notes are written up in loving detail and sometimes they're being elucidated or even made up as things go along, but the basic idea is the same.

Because it is two halves: sandbox and world in motion, sandbox and living adventure, sandbox and drama. In all these styles, we are saying there is this whole other aspect to it, and your description of it focuses entirely on one element: the notebook

 

[pemerton]

The players are themselves not generating setting content, that is for sure, but through their characters they are impacting the setting. And having a somewhat concrete setting is one of the things that allows them to change it.

<snip>

And this is not simply a matter of playing to find out what the GM has determined. The GM may know what sects are in the setting, what NPCs are in those sect, what towns are where (and many of the shops in those towns), where the imperial borders are, what the imperial customs are, etc. But the GM doesn't know what is going to happen.

What rules and processes govern those changes?

What is the nature of the GM's ignorance? Eg is the procedure "GM decides" but s/he hasn't decided yet? Or does the GM prepare if/then chains and statements of disposition for various NPCs and organisations but doesn't know yet which ones the players, via their PCs, will poke at?

These are not rhetorical questions. Presumably they have answers, and different answers might produce different play experiences?

 

[pemerton]

The whole reason we are making this distinction of realness is to show that something is established in the setting, and the players have agency to explore it.

The bolded part of your post is metaphor.

I have explored Rome - walked around the city, admired the Pantheon, been struck by the size of the Colosseum, etc.

But I have never explored the Pomarj. I can't, because it doesn't exist - or, if you prefer, it exists only in imagination.

What I have done is ask the GM questions like where are we on the map? and then we've opened up an online map of Greyhawk and zoomed in on the Ulek/Pomarj border area and looked at the various forts and steadings marked there. And we've agreed that these are the old border forts once garrisoned by the Order of the Iron Tower.

And then the GM has said things like As you and Aramina wander through the border area, you come across abandoned homestead and signs of flight.

Etc.

Of course you're under no obligation to literally describe how the play of your game unfolds at the table. But if you stick only to metaphors like the player's explore the setting that will make conversation about your play more difficult than it probably needs to be.

 

[pemerton]

you've essentially adopted the sociology definition of agency, rather than the literary one

What is the literary definition of agency you refer to?