A Question Of Agency?

[Bedrockgames]

I think that everyone posting in this thread is very familiar with the approach to RPGing described in these posts. It is pretty canonical for D&D since the early-to-mid-80s; for RQ and RM as I have always encountered them (other than some of my own RM play); and I suspect is very typical for play of GURPS, HERO, Star Wars, and a lot of Traveller. And that's just to name some games I thought of now.

Well, yes, a lot of it comes out of the OSR, which was us going back to earlier games, editions and adventure structures. And I started gaming in '86 so much of my early experience was around styles that embraced letting the dice fall where they may, a GM creating a place for players to explore, and not worrying about having something like a overarching plot or story (it was more lets see what the group does today and lets see what happens to them). But it is new too. It is definitely through a lens of the present. And the effort is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, find what is useful. But there are other aspects to it, and a lot of people arrived here by very different paths (this is why I keep hammering "living adventure" which is a concept that I first encountered when I was running Ravenloft in the early 90s and used Feast of Goblyns). That gave me a very different sense of the game than say people who use a term like world in motion. We are in a similar space but there is a difference.

There is a lot more to the style, a lot more to what I like, and a lot more in general, but these conversations tend to get very binary and very locked in around the points people are making.

I think both sides in this discussion had a strong reaction to some of the railroading and the Gm as story teller that was heavy in the 90s, and some of us also had a reaction to things like the rigid linear adventure structures in the 3E DMG. And we all went into the forest to find a solution to this problem (and there may have been other problems in the mix or different problems). One sides solution was things like the tools you guys are talking about (and these tools make sense, and they do solve the problem). Our solution was to go back and see where things might have gone off the rails, then find a way to bridge that to our current games and approaches. I settled on a few different approaches based on that which work for me: Sandbox-living adventure, Sandbox+drama, monster-of-week/monster hunt, situational character driven adventures, etc. Basically I took the things that had stuff which worked for me: the van richten books, Call of Cthulhu, the 1E DMG, the Isle of Dread, OD&D, the HARN setting, 100 Bushels of Rye, Feast of Goblyns, etc.

But I must reiterate, this isn't my only way of approaching games. The groups I belonged to growing up played all kinds of RPGs, and the groups I am in now, are the same. What I am describing is what kind of games I like to run most. But one of my favorite games is the old Hong Kong Action Theatre!, which as a concept is quite different from what I am talking about (but lots of fun). I also used to love the game OG, and TORG with the Drama deck. And like I've said many times, I really quite like Hillfolk. One of the default games in my group is Savage Worlds, which is a game I am always happy to play (and the person in our group who usually runs it, does so in a very different style from the GM approach I am describing above).

 

[pemerton]

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.

It's not my job to explain why your play is thrilling to you. That's on you.

I just finished reading the HPL story "Rats in the Walls". There are many reasons I could give why it's not a great work of literature, but I wasn't bored by reading it. And reading it was, literally, learning what HPL wrote.

One of my favourite films is Ashes of Time. I don't know if I would describe it as thrilling but it is certainly moving and also engrossing and also, in some ways, puzzling. And when I watch that film, which I have done many times both at the cinema and via my DVD copy of the Redux edition, I am literally viewing and listening to what was filmed and recorded.

If you think that learning what someone else wrote or filmed is not thrilling, that's on you. The point of my previous two paragraphs is that there are whole modes of art predicated on the opposite view. And that's before we even get to "lesser" genre forms like Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure which are intended to be thrilling and which involve learning what the author has written.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It's not my job to explain why your play is thrilling to you. That's on you.

I just finished reading the HPL story "Rats in the Walls". There are many reasons I could give why it's not a great work of literature, but I wasn't bored by reading it. And reading it was, literally, learning what HPL wrote.

One of my favourite films is Ashes of Time. I don't know if I would describe it as thrilling but it is certainly moving and also engrossing and also, in some ways, puzzling. And when I watch that film, which I have done many times both at the cinema and via my DVD copy of the Redux edition, I am literally viewing and listening to what was filmed and recorded.

If you think that learning what someone else wrote or filmed is not thrilling, that's on you. The point of my previous two paragraphs is that there are whole modes of art predicated on the opposite view. And that's before we even get to "lesser" genre forms like Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure which are intended to be thrilling and which involve learning what the author has written.

First, I agree that ashes of time is an interesting film (I think of it as a movie that makes you feel drunk or in some kind of altered state, while being moving like you describe). You may know this already, but if you want it to be less puzzling (still puzzling but less so) the key is Legend of Condor Heroes. He is basically remixing the characters from that story into Ashes of Time (the main character in Ashes of Time, Ouyang Feng, is the villain from LoCH).

No, learning something isn't dull. But yes, learning what is in the GM notes is dull gaming. I think most people would see this as such. When I was fed up with the 3E approach to running games (which I found quite linear, and structured around planned encounters), my remark was always "I might as well just show the players my notes and be done with the session". The whole point of sandbox and living adventure to me, was to escape from that sense that the players were just learning what I had on the page (and I think I succeeded).

 

[Ovinomancer]

What is the literary definition of agency you refer to?

Doesn't really matter -- players aren't literary objects. This is talking about how characters in fiction display agency, and is confused because the only writer is actually employing agency. Rather, the literary terms is talking about the appearance of a character to make meaningful decisions. It's somewhat useful in talking about how to write characters, but utterly pointless in a discussion of RPGs, where players are making choices, not characters.

 

[pemerton]

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.

I the player am not remembering anything. My character is.

I'm not sure why you say it's not agency. I'm also not sure whether your "it" refers to memory or authorship, but both are forms of agency. Being able to recall things is an exercise of agency. I have had the experience of losing it. So do those who suffer from dementia.

Writing things is also an exercise of agency.

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'.

I don't know what you see as the difference between agency and power. In this context they seem to be more-or-less synonymous.

You also seem to count finding one's brother which is introduced into the fiction as the result of resolving a check as authorship, whereas you don't similarly classify defeating an Orc in combat which is introduced into the fiction as the result of resolving a check. I don't see what property the first possesses but the second lacks such that the first but not the second is authorship. Both contribute to the content of a fiction.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Doesn't really matter -- players aren't literary objects. This is talking about how characters in fiction display agency, and is confused because the only writer is actually employing agency. Rather, the literary terms is talking about the appearance of a character to make meaningful decisions. It's somewhat useful in talking about how to write characters, but utterly pointless in a discussion of RPGs, where players are making choices, not characters.

It is important because that is where the term is borrowed from, and that shapes how a lot of people are using it here. And while I agree that RPGs and literature are different, and you don't want to confuse mediums, the literary useage has viable meaning in an RPG, and one that connects to the agency in sandbox one side is discussing (and this is the language people who run sandboxes frequently use, and when they use it, they don't take agency to mean authorial power).

 

[pemerton]

Doesn't really matter -- players aren't literary objects. This is talking about how characters in fiction display agency, and is confused because the only writer is actually employing agency. Rather, the literary terms is talking about the appearance of a character to make meaningful decisions. It's somewhat useful in talking about how to write characters, but utterly pointless in a discussion of RPGs, where players are making choices, not characters.

If that's what's meant then I already posted about that somewhere upthread.

We can discuss whether characters in a RPG exercise agency (like REH's Conan most of the time, though cf Hour of the Dragon) or don't (like Gollum and perhaps even, to some extent, Frodo). But that sort of exercise in literary criticism seems to have no relevance to this thread. Which I think is what you have said too.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I the player am not remembering anything. My character is.

But your character, and the memory don't really exist.

 

[pemerton]

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

Suppose you're correct. Then the apposite word for my description would be incomplete. Not condescending. Nor dismissive.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm not sure why you say it's not agency. I'm also not sure whether your "it" refers to memory or authorship, but both are forms of agency. Being able to recall things is an exercise of agency. I have had the experience of losing it. So do those who suffer from dementia.

I would say you are mixing two things: you are either inventing a memory or recollecting a memory. Recollecting something isn't agency in an RPG, at least not the way I am using the term. That is entirely internal. If you are inventing a memory, that is authorial power, but in an RPG I wouldn't consider that agency. Now if you used that memory toward some action in the setting, I might call it agency (for example you remembered your father's bagel recipe and begin the first step towards becoming the bagel king of Constantinople).

I too have had the experience of losing memory. And in the sociological sense, sure it might be agency. But not in any sense relevant to RPGs in my opinion. Also there is a huge difference between a real memory and one you made up for a game.