A Question Of Agency?

[Aldarc]

Then why bring up the experts and the shifting meaning of terms in relation to agency at all?

I thought that was apparent: to illustrate the simple point that common usage is not necessarily correct, accurate, or unassailable usage. It does not necessarily mean that any side has the experts or scientists - as much as hobby TTRPGs could - but that the common/conventional usage of such terms has been challenged by others. However, in the case of my example (i.e., gender, sex, and sexuality), it was done by gender/sexuality experts and scientists (as well as activists).

I am not going to engage you on that topic any further.

Until the next time.

Please consider the possibility that nothing nefarious is going on. That people are using the best language they know to describe their perspectives. That when we value different things in the play of roleplaying games we might similar language in different ways in a manner that reflects what we value.

And that maybe the examples being used, such as Burning Wheel or Blades in the Dark, help elucidate those perspectives through play experience rather than simply being about people trying to push their pet games.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Until the next time.

No, I am putting a lot of users on ignore after this thread. I think the venom has gotten much worse this time around

 

[hawkeyefan]

That is fair, but we are not talking about video games

So I was reading through your replies to my posts and I’ve decided not to respond post for post because it’s not going to get us anywhere. I figured I’d rather maybe share examples of actual play and discuss those.

Before I’ve had a chance to come up with anything, I saw the post above. It’s your reply to someone linking to a very relevant article to the topic at hand.

And you don’t comment on it in any way. You dismiss it because it’s about video games.

So instead of responding to any of the replies you made to me, I’m asking what about that article do you think was irrelevant to the discussion of player agency in TTRPGs?

I’d rather hear what you have to say about that article than watch you and others trade barbs.

 

[Bedrockgames]

@Ovinomancer, at this point, all I really have the energy to say to all that is: we disagree fundamentally on pretty much everything you said

 

[Bedrockgames]

So instead of responding to any of the replies you made to me, I’m asking what about that article do you think was irrelevant to the discussion of player agency in TTRPGs?

I’d rather hear what you have to say about that article than watch you and others trade barbs.

I didn't read the article (and I am not going to because I don't do that as a general rule in these discussions, otherwise I'd spend most of my day reading articles). My point was simply that if he is coming at this from the perspective of the term as it is used in video games, then that might be part of the problem. Now if video games happen to use agency to mean things you can do in the setting through your character, obviously I wouldn't object. But I don't play video games, so I don't really have any interest in exploring what agency means in them.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I’d rather hear what you have to say about that article than watch you and others trade barbs.

If people don't throw barbs at me, I won't trade them. But if someone throws a barb, I respond with one.

 

[Aldarc]

Here is the real issue Aldarc: I don't take your judgement of coherency seriously enough to feel like it warrants more than a single post. It basically felt like more like an ad hom from you than an actual argument that I was being incoherent.

That's fine if you don't take it seriously, but it was not an ad hominem just because you distrust me. I definitely would not have pointed out that everyone does this if that were the case.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Alright, going to try to talk about some of these things with some specificity. I wrote in my last response to @pemerton why I think it may be a worthwhile endeavor to develop this kind of matrix. I also addressed some of the first paragraph below, so I'm just going to refer back to that and do a bit more on that end.

I'm absolutely able of being moved off of the development of such a matrix if it doesn't enhance the ability to achieve the things I wrote in that last post to pemerton. I'm not there yet though (and I'm working through these things in real time).



Alright, to start, I'm going to link back to the Spout Lore breakdown. That works through some of the above so you can comment on that if you'd like.

As far as "is it possible to not pick up the Character Game Piece (and again, this includes the here and now provisos) when you pick up the Situation or Setting Game Piece", I would say (a) its not terribly common and (b) some cases for it will be more tenuous than others.

Here are a few cases that I'm confident in.

* FitD Flashbacks always violate the now proviso and often violate the here proviso of Character. So those are always grabbing the Situation Game Piece and sometimes grabbing the Setting Game Piece (more on that below).

* Khan of Khans (Barbarian move in DW) - Your hirelings always accept the gratuitous fulfillment of one of your appetites as payment. That is a PC build move that, once taken, forevermore changes the Setting. And, because of it, there will be Situation ramifications. It is sort of like the GM asking a question and using the answer; "Does your porter Duvalle relish your destroying of the King's minstrel's lyre when he serenaded the throne room with a song of his master's conquests (Pure Destruction or Power over Others as Appetites)...or is he still going to need that Coin you owe him?"

* Plan of Action (Dashing Hero move in DW) - 4e has a move just like this. There is always a rope, chandelier, window, cart, easily spooked-herd of livestock, tapestry to be cut, rug to be pulled, ale soaked floor, bannister (any fitting piece of terrain or environmental hazard) whenever it would be handy for you to have one in a situation. This is clearly picking up the Situation Game Piece.

* Faction Clocks for Gangs at War after Crew Has Initiated it via Deception (or other) Score - So, the Score itself would involve all the manipulation of Game Pieces relative to its handling. But, after its been set in motion (unless the PCs commit to a Score or a Downtime Activity to help one side or the other...or both...keeping them perpetually At War has big advantage), the actual Fortune Rolls to resolve the Faction Clocks for the war as it unfolds will just be the Setting Game Piece.

* A Lover in Every Port in DW - You tell the table if there is an old flame in this new town...then we roll to find out if they're helpful/complicated/harmful. This is grabbing the Setting and Situation Game Pieces.

Then there is the next layer where the manifestation of the move is less strongly through Character (but its there) and much more strongly directly with Setting or Situation (or both). Things like The initial part of the first iteration of Come and Get It in 4e (Your enemies respond to your exhortations/feints without fail), Through Death's Eyes in DW and Visions of Death in AW (are you channeling Death...are you dictating to Death to decide who lives and who dies?), Thief's Escape Route/Connections in DW, Circles in BW/TB, Streetwise and Secrets of the City (and the like) in 4e - Is there a way out of this difficult situation and are you capable of taking it (and at what cost), do you have available friends/allies capable of changing the situation?

There are plenty more, but those are the ones that come to mind as good expressions of the idea. There is enough meaningful difference between these things (in terms of Character, Setting, Situation) that when designing them or discussing them, the reality of the player's orientation to them and relative potency of those differences are important to delineate (qualitatively).

Thoughts (anyone)?

This seems to have missed my complaint -- that the very fact that I cannot pick up situation or setting without also picking up character (at least in the vast majority of cases) says to me that these are arbitrary categorizations of play. They do not have independence, and cannot be evaluated independently. The best we can do is treat these like an equalizer on a stereo -- I might be able to say that I put Characterization at +1, Situation at -1, and Setting at -2, but this is, again, not very useful because it doesn't have a baseline comparison, it's a subjective evaluation. At least the stereo actually defines +0, and the steps are actual measurements. This approach just adds another layer of mysticism and jargon to an already challenging discussion.

Which is why I argue there's no subdivisions of agency. You can evaluate a given situation for more or less agency than another one without inventing categories such as these.

Starting with the bolded. This is hugely important. I want to make it clear that in both bins, these things are intended to (a) share aspects of nature (be kindred in a meaningful way...and have overlap on a Venn Diagram), (b) have some level of situational interdependence that you can evaluate (for its presence and potency), but (c) when that interdependence isn't present, be evaluate what degrees of freedom are involved and what they mean for design and play.

That (a) through (c) isn't an accident. That was intentional.

I responded to @pemerton above about my aims with this. One of the BIG ones is exactly what you're talking about above in the bold.

The independence of Protagonism and Tactical and/or Strategic Agency is a real thing. And I'd like us to recognize it and discuss it. FURTHER, I'd like to discuss the other thing I wrote in that response to pemerton. I'm just going to c/p it:

When the design around these 3 (P, T, S Agency) is not robust (but it aims and/or alleges to be) and the play becomes unwieldy, it gives rise to Force manifesting in play as a participant (typically a GM) arrests 1 or 2 of those so that the third can be prioritized and survive that "contact with the enemy." This paradigm shows that there is an actual apex priority in play and that, when push comes to shove (because system hasn't been able to maintain equilibrium and its offloaded on the GM to juggle this), it will win out (because the GM expresses their authority to make it so...typically with sleight of hand/illusion to keep up the pretense that all 3 of these things are actually still in equilibrium...when they're absolutely not).

This, in my opinion, is a HUGE issue with D&D and it hasn't been forensically broken out as to how/why this happens. The Forge tried to tackle this with its "incoherency" model, but that didn't do enough work (or at least the right kind) with most people but it absolutely is a real thing and understanding it would be very good.

Take the following two game realities:

1) 5e Adventure Path:

* Players have whole swaths of Tactical and Strategic Agency.

* Players have absolute zero Protagonist Agency (the game is not formulated around addressing the PCs' dramatic needs...its entirely about the metaplot's or setting's dramatic need - which may be an NPC's dramatic need; eg Strahd).

* When the players Tactical and/or Strategic Agency would negatively impact the script for addressing the metaplot's/setting's dramatic need...it is arrested entirely by the GM (via covert Force - Illusionism).

All told?

No Protagonist Agency for the Players + the apex priority of play is the Protagonist Agency of the metaplot/setting (because when that makes "contact with the enemy" - the Players' Tactical and/or Strategic Agency - one survives...one is subordinated).

2) My Life With Master (if you're not familiar, think of it as a game of Cthulu where (a) the game is actually about the PC's dramatic need and (b) instead of just characterizing your PC's descent into madness, you actually have an extremely small, but persistent, profile of Tactical and Strategic Agency that will actually affect the end state of the game).

* Players have total Protagonist Agency.

* The footprint of Players' Tactical and Strategic Agency is miniscule (particularly compared to every moment of 5e where GM Force isn't deployed)...BUT...it is never subverted by GM Force.


There are vast differences between (1) and (2) above. Then you get to Blades in the Dark and Torchbearer where all 3 are in extraordinary equilibrium and "play priority warfare (where someone has to exert Force)" never manifests. That is, as much as anything, why I think a matrix like this is helpful.

Or, even if a codified matrix doesn't develop, a better, more clear means to talk about these things.

So, again, Venn diagrams are not always useful. One that features Men and Telephone Poles might have overlap in the area of Tall, for instance, but this is only useful in a very narrow categorization. Just saying that there's overlap on a Venn diagram doesn't show usefulness. Or, to put it another way, all models are wrong, some are useful. Saying you have a model doesn't show usefulness.

And, the overlap you're showing between Protagonism and Tactics/Strategy is one that is orthogonal -- the overlap can vary depending on what we're looking at because Protagonism isn't related to Tactics/Strategy in any way -- I can have zero Protagonism (no overlap at all) or maximal Protagonism (complete overlap) for Tactics or Strategy. Venn diagrams work to show where there's a commonality, and a diagram where one factor can vary independently of the others doesn't show commonality. So, again, I'm making the argument that the categories aren't coherent with each other at a structural level, without even touching on usefulness.

To touch on usefulness, you've again created an arbitrary division -- the lines between what's tactical and strategic are crazy blurry -- that doesn't really establish a clear way to tell one instance of agency from another except by subjective equalizer sliders, which are again unmoored from any measurements are are more feelings of how a thing works. And, since we're right back to looking at a situation of agency in a way where we can't make objective statements, but rather can, at best, point to where there's a large enough difference to discern, I'm not sure what these categories add to the discussion. It also lends (false) credence to the idea that combat in 5e AP play, which is high on the Tactical slider, offsets the high Protagonism slider in My Life with Master. However, the fact that 5e AP play is high in Tactical play ignores that it's the system that does this, not the play -- 5e features a strong combat resolution sub-game that enables Tactical decision making in combat, if not anywhere else. My Life with Master has no combat resolution sub-game, just the common resolution game that's used throughout. Is it then useful to look at play like 5e AP play that could enable Protagonism and Strategy, but doesn't and say that since it has high Tactical play, it's agency level is similar to a game that doesn't have the ability to engage the same kinds of Tactical play, but features agency throughout? This is the problem, to me, of binning agency -- it leads to bad comparisons because the arbitrary nature of the bins encourages evaluations of play that are localized and narrow that are then used at a wider level. 5e features a lot of tactical agency in combat, but combats have low strategic agency and no protagonism agency, so overall agency is low. My Life with Master is focused on enabling high levels of agency throughout play, but has no tactical sub-game and so rates low in this area, which appears to show that these games are closer in player agency than actual play would indicate.

All that said, I think it is useful to note that games like 5e, through their design, create space where agency exists that other games do not (like in combat). However, I think that this needs to be evaluated holistically rather than narrowly, because it's important to note that while 5e does create this space in combats for agency to exist (and it does), this is still within the framework of the GM largely determining when combats occur and what the outcome of them are -- maybe not in hitpoints or dead enemies, but certainly in narrative. And this evaluation is missing from your P/T/S framework because it's looking a narrower categories and have no way of summing to a holistic conclusion.

 

[Bedrockgames]

That when we value different things in the play of roleplaying games we might similar language in different ways in a manner that reflects what we value.

This I get and I also agree with. But my problem, and I believe Frogreaver's problem as well, is our use of agency is not being taken seriously at all (in fact it is being labeled incoherent)

 

[darkbard]

I think this is a pretty contested assertion. But I will leave it to the literary professors to tackle as it isn't my area at all

Well, as an English professor, I assert that your use of agency seems incoherent from my perspective, and, further, that most professional discussions of agency in literary studies these days make frequent use of crossdisciplinary concepts and terms from sociology, philosophy, etc.