A Question Of Agency?

[darkbard]

Yes, he did, and in a way that shows it's a, if you'll excuse the pun, fictional thing. Literary agency doesn't examine agency at all, it examines the appearance of agency at best.

I would agree with you entirely if, say, all literary study involved fictional characters in fictional texts. But what can one say of examinations of agency in Emerson's "Fate" or William James's Principles of Psychology, both of which have served as the locus of inquiry re agency and other, sometimes related topics in my own work?

This is but one reason why applying a narrow application of a term from one discipline to another seems obfuscating rather than enlightening to me.

 

[pemerton]

Usually when I run an NPC, I just have this gut sense of what they are reasonable about and what they are unreasonable about, and I think that is typically fairly easy for players to start to figure out through interacting with them or knowing the situation before hand.

Upthread I have described this as RPGing-as-puzzle-solving: the players declare actions for the PCs which elicit information from the GM, and they piece this information together to get a clearer picture of what the GM is imagining.

I do not regard it as involving a very high degree of player agency, because it makes the GM's pre-established conception of the fiction the focus of play.

My last few sessions of Traveller play have resembled this to a degree. (I posted about the second-last one quite a way upthread but I don't think anyone replied to that post.) Though the object of exploration has been an alien building rather than a NPC. In our most recent session I tried a few different techniques to try to shift things away from a GM-focus to a player-focus - those techniques included providing some more clarifying fiction of my own to try to round out "the mystery" and give the players all the information they seemed to want about it; narrating some instigating events (attacks by aliens which were also Aliens); and meta-level goading/poking - and those worked to some extent. I think we may also be starting to hit some limits of Classic Traveller as a system, but I'm not sure and I'm not sure yet if I can quite articulate what I have in mind. It's to do with the lack of player-accessible mechanics to engage the "big picture" - eg what are the Imperial navy doing "off-screen" - in a game that invites an escalation over the course of play to make that "big picture" of growing importance to the PCs.

A contrast in this particular respect would be 4e D&D, which has a resolution framework - skill challenges - that scales up nicely as the PCs move from Heroic to Epic tier.

The idea that agency is achieved through gameplay is something I consider fundamental to OSR sandboxes as I play and run them. The idea that as you play a game the player achieves more skill and gains more mastery over their environment is a crucial part of play. So I think scenario design is an often overlooked part of agency here. For me navigating the environment in that sort of play should require cleverness and be fundamentally fair. What I mean by fair is that actions should not be blocked by things that players have no chance to learn. The text of Moldvay B/X is a damn near perfect distillation of these concepts in action.

This is a slightly different point to the above but also connects to "puzzle solving" and "big picture".

As you know, I have a view that once the fictional scope of the action expands beyond the fairly sparse dungeon context, your constraint that actions should not be blocked by things that players have no chance to learn becomes harder to honour. I'm curious if you agree. And if you do, how does Stars Without Number handle this problem? (Or does it not, or perhaps not need to?)

 

[Ovinomancer]

I would agree with you entirely if, say, all literary study involved fictional characters in fictional texts. But what can one say of examinations of agency in Emerson's "Fate" or William James's Principles of Psychology, both of which have served as the locus of inquiry re agency and other, sometimes related topics in my own work?

This is but one reason why applying a narrow application of a term from one discipline to another seems obfuscating rather than enlightening to me.

Sure, but those concern agency because they're in part or in whole explorations of the concept of agency -- we're not imputing agency to the characters. But, literature is a many-wondered thing -- any statement about it must perforce be a generalization. So, yes, I award you technically correct, which is, as everyone knows, the best kind of correct.

Disclosure, I haven't read Principles, but I have read "Fate." I'm also thrilled that these are punctuated properly -- it's so uncommon that I find myself failing at it due to lack of practice.

 

[pemerton]

what can one say of examinations of agency in Emerson's "Fate" or William James's Principles of Psychology, both of which have served as the locus of inquiry re agency and other, sometimes related topics in my own work?

Are you familiar with AJ Ayer's work on James? (Especially The Origins of Pragamatism.)

A long time ago that was one important focus of my MA.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Which RPG are you talking about?

In Burning Wheel a player can do what you say can't be done. It's also a possibility in Prince Valiant (though more often it would be used for unhorsing rather than killing). It's also a possibility in 4e if the Orc is statted as a minion. And whether the Orc is statted as a minion is not necessarily just the GM's decision. In my 4e GMing I've adjudicated skill checks which have as their outcome the "minionisation" of a NPC. And I'd be surprised if I'm unique in that respect.


This doesn't seem relevant to the question I asked. There is no real Orc. There is no real attack. There are words spoken and dice rolled and numbers tracked and more words spoken. How is it not authorship?


This goes back to the question of what "reality" of where he is or not? Given that you reject the notion that such "reality" might be established as the outcome of action resolution, I assume you mean what the GM has written down or what the GM has decided or maybe what the GM determines by a roll on the random NPC location table.

Those all seem to be processes of establishing a fiction (which, in this context, = authorship). In the case of the brother, you want it to be authored by the GM unilaterally rather than via an action resolution process. Whereas in the case of the Orc you are happy to go the other way (but there's no reason in principle why the GM couldn't just decide that the Orc parries the attack, or that the GM couldn't roll on a random NPC defensive manoeuvre table and get the result that the Orc parries the blow and disarms the PC).

Nothing you are pointing to about your preferences for different processes of authorship explains why the player's ability to bring it about, via game play, that the fiction contains a dead Orc is not a process of authorship. What else would it be?

I hate to say it, but the clear and obvious conclusion is "Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson didn't do it that way, so you are wrong." is pretty much the answer. There is no LOGICAL reprise to your statement, it is clearly true. Sometime in 1973 (roughly) Dave Arneson drew a box around what was allocated as DM and player jobs within 'Blackmoor' and that became 'gospel'. You can break yourself against this brick wall for the rest of your born days, and you will get nowhere.

Actually, I'm amazed to see this thread A) is still active, and B) the discussion hasn't progressed the slightest bit in the last couple weeks since I last read it. I'm sure we have much better things to do. I have a nice set of ideas for a rewrite of HoML, sort of "PbtA meets 4e, with peanut butter filling." Lets turn our attention to something productive instead of re-arguing age-old debates that never change anyone's mind... lol.

 

[Fenris-77]

@AbdulAlhazred - you should check out Vagabonds of Dyfed, its an OSR adjacent game with a PbtA engine. It might not be exactly what you're imagining but it be a place to start. IDK about the peanut butter filling though, other than that there should be some.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@AbdulAlhazred - you should check out Vagabonds of Dyfed, its an OSR adjacent game with a PbtA engine. It might not be exactly what you're imagining but it be a place to start. IDK about the peanut butter filling though, other than that there should be some.

Yeah, there are a lot of interesting games out there. I will give it a check. I was just reading the free version of Ironsworn. It has some interesting stuff in it. If you haven't checked it out, it is 'NQPbtA' but clearly a bit of a spin on PbtA with a bit of BitD thrown in for good measure. Also interesting because it supports GM-less and Solo play.

 

[darkbard]

Are you familiar with AJ Ayer's work on James? (Especially The Origins of Pragamatism.)

A long time ago that was one important focus of my MA.

Alas, by reputation and occasional citation only. It's a helluva broad field!

 

[Bedrockgames]

I would consider this to be a high-degree railroad. Absolutely devoid of player agency, because the outcome was utterly foregone.

And I think here we bump into a fundamental issue over our uses of language. This isnt' at all what I would recognize as a railroad. The GM deciding something about a detail in the setting, even something related to your character, or what you might be interested in, isn't railroading. Railroading is when the choices you make in the setting are being thwarted, so you are railroaded towards some adventure or outcome the GM wants. This is by no means a perfect definition (it has been a long weekend), but it is much closer to my conception of the term railroad, than you saying you are being railroaded because the GM has decided your characters brother is dead. Now that decision could be made in a railoady way: for example you guys are on a quest for your brother and the GM doesn't want that, so he makes him dead. That wouldn't be a good reason in my mind to decide if a relative is dead (I do think when it comes to player character relatives, GMs should be very careful in how they use them).

But I can't say I've ever heard anyone call a GM having power over that setting element as features of a railroad. And this is part of why I find conversations with you frustrating. It seems like many of the things which are defining features of the more open sandbox style (agency, avoiding railroads, a believable world, etc), are you things you very consistently shift the language on to not only make defining features of approaches and games you prefer (like Burning Wheel). But also you treat it as a zero sum game and deduct that proportion of each one from the sandbox style. Perhaps you don't mean anything by it. Perhaps this is just how you really feel about the terms. Perhaps you are stuck in legal mind mode, because it is related to your profession and that is just how you make points. I don't know. But this is the aspect of engaging with you I find quite difficult to wrangle with at times.

 

[Campbell]

As you know, I have a view that once the fictional scope of the action expands beyond the fairly sparse dungeon context, your constraint that actions should not be blocked by things that players have no chance to learn becomes harder to honour. I'm curious if you agree. And if you do, how does Stars Without Number handle this problem? (Or does it not, or perhaps not need to?)

I do think it becomes more difficult. I would say that for bigger picture stuff I'm probably somewhat more guided by Apocalypse World style techniques in Stars Without Number. I tend to fail back on them in the absence of more concrete guidance. Stars is pretty much B/X + Classic Traveller so it leaves a lot of blanks for the GM to fill in. XP is also goal based so I generally have a good idea of what players want to do.

I find it somewhat easier to handle if I focus on personalities and factions. SWN has a fairly rich faction framework (for which it is credited for in Blades).

I would say the way I run larger sandboxes is somewhat a synthesis of Sorcerer, Apocalypse World, Blades, Kevin Crawford's instructions, and Moldvay. So probably not what some what some would call true sandboxes.