A Question Of Agency?

[FrogReaver]

One reasonable conception of agency I've read divides it into three types, ranked lowest to highest (amount of agency). Here's a quick and dirty precis:

Agency Level 1: The freedom to deal with the situation. This is the an ogre jumps out of the birthday cake, what do you do? level of agency. Very common, and seldom quashed except by railroad tycoons.

Agency Level 2: The freedom to choose the situation. This is the level where players have the ability to choose their own route through an adventure. Whether that's multiple paths to pick from, or the freedom to creatively think of other approaches on the spot. Summed up, this is free exploration.

Agency Level 3: The freedom to choose the goal. This is sandbox agency, where the goals of play are player decided. They can do whatever they want. Rescue the princess, wash their hair, or go into business selling trinkets crafted by needy Goblin orphans.

What's interesting about this is that I see people talking about sandboxes and both levels 2 and 3 as the 'definitional agency' of that playstyle. I'm not suggesting that's wrong, only that different styles of sandbox involve different versions and complexions of the latter two. Most RPGs are pretty heavy on level 1 no matter what system or style. I wouldn't say this is by any means the last word in how to construe agency, but I do find it a helpful model.

I get where you are coming from and the framework is very closely aligned to how I view things. I don't like the term level there as I think players really establish what kind of hierarchy toward those types based on what they prefer and/or see as being less common.

Not to speak for people, but the impression I get from many is that "more agency" translates best to "more types of agency". Which is why I imagine that those explaining to me that my playstyle doesn't give players the agency to modify and introduce setting elements during play seems like such an important point. If you measure agency by the number of types present then showing me that my style doesn't contain all the types yours does is primae facie proof that my style has less agency. And if that's the measurement we are using for agency I would fully agree with that.

But no where has anyone defined what it actually means to have more agency. It's just a vague notion instead of even an attempt at a concrete definition.

 

[pemerton]

I posted a section from my book on Imperial Exams (a few pages back now I think, but it includes a quoted section on the exams and the tests for them), there is a whole procedure laid out which I used (it basically boils down to attending the relevant exams when they are offered then passing all the skill checks on the list (which isn't easy).

Would it have made a difference to the play experience if, instead of test/skill checks, the GM just decided the exams were too hard and the PC failed?

What terms should we use then? What would be acceptable to you as a term, that also doesn't distort what we are trying to say?

<snip>

I think any objective person who looks at the trends in sandbox play would definitely say our definition is much more in line with how sandbox gamers talk about agency.

For reasons of your own you have rejected the phrase "sandbox agency".

Given that I am not confused by anything you've posted, it doesn't really affect me what term you use. But for the reasons I've stated I think calling it "old school" agency would be misleading. I mean, I could call my sort of gaming "old school skill-testing" if I wanted to, but I would expect others to object that that's a rather misleading description of it.

It just seems to me what you want is for us to concede that your definition of agency is the right one, and the style of play you are talking about it maximizes agency the most.

Once again the normative language. I still don't get it.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'd think of the "agency types" as more sliders or gauges than switches. So, maybe the ability to choose from goals you know about is X amount of level 3, and the ability to create a goal is Y amount?

That's my view as well. There are many types of agency. The difference is that you are viewing each type of agency as having it's own independent axis that we can slide up and down. It's not been shown that each type of agency is actually independent (at least based on the current methods of producing them), which leaves open the idea that increasing some types of agency can decrease others because they aren't actually independent.

 

[pemerton]

In an old school sandbox like Moldvay you start with almost unlimited autonomy. You can pretty much go anywhere and do anything.

Maybe I've misunderstood something, but to me this doesn't seem right.

Moldvay tells us that play starts at the dungeon entrance. B2 Keep on the Borderlands - the module that shipped with my copy of Moldvay Basic - actually deviates from that expectation, but it's not true that in B2 the players can have their PCs go anywhere and do anything.

In a Moldvay Basic game I think the whole thing will fall apart if the players don't have their PCs enter the dungeon the GM has prepared for them.

 

[prabe]

That's my view as well. There are many types of agency. The difference is that you are viewing each type of agency as having it's own independent axis that we can slide up and down. It's not been shown that each type of agency is actually independent (at least based on the current methods of producing them), which leaves open the idea that increasing some types of agency can decrease others because they aren't actually independent.

Thinking of them as sliders/gauges/axes doesn't necessarily mean they're independent. It's possible they're deeply interrelated.

 

[Fenris-77]

Well, ItW&W, as a supplement, is more focused on smaller wilderness areas, with the stated goal being nifty 'wilderness dungeons'. This is predicated on the presence of paths of various sizes sorts and difficulties. Travel at the 6 mile hex level is about the initial binary of follow the path or not, and it goes from there. Staying on the path means encounter rolls with bespoke tables and eventual arrival at .... wherever the path leads. Leaving the path means navigation tests and a roll (not easy) with failure meaning a roll on the becoming lost table, which tells you how long and where you end up. Lets call IWW (a shorter acronym) a system for regional level travel, or something between one and a handful of adjacent 6 mile hexes. The construction of these wilderness dungeons is a randomized system that scatters adventure nodes of different sizes and sorts over a hex and then connects them with various types paths.

For the perilous journey kind of travel you're talking about I'd probably use something more or less like the DW journey rules from Perilous Wilds. Navigations rolls, roles for different party members, but streamlined for OSR play and with a heavy emphasis on resource management (food and light are the gas in my adventure engine). I have a bunch of random tables that cover what DW would call discoveries, usually arranged by region and terrain type, so it's more than just wandering monsters.

In both cases, I'd use the IWW camp loop. IWW focuses on water, food, and shelter as the core needs. The party roles 3d6, one for each need, with successes on a 4+ and appropriate skills granting advantage on the roll. 3 successes means everyone is fine, and less successes add one or more levels of exhaustion to one or more party members who can consume resources to mitigate the exhaustion. Six levels of exhaustion kills you, so there's some bite to the rules. The encounter rules I use have some resource consumption built into them and I also have resource consumption baked into my rules for resting during the day. The goal there is to thread food and light resource management as deep into the day-to-day as I can so it seems less like an occasional mini-game and more like a fact of life.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I’m about to commit the cardinal sin of rpg discussions. So forgive me in advance. It’s very relevant though and I think our avoidance of this topic is clouding this agency discussion.

when a player is determining a piece of the setting is he roleplaying in that moment? He surely is advocating for his character - but is that roleplaying?

that isn’t to say he isn’t roleplaying in other moments but is he roleplaying in that particular moment?

If you look at @pemerton's Burning Wheel play example, with 'remembering the tower is nearby', can you call that anything EXCEPT RP? What else would it be? Obviously this might not be true of every example of player PC advocacy. It may not be true of every example of other sorts of play either, depending on your definition of RP...

 

[Fenris-77]

Maybe I've misunderstood something, but to me this doesn't seem right.

Moldvay tells us that play starts at the dungeon entrance. B2 Keep on the Borderlands - the module that shipped with my copy of Moldvay Basic - actually deviates from that expectation, but it's not true that in B2 the players can have their PCs go anywhere and do anything.

In a Moldvay Basic game I think the whole thing will fall apart if the players don't have their PCs enter the dungeon the GM has prepared for them.

The Moldvay adventure design process (which I just read about half an hour ago, coincidentally), calls for the map to start with the base village (or town etc) and the dungeon to be placed first, somewhat centrally, and the rest of the map built around that. B2 fits that pattern like a glove.

That said, old school sandboxes aren't by definition places of unlimited autonomy either. They might feel like that if the GM is enough of a masochist to richly detail every single hex for leagues around, but that's not how Moldvay would describe the process. Unless by autonomy you mean the ability to wander from hex to hex dealing with whatever the random encounter tables vomits into your path.

 

[Fenris-77]

Thinking of them as sliders/gauges/axes doesn't necessarily mean they're independent. It's possible they're deeply interrelated.

This is precisely the way I'd describe things.

 

[Bedrockgames]

For reasons of your own you have rejected the phrase "sandbox agency".

I proposed that. Frogreaver said it encompasses more than sandbox so I said fair enough. My preference is for plain english, without jargon, and for language to reflect general use. But here I am just trying to figure out a way to navigate the conversation