A Question Of Agency?

[Ovinomancer]

Yep. That's the conclusion I had arrived at as well.

So, it's not an RPG, it's an RP/G. Whenever you're doing the game part, you're not doing the roleplaying part. This is, again, just arguing that roleplaying is play acting only.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Deadly diseases are a part of our world. Brothers die all the time to disease or random violence in such a way that we cannot intervene.

In the real world we don’t lack agency because we can’t control these things, we have agency despite our lack of control over them. Because, even though we have no control over such things, we do have meaningful choices about how we respond to them.

That’s what real world agency looks like.

*Note - this is pretty much identical to the sandbox conception of agency.

I expect there are a LOT of philosophers out there rolling in their graves or gnashing their teeth at this! lol. You cannot even prove that free will exists AT ALL (and believe me, every single attempt to do so has been demonstrated to be circular reasoning of some sort). Maybe there are ways out of that, and maybe not, I won't pass judgment, but my point is you are in fraught territory here, and your analogy doesn't really carry water.

 

[prabe]

So, it's not an RPG, it's an RP/G. Whenever you're doing the game part, you're not doing the roleplaying part. This is, again, just arguing that roleplaying is play acting only.

That seems to follow logically, if you accept the premise that resolution isn't roleplay.

FWIW, I don't think the player determining where the tower was resolution. The resolution gave the player that ... right? privilege? I'm willing to grant that the player looking at the local map and saying, "The Tower is here" is plausibly not roleplaying, but that's the only part of that I can see an argument about (and I'm not making it, to be clear).

 

[FrogReaver]

I expect there are a LOT of philosophers out there rolling in their graves or gnashing their teeth at this! lol. You cannot even prove that free will exists AT ALL (and believe me, every single attempt to do so has been demonstrated to be circular reasoning of some sort). Maybe there are ways out of that, and maybe not, I won't pass judgment, but my point is you are in fraught territory here, and your analogy doesn't really carry water.

Doesn't have to be "proven". The definitions used here are certainly not "proven". You can agree that's the common conception of agency in the real world though?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Doesn't have to be "proven". The definitions used here are certainly not "proven". You can agree that's the common conception of agency in the real world though?

Fundamentally, though, what you're saying is that you have the agency to choose how you react to something you have no control over, which is, well, uninteresting. You always have this. I don't see how this establishes anything that illuminates the topic, unless you're trying to claim that having the agency to choose how you react to a thing is comparable to having the agency to choose how to react to a thing AND the agency to influence or choose the thing in the first place.

This is, ultimately, the crux of the argument that some games have more agency than others -- if I have agency in being able to select an outcome -- not the power to declare by fiat, but the ability to influence it -- then I have more agency than a game were I can only choose how to react to a thing. Specifically, if the GM unilaterally declares the brother dead, I have agency to choose how to react to this. However, if I have the agency to have a say in the outcome, and it goes against me, I retain this exact same agency -- I've lost nothing and gained the agency to have at least contested the idea of my character's brother being dead.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I expect there are a LOT of philosophers out there rolling in their graves or gnashing their teeth at this! lol. You cannot even prove that free will exists AT ALL (and believe me, every single attempt to do so has been demonstrated to be circular reasoning of some sort). Maybe there are ways out of that, and maybe not, I won't pass judgment, but my point is you are in fraught territory here, and your analogy doesn't really carry water.

I didn't see him making the assertion that free will was proven. Maybe I missed something in his post that pointed you towards this. It looked more like a general statement about how we think of having agency in real life. But just to take this point, if one were to conclude free will and agency are the same thing, and that free will can't be known to exist in real life, can it ever be known to exist in a game? And if one takes it a step further and rejects free will existing in real life, surely it can't exist in a game either (since games would be being played by people who don't have free will themselves).

I think what he is trying to say though is, the existence of events outside our control doesn't mean we lack agency, we still get to react and grow. I mean if my brother dies, and it is beyond my control, there are still many things that stem from that which are entirely in my control. And if my brother dies from an illness, and there is nothing I can do to stop it, I wouldn't see his death as meaning I lack agency or free will. I think in life there are events we can control and events we can't. A game should have both in my opinion

EDIT: Also just to weigh in on free will, obviously a contentious issue and people should read the arguments for and against, and form their own conclusions. Personally I find the arguments in favor of free will more compelling, but that is just my opinion.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I just don't understand the deliberate disregard, and even contempt for, the idea that a player has something valuable to contribute behind describing how his character moves around and acts.

I honestly think it mostly has to do with the expected division of responsibility. It’s simply what the predominant game has conditioned people to expect.

When I suggested reducing or limiting GM power, a common counterpoint was that I didn’t trust the GM.

But I feel like that trust needs to go both ways. Do folks who want to keep most responsibility with the GM not trust the players? It kind of seems so....they always assume players will use any and all power they have to reduce risk and overcome obstacles with no challenge.

This seems to me an artifact of one mode of play that gets applied across many modes.

I mean, one would think that responsibility and power being distributed a little more would promote trust because there’d be less ability to actually abuse the power, as well as less need to do so and less desire.

 

[Fenris-77]

Great googly moogly. The last thing this thread needs is a dose of actual arguments about free will. Try and contain yourselves gentlemen.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Tabletop roleplaying doesn't work if the referee is not a fair arbiter.

Keep in mind that the first tabletop roleplaying campaign out there Blackmoor didn't have a setup where the referee was running the "opposition". There were players playing the good guys and players playing the bad the guy. While Dave Arneson was running some NPCs, he mostly adjudicating between two opposing group of players. Later he did run the Blackmoor Dungeon where he handled the monster. But even then there were players who were involved like Sir Fang the Vampire Lord.

I am describing this bit of history to illustrate that the referee being a fair arbiter lies at the heart of tabletop roleplaying. WIthout it none of it work.

It now about having power. It about the fact that a major reason why tabletop roleplaying works is the players only know what their character knows.

Nor is dispersing the decision making about the setting, it locales, creatures and characters is a magic bullet for making a campaign better. Instead of relying on one guy getting it right, now you have to rely on the group getting it right. It can work, but small group dynamic ensures that there will be as many negative outcomes as there with a single human referee although they will be different.

I think you betray a very 'classical' notion of how RPGs work. This would have been quite fairly considered the consensus view, with perhaps only a very few dissenters, in something like 1980.

If you read Dungeon World, for example, nothing like 'fair arbiter' exists as a role. Nor is there a notion of 'secrets hidden from the players' (there may be things the GM has in mind that he will reveal later, IF doing so follows from the principles of play).

I don't disagree that giving players authorial power is no panacea. However, pretty much all modern 'narratively focused games' provide pretty strict regulation in that area. Again DW handily illustrates this, as it actually doesn't outright grant this authority to the players. Instead it provides pathways by which they can exercise it, and principles of play which govern the GM's process by which these pathways are actualized. There's no specific point in a PbtA game where the GM is told "the player is in charge of authoring content here" except in very circumscribed ways. Usually the GM is just told that he has to talk about a certain thing, explain a specific thing/subject/situation, etc. What I mean is, 'authorial chaos' would be a legitimate critique, but in practice it doesn't really arise due to game design techniques.

While your description of Blackmoor may be correct (I really have never read a detailed description of how it was played), oppositional play like that is a huge rarity in RPGs. It is more a feature of Free Kriegsspiel which fed into the 'Braunsteins' which inspired Dave's development of Blackmoor. I'd point out that this mode doesn't really work well unless you can either guarantee that both 'teams' are engaged in every session, or you develop a troupe play methodology. That may in fact be one reason that the LBBs were used that way a lot, by Gary Gygax for instance. Again, I don't know, but his early games sound like they at least featured competitive play, if not outright teams fighting it out with each other. Troupe play mostly died pretty early on, and I can frankly say I never witnessed oppositional play at all, and I started playing in about 1975. My point is, yes, a referee would be needed there, but not so much in modern play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Just to reiterate Estar's point, you can't be a dictator and have a functioning group. You have to earn the trust of your players and that means being fair, and not abusing the authority to go on a power trip. You are there to facilitate the game.

I beg to differ. By all accounts Gary was exactly a dictator. 1e AD&D is festooned with places where he declares this outright, admonishing rule with an iron fist. HOWEVER I am sure he was also pretty flexible in terms of 'grants of license' within specific narrow limits. We already discussed his "let the player map out the castle location" statement in 1e DMG for example. I think he did this a lot, and also often added elements to the game via brainstorming with his inner circle (remember, they were WRITING the game, so necessarily there had to be a process for generating new material like this). Still, he was well-known for being dictatorial when it suited him, and his games were fantastically successful by all accounts.

I also played with such a GM for many many years. He would absolutely never yield control of deciding anything of consequence in his campaign to any player or the action of any character. Yet he was, and probably is though we don't get to talk anymore, enormously successful as a GM. This kind of GMing is pretty common. When it is pushed too far, it usually fails, unless the GM in question has a huge amount of innate talent and creativity (such that spectating on their doings is worth the price of admission).

Finally, I think I made the same point, you cannot take it too far. There are conventions and such, but I still liken this to a Sovereign and subjects model. Yeah, there was that pesky Magna Carta, and now and then Parliament kicked the King's ass, but the King's word was still pretty much law. That's exactly the situation here, and generations of people did not see that as freedom, or they never would have rebelled again and again. Democracy seems like a better solution overall...