A Question Of Agency?

[FrogReaver]

This = not having the ability to do X means to you a lack agency over X hasn't ever been a part of my definition of agency. If you think otherwise then we have some crossed wires somewhere.

So you wouldn’t say a player that lacks the ability to kill a dragon, lacks agency over/to kill a dragon?

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think people are going to have different answers here, and that this is more of an ongoing conversation in each style within the hobby. Ultimately I find, when I talk with Estar, a lot of what he says about fairness resonates. But there is a lot here.

For me, first and foremost is fair application of the rules. I shouldn't give apply the rules differently to Steve than I do to John. And I think I would add to that, you should apply the rules fairly to the monsters and the NPCs too (this may just be my own take, I can't say I am speaking for others on this one). To me that is important because that gets at the fairness of the players expectations of things like strategic choices, tactics, etc. I think fairness also extends to what the players try to do: if a player wants to start a cult to a new deity of coffee, and has some methods for persuading people to follow, the GM ought to hear those out and try to adjudicate that scenario as fairly to the player as possible (and unfair adjudication here would be something like, the GM simply not wanting to deal with a coffee cult at the moment, so he makes it never materialize or barely materialize). A fair GM will take that goal seriously. Now maybe starting a coffee cult in that setting, at that moment, with the players present resources, is a bit boneheaded and won't work. But I think a fair GM will also give the player a sense why such efforts are not working, so it is clear it isn't just an arbitrary decision. Fairness is giving players the win, even when it is inconvenient to the campaign, the adventure, what the GM wants, if the players legitimate get a win. Fairness is also how you treat people at the table, and I do think that can extend to situations like having a player who simply isn't good at one aspect of play but wants to engage it (here is where I usually give people an A for effort, or I rely on things like Skill rolls to help balance that stuff our). I do think this one is a delicate situation because if you shift something like that for a player who is having a hard time, a player who isn't may feel like they are having to work harder for their success. But just as an example, Elliot in both those games is one of the most eloquent players in the group, and a great actor when it comes to playing his character. I am not, but I can string sentences together and make a compelling case for things. If I were a GM handing me and elliot in the same situation, I would focus more on what I (the player in the example) is saying, and more on Elliot's performance probably to get a sense of how convincing each one is being (because obviously there is a massive disparity in acting talent there). So I think as long as the player is bringing something to the table, in those cases, it is pretty manageable and neither one feels shortchanged.

Sure, I can see all of that. I wouldn't ever say that the concept of fairness is entirely different for a RPG, just that it would be different in some ways. Certainly you want all participants to feel that they're all being treated similarly.

I think I would still look at participants individually and craft my approach accordingly, but I don't think it needs to be limited to that personal level, and let's be honest, even the most hardcase view of "GM as neutral and fair" is going to allow for at least a little of this. Gygax may have cackled with glee at ripping up the character sheet of some grognard who tried to take down Acererak, but he'd likely not be quite so gleeful toward a 10 year old who only just started playing.

But beyond that personal angle, there are the game elements. Classes or playbooks, races, archetypes, backgrounds....all that stuff. In most cases a game is going to include characters who have different features like these, and I think those give a GM the ability to think of those characters and treat them differently. I think we all have an idea that playing a caster is going to be different from playing a skilled rogue type.

Is it necessary to treat these characters fairly? In some cases yes. If each of them are shootnig a bow at a troll, then the troll should have the same AC and HP and so on.

But what about in the fiction that we craft or introduce as the GM? Is what's challenging going to be the same to each character? Do we tailor things with the character in mind? If I have just the wizard, isn't a trap filled dungeon kind of douchey? And if I have a rogue, isn't having nothing but magical obstacles kind of a pain? Now, a party may have both of these, and so that's great...but then we're starting to look at them as a team, and then the idea of what's fair is being applied to them collectively.

How much do we tailor the challenges to the specific characters present? Both individually, and as a group? Does that matter when it comes to how much agency we tend to think the players have?

 

[Fenris-77]

So you wouldn’t say a player that lacks the ability to kill a dragon, lacks agency over/to kill a dragon?

Agency is about the ability to decide to try and go kill the dragon. Agency would also be in having choice about how to approach the the dragons lair, and in being able to enact whatever plan you came up with to best the beast. The ability to actually succeed, however, is something else. I think the confusion probably stems from the very idea of agency over, which I wouldn't use on purpose, but I may have given you the wrong impression about at some point, or we've gotten confused some other way.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I look at this as a spectrum, and a given GM just kind of reflects the 'harsh realities' of the setting to the degree they are harsh. I have players who like the challenge the setting can present to them. So I do make an effort to adhere to what I call 'the evolving martial landscape'. This is rather specific to wuxia, but in a wuxia campaign, your 'rise' is very much linked to your martial prowess. And what techniques you know, what techniques you develop, what combinations you come up with, will matter in terms of your ability to defeat people and impose your will on the setting. I think every GM handles this challenge differently, I tend to take a peaks and valleys approach, where if the players are weak, no one is particularly threatened by them or concerned with defeating their martial style. As they rise up, and gain more power, and get increasingly effective, or if they are just well built from the start, which can happen, they pose a greater threat, which is going to cause NPCs and sects to be more likely to form alliances against them, and it is also going to cause people to try to devise counters against their techniques (so they may see more responses to their arsenal emerging over time). I don't know if this addresses your post suffiencitly @hawkeyefan but your post prompted these thoughts.

I think this is an interesting element. Again, I'll lean on Blades in the Dark as a way of talking about it.

In Blades, this progression of the characters as a group is formalized in several ways. First and most obviously, they pick a specific type of crew to be, and they have a crew sheet for their team that works very much like a character sheet. It has abilities they get to select as they gain crew XP and advance. The crew also has a Tier, and this is kind of a ranking within the setting. So a Tier 0 gang is one that most people won't have heard of, and other gangs and factions likely are indifferent toward. It also gives a sense of the quality of their gear and their lair and so on.

So, a crew can gain XP, and then gain new abilities or new lair features, or underlings that work for them. They can also move up in Tier. The process for this is to gain Rep (which they gain with each Score they pull off). When they gain enough Rep, they can spend it to move up a Tier. So their standing improves overall, they can start to afford better gear, their underlings are more capable.....all that kind of stuff. It also means that other Factions, likely higher ranking Factions with more power and influence, may start to take notice of the crew. There's a very formal player facing element to it all, it can be measured and tracked, and the players can work toward those goals clearly.

Do you think this would fit in your kind of game?

 

[FrogReaver]

Agency is about the ability to decide to try and go kill the dragon. Agency would also be in having choice about how to approach the the dragons lair, and in being able to enact whatever plan you came up with to best the beast. The ability to actually succeed, however, is something else. I think the confusion probably stems from the very idea of agency over, which I wouldn't use on purpose, but I may have given you the wrong impression about at some point, or we've gotten confused some other way.

To me the meaningful part would rule that out (other than under extraordinary circumstances). I don’t view suicide by dragon as a meaningful choice (at least without additional context that could make it so).

also, nothing I’m talking about is the ability to succeed.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would honestly have to play it to see, but I think for my players it would certainly be an issue. I've often tried to bring in more abstract procedures for this sort of thing and the rejection level for them is quite high. I designed a whole sect building system, and it worked in theory, and worked if it remained at an abstract, background level, but the players pretty consistently wanted to get into specifics and that is what made it break down for me. I am not sure though if this would do that or not. Also, some of it might be workable as a way of buffering specifics if I understand because it gives material bonuses for controlling different elements of a faction? So if I read you correctly, one way I could use something like that is allow my players to play things out as they do (say they go into a quarter of the city where an enemy gang operates and take over a couple of workshops they control, if I can identify what that means on the map you showed me, I could note that and it would provide them with some kind of ongoing advantage or resource. Again though, the problem is the specificity. My players are the types who will take over a workshop, and then start utilizing it pretty finely in the game

I think a proper way to put it might be they are setting first before mechanics type players. Where any mechanics are just meant to reflect the setting material and the characters who inhabit it. And they often don't find the mechanics themselves engaging (it is more about having mechanics that just don't get in the way, or do what they need for what they want to do in the setting).

But again, a little hard to say without trying it and absorbing the information through play. There is a lot in your post I read, but I couldn't translate into a visualization of actual play (just due to lack of playing it myself).

But I will say, even if it turns out it isn't portable into my game, I would still like to play the game on its own terms so I understand it. And I am sure I would be able to find some inspiration from it for helping me solve this criminal underworld puzzle (it is something I've never quite cracked or settled on).

I think, with BitD specifically, that it is a game which largely eschews highly concrete structure, even in 'tactical' play. So, your PC's inventory is at least somewhat abstract, for example. You could technically pull almost anything out of your pocket, following some sort of mechanical process (I'm no expert on the details). The same thing applies to things like 'turf' and whatnot. The bonuses your crew might get from those MIGHT actually be described in specific terms, when they become relevant to the fiction. Otherwise they remain relatively abstract, the players know certain benefits can accrue to them, and maybe they are even defined a bit more clearly in various ways (I'm not sure, I know there is 'downtime', 'vices', 'patrons(?)' etc.).

So, clearly there is a bit of an 'impedance mismatch' there, your players expect a concrete mechanistic 'rules as physics' sort of approach. The process outlined above however is disconnected from that. IME it is hard to bridge the gap. In the 90's I tried to make a really thorough sort of sandbox (it had a strong meta-plot, so maybe some purists would balk at this description) which had a lot of this sort of abstraction, and tried to 'map' it back into concrete terms. It didn't turn out to be a very viable approach. Players simply have their own agendas and unless you either constantly rework things, or use a lot of force, the whole structure simply won't hang together. It also ends up being very obtuse. The players rarely can figure out exactly what is connected to what, etc. This feeds back to my observations of 'game reality' not really existing to any appreciable degree. It turns out players were simply inventing all sorts of reasons why things happened in their minds, which they took to be both canonical and totally reasonable. In the meantime I'd simply started from different assumptions, of which an almost limitless range exist.

Now, maybe someone else can make this work, but my realization, particularly when I started running 4e, was that simply granting the players the authority to 'be right' in their assumptions and not trying to nail much of anything down worked a VAST amount better. It was 100x less work for me, and the player's engagement with and feeling of identifying with the world and seeing it as working in a comprehensible way, increased a LOT. So the 4e game ran as basically a reprise/follow on to the supposed events of the 90's 2e campaign, and it was a lot more successful and fun. That game ran for a few years, although it kind of bogged down a few years ago. Maybe I should revive it

 

[Fenris-77]

To me the meaningful part would rule that out (other than under extraordinary circumstances). I don’t view suicide by dragon as a meaningful choice (at least without additional context that could make it so).

also, nothing I’m talking about is the ability to succeed.

The ability to make that choice, assuming it was important to the character somehow, is the important part. As for success, you were the one that pointed toward lacks the ability to kill as a measure of agency (or a lack of agency more precisely). I wouldn't say that phrase has anything to do with agency.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I agree. I wouldn't describe my own campaigns as sandboxes, but there are points where the party can choose from numerous (in some cases innumerable) options. Heck, my Saturday campaign is kinda at a point like that, and they're high enough level that I'm probably going to ask them what they're thinking of doing, so I can be ready for it (or at least think about it before it happens).

I definitely think it's possible for a game to be written so some GM-ish authority devolves to the players. I think it's possible for a game to constrain its GM tightly enough that it feels as though that's happening, even though it's not exactly (I think this is what PbtA games do, but I'm far from an expert and I'm more than willing to acknowledge error if need be). There are games that specifically call for the players to be involved from the start of the campaign in setting-building (Dresden Files and Fate Core come to mind). I think it's possible for a given GM to recognize that running a more collaborative-built world doesn't work as well in their brain (it me) without it meaning that the games or the GM are bad.

Right. I know that ultimately, all of this stuff we're talking about comes down to a matter of preference. I think some of the difficulty is in confusion about definitions and the like and the impact that has on discussion, but I think if we just try to move past that, we can start to have a bit of a discussion again (the collective we of the thread I mean, not specifically you and I).

I think explaining actual processes helps to shed light on things. Lacking those, descriptions of the fiction don't really offer much. Many games could produce identical fictional results....I think the matter is how they are produced. I do think there is definite value in looking at these examples and then reflecting on our own play to see how they contrast.

Why? Because creative people are drawn to TRPGs, and it's a waste not to use all the creativity at a given table. Just because I didn't like the collaboratively built setting I ended up running (not to mention the process took my table way, way longer than advertised) doesn't mean I don't like the idea. It's why--though I've griped a little here and there about an instance of getting 11,000 words of backstory--I have blank spaces in my world and I explicitly ask for how people's characters came to be where they are at the start of the campaign; and, I specifically grab things from those backstories and use them to set up stories in the campaigns and tie the characters to the setting and the campaigns.

Yeah. The guy who gave me 11,000 words of backstory has since acknowledged that he went at least a little overboard--as an example.

Right! To tie this back to my driving analogy.....the kid just brought the truck back with a missing bumper, a broken headlight, a dent in the door, and a flat tire. How likely is the GM to hand him the keys again?

This is why I think examples of degenerate playing and GMing don't help. At best, they may highlight a possible weak point in a system, but generally speaking they seem to be more about trying to "win" the discussion.

To kind of put that in perspective, I'm far less worried about a tyrant GM who stomps all over any decision I make and who openly shoves my PC back on the path of his plot and brags about his authority to do so......I'm far more concerned with the GM who is thoughtful and has a method, but who doesn't realize that certain decisions he makes are undermining my decisions as a player.

I'm not afraid of that because it's worse.....but just because it's more common, it's harder to spot with a lot of games, and very often the GM doesn't even know they're doing it themselves.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here is how the metaphor breaks down:

In an actual pond, the interaction of ripples is (i) literal, and (ii) takes place in accordance with physical laws that are quite impersonal.

In the metaphorical pond of the sandbox, there are no literal interactions of ripples. The GM looks at his/her pre-authored ripples, looks at the players' ripples, and decides what the interaction looks like.

As usual, you say in 20 words or so what it takes me 3 paragraphs to say.

 

[prabe]

Right. I know that ultimately, all of this stuff we're talking about comes down to a matter of preference. I think some of the difficulty is in confusion about definitions and the like and the impact that has on discussion, but I think if we just try to move past that, we can start to have a bit of a discussion again (the collective we of the thread I mean, not specifically you and I).

I think explaining actual processes helps to shed light on things. Lacking those, descriptions of the fiction don't really offer much. Many games could produce identical fictional results....I think the matter is how they are produced. I do think there is definite value in looking at these examples and then reflecting on our own play to see how they contrast.

I agree that talking about processes helps some, but I think that principles matter at least as much from a GMing standpoint as game mechanics. I know there are some in this thread who prefer to consider games as they are published--so the principles of play in, e.g., BitD, don't apply to D&D, even if a given DM is importing things. @Ovinomancer said elsewhere, IIRC, that he runs D&D 5E with much more of the mechanical bits player-facing (announced DC, public rolls, maybe other things) but when he talks about D&D 5E, the game, he's talking about what's in the books. That's fine, when one is talking about what's in the books; but I think it's fair to think of it as incomplete if someone who runs 5E is looking for ways to increase player engagement (since I think one can grab tricks or principles from other games and apply them to 5E to great effect).

This is why I think examples of degenerate playing and GMing don't help. At best, they may highlight a possible weak point in a system, but generally speaking they seem to be more about trying to "win" the discussion.

I can see this. Of course, I'm not sure many of the instances of bad GMing I've seen discussed have been exactly degenerate--there have been systems published that seemed almost intended to generate what many would describe as "bad GMing" if played according to what was in the books.

To kind of put that in perspective, I'm far less worried about a tyrant GM who stomps all over any decision I make and who openly shoves my PC back on the path of his plot and brags about his authority to do so......I'm far more concerned with the GM who is thoughtful and has a method, but who doesn't realize that certain decisions he makes are undermining my decisions as a player.

I'm not afraid of that because it's worse.....but just because it's more common, it's harder to spot with a lot of games, and very often the GM doesn't even know they're doing it themselves.

Yeah. I think intentionally bad (abusive) GMs are ... less common than some people seem to think, but more common than I think most people would prefer. I think unintentionally bad GMs are much more common, and led astray by the games they're running (or by games they've run, and now they're applying those lessons to other games).