D&D General What is player agency to you?

[mamba]

I do think it's worth separating the two for purposes of discussion. Though I would bet certain folks (I'd bet @pemerton, for example) would argue that they are linked enough that they SHOULD NOT be separated.

Thoughts?

I am separating them, even though there obviously is overlap / one influencing the other.

To me the player can declare what their char does, but the resulting outcome is not something they can also declare. That either is determined by rules or the DM (when there are no rules, or when the rules for some reason get overridden as an exception)

To me player agency is the player deciding what action to take, not the player telling the DM the result of their action.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I don’t think this is unclear, the DM does, they are in a better position to / are the ones having more details by default

If it is the most logical position that prevails, and the DM, by force of being DM, gets to decide which position is more logical, then why are you disagreeing with me?

Your position isn’t that the most logical position prevails. It’s that the DM’s position prevails, by dint of being DM.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

yes, ultimately the DM decides. In no way does this mean he can just abuse that position and force the players to do whatever he wants, but it does mean that he can deny an action the player would like to take when from the DM’s perspective there is a good reason why it should not be possible.

When push comes to shove, one person has to decide, for me that will always be the DM. 99% of the time we are not in that situation however and things get resolved cooperatively.

The premise was ‘because the feature says the noble can get an audience, that means there is no way the DM can ever deny one’, I disagree with that, pure and simple.

Okay, let's take a step back.

I have said, repeatedly (I can dig up links, if you really want them, but I doubt you do), that there really might occasionally be times when that's the only option. I really did say that!

My problem is, people act like this is pretty common. E.g. it'll happen many, many times in a single campaign--perhaps several times a session even. That, to me, sounds like a pretty big problem. Hence why I have used phrases like "we should be looking for a reason to say yes, not looking for a reason to say no." I feel pretty frustrated, further, when anything I say about how something can actually work, and is in fact helpful and productive, is instantly dismissed as being unrealistic BS, as opposed to something meaningful and consistent (because, guess what, I care about world consistency to! I just recognize that that is one food group among several, not to be abandoned, but not be obsessed over to the exclusion of other incredibly vital nutrients!)

I gave my example of time-travel audience-seeking because the argument I saw looked like--no more and no less--"this is obviously stupid, we all agree it's obviously stupid, so that means we've established a hard line." But I don't agree with that. This alleged hard line isn't there. You have made a leap, here, from "I, mamba, don't think that makes sense" to "it's inherently unbelievable, it doesn't matter if you happened to make it believable for you, it never ever could be for me."

I'm saying--maybe, possibly, potentialy--think about how such a thing might actually be believable, in an open-minded context?

Nobody--neither me nor my players--"changed" anything to have such a time-travel audience happen. Nothing was warped or twisted. It required no stupid inconsistencies, and certainly didn't turn the world into this trivial "Here guys, I'll give you absolutely everything you ever ask for, without any effort, no matter how little sense that makes, because that's totally awesome right?!?!"

It's frankly a little bit insulting, the way you've characterized this--that my game is somehow valueless, meaningless, inconsistent, boring, challenge-free. Merely a trite, flat exercise in wish-fulfillment, without any care whatsoever for having a world that "exists" in some fictional sense. I actually try very very hard to make a world that DOES have such durability, that DOES follow logic, that DOES act under rules. I encourage my players to work out the rules, and the exceptions. They delight in looking back and saying, "Oh. OH! It...it was like that all along, wasn't it? I just couldn't see it before. But it was always there!"

 

[Maxperson]

I suspect a non-negligible % of DMs disagree on the force a player portion.

Maybe, but they don't really matter. What can they do? Either the players agree to what the DM wants or they walk away and find a new game. He can't actually force them to do anything. They always have the option to leave and find a better game.

Players cannot force the DM. The DM cannot force the players. Either they agree for whatever reasons or find/run new games. That's one reason I've said for so long that it's important to find people who share your playstyle.

@bloodtide, the OP, is QUITE vocal about how his game is extremely railroaded. Which means he 100% forces the players to go down the specific paths he wants. And he is also vocal that players in no way shape or form, share the same authority (to force him to do anything). That seems to be what got the ball rolling on the agency discussion.

And they have the option to find a better game. You can't force someone who has the option to leave. For whatever reason, they are okay with the railroading and playing in the game of someone that the OP admits they dislike. I don't get it, but there it is.

 

[FrogReaver]

If it is the most logical position that prevails, and the DM, by force of being DM, gets to decide which position is more logical, then why are you disagreeing with me?

Because they way you said it means something different than the way he said it.

You: so you are saying whatever the dm says is most logical simply because the dm said it

Me: what the dm says is going to tend to be more logical because the dm is privy to more info than the players

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Maybe, but they don't really matter. What can they do? Either the players agree to what the DM wants or they walk away and find a new game. He can't actually force them to do anything. They always have the option to leave and find a better game.

Players cannot force the DM. The DM cannot force the players. Either they agree for whatever reasons or find/run new games. That's one reason I've said for so long that it's important to find people who share your playstyle.

And they have the option to find a better game. You can't force someone who has the option to leave. For whatever reason, they are okay with the railroading and playing in the game of someone that the OP admits they dislike. I don't get it, but there it is.

You significantly underestimate the social cost of disengaging from a social activity.

As someone with social anxiety, I can tell you, this is a very serious cost. I have, more than once in my life, felt unable to pay it--even though the activity in question had become not at all enjoyable, and I would have walked away if I had the spoons and the social capital to pay such a price.

 

[Maxperson]

Read it instead as as “oblige the DM to…”

I don’t think being obliged to follow the rules is doing it wrong.

Depends. I think this is a social contract issue and not one of system. D&D or not D&D, if the group comes together under the social agreement that the DM will or won't do certain things, such as follow the rules exactly or house rule to his heart's content, then that's what should happen.

 

[Maxperson]

You significantly underestimate the social cost of disengaging from a social activity.

As someone with social anxiety, I can tell you, this is a very serious cost. I have, more than once in my life, felt unable to pay it--even though the activity in question had become not at all enjoyable, and I would have walked away if I had the spoons and the social capital to pay such a price.

I can see that on a case by case basis. For some people this would be the case and I'm sorry you were in that situation. It certainly sucks when that happens.

 

[Pedantic]

No, it's not. This isn't a question of 'realism', it's a question of internal consistency and whether or not something makes sense in the context of the game fiction.

I think we're really circling a question about an impartial, fictional world motivated by internal causes unrelated to the PC, which is in theory being run as software on the GM's brain.

This is obviously a flawed process, and we're essentially dealing with two reactions to that. Acceptance as the best possible expression of that setting that can be achieved with the technologies we're working with, or acceptance that such a thing is intrinsically flawed and abandoning the goal in favor of another.

The concern is either the GM might slip up and not in fact, rigorously work from internal causes (or, seeing as that is impossible, do their best to fake it to an appropriate level of abstraction), and if that's the case, then surely it's better to just let players get involved in creation so that events are at least collectively agreed upon.

Doing so immediately means that events can't actually be the result of internal causes. The game state morphs from a fictional world being explored to a shared fiction being authored. Preserving that state, is fundamentally I think why players cede authority to a GM; it's possible for a GM to use player choices/desires as the basis for world events, but it isn't guaranteed and the whole professional responsibility of the role more or less lies in not doing so (or only doing under some other criteria that everyone agrees will meaningfully improve the game).

So, dilemma: do you set up an agent to do their best to do a probably impossible thing for you, or do you change what you want to something else, which is possible?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Because they way you said it means something different than the way he said it.

You: so you are saying whatever the dm says is most logical simply because the dm said it

Me: what the dm says is going to tend to be more logical because the dm is privy to more info than the players

And the DM is privy to that info solely because the DM invented that info.

That is exactly what this is. The DM is inventing what they feel like inventing. That's what DMs do in this paradigm. They invent what interests them.

So "DM is privy to more info than the players" is in fact equivalent to "the DM has said so." Because the one, and only, reason the DM is privy to more info...is because they invented that info.

I can see that on a case by case basis. For some people this would be the case and I'm sorry you were in that situation. It certainly sucks when that happens.

The real irony is, the one time this actually applied to TTRPG stuff, it wasn't the DM, it was one of the players. He was a complete jerk and almost certainly drove that (first-time!) DM away from ever attempting DMing, or at least from doing so for a long, long time thereafter.

Usually this sort of thing happens in more "let's go do an X" things, or with long-time friends who REALLY love a particular game/activity that I just don't like, but which I have to play if I want to spend time with them. Well, past tense; I intentionally let those friendships die out because of...other issues.