D&D General What is player agency to you?

[soviet]

no one ever disagreed with this, it probably was said 10 times by now too, not exactly a hot new take

Other posters are.

We might say narrative control instead of player agency, but the principle is clear. In one of the two the player exerts more control over the ‘story’

No, it's entirely through their character's actions.

 

[Maxperson]

No, it's entirely through their character's actions.

Actually, almost all of them are also through NPC actions. You seek shelter at a noble's manor, the NPC has to take action to say yes or no. You want healing at a local temple as an Acolyte, the NPCs there have to take action to say yes or no. You want your criminal contact to do something, that NPC has to take action to say yes or no.

This is what you are overlooking. Almost none of the background abilities are player/PC action only. They require DM/NPC action as well, and those are dependent on in-fiction circumstances which can sometimes mean the ability doesn't work.

 

[Micah Sweet]

FWIW, I don't think that the problem is some hypothetical other person you are imagining denigrating your favored game on this basis. Instead, I personally think that this reflects your own belief and values that more player agency is better and that it exists as moral good that should be maximized. You would like to believe that you are maximizing player agency. However, when you are confronted with the idea that other roleplaying games may have more player agency than the games you prefer, you perceive it as a threat to your belief system, wherein you claim to value player agency and therefore desire to maximize player agency.

Yet instead of seeing the value of how restricting player agency in key areas enhances your play experience, you become upset that your game preference could hypothetically be perceived as having less player agency than those games that exist outside of your preferences. Again, this is because your own choice to see player agency as a moral good or simply in terms of more player agency is better. Because if you choose to believe that more player agency is better, then any roleplaying game or viewpoint that has a more expansive view of player agency would carry for you the value judgment that your game is inferior. That possibility is unacceptable to you.

However, your solution to this perceived threat then becomes to deny that any player agency outside of your play preferences is a form of player agency at all! This is where I and others take umbrage, because I do believe that a player's agency as part of gameplay entails more than the declarations that they make for their player character in the game fiction.

At least that's my personal reading of the situation.

You go around so many threads to parade the idea to other posters talking about the direction D&D is taking that "new is not always better." I personally don't see why you can't do something similar with player agency and adopt the mantra, "more agency is not always better." And I would agree with you there because like with the former, it's a more defendable motte position than what is likely your more controversial bailey position.

However, the actual argument you made earlier just seems like a null point for me. I would like to think that I have I made my stance on this issue pretty clear here, and @Campbell likewise put forth a similar view above. I have no interest in denigrating other games on the basis of agency as a moral good. I don't think or believe that more player agency is always better. Instead, I think that it's important to recognize how the restrictions on player agency can improve the play experience of some preferences, styles, and modes of play. The amount of player agency that I may want is not a constant; instead, it depends on the tabletop roleplaying game I want to play, what I hope to get out of it, or even who I am playing it with.

My own partner seems to prefer games with less player agency than likely you or I do. They play video games for story that is revealed to them, and I think that they approach TTRPGs with a similar preference. They don't like having to pro-actively pusue their own goals in the game. They like adventure paths with story. I don't think less of them for their game preferences. I'm past the point of judging people who prefer adventure paths. I'm not judging my partner for their TTRPG preference for less player agency, and I honestly hope you aren't either. Otherwise, we will have more serious problems.


It turns out that it's something that can be learned through a simple Google search: furphy.

First of all, this is a very personal thing to say to me, and I was at first rather angry. That being said, you have a point. The kind of agency in which a player can make an informed decision through their PC that nonetheless is restricted to that PCs knowledge and abilities is very important to me. Conversely, players controlling fiction outside of their PCs is not only something I personally dislike, but a growing trend in gaming as a whole that threatens to make the industry and the community less welcoming to me, and that is hard not to see as an attack on my preferred style. As a result, I tend to land on the side that player narrative control in that fashion does not mean agency to me.

That does not mean that there's anything objectively wrong with those games, or playing games that way. Obviously those players view agency differently than I do, and their opinion is just as valid as mine. I just don't like the direction things are going in the industry.

 

[mamba]

No, it's entirely through their character's actions.

no, there is no action ‘I get an audience’, there only is an action ‘I request an audience’, just like there is no action ‘I hit the orc’, only an ‘I attack the orc’.

As soon as NPCs are involved it no longer is through the char’s action declaration only.

 

[Oofta]

The rules says that a particular character type can do X.

In campaign A that ability always works unless a pre-established fact makes it impossible.

Who decides when a fact is pre-established? Because as far as D&D is concerned "The DM creates a world for the other players to explore" amongst many other clearly stated statements of the roles in the game.

I agree, probably just not in the way you mean. I'm not going to not allow an ability simply on a whim or because I "don't want" the player to use that ability. It will be because there are factors that prevent it from working.

In campaign B that ability only works if the GM agrees it matches their aesthetic sense of what should happen, based on whatever additional criteria and qualifiers may occur to them at the time.

Players in campaign A have more agency than players in campaign B.

Even if I thought an ability should always or almost always work, I don't think it has much to do with agency. This is such a minor thing people are getting hung up on. If I'm playing in a published module, odds are my agency is limited dramatically simply because we have pre-established goals and limits on options. In my home campaign, it's more or less a sandbox with the players always deciding what direction they're going. If they don't want to pursue a thread of stopping a vampire cult that I thought was cool, so be it. Perhaps the world has a new vampire lord because they decided that hunting down pirates was more fun, but they have the option to take the campaign in that direction.

Having choices that matter to the entire direction of a campaign is far more important to overall agency than whether or not you can get free lodging.

 

[Aldarc]

First of all, this is a very personal thing to say to me, and I was at first rather angry. That being said, you have a point. The kind of agency in which a player can make an informed decision through their PC that nonetheless is restricted to that PCs knowledge and abilities is very important to me. Conversely, players controlling fiction outside of their PCs is not only something I personally dislike, but a growing trend in gaming as a whole that threatens to make the industry and the community less welcoming to me, and that is hard not to see as an attack on my preferred style. As a result, I tend to land on the side that player narrative control in that fashion does not mean agency to me.

That does not mean that there's anything objectively wrong with those games, or playing games that way. Obviously those players view agency differently than I do, and their opinion is just as valid as mine. I just don't like the direction things are going in the industry.

IMHO, I think that your worries seem a little overblown considering how miniscule and marginal that "growing trend" that you feel threatens you is in the big picture scheme of things of our hobby. Your interests are fairly well represented by mainstream, traditional games. It feels a bit like a 800 lb. gorilla talking about how they feel threatened by a kitten. Yes, that non-traditional gaming kitten is growing, but it will only grow up to be a house cat, and you will still be the 800 lb. gorilla in the enclosure.

 

[Micah Sweet]

IMHO, I think that your worries seem a little overblown considering how miniscule and marginal that "growing trend" that you feel threatens you is in the big picture scheme of things of our hobby. Your interests are fairly well represented by mainstream, traditional games. It feels a bit like a 800 lb. gorilla talking about how they feel threatened by a kitten. Yes, that non-traditional gaming kitten is growing, but it will only grow up to be a house cat, and you will still be the 800 lb. gorilla in the enclosure.

5e itself has been growing more like that housecat, and 2024 WotC D&D may very well continue that trend as far as compatibility can allow. CR recently announced two new games that both have a strong narrative influence, and they certainly carry clout in the community. On this very forum it seems more threads than ever before revolve around debates about classic vs. Narrative play. The growth is not small.

 

[Aldarc]

5e itself has been growing more like that housecat, and 2024 WotC D&D may very well continue that trend as far as compatibility can allow.

Again, those background feature that are being discussed are likely going away in One D&D. I'm not really sure what other "threatening behavior" D&D 5e, whether it's the kitten or gorilla, has demonstrated when it comes to greater player agency outside of your preferences.

CR recently announced two new games that both have a strong narrative influence, and they certainly carry clout in the community.

From what I read in the quickstart, Candela Obscura stripped out a lot of the player-facing agency from Blades in the Dark in favor of a more traditional GM-curated gaming. I talked about some of the changes that I observed on the Candela Obscura thread. We have yet to see how Daggerheart actually plays out. It may look like it takes some mechanical or presentation cues from narrative games, but what matters is GM vs. player authority when it comes to establishing the fiction.

On this very forum it seems more threads than ever before revolve around debates about classic vs. Narrative play.

We are but a tiny storm in a teacup.

The growth is not small.

We can co-exist. There's nothing gained by treating this as a zero sum game.

 

[Raiztt]

Nobility being an internal trait makes at least as much sense, in the context of the game fiction, as dragons being able to fly.

Aragorn and Eomer; the Princess and the Pea; King Arthur drawing the sword; even Conan in the REH novella The Hour of the Dragon - nobility as internal trait is a huge part of the literary canon that D&D derives inspiration from.

If I put a dragon in a void, it's still a dragon. If I put a noble in a vacuum, it is not. What makes it noble is not internal to it but relative to something else that makes it noble. You can only be noble relative to something else.

Dragons being able to fly is disanalogous to nobility.

You're equivocating as to what is meant by nobility. Having the personality trait of nobility is not the same thing as having the social rank of nobility. So while a hero might have the internal trait of being noble as per the adjective, that does not make them noble as per the noun.

This is why your examples aren't analogous.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Only if agency and narrative control are the same thing to you.

What’s the difference?

If I say “My character goes to the inn” how is that not narrative control?

The Noble Feature and similar allow me to declare that I seek an audience. The DM should be obliged to grant that, barring sufficient circumstances.

If I say “my character casts fireball” the DM is obligated to say what happens per the rules.

None of those things should be rules widgets in my view. That should all be roleplayed between the player and the GM.

Why wouldn’t they be roleplayed? It can all be roleplayed out. The ability doesn’t prevent that.

And I agree. It does do all that. Although, I still think for most players, they expect the DM to come up with the details. Most players I know say things like: "I use my guild artisan feature to contact their lawyer" after being charged with some crime (true or not). And even when pressed, such as the DM asking which lawyer, many players might just state: "The best lawyer."

Sure, I think that can absolutely be a trend. I think it’s largely ignoring what the book says… but considering the natural language and how fuzzy that leaves so much of the text, and how common it is to ignore the rules and what’s in the books, it’s really not surprising.

It mostly comes from lack of familiarity with alternatives to heavily GM-led gaming. It’s like a default expectation for many players that the DM is gonna be the one to determine all of this.

In my experience, when that’s the case, it takes a GM who can encourage that kind of play, and can show the positives of it.