D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

You seem to adhere to the rules that bind the GM but ignore the rules that say the GM can override them. That clearly is your choice and there is nothing wrong with it, but neither is with using that other set too. We just want different things.

I am talking about degrees of player agency, and approaches to RPGing that increase or reduce it. On the way through I'm also saying something about my preferences, and about what the 4e D&D rules say. I'm not telling others what they should or shouldn't do in their RPGing.

 

[pemerton]

Question stands - I don't know why players do the things they do, they just do them sometimes. This situation is certainly plausible and coherent.

You are asking me to form a view about what is consistent with exercising agency, and following the rules, without saying who is deciding what - but how can we judge the application of rules in a game without knowing about the actions and decisions of the participants?

 

[mamba]

And all the stakes and consequences unfold in relation to PC-authored concerns: Elfstones, dreams, Dwarves, Dwarves vs Elves, the befriending of and betrayal by Gerda, the ups and downs of the relationship with Megloss.

This is another illustration of what I regard as relatively high player agency RPGing.

I agree about the agency part, I still am fuzzy about what the DM actually does (instead of it being DM-less)

Will post an example + questions later

 

[hawkeyefan]

so the mere possibility then, not the actual occurrence… yeah, I disagree, then the DM interfering is no different from a die roll not going your way, and you do accept that happening

No, that's not true. I don't buy into the idea that the DM has absolute authority. It wasn't until people started citing that as justification that I pointed out that it means agency is dead in such a game.

That also means you absolutely have to reject the audience getting denied, no more dancing around the subject, saying ‘it may be, I just have not heard a good reason yet’ then

No it doesn't!

I am aware, and as I wrote a little further down, I do not care about that, they might as well complain about their dice rolls

I'd like to point out that not seeing a distinction here is a massive failure, and is probably a huge part of the disconnect.

 

[pemerton]

the same is true for the side that says the DM has to find a way to make it work

I've posted actual play examples from 4e D&D, from Burning Wheel, from Torchbearer and from Classic Traveller. I can provide more if you like. These are not hypotheticals - they are actual illustrations of high player agency play, with consistent and compelling gameworlds, emotionally powerful action, and no "player narrative control" beyond declaring actions for their PCs.

 

[Oofta]

No, that's not true. I don't buy into the idea that the DM has absolute authority. It wasn't until people started citing that as justification that I pointed out that it means agency is dead in such a game.




No it doesn't!



I'd like to point out that not seeing a distinction here is a massive failure, and is probably a huge part of the disconnect.

Pretty clear pretty much everywhere that the DM makes the final call. Even in the first few pages of the PHB: "...the DM determines the results of the adventurers’ actions and narrates what they experience."

Whether the DM occasionally saying "no" on background features because they make no sense is decreasing agency is, I suppose, a matter of opinion. The extreme hyperbole of the DM being the referee and final arbiter of the PCs actions means no agency is ludicrous.

 

[hawkeyefan]

No, it's really not just an interpretation. For specific to beat general you require..........................specificity. Unless you can point to the noble ability and show where it explicitly says that the rule rules the DM in this one case, you have no instance of specific beats general. You can't infer specificity. Not that there's even an inference of it in that ability. You have nothing. On the other hand, I have several passages which SPECIFICALLY allow the DM to alter the rules as he sees fit, which includes background abilities.

I don't care about the quotes from the book. I'm not telling you you can't play 5e that way. Go right ahead.

Nothing one way or the other. Player agency doesn't hinge on the players creating or enforcing rules, or always getting their own way. Player agency is that the player has the ability to declare that he is going to try and get the local noble to put him up for the night and that he can expect that it will work unless there's a valid in-fiction reason for it not to work.

No one has said players should create or enforce their own rules or always get their own way.

Why would they automatically know about it. If it's in my game, I will have ways for them to learn about it, but I'm not going to shove those ways in their faces to ensure that they do. The players still need to play the game and do research when going into an unknown situation. If they fail to look and are surprised by it, then that's on them. If they do look and find out about it, then they know in advance.

It's not that they'd automatically know about it. It's that if it had anything to do with them, they most likely would. If this was all coming about because of their actions rather than just some outside thing the DM introduced.

Players who have agency tend to drive the game more... there's less need for DM plots to be dropped on them.

That's because it appears that you have some super negative views about D&D DMs and they have to be going out of their way to block the players, put their own ideas ahead of the players because muahahahahahah, that's what D&D DMs apparently do, and so on.

Your hang-ups regarding D&D DMs, though, just plain don't apply to me. I'm not defined by your issues.

No, I really don't. I'm playing in a 5e game now. It has even less agency than I'd typically expect from 5e. I'm a little surprised, but I'm still playing and having fun, even if it's not what I'd choose.

I'm simply able to be honest about what D&D does and how it works and its level of agency.

So the point is to deny agency? Because that's what happens when you go out of your way to say yes in virtually every situation. Why bother to come up with a reasonable way to open the locked door when you can just spit on the door lock and the DM will find a way to say yes?

What rule are you citing that allows this? Remember, we're talking about something allowed by a specific ability, not players just randomly trying to weasel past obstacles.

And I didn't say the point is to deny agency. That's just what happens. The point appears to be to maintain the DM's ideas about the game world.

You're invalidating the ideas of your players by diminishing their meaning. The meaning of clever idea I came up with is castrated by you saying yes to the ridiculous idea that the other player came up with. And there is no real meaning to ridiculous ideas when you aren't going to be saying no to them, because you want to think of a way to make it work.

I prefer to have real player agency where ideas actually MEAN something. Even if the meaning is failure.

I gave an actual play example that wasn't ridiculous in any way. I prompted the player to tell me. The player is a creative guy, and he responded to the challenge and came up with an idea. And the result was something none of us had foreseen. The game went off in a new direction because of his ideas.

Also, you're now starting to veer into value judgments, which seems unnecessary.

I can't share something that doesn't exist. If the player makes a reasonable request I'm either going to say yes or give it a roll if the outcome is in doubt. I don't shoot down reasonable requests.

But you said that requests may not work due to things the players didn't know. Like the no-healing god thing... give an actual example along those lines. I can't believe that this has never come up in your games, or else why would you be so adamant about it.

Where I on the other hand use them to override the rules when the rules hit a situation where following the rule would end up with a nonsensical situation.

Yes, exactly. Give an example of that.

So nobody is saying that the players have control over the narrative, but the players have to have to buy in to being sent to a different universe?

Why are the players being sent to a different universe? Did they just get zapped there because the DM decided that's what happened? Or did this happen as a result of play?

I didn't say it was given. I said it's not inherent in "yes" or "no" and it's not. You can say both and agency will be respected. You can say both and diminish/remove agency from the player. Circumstance will determine which is which.

It absolutely is inherent in yes or no.

 

[pemerton]

Suppose a player doesn’t get to do what he wants because the DM tells him no - some call that a denial of player agency.
What if the game rules tell him no - is that a denial of player agency?
What if the dice tell him no - is that a denial of player agency?

It seems to me that rules and bad dice rolls deny players just as much player agency as a DM saying no. Thoughts?

they might as well complain about their dice rolls

In general, when playing a game there is a big difference between losing on a roll of the dice and having the other participants decide, by fiat, that I lose. I think this is obvious. It's also one basic premise from which the regulation of casinos flows.

In the context of RPGing, what the dice rolls do, primarily, is establish the constraints around establishing new fiction - who gets to say it, and what they get to say. Just as, in craps, the dice are a mechanism for the allocation of money, so in RPGing the dice are a mechanism for the allocation of responsibility and constraints around who gets to say what.

When I agree to play the game, I agree to the rules. Why do I want to play a RPG, which has rules that constrain what I and my friends can say about what happens next? Because it makes the resulting fiction more compelling, as per the quotes from Vincent Baker that I discussed in this recent thread.

to me it sounds like the players are perfectly capable of reading the rules themselves and figuring out what happens next, I see no need for a GM in how you describe the role of the GM

Your example provides both too much detail and too little information for me to figure out what the GM was actually needed for.

I agree about the agency part, I still am fuzzy about what the DM actually does (instead of it being DM-less)

As I've posted, and as I've illustrated with multiple examples from actual play, the GM frames scenes and narrates consequences (especially consequences that flow from failure).

A game in which the same participants frame the scenes, describe the actions of the protagonists, and say what happens next, is not a RPG (at least in the mainstream sense) - it's just coooperative storytelling. RPGing is more exciting than cooperative storytelling, because of the role division - for instance, it's more exciting for the players to have someone else work out, following a failed roll, how whatever it is that they've staked is lost. It's more exciting to respond to an external prompt than to your own imagining about what might go wrong.

Eg - when I described Megloss conjuring up the Flames of the Shroud and incinerating Gerda, this prompted the player of the Dwarf PC to impassioned action (Megloss had just murdered the PC's friend). We saw this at the table through his grim face, the tone of his action declaration (thoroughly declarative, not at all tentative) and his expenditure of player resources (a Persona point spent to channel his Avenging Grudges Nature) to build a huge dice pool.

This is what makes RPGing fun.

 

[mamba]

No, that's not true. I don't buy into the idea that the DM has absolute authority. It wasn't until people started citing that as justification that I pointed out that it means agency is dead in such a game.

yeah, it is true, there is no real difference between a die roll telling you no and the DM doing so, if anything the die is impartial and the DM permissive

The players do have agency in either case, that is not even a question

I'd like to point out that not seeing a distinction here is a massive failure, and is probably a huge part of the disconnect.

no, it is not, but I can see a disconnect if you believe there is a difference

 

[hawkeyefan]

yeah, it is true, there is no real difference between a die roll telling you no and the DM doing so, if anything the die is impartial and the DM permissive

The players do have agency in either case, that is not even a question

You’re wrong.