D&D General What is player agency to you?

[mamba]

If anyone actually argued that, perhaps this would be a real rebuttal. Instead, as usual, it is simply hyperbole, to enable dismissing without engaging.

if you did not see these examples, you paid too little attention to the thread, they are in the extremes you are ridiculing

 

[mamba]

That's because Waterdeep is imaginary

the guards at Buckingham Palace would think the same of whatever place you claim to be from

 

[pemerton]

If you want it to work no matter how illogical in your game feel free. I wouldn't want to play in that game.

Notice how I've given multiple actual play examples, which actually demonstrate how high player agency produces compelling game play with engaging fiction:

*The PCs in Traveller sneaking up on the enemy installation, with nothing but their vacc suits to protect them against the corrosive atmosphere;

*In Burning Wheel, Thurgon meeting a retired member of his order who carries both Thurgon and Aramina downriver to Thurgon's ancestral estate, where he meets his brother, with an unhappy ending, and then meets his mother, whom he liberates from her melancholy with a prayer to the Lord of Battle;

*In Burning Wheel, Jobe returning to the ruined tower of his apprenticeship under his brother, searching it in hopes of finding the abandoned nickel-silver mace The Falcon's Claw, only to find instead the black arrows his brother was crafting prior to the events that Jobe believed had caused his brother to turn to evil;

*In Torchbearer, a PC becoming obsessed by a spirit haunted gem, that gem seducing a newly-made friend into stealing it, the PCs learning the truth of this from the first PC's enemy, and the whole set of relationships ending in a blood-operatic finale with both friend and enemy dead, the PC fundamentally changed by her near-death experience, and the Elfstone abandoned among Gerda's charred body at the top of her apartment stairs;

*In 4e D&D, the PCs travelling to the palace of Yan-C-Bin, being threatened with imprisonment, asserting their authority and turning the tables, and establishing the price for which the Djinn can keep their freedom.​

I will stack this up against anyone else's RPGing any day of the week. It has more "logic", more depth, more consistency than anything I see hinted at by those in this thread who assert unlimited GM authority.

 

[pemerton]

the guards at Buckingham Palace would think the same of whatever place you claim to be from

Would they? Says who? I mean, here's what the rulebook says they would think:

Thanks to your noble birth, people are inclined to think the best of you. You are welcome in high society, and people assume you have the right to be wherever you are. The common folk make every effort to accommodate you and avoid your displeasure, and other people of high birth treat you as a member of the same social sphere. You can secure an audience with a local noble if you need to.​

So they would accept that I have the right to be there, would treat me as a member of the nobility, and would grant me an audience with a local noble (of whom the UK has quite a few, some of whom live in and about Buckingham Palace).

 

[Maxperson]

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.

No. That's not how specific beats general works. A rule is "general" until something acts to supersede it. The general rule of nobles is that they can get put up by local nobles. This is superseded by the DMG quotes that SPECIFICALLY state that rules in the PHB are secondary to DM rulings. He is not beholden to such rules. For something to overrule the DMG quotes, it would have to specifically say so. Nothing in backgrounds(or any other rule) does say so, so there is no such thing a specific beating the DMG quotes.

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.

Seeking to always say yes diminishes agency. It overrides those times when player agency is respected by saying no and instead says yes. It's not a value judgment. It just is what is. You can't seek to say yes to me all the time and have my ideas mean much at all.

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.

Yes, exactly. Give an example of that.

In full disclosure I have ADHD and my memory doesn't work normally. I've never been able to pull up examples just because. If something happens to remind me of the time we did X, Y to accomplish Z, it's there. But if I'm just minding my own business typing here, it's extraordinarily rare for me to be able to pull up that specific memory.

I can give an example from my most recent campaign when I allowed something reasonable even though the rules said no, because it's reasonable and I absolutely hate that many spells and magical effects will work on a stone golem(because creature), but won't work on a stone statue(because not creature).

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?

Why does it have to be one or the other? It can be both. The DM could decide to have a portal like the City on the Edge of Forever that runs through images from various universes. The bad guy could jump through to escape. The PCs could jump through afterwards and roll poorly, ending up in a random universe. The DM decided AND it happened through game play.

It absolutely is inherent in yes or no.

This is an objectively false statement, because my agency can be diminished by both yes and no, and it can be respected by both yes and no. It quite literally cannot be inherent AND still allow that to happen.

 

[mamba]

Would they? Says who? I mean, here's what the rulebook says they would think

I do not consider that particularly realistic, I understand that you are obliged to run with it regardless

 

[pemerton]

I do not consider that particularly realistic, I understand that you are obliged to run with it regardless

Of course it's not realistic - we're already in a scenario in which Faerun exists, and a PC has travelled from Faerun to the contemporary UK. It is an unrealistic scenario, which breaks genres. The closest thing I can think of to this is Doctor Who, and Doctor Who is full of situations such as I suggested.

Or consider the film Stargate, in which the travellers to the new world are nearly straight away recognised and integrated into the new society, asserting their authority as soldiers and scholars and so on.

If you are asking how a genre mash-up situation is going to work, and then complain it is more like a Bond film than a Bourne film, my advice is - don't do genre mashup!

 

[soviet]

I live in the UK, and let me tell you, a gang of adventurers from Waterdeep are unlikely to be the weirdest people the king encountered that day.

 

[Oofta]

If anyone actually argued that, perhaps this would be a real rebuttal. Instead, as usual, it is simply hyperbole, to enable dismissing without engaging.

A random stranger getting an audience with the king of England because they claim to be a noble from some unheard of land? That's tells me they always saying yes no matter how illogical. Nobody has been able to come up with a reason why a background feature would not work for some people.

 

[mamba]

Of course it's not realistic - we're already in a scenario in which Faerun exists, and a PC has travelled from Faerun to the contemporary UK

I prefer some realism over a fever dream, even in my fantasy fiction