mamba
Legend
Torchbearer is a variation on it, more locked into D&D themes, more rules heavy and procedural from my understanding, in either case, BW, TB, TB2 should all be much more suitable
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D&D General What is player agency to you?
- Thread starter bloodtide
- Start date
That wasn't what I said. I said, the logic is that it is meaningless if the car seat provides perfect protection against the crash - if there is no chance of my choice to put my child in the seat not achieving what I hope it will.
Which is absurd.
If we want to make the stakes not my child's wellbeing but my car crashing, then the analogue would be that the design of self-driving cars is only meaningful if there's a small chance they'll crash despite the best efforts of the engineers. Or that the design of ABS brakes is meaningful only if there is a small chance that they will nevertheless fail and the car go into a skid that can't be steered out of.
The general form of the argument is that a choice is only meaningful if it's a gamble. Which only has to be stated for its absurdity to be evident.
Not really. If situation X will never come up in play, for any of a host of reasons, then the fact that the rulebook doesn't explain how to deal with it doesn't show that the rules can't work.
I also find that nearly all the hypotheticals involving the Noble are described in terms of the fiction ("You're on the City of Brass - why would the Pasha of the Efreet meet with you?"), rather than in terms of the process of play. So they're not helpful for understanding player agency, which has nothing to do with the content of the fiction and everything to do with the processes of play.
And finally, I refute every hypothetical conjecture that allowing players a high degree of agency will produce illogical, inconsistent, shallow fiction by adducing multiple actual play examples that demonstrate the opposite.
mamba
Legend
I was talking about combat there, not story
I don't see these as particularly different. For instance, Gerda running through the Dreamwalker, and thus driving out her lust for the Elfstone, was the resolution of a combat (in Torchbearer language, a Kill conflict).
mamba
Legend
you do not know that beforehand though, and no seat provides perfect protection
I don't use standard D&D cosmology, but the party was recently in Jotunheim, land of the giants. So asking to see a giant noble because of a background feature would have been a non-starter. Giants view humanoids as slaves or vermin; they have zero respect for human social norms.
mamba
Legend
the combat part I see no issue with handling purely mechanical, at a high enough level of abstraction.
That in your campaign intertwines some metaphysical progression is either a feature of the game or of your playstyle. In either case I expect it can be sufficiently ’disconnected’ from combat so the actual combat part can be automated while the DM keeps control over the ‘metaphysical part’
Quest-givers, as a general phenomenon in RPGing, are a threat to player agency in my view, as they provide a very obvious entry-point for the GM to impose their conception onto the shared fiction. This is at least part of what is lying behind @chaochou's reference to players setting their own goals.
There are techniques that can be used to offset these risks - eg drawing the content of the quest, the motivations of the quest-giver, and other salient elements from the player-established priorities for play.
Done well, the audience obtained by the PC Noble seems like an opportunity to deploy those techniques.
Suppose that it did. Would it therefore be a meaningless decision to choose it, rather than to choose a less reliable one and thus gamble with my child's life?
This whole argument that choices that can't misfire or go wrong or be thwarted are not meaningful ones is a dead end. I can't believe it's being seriously put forward.
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