D&D General What is player agency to you?

[mamba]

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.

what if during the audience the king says 'I will grant your request, but you will have to do this thing for me first...'? Seems perfectly valid, are you actively avoiding this? Are you entangling this with things the players brought up, so it still revolves about their story?

 

[mamba]

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.

I think you misunderstood where I was coming from. If you know that the act of putting the child in the seat will not protect it, or you know that there will be no incident requiring you to put it into the seat, then your act of doing so becomes meaningless. You have the same outcome whether you do or you do not. You only do it because you do not know this, regardless of whether 'fate' had already decided on one or the other

That does not mean choices that cannot fail are meaningless. I decide what I watch on TV, with pretty much no chance of failure, and I still think it matters

 

[SteveC]

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.

I think you have an interesting point. I think in many other games quest givers are more of an issue because the game itself is designed for shared narrative control. I'm presenting it here as an attempt to provide options for "what happens next," and "what do you want to do next." An audience could very well create an issue where the noble makes direct demands of the characters, and I think that would be part and parcel with people's expectations for D&D. What the group does after the audience if they're given a demand is still up to them. I do get the sense, however, that it could lead to a feeling of railroading and a loss of agency. Not something that I'm interested in: I want to empower characters and have them build relationships with the world, not make them feel like they're stuck.

 

[mamba]

An audience could very well create an issue where the noble makes direct demands of the characters, and I think that would be part and parcel with people's expectations for D&D. What the group does after the audience if they're given a demand is still up to them. I do get the sense, however, that it could lead to a feeling of railroading and a loss of agency. Not something that I'm interested in: I want to empower characters and have them build relationships with the world, not make them feel like they're stuck.

pretty sure that doing something for the king is building relationships with(in) the world

 

[bloodtide]

I believe I’m the only person in this thread to offer an example of 5e play that included a character with the Noble background (Braeda, the human Diviner Wizard) who actually used the Position of Privilege feature. And the player and I had talked most of that out, and Braeda had a very clear place in our game world, as did her family.

I’ll add though, that if we had not, I’d almost certainly still allowed the feature to work when used, and would have taken the opportunity to establish some of those details on the spot.

Someone may offer some counter example… but don’t expect it’s likely. Folks prefer to offer hypotheticals. It seems most folks treat the backgrounds as a pair of skills and little more.

Example One, Tessa, the good player. Her character the dwarf cleric, Devrona of the Lost Mountains. Is a noble in exile. Backstory: when she was young a red dragon destroyed her home and scattered her clan. Now, years later, she acts like a good dwarven noblewoman. Tessa typed up this backstory with plenty of details on her own time before the first game and gave me a copy. She read through my list of "books about dwarves", made a bunch of notes....and then made up her on more personalized notes about her clan with plenty of details on her own time before the first game and gave me a copy. And she made up a bunch of "dwarf nobles of her clan" notes with plenty of details on her own time before the first game and gave me a copy.

Then when the game starts, Tessa, role plays Devrona of the Lost Mountains, as a bit of a sad but proud noble dwarf, with the hope of finding her lost clan someday. So she role plays Devrona of the Lost Mountains as an adult character with adult feelings, emotions and thoughts....and even gives her character two drawbacks: greed and dragonslaying. She often tries to avoid combat and talk things out. She uses the "privilege" feature often, mixed in with plenty of role playing and often gives a gift of value to sweeten the deal. She treats anyone, except criminals and the like, with a fair amount of respect. Devrona of the Lost Mountains has a good memory for names and titles....through her player Tessa writing them all down.

Her Feature works best with related cultures, but her noble bearing and personality does get her at least some privilege in most settings. Though she has found some places and groups that could care less about her nobleness or anything about her.

Example Two, Kyle the Bad Player. So Kyle makes his self insert crazy killer knight fighter, Ragnar. He takes a minute to scribble a back story of "family killed by dragons and adopted by the a noble family to be a knight". And then he just plays a crazy version of himself in a fantasy world. But it does say "background noble" on his character sheet. He only "role plays" himself. He pays no attention to names, titles or any details....often just saying "I go talk to that guy over there" or something dumb like that. Every so often Kyle will see his back ground on his character sheet, and try yo exploit it. Randomly walk over to an NPC, act like a jerk and roughly a three year old and demand huge favors and money. And then whine and cry when he does not just get it automatically.

The tale of two nobles.

 

[SteveC]

pretty sure that doing something for the king is building relationships with(in) the world

Without a doubt! I just want the players to walk out of that scene thinking "here's cool new stuff we can explore and maybe help our reputation with that noble," rather than "sigh, guess we know what we're doing as our next fetch quest." It's all in how you present it, so that the character who got the audience feels like it was useful rather than just something the DM did to appease them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think you have an interesting point. I think in many other games quest givers are more of an issue because the game itself is designed for shared narrative control. I'm presenting it here as an attempt to provide options for "what happens next," and "what do you want to do next." An audience could very well create an issue where the noble makes direct demands of the characters, and I think that would be part and parcel with people's expectations for D&D. What the group does after the audience if they're given a demand is still up to them. I do get the sense, however, that it could lead to a feeling of railroading and a loss of agency. Not something that I'm interested in: I want to empower characters and have them build relationships with the world, not make them feel like they're stuck.

Yeah. All of @pemerton 's concerns assume shared narrative is what you want (I assume because it's what they want). If you don't, and that kind of agency isn't important to your game, there's no "risk".

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think you have an interesting point. I think in many other games quest givers are more of an issue because the game itself is designed for shared narrative control. I'm presenting it here as an attempt to provide options for "what happens next," and "what do you want to do next." An audience could very well create an issue where the noble makes direct demands of the characters, and I think that would be part and parcel with people's expectations for D&D. What the group does after the audience if they're given a demand is still up to them. I do get the sense, however, that it could lead to a feeling of railroading and a loss of agency. Not something that I'm interested in: I want to empower characters and have them build relationships with the world, not make them feel like they're stuck.

What is the problem with receiving orders from a higher authority? That's what kings and their ilk do, and it happens all the time in games, and stories, and real life. Besides, being told to do something doesn't mean you have to do it, so agency is preserved.

 

[Mort]

After so many pages, I'm still confused how some seem to regard the noble position of privilege feature as some kind of unfair "I win" button.

It's just a shortcut call to adventure and can easily cause more problems than it solves (for the PCs).

Frankly, the DM can easily make the PCs lives much more complicated and difficult than if they hadn't used the feature.

 

[SteveC]

What is the problem with receiving orders from a higher authority? That's what kings and their ilk do, and it happens all the time in games, and stories, and real life. Besides, being told to do something doesn't mean you have to do it, so agency is preserved.

Nothing is wrong with it, especially in D&D. What I don't like it giving players too much of a "do this or else." I think that builds resentment and makes for a feeling that the game is on a railroad, pretty much the anthesis of player agency. I don't mind doing this from time to time (and again, especially in a game like D&D) but if you do it too much, it's, frankly too much.

But yes, especially at the start of a D&D campaign, the task given by a "higher up" makes perfect sense.