D&D General What is player agency to you?

[mamba]

I like that description, but want to focus on one part

Key to achieving (i) is to have a system for framing, and for resolution, that will make dramatic need salient without anyone have to choose, in advance, what the resolution of those needs will look like

that to me sounds like first of all the story is emergent, not somewhat roughly laid out, with enough room to ‘breathe’. You know what the themes are, because those come from the players, but not at all how things will develop.

So the story unfolds at the table with no one beforehand knowing what will happen, not even to the degree to which a ‘traditional’ DM does (the rough layout).

Does that mean there is no prep work at all, or are you thinking about these things ahead of time in a ‘if the opportunity arises, I’d …’ kind of way?

How do you as the DM ensure that the story accomplishes the below in a satisfactory way

characters who have dramatic needs; rising action; perhaps most importantly crisis or climax in which the question of whether the character will fulfil their dramatic need is posed and answered

and does not just randomly meander all over the place without getting any closer to the climax?

Is that built into the ruleset, and it keeps rising the tension by itself? Is that something you subtly nudge in that direction? Do the players decide that what just happened through rolls on some tables was good enough to constitute that rise and act accordingly? Do they keep rising the tension by bringing in new elements when they think it is a good time to do do? All of this?

To put it into maybe the least charitable interpretation, is the story simply what outcome random rolls resulted in (plus the actions the players took either to achieve them or as a reaction to them) and how the group agreed to make sense of them to form as coherent a storyline as the rolls allowed (not just at the end, but throughout play, to maintain a consistent understanding of the situation)?

To me it does sound a little like that, with the player introducing a new element (the item in the tower they had to leave long ago) when they think of it (I still maintain that is what they did, even when for the consistency of the world it is being framed as remembering).
Some rolls decide how believable it is to only ‘remember’ this now / at all (so you do not remember that you left your pink pet dragon there and are now looking for that…), some more rolls determine whether they find the item, or what they find instead, and the DM (or players?) has to then on the fly make sense of what they actually found when it was not that item but some randomly rolled one, because obviously the DM had not planned for that other item to be there and what its implications are.

I am not saying you cannot get interesting and most of all surprising stories that way, but I wonder about how to steer / control the story arc. Is that ‘just’ a matter of thinking on your feet, or does more go into it?

 

[pemerton]

that to me sounds like first of all the story is emergent, not somewhat roughly laid out, with enough room to ‘breathe’. You know what the themes are, because those come from the players, but not at all how things will develop.

So the story unfolds at the table with no one beforehand knowing what will happen, not even to the degree to which a ‘traditional’ DM does (the rough layout).

Correct.

When I sat down with my group a couple of weekends ago to play Burning Wheel Torchbearer, I had no idea that the focus of the session would be on trying to recover the Elfstone from Gerda, let alone that it would end in a blood operatic climax.

Does that mean there is no prep work at all, or are you thinking about these things ahead of time in a ‘if the opportunity arises, I’d …’ kind of way?

It can depend. In the case of that Torchbearer session, no prep work - but there were 8 or 9 prior sessions of play to build on.

For Burning Wheel, I have written up stat blocks for various possible antagonists. But (for instance) the black arrows were a spontaneous invention (though suggested by the fact that one of the PCs, an Elven "ronin", wore a broken Orcish arrow around his neck, as a token of his captain killed by Orcs).

For 4e I would often write up stat blocks, and draw maps for situations that I thought would be interesting given the trajectory in which play was heading. Sometimes I would draw up a map on the spot, or pull a map out of a module and use that. (4e D&D needs combat maps for its combat resolution system to really shine.)

How do you as the DM ensure that the story accomplishes the below in a satisfactory way

characters who have dramatic needs; rising action; perhaps most importantly crisis or climax in which the question of whether the character will fulfil their dramatic need is posed and answered

and does not just randomly meander all over the place without getting any closer to the climax?

I rely on the system to do its job! That is to say, the system - if it is well-designed - will ensure that climaxes occur.

"Say 'yes' or roll the dice" is one component of this. "Meandering" actions in which nothing is at stake don't engage the resolution mechanics - the GM says yes, the fiction changes, and so the next action gets declared. Intent-and-task resolution is another component - by incorporating player intent into the narration of failure, stakes escalate. When this is combined with the principle of using player priorities to guide framing, various stakes not only escalate but intertwine - as in the example of Megloss, Gerda, and the evil spirit that came out of the Dreamwalker PC's heart all coming together in my last Torchbearer session.

Is that built into the ruleset, and it keeps rising the tension by itself? Is that something you subtly nudge in that direction?

Not much about it is subtle. As I hope can be seen in the play examples, it's pretty overt. Like when Thurgon meets his mother, there is no particular subtlety - the GM has Xanthippe ask Thurgon to abandon his errantry, and not leave her again. This produces a crisis for Thurgon. It was resolved by successful prayer (Ob 5 Minor Miracle) to relieve Xanthippe of her burdens and instead be ready to join Thurgon in liberating Auxol, their ancestral estate.

Other systems use mechanics as well as fiction to handle the rising of tension. For instance, the version of Cortex+ that I know and play is Marvel Heroic RP and my own fantasy adaptation inspired by the Cortex+ Hacker's guide (which was a type of precursor to Cortex Prime). This has a Doom Pool which is a GM-side resource that grows over time (driven by the mechanics) and that the GM can draw from for various purposes - including buffing NPCs, but also to bring a scene to a close. This gives the players an incentive to try and resolve whatever it is that is at issue before the Doom Pool grows to the point that the GM can use it to end the scene, and this creates tension and escalation in itself.

Do the players decide that what just happened through rolls on some tables was good enough to constitute that rise and act accordingly? Do they keep rising the tension by bringing in new elements when they think it is a good time to do do? All of this?

Not really. The player's job is to play their PC. It is decisions made on the GM side, and the interplay between these and mechanics, that generate rising action and precipitation of climax - as per what I've posted above.

To put it into maybe the least charitable interpretation, is the story simply what outcome random rolls resulted in (plus the actions the players took either to achieve them or as a reaction to them) and how the group agreed to make sense of them to form as coherent a storyline as the rolls allowed (not just at the end, but throughout play, to maintain a consistent understanding of the situation)?

I wouldn't say so. I mean, you can read the actual play in this thread, and the various posts and threads that I've linked to.

To me it does sound a little like that, with the player introducing a new element (the item in the tower they had to leave long ago) when they think of it (I still maintain that is what they did, even when for the consistency of the world it is being framed as remembering).
Some rolls decide how believable it is to only ‘remember’ this now / at all (so you do not remember that you left your pink pet dragon there and are now looking for that…), some more rolls determine whether they find the item, or what they find instead, and the DM (or players?) has to then on the fly make sense of what they actually found when it was not that item but some randomly rolled one, because obviously the DM had not planned for that other item to be there and what its implications are.

I am not saying you cannot get interesting and most of all surprising stories that way, but I wonder about how to steer / control the story arc. Is that ‘just’ a matter of thinking on your feet, or does more go into it?

Dice rolls will shape the rising action and culmination in crisis. But it is not a retrospective imposing of meaning that is going on. Because at each moment of play, the stakes are meaningful, because of the principles whereby they are established and put into play.

The GM needs to be able to think on their feet. A lot of GM advice for this sort of game addresses that - eg when GMing 4e D&D I used GMing advice not just from 4e (which is so-so in this respect) but Burning Wheel (especially the Adenturer Burner), Maelstrom Storytelling, and Robin Laws's HeroWars and HeroQuest revised.

There's no need to control the arc beyond that. Foreshadowing is a naturally built in, because of the way stakes are established and consequences narrated. Some threads will be set out but not resolved; this is inevitable in unedited fiction, I think.

Surprising things happen - surprises for the GM as well as the PCs. For instance, I've already mentioned that I didn't anticipate the Megloss-Gerda blood opera. Or, when I framed the PCs into an encounter with Djinn in the course of trying to recover their Thundercloud Tower, I didn't know that it would turn into a diplomatic negotiation with Yan-C-Bin, which would result in a truce with the Prince of Evil Air Elementals, and the Djinn who serve him. I wasn't expecting the black arrows until I had to narrate a failed Scavenging test. And so on.

The experience of surprising, compelling fiction is a big part of the appeal of RPGing, for me at least.

 

[mamba]

This has a Doom Pool which is a GM-side resource that grows over time (driven by the mechanics) and that the GM can draw from for various purposes - including buffing NPCs, but also to bring a scene to a close. This gives the players an incentive to try and resolve whatever it is that is at issue before the Doom Pool grows to the point that the GM can use it to end the scene, and this creates tension and escalation in itself.

Since this whole thing started with agency, how is you closing the scene not a denial of player agency? Or is this seen the same way a failed dice roll is, i.e. it was the rules, not the DM getting in the way? The players had their chance but let the doom pool build too far, much like the players had their chance to roll a die, they just did not succeed?

How much agency do you have over how you are closing a scene / how is that different from the DM telling the players ‘this is what happens’?

 

[FrogReaver]

@mamba

I think one the biggest differences in such games is that narration of consequences doesn’t need to meet the same standard that it would in a typical d&d game. Consequences just need to be plausible from the context of the already established fiction/genre/setting.

In Blades in the Dark a consequence might be you shoot at the opposing NPC, you miss and he grabs your friend knife to neck threatening to kill them if you don’t put down your gun (if the friend was a PC they would get a defense check).

In most cases the resulting fiction is much closer to a novel than what typical d&d style play brings. I think you mentioned fever dream before and it’s not to that level imo, but it’s more twists and turns than d&d style play typically yields.

 

[mamba]

You had me agreeing right up until that last paragraph and especially the last sentence.

yes, I do not see this as having no agency, you have a different form of agency. In the emergent case a lot seems to be driven by the rules themselves, in the traditional case the DM has more control.

In either case the player has agency and it can get thwarted. It only becomes an issue if the players in the traditional game start to believe their DM is unfair. In the emergent case they know the DM cannot be, even if the situation turns into that.

If I interpret that last sentence as ‘in emergent gameplay the players exercise more control over the narrative and the DM less than in traditional play’, I’d agree with that too. To me that is separate from agency however, or at a minimum the players decided to give up that part of their agency when they decided to play the traditional way. Giving up your agency by choice is you exercising your agency too…

 

[mamba]

In most cases the resulting fiction is much closer to a novel than what typical d&d style play brings.

yes, it lends itself more to abstract and less detailed play, more telling a story than reenacting it. Or at least it looks that way to me predominantly… but @pemerton plays 4e that way, and that is as grid-based and detailed as it gets, at least for D&D, so it does not have to be like BitD

 

[Maxperson]

Choosing matters. For instance, suppose the situation offers possibility P - and whether I as a player choose P or not P, the GM will say "yes". My choice is meaningful - it brings it about that either P, or not-P, is part of the fiction.

As I've posted, and @mamba has said much the same, there doesn't seem to be any gameplay here, and so one might assert that (as a matter of tautology) it's not player agency. But the notion that these choices don't matter seems bizarre. That would mean that the author of a story has no agency and no scope to meaningfully choose the content of their story, which seems flat-out wrong.

Apples and Oranges. An author is writing a story. A DM and players, even one who is railroading his players, are not writing a story.

In an RPG players have an expectation that their choices will mean something.

This makes no sense. The meaning in choosing something that I am guaranteed to obtain consists in what I chose. Like, at my child's school they can choose some electives. They're guaranteed to get some of their choices. That doesn't make their choices meaningless.

It does. Let's take a locked door in a long abandoned ruin. I want to open it. That's my choice. If I'm playing with someone who just wants to find reasons to say yes, I can do any of the following.

1) Take out lockpicks and try to open the door.
2) Run really hard at it and try to bash it open.
3) Take out a weapon and hack at it.
4) Pick up a stone and try to bash the lock.
5) Spit on the lock and hope(I guess) to loosen the mechanism.
6) Knock on the door and get someone on the other side to open it up.
7) Punch the metal lock with my hand.
8) Pick up a rat and shove it's head in the lock and twist.
9) Take out my lute and play a mystical sounding tune in the hopes that it has some sort of musical tone opening mechanism.
10) Tap dance in front of it in the hopes that it has some sort of dance combination to open.
11) Wait 10 hours for it to unlock itself.

All of those are done because of my choice to open the door, but some of them should get flat out "No" as a response, while others are good ideas. If all(or even nearly all) of the ideas put forth, both good and bad are going to get me a yes or a chance to work, then none of my choices really have any meaning. You are depriving my choice to get that door open of meaning by trivializing it with the "say yes" playstyle.

This is back to the idea that the GM has to veto things to save the player from the tyranny of getting what they want!

Or not. Since what I want is player agency that actually means something. Reducing my desires to nothing through the "say yes" playstyle isn't getting me what I want.

 

[Oofta]

yes, I do not see this as having no agency, you have a different form of agency. In the emergent case a lot seems to be driven by the rules themselves, in the traditional case the DM has more comtrol.

In either case the player has agency and it can get thwarted. It only becomes an issue if the players in the traditional game start to believe their DM is unfair. In the emergent case they know the DM cannot be, even if the situation turns into that.

There are certainly games that attempt to eliminate bad GMing, changing to a different style that guarantees agency is one of them. I just find it hard to believe that the same person who DM's a complete railroad won't also find a way to be a bad GM in other systems. Of course we don't hear about those, so it is a bit of speculation on my part.

Then again the all-aboard-the-railroad DM is also something of a myth in my experience as well. At least for more than a session or two.

 

[Micah Sweet]

@mamba

I think one the biggest differences in such games is that narration of consequences doesn’t need to meet the same standard that it would in a typical d&d game. Consequences just need to be plausible from the context of the already established fiction/genre/setting.

In Blades in the Dark a consequence might be you shoot at the opposing NPC, you miss and he grabs your friend knife to neck threatening to kill them if you don’t put down your gun (if the friend was a PC they would get a defense check).

In most cases the resulting fiction is much closer to a novel than what typical d&d style play brings. I think you mentioned fever dream before and it’s not to that level imo, but it’s more twists and turns than d&d style play typically yields.

Yes, it seems to generate drama, which is not something I'm interested in using mechanical force to invoke.

 

[FrogReaver]

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 your example was that the child would never be hurt whether put in the car seat or not, then we would all agree that putting the child in the car seat was meaningless.

The example I provided illustrates where the meaningful choice lies and it's because a child can be hurt when not put in a car seat if an accident happens.

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.

None of this makes any sense to me. These analogies are comparing the wrong things.

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.

1. There's another type of meaningful choice - you can have X but not Y or Y but not X. Of course if you are just saying yes to the player then this can never happen either. Player: I want X and Y... DM: YES!

2. I think the proper context is: A choice is only meaningful if there's something at stake around the choice (which covers both my [1] and the 'gambling' you are talking about.