D&D General What is player agency to you?

[mamba]

I can tell you from personal experience that trying to find something to watch on TV can result in failure. I've cycled through hundreds of stations with useless crap to watch, only to just turn it off out of failure to find something interesting more times than I can count.

yeah, if you are stuck without DVDs or VoD… and you do not lose power.. I guess it was a good thing I added that bit

 

[Maxperson]

yeah, if you are stuck without DVDs or VoD… and you do not lose power.. I guess it was a good thing I added that bit

Ugh! The power went out at my house for 9 and a half hours during a heat wave about a week and a half ago. Southern California can sometimes suck. Trying to sleep was miserable with all that heat.

 

[mamba]

What I’m saying is An activity being meaningful doesn’t mean a meaningful choice was made during the course of the activity.

yes, the two are not mutually exclusive. I assume most activities the players are interested in will have a meaning, and at a minimum the choice was to take the action or to not do so.

 

[FrogReaver]

yes, the two are not mutually exclusive. I assume most activities the players are interested in will have a meaning, and at a minimum the choice was to take the action or to not do so.

There’s the choice! So why is not watching tv or watching it (and always finding something you want to watch) a meaningful choice?

 

[mamba]

There’s the choice! So why is not watching tv or watching it (and always finding something you want to watch) a meaningful choice?

I think we are discussing different things. I started out with saying ‘even an action with no chance of failure can have meaning’, not ‘an action without meaning has no meaning’, that is a tautology.

Watching or not watching is meaningful to me, why else would I choose to watch? I assume that is true for everyone else as well. People do watch TV / go to the movies, they do not just sit around and sometimes a TV rolls into their field of vision like tumbleweed.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think that there is almost always some sort of stake involved with going past a locked door, even if it's just to see what's on the other side vs. failing to see what is on the other side. Sure getting through the door with the criminal organization provides higher stakes, but there are rarely no stakes at all.

What's the stake in getting past a locked door if it will just be unlocked if you want it to be? I think that was essentially your point as well.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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’?

Yeah, the way I interpret this is that there is a GAME going on here. It has rules, and a 'process of play' which are necessary in order to construct a session of play at the table, otherwise you have just a GM fiddling with dice and telling a story (or whatever). The players know the rules, and the rules are designed to precipitate conflict, to make it so that the players will DO stuff. There's no 'lack of agency' here whatsoever, the game is simply played a certain way. It would be equally pointless to say that in chess the Checkmate rule removes some player's agency because they can't ignore it and keep playing! Agency isn't "do anything you feel like" its empowerment to make meaningful choices. This is why the choices have to be informed and they have to produce genuinely distinct outcomes, the stakes need to be explicit, etc. Without all that you have performance, but not agency. Without rules you have performance, but no game, and without game to give structure to stakes, its hard to have agency either! I will say that PRINCIPLES can operate like rules though, so not everything must be pure mechanics, games like Dungeon World have GM principles that also structure conflict.

 

[Maxperson]

What's the stake in getting past a locked door if it will just be unlocked if you want it to be? I think that was essentially your point as well.

It's not so much the stake will change, but rather that there's no meaning to the choice that gets me to it. No matter what I'm going to see what's on the other side. "Say yes or roll(often with fail forward)" will guarantee that.

What I want is for my choice to matter as well as the stake to matter. One or the other mattering isn't good enough for me to have agency or much agency.

For me to have full agency my choice needs to have meaning. There needs to be a reason for me to try and pick a good choice over the first mediocre choice that springs to mind, and having the chance for a flat out "no that fails." does that. I will discard options that I think will fail and try ones that I think can succeed. There may be unknown things that cause those attempts to fail, but that's okay since those failures give me more information to go on and my guide my further good ideas to a better chance of success.

The odds are very high that I will eventually succeed, but the adversity and chance for failure is what gives my choices meaning and me agency. And there's a small chance that I will not figure it out and that's okay. Pure failure is part of the potential stakes of trying to get past the door.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think we are discussing different things.

I think so too and I think your at fault for starting to talk about meaningful activities when the topic was meaningful choices. Do you care to go back to talking about meaningful choices?

I started out with saying ‘even an action with no chance of failure can have meaning’, not ‘an action without meaning has no meaning’, that is a tautology.

Action != Choice

Watching or not watching is meaningful to me,

Anything deeper than superficial preference?

why else would I choose to watch?

Can you choose to do something that's not meaningful? Like buy a red car over an identical in everyway blue car? I think so!

Or are we to the point of tautology in your definition where if one chooses something then it must be meaningful?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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

I think this is all pretty much just a matter of how the GAME part of the RPG is structured. Its going to need to allow player's intent and action to come into play, but its perfectly possible, IMHO to have a game structured such that rules would govern "you missed the NPC and now he's got a knife to your ally's throat." For instance, a system structured in terms of 'openings' vs something like 5e's (or 4e's) structured initiative could deliver that sort of action. Maybe a rule like "whenever you fail to land an attack, the target gains an opening and can move." You could structure all of combat that way! I mean, there might need to be some additional rules related to, say "well, if you don't get an opening for a while, you eventually get a 'big move'" or maybe just "spend a power point to take your opening now" or something like that. I haven't seen a system with that design, so it would probably take a bit of work to get it right.