D&D General What is player agency to you?

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

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.

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.

This is a straw man argument if I ever saw one. It is trivially dismissed by the observation that, in every narrativist type game I have ever seen (a bunch of them), the core rule is that the current action must 'follow from the fiction'. So, many of your more outrageous option, like 10 or 11, are simply preposterous on the face of them and don't, presumably, follow from the fiction. They will thus not meet the criteria of action AT ALL. This is made exceedingly clear in the Dungeon World rules, for instance. Where RPGs have some sort of 'say yes' structure, it is ALWAYS something like 'say yes OR ROLL DICE' or 'yes, but...' etc. You are being disingenuous here when you post this sort of thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.


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


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.

And AGAIN, this is a straw man argument because there are ZERO GAMES where the rules tell the GM to simply 'say yes'. THEY DO NOT EXIST AND YOU KNOW THIS.

 

[Maxperson]

This is a straw man argument if I ever saw one. It is trivially dismissed by the observation that, in every narrativist type game I have ever seen (a bunch of them), the core rule is that the current action must 'follow from the fiction'. So, many of your more outrageous option, like 10 or 11, are simply preposterous on the face of them and don't, presumably, follow from the fiction. They will thus not meet the criteria of action AT ALL. This is made exceedingly clear in the Dungeon World rules, for instance. Where RPGs have some sort of 'say yes' structure, it is ALWAYS something like 'say yes OR ROLL DICE' or 'yes, but...' etc. You are being disingenuous here when you post this sort of thing.

It can't be a Strawman if I'm not ascribing an argument to a particular person and arguing against it. It's possible I'm mistaken, but it's not a Strawman.

Just to be certain, what makes those things disingenuous? What is wrong narratively with the hopes that there's some sort of time lock on the door such that waiting 10 hours is a bad idea?

 

[FrogReaver]

This is a straw man argument if I ever saw one. It is trivially dismissed by the observation that, in every narrativist type game I have ever seen (a bunch of them), the core rule is that the current action must 'follow from the fiction'. So, many of your more outrageous option, like 10 or 11, are simply preposterous on the face of them and don't, presumably, follow from the fiction. They will thus not meet the criteria of action AT ALL. This is made exceedingly clear in the Dungeon World rules, for instance. Where RPGs have some sort of 'say yes' structure, it is ALWAYS something like 'say yes OR ROLL DICE' or 'yes, but...' etc. You are being disingenuous here when you post this sort of thing.

It's not a strawman in the context of the discussion that was being had. If you ask me or @Maxperson, I know i would agree that such is not how a narrativist game functions, and I'm fairly certain he would as well. So if anything the accusation that we think that's how narrativist games work is the real strawman (please take that as the TIC joke it's intended to be)

The context of the discussion for a good chunk of the last 20 or so pages has been around the notion that given something like the Noble Background in 5e, that the players lose agency if the DM ever rules in any situation that this feature (or ones like it) doesn't work. Within that context there was a claim that saying yes all the time actually invalidates player agency (something along the lines of removing meaningful choice by removing the stakes, but with some additional nuance). That's where this example fits in.

 

[FrogReaver]

And AGAIN, this is a straw man argument because there are ZERO GAMES where the rules tell the GM to simply 'say yes'. THEY DO NOT EXIST AND YOU KNOW THIS.

No one is suggesting there are any games like that. We are talking about agency here and digging into the notion of whether saying yes all the time can invalidate agency instead of empower it.

Not everything is an attack or suggestion that narrative games play a certain way.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I was thinking of telling a story as in retelling an event, not as inventing it. So retelling an event and reenacting it.

Neither one is playing an RPG, but retelling comes closer to BitD from how you describe it and reenacting closer to D&D. Not the other way around. That is the point I was trying to make

D&D, generally, has few 'leftward arrows', that is play structure which goes from specific mechanical processes and outcomes back into fiction in a way that then defines the new fictional state. D&D combat is notoriously lacking in fictional relevance, you can do an entire combat in pretty much any version of D&D without once referring to the fiction. At most a game like 5e, where there may not be a 'board' may have some fairly weak tie backs where the GM MAY describe certain outcomes as having fictional effects that themselves have consequences in mechanical terms. This is often in the form of things like loosely described spell effects, or 'terrain fiction' where the GM might decide that a character has been forced back onto some unfavorable terrain and suffers some sort of effect from that.

4e interestingly can play that way, as mere 'skirmish game' fights, but the deep tie ins between character's abilities (powers, feats, items, class abilities, etc.) and lore/plot/fiction/location often suggests much more. Things like terrain powers, page 42, and the general 'say yes and...' sort of GM advice can produce a much richer game in that respect. Its a bit TIGHTER game in some ways, which some like and others don't, but it is illustrative of how a lot of little things can really have a deep effect on how a game plays.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Only if there was something at stake depending on how you chose.

Like if the yes choices yielded - you are through the door through the help of some other criminal organization and in return you will owe them a favor, which organization did you choose to help you? (for this example you have knowledge about these organizations and the kinds of things they might want you to do).

But if they player simply changed his query to i want through the door without help of a criminal organization... we are back to your list of options i guess and there's no stakes involved.

And this is why we don't have conflict resolution mechanics invoked when nothing is at stake! If every choice leads to the same place, then the rules of pretty much all narrativist games I know of, and many others too, simply say "don't bother with rules here, just move forward." I mean, even the 5e DMG states this as, at least optionally, a criteria for checks to happen or not. If all approaches to opening your door lead to the same outcome, NONE of these systems recommends what you are talking about doing here.

As for the "consequences" part. I would expect that the fictional situation would be structured so as to make it explicit which 'criminal organization' you are establishing a relationship with BEFORE the situation is established. Like in BitD you would acquire this as a resource (maybe in a flashback, but still established before any conflict). I can see a D&D game where you have a class feature to 'call in a favor' and it also operates in a similar fashion within the structure of play (IE only invoked at the time of use, with fictional consequences being somewhat retroactive). Its a technique that can work in any game, but certainly having it be 'after the fact' of carrying out the task is unusual at least. I wouldn't consider these things 'stakes', normally. They're costs, but more resource expenditure. Now, BitD DOES allow for calling it stakes, by using Devil's Bargain mechanics (gain an extra die in your pool in return for a complication) but again you choose the bargain BEFORE any resolution happens!

 

[mamba]

I think so too and I think your at fault for starting to talk about meaningful activities when the topic was meaningful choices.

this is what started this particular chain of posts

Explain to me how anything I do matters if you're always going to be trying to find ways to say yes?

If the GM says 'yes' to every player action declaration, I think play may be quite boring - it becomes closer to a novel co-authored by the players rather than a game - but I don't see that players are having their agency thwarted.

I replied to the second and I agree with it. That one is 'your actions have meaning, even if there is no chance of failure', and I still consider this true. It is not the chance of failure that gives them meaning, it is their outcome. That also is what the first one says (I do = my actions, matters = have meaning), so 'Explain to me how my actions have meaning if the DM just grants that they succeed'.

If you go with 'if all three options lead to the same outcome, then it does not matter which one of them I pick', then we agree. That is true, it just is not how I read the posts that started this.

 

[FrogReaver]

this is what started this particular chain of posts



I replied to the second and I agree with it. That one is 'your actions have meaning, even if there is no chance of failure', and I still consider this true. It is not the chance of failure that gives them meaning, it is their outcome. That also is what the first one says (I do = action, matters = meaningful), so 'Explain to me how my actions have meaning if the DM just grants that they succeed'.

If you go with 'if all three options lead to the same outcome, then it does not matter which one of them I pick', then we agree. That is true, it just is not how I read the posts that stared this.

Then I think we are all talking past each other.

 

[Maxperson]

I replied to the second and I agree with it. That one is 'your actions have meaning, even if there is no chance of failure', and I still consider this true.

Sure, and my point didn't really disagree with it. My point was that always saying yes or rolling for success minimized agency, not got rid of it. Sure the choice has some inherent meaning, but the amount of agency involved is less than if the various choices had a range of meanings from failure to roll to auto success.