D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Micah Sweet]

It is not the PC who benefits. It is the game participants.

If they and DM want the world to explicitly revolve around the players. I don't.

 

[pemerton]

If they and DM want the world to explicitly revolve around the players. I don't.

Fair enough. I would expect that you can see that if the fiction does not "revolve around" the players - or to put it another way, if they do not play a substantial role in determining what it is or will be about - then that is relevant for the degree of agency that they are exercising.

 

[Campbell]

It is not the PC who benefits. It is the game participants.

One could even say it is usually very much not for the benefit of the player characters.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Fair enough. I would expect that you can see that if the fiction does not "revolve around" the players - or to put it another way, if they do not play a substantial role in determining what it is or will be about - then that is relevant for the degree of agency that they are exercising.

They do, through their actions and what they decide is important in play. The world is not designed primarily with the desires of the PCs in mind (although I allow for player-authored goals in session 0 if they want). I admit that this allows for less player agency in authoring the fiction, but that is not what the game is about for us, as we do not have a narrative focus.

 

[pemerton]

One could even say it is usually very much not for the benefit of the player characters.

Right.

This is from the Burning Wheel rulebook (Revised p 109):

If one of your relationships is your wife in the village, the GM is supposed to use this to create situations in play. If you're hunting a Vampyr, of course it's your wife who is his victim!​

The same text appears in Gold (p 377), with the word "trouble" substituted for "situations".

This is an example of player agency: the player, by establishing a particular priority (this relationship) in the build of their PC, has contributed in a very concrete way to the content and the focus of the shared fiction. But of course it doesn't benefit the player character that their wife is the victim of the Vampyr.

It benefits the player in the sense that it makes the content of the game more intimate to them, and so more emotionally compelling. It doesn't make play any easier for the player.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't see it, so let's try this again

1) If your character in game finds a lamp with a genie in it, the genie offers him three wishes, no questions asked, no conditions. Your char says 'well, in that case, my first wish is unlimited wishes', the genie looks surprised and says 'I did not consider this, but I gave you my word, so unlimited wishes it is'. You now have used 6 wishes so are certain it works, and anything you wished for did happen. Does having the genie increase or decrease your agency?

I don't see this as the same at all as what I am saying. If I have infinite wishes with literally no limitations, then I would expect any wish to work. If I wished for the the mountain behind my castle to be lifted into the air, it would be. However, if I just announced that my PC was going to walk over and pick up the mountain behind the house, I would expect it to fail without a roll or fail forward. This despite my desire as a player to have the mountain lifted up in both examples.

2) Is there a difference for your agency between the genie being called 'Abarax, the Magnificent' or 'Joe, the DM' ?

No real difference there. The major difference is the in-fiction wish vs. John the PC just trying to pick up a mountain.

The only difference I see is how you initiate something coming true. In the first case you let your genie know in game, in the second you say 'I perform this silly little dance that has no reason to work, but somehow always does, I must really have stumbled onto something here, to …’ and the DM in both cases says 'you succeed'.

If anything was reduced / taken away in the 2nd case it is your ‘ability’ to fail against your will (in the first case you can simply not talk to the genie), but to me that is no reduction in agency

Again, I'm not saying in all cases "say yes or roll" removes or reduces agency, but if it's always present it WILL ultimately reduce my agency by making some things that shouldn't work, work or at least have a chance of working.

 

[FrogReaver]

I am struggling to follow this.

Yea...

In RPGs, sometimes when a player declares (speaking as their character) I do X then X becomes part of the fiction. In a lot of D&D play, action declarations like At the T-intersection, I turn left rather than right or I open the north door, not the south door work like that: the action declaration means that the character is going left, not right; or is mucking about with the north door, not the south door.

I follow this.

I have never heard it suggested that these are "meaningless" action declarations, or that they are negations of player agency, prior to this thread.

Without additional context/info i'd suggest that left rather than right or north door rather than south door are meaningless choices. Meaningless actions? I don't know why we are talking about meaningful/meaningless actions.

Agency isn't about actions, it's about choices, meaningful choices.

In fact, the whole OSR approach to designing dungeon maps (Jacquay and all that) rests on the premise that those sorts of action declarations are highly meaningful and are high agency.

I'd say such action declarations promote 'agency of exploration'. Exploration is about making choices of what to do next, sometimes with little or no info present, learning from the results and then making more and more informed decisions about what choice to take next. That is, the greater context of exploration grants meaning to such chosen action declarations that would be meaningless when taken of themselves.

In most versions of D&D, there are spells which do not require any sort of check to be successfully cast. For instance, in most circumstances casting Passwall just permits the player to declare the hole in the wall to have been created.

Agreed. Not sure the purpose of pointing this out yet.

Or suppose that a PC is on the floor of a room with a very high ceiling, and wishes to get to a ledge right up near the ceiling: the player can declare I cast Dimension Door (assuming it is one of their memorised spells, or on a scroll, or similar) and declare that they teleport up to the ledge and - lo and behold - it happens.

Agreed. Not sure the purpose of pointing this out yet either.

In 5e, as I read the rulebooks, the action declaration by a player with the Noble background I seek an audience with the local potentate works similarly to those pedestrian examples - it elides time and space a bit more than the dungeon navigation action declarations, but the upshot of the action declaration is that the audience takes place.

Oh I see now. We are back to this old argument. Premise: "If magic can be an acceptable fictional explanation for eliding time and space" Conclusion: "Then it never matters how time and space are elided". That logic doesn't follow.

Prince Valiant permits these sorts of action declarations if the player has, and spends, a Storyteller Certificate. In one of our sessions, Sir Morgath (a PC) was jousting with Sir Lionheart (a NPC), self-proclaimed greatest knight in all Britain. Sir Morgath's player was of the very strong (and sound) view that in an opposed roll of the dice Sir Lionheart would easily defeat Sir Morgath: so he cashed in a Certificate and elected to Kill a Foe in Combat: as the player narrated it, when the lances of the two knights connected, the one wielded by Sir Morgath splintered, and a shard flew through a gap in Sir Lionheart's visor and entered his brain through his eye, killing him!

That was not a meaningless decision. The fact that I, as GM, had no power of veto didn't mean the player had no agency. They had full agency, which they exercised, achieving the outcome they desired.

It looks more and more like you are arguing against a position I'm not taking.

I agree that wasn't a meaningless decision. I also agree that a GM having no power to veto here doesn't mean the player had no agency. We aren't in opposition on this part.

As I posted upthread, this argument that players getting what they want via fiat declarations is at odds with agency, or the exercise of agency, is a dead end, and it baffles me that anyone is putting the argument.

As I said before, it baffles me that this baffles you.

 

[mamba]

Again, I'm not saying in all cases "say yes or roll" removes or reduces agency, but if it's always present it WILL ultimately reduce my agency by making some things that shouldn't work, work or at least have a chance of working.

making things work that shouldn’t is not reducing your agency, that is the point… you basically just quoted me saying that…

If anything was reduced / taken away in the 2nd case it is your ‘ability’ to fail against your will (in the first case you can simply not talk to the genie), but to me that is no reduction in agency

agency: action or intervention, especially such as to produce a particular effect

Or instead of the dictionary definition, to me agency in an RPG is

1) the ability to set your own goals
2) the ability to decide what steps to take to accomplish your goals

1) is not affected at all. 2) is not affected at all, but the probability of your steps accomplishing your goal increased, so if anything you now have more agency.

Same for the dictionary definition, always producing the desired effect, even when you should not be able to, is the opposite of reduced agency

 

[mamba]

Without additional context/info i'd suggest that left rather than right or north door rather than south door are meaningless choices.

whether I open a door behind which is treasure or one behind which is a dragon is not meaningless.

They may be uninformed, depending on my knowledge when I made them, but that is not the same.

I think you use ‘meaningless’ as ‘uninformed’, ie if you know nothing that helps you with the decision, then it does not matter to you in that moment which one you pick, as you have nothing to go on. It will very much matter / have meaning after the fact…

 

[FrogReaver]

whether I open a door behind which is treasure or one behind which is a dragon is not meaningless.

The outcome isn't meaningless. The choice is. You are conflating meaning in some area for meaning in all areas.

They may be uninformed, depending on my knowledge when I made them, but that is not the same

An uninformed choice is a meaningless choice, at least outside of any greater context.