D&D General What is player agency to you?

[mamba]

Any kind of sense? No.

The example given was that someone else had traveled to this lifeless plane, and they had supplies with them. They lost them or they perished, and the characters then discovered the supplies

yeah, we disagree about that making sense.

Don’t think it said anything about perishing, they simply accidentally dropped some eggs and traveled back to wherever they came from. I like yours better.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't often "advance time", we are playing through day by day.

Well, you should consider it. Take group A as an example. They plan to just wait on dragon to return to town. There's nearly nothing meaningful they can do day by day if that's their plan, and then if they try to actually enact it by doing something like going to the bar and waiting on the dragon, you take their PC's away from them (see below).

Like I've heard of railroading, but dang!

There is not much "adventure worthy" or "fun" in town. The tavern is just locals. There are no obvious 'cool' monsters in town. In any case I come down hard on any player that tries to do anything non adventure related.

Because I hate wasting time doing "Second Life Crap" in an RPG. Like when a player wants their character to go "to the bar" and "pretend to drink" for 3-6 hours of real time. And most players lack that "tie" skill....

Yea, that would be the soft way. If they are lucky they would say just find the "bar" closed.....for a bit worse, and used in this game....a ghost would suddenly possess the character. Then the player would was forced to sit and do nothing as I played his character for a whole real life hour....then the ghost moved on.

This has to be the #1 most egregious example of taking away player agency. This is worse than rocks fall you die.

Group Z: breezed through town and went right out to find the dragon. They had plenty of encounters, but could not find the dragons lair.

They traveled in aimless circles trying to 'spot' the dragon. They looked for big caves and explored them. They followed a herd of mountain goats for a while hopping the dragon would come and eat some.

Almost impossible to find Dragon that leaves the groups wandering aimlessly yields a near complete lack of agency - and even if they are partly to blame for not finding/remember/using the clues, that doesn't take away from the fact that they currently have little to no ability to effect the campaign.

Group B thinks it's a trap too, but are planning to make the trap a trap for the dragon.

The first problem is group B has no leader.....and worse five leaders. Their second big problem is their wacky ideas....they wasted a lot of time on the idea of making "an illusion of a dragon" to "do something" but none of the characters are any type of spellcaster with illusion spells...let alone some higher level spells.

Whether they are 'bad' ideas or not, it sounds like you are shooting most all of them down outright - another agency impacting move.


-In short, your campaign scenario along with the way you DM has led to an environment where the players basically have to wander around in the wilderness in hopes of finding the dragon. They can't go randomly talk to townspeople, they may get possessed by a ghost and sit there doing nothing for an hour. They can't make plans to get an advantage of any kind because you always say no. And to top it off, they can't even wait on the Dragon to just come to them because you don't advance time.

I actually was leaning toward the players just being a bit too entitled and that you mostly ran a normalish game, but it's not them, it's you.

 

[Maxperson]

They are when they are used to knock down a position no one is advocating.

That isn't what they were being used for. We have a number of folks here who argued that there was never a time when the ability should not work. The hypotheticals were created to show that there is a ridiculous enough scenario that the ability should not work.

If the folks arguing "never fail" admitted that those hypotheticals were indeed too ridiculous to warrant success, then an actual dialogue could occur where the line is drawn between success and failure. Unfortunately, people just evade the question, instead talking about "Strawmen" or "agency" or "such a scenario wouldn't happen." Evasion allows them to avoid the real discussion.

At no point, though, were the hypotheticals being used to knock down a position no one was advocating.

 

[Maxperson]

That's not a real feature, - it is an absurd exaggeration, that's why I called it a strawman. The real feature has the "the food must be available" limitation.

I'm not advocating for the insertion of absurd features.

I THINK that the egg thing was an invented ability similar in terms to the noble background feature, not as an exaggeration of the real feature you are discussing now. I can't be sure, though, as I sort of came into it in the middle and just went with the egg thing.

 

[Maxperson]

You misunderstand me. The hypothetical scenario is ridiculous. Like, as an example, it’s useless.

It seems less like a scenario for actual play than like a scenario to try and score rhetorical points.

That someone tried to offer an answer doesn’t make their attempt ridiculous. The entire scenario is ridiculous.

Is that clearer?

It's not any clearer, because I've explained probably 6 times now the reason for the hypothetical scenario and it's none of what you suggest there. Ignoring the real purpose in order to suggest incorrect reasons isn't going to clear things up.

 

[Maxperson]

Let me ask you this - Does the ability not work because there really is no way to arrange a meeting/find food, whatever?

Or does the ability not work because you have a specific way the group must arrange the meeting/find food, whatever?

Option 3

Does the ability not work because there really is no way to arrange a meeting/find food, whatever that isn't absurd?

There's always a way to make it work if you don't mind potential ridiculousness.

 

[Maxperson]

But the ability says "a local noble" not "a specific noble"

So there's no guarantee of a specific noble anyway. If the noble in question doesn't want to meet them, the ability doesn't force it in any way.

The implication in how it's written is a local noble of your choosing. Generally YOU secure the audience, the audience doesn't secure you.

 

[pemerton]

How can you not recognise that this has implications for the agency exercised by the players over the shared fiction?

what makes you believe he / we do not recognize that?

Posts like this:

Having options that are relatively clear and being able to choose between those options is agency. I don't care if you succeed or not.

I mean, a player in a total railroad can choose between options, in the sense of declaring this or that action. It's just that the GM will narrate basically the same thing, whatever action the player declares.

A notion of player agency that says that a player in a total railroad has agency is not a helpful one.

And the underlying point is this: player agency in a game is the capacity to affect the way the game unfolds; the way that a RPG unfolds is by changes in the shared fiction; the pre-eminent way a player can change the shared fiction is by declaring actions for their PC; if the outcomes of those declared actions are just decided by the GM, then the player is not making changes; hence the player is not exercising significant agency.

 

[pemerton]

Those outcomes were reasonable given the fictional events and motivations of NPCs in that world.

But those are all just made up by JRRT. They weren't independent constraints he was governed by.

This is the point that @hawkeyefan and I are making: the GM can author events and motivations - normally quite trivially - to make it reasonable that an audience will be granted. I gave some examples not too far upthread - a Pasha of the Efreet who receives a dream (like Boromir did, as Faramir knew); a King who is obsessed by urban ugliness and natural remedies, both things a party from a magical mediaeval land can speak to him about with some authority.

The real issue here is that the GM has already decided events and motivations independently of the fact that the player is playing a Noble.

your replies? Your insistence to grant what the players want even if it stretches credulity to the breaking point

Credulity is only broken by the GM cleaving to secret information that contradicts the reason presented at the table.

Aragorn was the king, and had the blood of elves, high men and angels running through his veins. He had extreme charisma and mental powers. He was far more than a wandering misfit and could have persuaded(and did) strangers to loan the horses. What happened was very reasonable from an in-fiction point of view and could have happened in any of our games.

Are you sure. I mean, here is the Noble background:

Thanks to your noble birth, people are inclined to think the best of you. You are welcome in high society, and people assume you have the right to be wherever you are. The common folk make every effort to accommodate you and avoid your displeasure, and other people of high birth treat you as a member of the same social sphere. You can secure an audience with a local noble if you need to.​

Yet I keep reading posts that explain why certain people of high birth would not treat the character as a member of their social sphere, would not assume they have the right to be where they are, would not be thought the best of, etc.

So why should I now accept that those posters would decide that Aragorn's status, and legacy, would be acknowledged by other NPCs when he steps out of nowhere hidden by a Cloak of Elvenkind and looking like he's been travelling in the wilds for days on end (as he has been)?

You can fail though mechanical means or if your decision has no possibility to succeed. If your decision was one with no chance to succeed, then you must have wanted to fail so saying no honors your agency in that situation I suppose.

This is ridiculous. The player doesn't know there is no chance to succeed - that is purely a product of the GM's private imagining and decision-making about unrevealed aspects of the situation. The player doesn't want those things; they are ignorant of them!

The Noble feature could have been written like this: If you seek an audience from a local noble, your DM will tell you what happens. But that's not the wording of the ability. It is written, presumably deliberately, to confer a higher degree of agency on the player.

 

[pemerton]

The DM generally hast the most information too, so that makes sense.

<snip>

what is reasonable is what follows from actual reason / logic and real world experience, and applying that to a hypothetical and fantastical situation.

Let's call the situation S. Let's call the range of reasonable outcomes R(O). It's true that S constrains R(O). The point that @hawkeyefan has made, and that I have also made, and have illustrated with my post 1891 upthread, is that - in a game of imagination - S can be varied. And the possible variations of S obviously, and very significantly, relax the constraints on R(O).

Now if the GM has some S in mind, and does not want to vary that, that may be the GM's prerogative (at least at some, perhaps many, tables). But a GM who does that, therefore forms the view that the player's desired outcome falls outside R(O), and therefore tells the player that their desired outcome does not come to pass is not enhancing, or increasing, or even upholding, player agency. They are exercising their own agency as author of the shared fiction. In particular, they are insisting on their own authorship of S as they have envisaged it.

This is a very GM-driven style of RPGing.

A quote from an earlier post:

'looking for a reason to say no either, we just take the reason we see as the most reasonable one in the circumstances'

As Pemerton says, can a bunch of misfits (Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas) with no real proof of heritage, be able to convince a noble to give them treasured horses as the most reasonable outcome? Or more likely the three would taken prisoner / executed?

Here, I think most reasonable is a bit extreme, and still very subjective, question is whether people think the above is a reasonable outcome, regardless of whether most likely to occur or not, and how much flex a DM will give in such a situation.

This is one reason why early editions of D&D (and some other classic games, eg Traveller) include reaction tables - there is always a chance of an enthusiastic reaction, such as Eomer's to Aragorn.

I personally prefer to reframe the reaction outcome as a resolution of a player's declared action (eg to make a good impression, by announcing lineage and loyalties). But by using dice rolls ("say 'yes' or roll the dice"), the full range of interesting possibilities is kept open.

I am not the biggest fan of fiat abilities, because I think dice rolls produce a more compelling pattern of success and failure (Robin Laws calls this the pass/fail cycle, and suggests that it is inherent to all stories). But where fiat abilities are tightly rationed (eg as is the case for Prince Valiant Storyteller Certificates), then they allow the player to really stake their claim - This is where I care, and will produce the outcome I want!

In the context of 5e D&D, the "rationing" consists in being able to choose only one background, and having the fictional circumstances that enliven it be reasonably narrow. I think this design is less compelling than Prince Valiant, as the player makes their choice at the start of play and in anticipation, rather than at the moment of truth as happens i Prince Valiant - but this would just be one way in which D&D design tends to favour "comfortable" over "compelling", and probably not the most invidious.

Ultimately I like to resolve these things through the rules. That's what they're for. If something being attempted is flat-out impossible (eg we have already established the duke is out of town) then no roll takes place - although you may be able to get an audience with his cousin, butler, etc. But if there is even a chance of a particular approach working, even if it's not the most likely outcome, then that's what the dice are for - play out the scene then make a Persuade check against the efreet/king/butler/secret service agents.

See just above - 5e isn't designed to best fit my preferences; but given how it presents backgrounds, I don't think it's particularly hard to make them work.