D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

1) they decide what they do, but not the outcome
2) there are plenty of cases where their action is not just negated, then they do affect the shared fiction

(1) is contentious, given that in many cases - as @hawkeyefan was pointing out upthread - a canonical account of what a person does includes an account of what happened, which includes or entails an outcome.

But even if that contention is set aside, getting to describe that I put out word, via my herald, that I would like an audience with <such-and-such a local noble house> in a context where the GM decides what actually happens, is low agency. It's the lowest degree of agency a player can exercise and still be playing the game at all.

As for (2), if the GM is always at liberty to negate/veto, then the player is really just making suggestions that the GM can choose to take up or not. I regard that as low agency. Taken literally, the player isn't playing the game at all, just making suggestions to the GM who is playing solo.

 

[Raiztt]

(1) is contentious, given that in many cases - as @hawkeyefan was pointing out upthread - a canonical account of what a person does includes an account of what happened, which includes or entails an outcome.

If players decide the outcome, what are dice and DCs for?

 

[pemerton]

Agency (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Is what I use when discussing agency or when I need a definition.

I don't think the notion of agency discussed in that entry is especially salient to analysing the agency that players enjoy in respect of games they play. But if we wanted to bring it to bear, we could ask To what extent is the content of the shared fiction, in RPGing, the product of any given participant's exercise of agency? Then we could say - by stipulation - that the greater the extent to which that content is the product of one or more players' exercise of agency, the more player agency is enjoyed by those players; and the greater the extent to which it is the product of the GM's exercise of agency, the less player agency is enjoyed.

And with that stipulation, @hawkeyefan, @soviet and I don't need to change anything that we've been saying.

 

[Raiztt]

I don't think the notion of agency discussed in that entry is especially salient to analysing the agency that players enjoy in respect of games they play. But if we wanted to bring it to bear, we could ask To what extent is the content of the shared fiction, in RPGing, the product of any given participant's exercise of agency? Then we could say - by stipulation - that the greater the extent to which that content is the product of one or more players' exercise of agency, the more player agency is enjoyed by those players; and the greater the extent to which it is the product of the GM's exercise of agency, the less player agency is enjoyed.

And with that stipulation, @hawkeyefan, @soviet and I don't need to change anything that we've been saying.

I'm just saying that it's easier to create a definition of agency and then determine whether or not someone has agency, rather than quibble about how much agency they have, which might be subjective.

 

[mamba]

1) is contentious, given that in many cases - as @hawkeyefan was pointing out upthread - a canonical account of what a person does includes an account of what happened, which includes or entails an outcome.

that is covered by 2) If you say ‘I go left’, that is what you do. 1) is only of interest when your outcome is being denied, whether by a die roll or the DM.

You all seem to treat 1) + denial as the default when it is the exception

As for (2), if the GM is always at liberty to negate/veto, then the player is really just making suggestions that the GM can choose to take up or not. I regard that as low agency. Taken literally, the player isn't playing the game at all, just making suggestions to the GM who is playing solo.

so unless the rules tie the DM down, there is little player agency, regardless of how permissive the DM is? I disagree with that

To me it matters how permissive the DM / game is, however we get there

 

[pemerton]

If players decide the outcome, what are dice and DCs for?

Vincent Baker has discussed this at length, and I quoted some of what he has to say in a relatively recent thread.

Rules that constrain who is entitled to say what when, where those constraint can include demands - eg demands on the GM to narrate a failure - make the play of the game more exciting then it would be if it was just round-robin storytelling.

The agency of the player consists in establishing the context and elements that the GM uses in framing and consequence narration.

 

[Oofta]

Posts like this:
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.

That's not at all what I said or implied.

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.

First, any background feature is a drop in the bucket compared to the choices the players can make in my campaign. But if you really want to be pedantic about it, I don't think every action or attempt by a player should succeed. Therefore, the result of the action isn't what's important. It's that the players can make meaningful choices that has actual impact.

Suppose the players come to a fork in the road. Path A is the easy route with little risk of failure. Path B is a riskier route but more rewarding or somehow better at achieving the party's goals. They have a reasonable understanding of risk and reward even if they don't know exact details.

I think the players have agency in this scenario. If they take path B they may not succeed but they made an informed decision. I don't guarantee success for any choice but I endeavor to give people multiple options and an understanding of what those choices mean.

 

[pemerton]

I'm just saying that it's easier to create a definition of agency and then determine whether or not someone has agency, rather than quibble about how much agency they have, which might be subjective.

Not really. If two siblings build a sand castle together, and one gets to decide everything about the castle except which turret the stick (as flag pole) gets placed in, we can say which one had more say over it. Sometimes these issues are subtle, and parents (or teachers, or whomever) struggle. But often it's fairly clear.

I don't think it's very hard to identify the difference between low player agency and high agency RPGing. It's not normally mysterious who's making the decisions about the content of the shared fiction.

 

[pemerton]

so unless the rules tie the DM down, there is little player agency, regardless of how permissive the DM is? I disagree with that

To me it matters how permissive the DM / game is, however we get there

I don't particularly care what the written text says - it doesn't have magic powers. I care about the actual practice at the table. Is the GM bound by player action declarations and some mutually agreed resolution process (other than GM decides)?

If the answer is no - if, to borrow from @chaochou, the approach to play:

*does not treat rules as inviolable (for the GM)
*features no reliability in resolution for key elements of gameplay and passes it all to the GM to resolve
*assumes the GM will create ad-hoc resolution processes - with resultant lack of transparency for players​

Then I regard it as low agency.

And if the GM achieved transparency by enjoying and exercising the power to just declare hitherto-unrevealed, and "negating", fiction true (eg the baron is not receiving visitors any more) then I regard that as also low agency.

 

[Oofta]

I'm just saying that it's easier to create a definition of agency and then determine whether or not someone has agency, rather than quibble about how much agency they have, which might be subjective.

Saying that agency means the players only have agency if they make a decision and determine the outcome is something that's not relevant to D&D because the game is not designed to work that way. Other games have ways of balancing it out, there are checks and balances that D&D doesn't have. So in D&D it sounds an awful lot like an "I win" button.