D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Maxperson]

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.

Yes, I'm sure. Unlike with Aragorn there's nothing supernatural to that background.

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)?

The Dunedain has supernatural gifts, unlike those nobles.

I've yet to see a convincing reason why a rogue with the urchin background who knows how to act and dress like a noble wouldn't be able to "secure an audience with a local noble if you need to." That background ability is entirely about mundane perception.

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.

Really? If my PC flaps his arms in an attempt to fly, I know that he has no chance to succeed. I don't need a DM to tell me that. There are many acts that the player will know will fail without any sort of "private DM imagining or decision making."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't disagree, but practically speaking that's not going to happen every time for every feature.

Why? Because it offends you all that players can make some assertions in a game? I just don't get it. I mean, literally its a nonsensical attitude when the goal is to play a game which is fundamentally cooperative in nature.

Position of Privilege
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.

This CLEARLY and unequivocally gives the authority to the PLAYER to decide they are going to get an audience with "a local noble" where the 'a' is pretty clearly (and I passed my SAT with a perfect score and got Straight As in English in College, I'm not guessing here) meant to be one of a class of nobles picked by the player. When someone says "do you want a donut" they do not mean "take this donut I'm shoving in your face" they mean "take any one of what is on offer here." Now, obviously, that may be a very limited, or even non-existent choice, but the PLAYER gets to choose from what is available! PERIOD.

Your character will be treated as a member of the Ruling Class within the society he is a member of, and I would also expect that to extend to other societies where his position is reasonably equivalent and similar social norms exist. If he shows up in the Dwarf Kingdom or Elfland, he'll get his audience. If he shows up at an orc lair the response might be "we ritually murder and eat the hearts of enemy leaders, GANK!" OK, but you'll at least get your minute with the Orc King to say whatever clever thing you think might get you out of that.

All this nonsense about GMs who are the only one who can say if its 'sensible' for this or that to happen, what a lot of bunk. I call it!

 

[Raiztt]

@pemerton, do you consider our very real lives to be "low agency" vis a vis our ability to effect outcomes?

 

[mamba]

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 there is no rule that says so, then how is the DM bound? Just by ‘does not treat rules as inviolable (for the GM)’?

I agree with the rest

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton, do you consider our very real lives to be "low agency" vis a vis our ability to effect outcomes?

Obviously the amount of agency a person exercises varies wildly across different domains of activity. Sociologists do work on this.

But I'm not talking about whether a factory worker, or a firefighter, or a bus driver, or a school teacher, gets to exercise agency in their job; or who gets to exercise what sort of agency in their overall home life. I'm talking about the exercise of agency playing a game.

We can compare games: say, chess to backgammon (the latter involves more luck and so outcomes flow to a correspondingly lesser degree from choices made) or bridge to five hundred (ditto), or in the context of RPGs (say) a total railroad (low player agency) to Burning Wheel run in accordance with Luke Crane's instructions to players and GMs (one of the highest agency RPGs around).

 

[Maxperson]

Well I'm a citizen of a constitutional monarchy, but am reasonably well-versed in US constitutional law and theory. I'm an academic lawyer, and constitutional law and theory is one of my fields. So is theoretical sociology. I look at the notion of noble birth as set out in the Noble feature; then look at the constitutional arrangements of the US; then read posts about using the feature to meet with the elected president of the republic; and then my head explodes!

Because the 5e feature has no inherent supernatural reason for nobility. It's just about power and position, and despite lack of "noble birth," higher offices in the U.S. are effectively nobility. Basically if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, calling it elected isn't going to make it not a duck.

 

[mamba]

Why? Because it offends you all that players can make some assertions in a game? I just don't get it. I mean, literally its a nonsensical attitude when the goal is to play a game which is fundamentally cooperative in nature.

because there are things that arise during play that you did not think of covering beforehand

That basically is why there is a DM in the first place, otherwise a thick rulebook would be enough

 

[pemerton]

if there is no rule that says so, then how is the DM bound? Just by ‘does not treat rules as inviolable (for the GM)’?

It doesn't seem profitable to delve deeply into the metaphysics of rule following. But in the context of a voluntary activity, rules bind by being taken up by the participants. A written text can make this easier, but isn't essential.

 

[mamba]

This CLEARLY and unequivocally gives the authority to the PLAYER to decide they are going to get an audience with "a local noble" where the 'a' is pretty clearly (and I passed my SAT with a perfect score and got Straight As in English in College, I'm not guessing here) meant to be one of a class of nobles picked by the player.

I don’t care about your SAT, I passed that too, ‘a’ means any noble of their choosing.

As I said before, that follows from how you go about getting an audience, you approach a specific person, you do not simply shout into a room full of nobles ‘one of you will have to talk to me, figure out who and let’s meet’

If that is how you think it works, then we are all saying the same thing, ie. chances are someone will talk to you, but others won’t

 

[Raiztt]

Obviously the amount of agency a person exercises varies wildly across different domains of activity. Sociologists do work on this.

But I'm not talking about whether a factory worker, or a firefighter, or a bus driver, or a school teacher, gets to exercise agency in their job; or who gets to exercise what sort of agency in their overall home life. I'm talking about the exercise of agency playing a game.

We can compare games: say, chess to backgammon (the latter involves more luck and so outcomes flow to a correspondingly lesser degree from choices made) or bridge to five hundred (ditto), or in the context of RPGs (say) a total railroad (low player agency) to Burning Wheel run in accordance with Luke Crane's instructions to players and GMs (one of the highest agency RPGs around).

There's a whole swath, an enormous swath, of people who play RPGs who want to say "Ok, you know how the real world works? That, but now fantasy".

And there are whole swaths of people who want to engage in, (what I do not consider to even be a game), collaborative fiction.

If your argument is that the former is 'low agency' based on your definition of agency, then obviously your syllogism holds. I just don't see the point of people slamming into each other saying "I do it like this!" and then someone else says "Well I do it like this!".