D&D General What is player agency to you?

[soviet]

I just think I detected/thought of a reason people might be chaffing so hard against each other in this thread and it has a lot to do with what they want as a player.

When I am a player, what I want is to explore. I want to overcome obstacles, I want to learn secrets, discover hidden places, etc. So, because of that, it is absolutely at odds with my purpose to do much authoring of the game world. Then, I'm not exploring - I am creating.

It was really fun to discover the creepy and eldritch horror at the bottom of the moat house in RttToEE because I didn't know what was down there. It would not have been fun if I just got to decide what was at the bottom. I want the world to exist independently of myself. I do not think this reduces my agency one whit, because I express my agency in the form of exploration, not in the form of creation.

You can do all of these things in a narrativist game too.

Expecting your Noble background feature to (almost) always work does not mean you are authoring the details of that meet or deciding the intentions of the person you meet. That can still all be within the purview of the GM. You don't have to abandon exploration in order to increase agency.

 

[Raiztt]

If I play a cleric, how fleshed out are the religions? Can I make up details of the church/practice/theology or do you want to control all of that?

Off topic, but I just want to say/comment that in so far as my games go: Religions, cosmology, and philosophy are extremely fleshed out but I always go with:
a.) extremely distant deities (it's possible to be an atheist in the sense that you could doubt that gods exist)
b.) divine magic is not fundamentally different from arcane magic, and does not spring from the gods
c.) afterlife uncertainty

 

[jmartkdr2]

Off topic, but I just want to say/comment that in so far as my games go: Religions, cosmology, and philosophy are extremely fleshed out but I always go with:
a.) extremely distant deities (it's possible to be an atheist in the sense that you could doubt that gods exist)
b.) divine magic is not fundamentally different from arcane magic, and does not spring from the gods
c.) afterlife uncertainty

Interesting, interesting. It actually increases my ability to play my cleric how I want because no one can prove I'm wrong.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I was solely thinking of keeping them in the same place, they all need some reason to be there after all, and it sounds like they would have different ones

Frankly, this is one of many unrealistic conceits which most RPG play makes to playability. I mean, you CAN certainly devise situations/settings where the PCs do, or must, have a plausible interest in sticking together, but very few really maintain such.

IMHO all play with very few exceptions is extremely contrived.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I do not see any of this affecting agency in the first place, sorry. You chose what you want to do, it failed, you do something else (in the case of the audience). The audience is just a means to an end, so find a different way. That does not affect your agency unless I keep denying your choices, one noble you cannot get one with does not register.

My point was, instead you sent me off on some GM conceived and desired dragon hunt. Obviously players can practice obstinate play and keep rejecting every GM overture. That may work fine in some games, not as well in others.

The ultimate point with Narrativist play and this kind of agency is narr play simply constantly refocuses on player concerns. Like in DW you could hand me a black arrow (soft move, part of a front) but you can't block my attempt to get an audience if I trigger a move that has that fiction, though the move MIGHT be able to fail. I will surely at least get to toss the dice.

 

[mamba]

Frankly, this is one of many unrealistic conceits which most RPG play makes to playability. I mean, you CAN certainly devise situations/settings where the PCs do, or must, have a plausible interest in sticking together, but very few really maintain such.

IMHO all play with very few exceptions is extremely contrived.

if they all have the same goal it kinda makes sense, certainly moreso than if they do not

In a town everyone can go about their things separately either way. In a dungeon / wilderness it makes sense to stick together.

The problem is what keeps you together for more than a quest when you have different goals, instead of everyone heading in different directions

 

[mamba]

My point was, instead you sent me off on some GM conceived and desired dragon hunt.

how exactly did I do that?

Last I checked you did not get an audience, how would that lead to this?

The ultimate point with Narrativist play and this kind of agency is narr play simply constantly refocuses on player concerns. Like in DW you could hand me a black arrow (soft move, part of a front) but you can't block my attempt to get an audience

yeah, not much difference in softness to me

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Its oppressive to the DM, from the perspective of mainstream D&D play, and that of previous non-4e (with exclusively player-authored quests) editions. A lot of people seem to like this, and that's great. But it does restrict the DMs choices greatly in comparison, and is not a game style I have any interest in.

I find the term 'oppressive' here both extremely inaccurate and highly revealing. Having GMed extensively in both ways I actually find that narrative play gives at least as much freedom as trad play. Narr is a lot more free and allows for much greater spontaneity IMHO. Yes there are things I can't do as a DW GM which you can in 5e, but if we evaluate agency by the criteria you, Max, or FrogReaver seem to prefer, I have lost nothing, right?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't find it hyperbolic at all. Narrative games restrain GM creativity to a degree I find oppressive, by insisting that all of it starts with what the players want. You don't agree, that's fine.

And then I exercise my creativity! Sometimes I am pretty much unconstrained too, or only one aspect of what I can frame next is already defined. Beyond that what you propose is like the old argument that Shakespeare is a bad poet compared to Frost. This is most certainly not a universal view of creativity. I freely grant, you might feel more constrained of course, but I don't think it can be stated objectively and again, the measure you apply to PLAYER agency seems like it would show them to be totally equivalent. It feels like a bit of a double standard.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So how do you describe a player's successful lore check or deciding what a successful check look like or similar?

You're nitpicking terminology. Terminology I've seen people that play PbtA games use. Perhaps I'm not using the correct term. You're know what I mean. If that is not the correct term, what is? Something that doesn't take two dozen words?

Maybe I can help a bit? In Dungeon World there's no part of game play where a player gets to state any fiction outright (the GM should ask questions and use the answers, but it's up to the GM to initiate that). So the GM still authors the fiction, but they are constrained to do so according to DW's rules about how it must relate to the PCs. This the GM will talk about them and what happens as their needs collide with the world around them. The GM can't say things are out of bounds of the fiction simply because they don't feel like telling a certain story, but they do get to choose what it all looks like.