D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

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

"I seem to recall that . . ."

You're nitpicking terminology. Terminology I've seen people that play PbtA games use.

In this thread, I think the phrase "player narrative control" has been used only by people saying that they don't want it. I haven't seen anyone use it to describe Dungeon World. I've denied its applicability to Burning Wheel or 4e D&D. This is from post 211, and I've reposed it several times, including (I'm pretty sure) in reply to you:

And in order to pre-empt, or at least attempt to pre-empt, confused or incorrect statements about how (say) Dungeon World works: in the RPGs I know that have higher player agency, the players cannot "alter game reality" in the way some posters in this thread are talking about. Rather, they establish their own goals and aspirations for their PCs (including working with the group collectively to establish the appropriate backstory and setting elements to underpin those goals and aspirations), and then the GM relies on those goals and aspirations as cues for their own narration of framing and consequence.

There may also be techniques that permit the players to declare actions or make decisions pertaining to their PCs' memories. This goes together with the players' establishing goals and aspirations, to overall produce characters that have "thicker" lives, relationships, etc than is typical of much D&D play.

@AbdulAlhazred reiterated this point just upthread (post 2410) in reply to you.

The following is from the Apocalypse World rulebook (p 109), and is equally applicable to DW:

Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned world says and does except the players’ characters.​

The reason that AW does not play traditionally, despite using a traditional allocation of tasks, is because of the principles that the GM follows in doing their stuff, that is, in saying things about "the damned world" and what it does. That is why I have repeatedly emphasised those principles: in high player agency RPGing, at least as I am familiar with it, what underpins the agency is that the GM, in framing and in narrating consequences, has regard to player-established priorities for their PCs.

This is why, to me in my subjective tastes, PbtA isn't a "game" as I understand it and more of like a group story telling session. A slightly more complex group improv.

I wouldn't say its not a game, but I do feel it is a different type of game from what I am familiar with and enjoy as an RPG. I would prefer they were called something else, but a lot of people really don't like what they think of as an RPG not being called an RPG.

As per what I've just quoted from Apocalypse World - which is equally applicable to Dungeon World - it is a RPG. It has a GM whose job it is to frame scenes and narrate consequences. It has players who engage the game by declaring actions for, and generally giving expression to, particular characters from a first person perspective.

It's not group improv any more than mainstream D&D is group improv.

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?

I've stated it many times - see eg this reply to you: https://www.enworld.org/threads/what-is-player-agency-to-you.698831/post-9091124. I've just restated it. Here it is again:

The GM, in framing and in narrating consequences, has regard to player-established priorities for their PCs.

I think the idea that traditional play can't be player focused is a strawman. It certainly isn't a given that any given game is player goal centric, but it certainly can be. I know my games are. I always have multiple threads going, multiple options the players can choose from. If someone has an individual goal, I'll try to figure out how to fit it in.

I'm reasonably familiar with this sort of RPGing. You are describing the GM engaging in framing, and consequence narration, having regard primarily to their authorship of their world. They provide the dramatic need - via the "multiple threads" - and the players then align the play of their PCs to those - "choose from multiple options".

That is not how Dungeon World or Burning Wheel works. In those RPGs, the dramatic needs by reference to which the GM makes decisions about framing and consequences come from the players.

(Torchbearer is more of an intermediate case. At least as I've experienced it, it toggles back and forth. It is not as consistently high on player agency as Burning Wheel, though it can be comparable to Burning Wheel for extended periods - eg my last two sessions of Torchbearer were indistinguishable from Burning Wheel as far as player agency is concerned.)

 

[pemerton]

If what happens next is only what the DM wants, why are they asking? Drama?

In my experience, either to create suspense/uncertainty, or to obscure the real-world causal relation between who is doing what at the table now, and what the table's shared fiction is going to be in 30 seconds time.

These are very basic, widely advocated, GMing techniques. Allied techniques include rolling dice behind a screen even when they don't mean anything, and pretending to take a while to decide something even when the answer is ready-to-hand, and pretending to be working from notes even when something is being made up on the spot.

That last one is very frequently advocated, on these boards, as being crucial to successfully improvising as a GM.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Another hopefully constructive addition.

The chance of success for a dice roll. Do higher or lower chances of success impact player agency or is the question of player agency independent.

I think some will say players that have success more often weighted in their favor have greater control over the narrative and thus greater agency.

I think others will say that player agency is independent of the chance for success because whatever the chance of success you had a meaningful choice to pick that or a different action.

Thoughts, opinions?

So, firstly, "some" will say anything. I don't think it's particularly fair to present that so baldly without nuance. It's pretty close to, "Players just want to win, and if you don't just let them win, they'll become petulant." Which isn't ideal. I am certain that's not what you're going for here, but it's too easy for it to fall into that.

For my own position, well, aforementioned nuance. In the ideal case, the answer is "no." However, I have both philosophical and practical (as in, lived-experience) concerns that make the answer a contingent "yes." Let's start with the former.

No: Player agency is not affected by success chances, because agency often lies in the attempt, not in the final result. If that were not true, then IRL agency would be nonexistent; I cannot choose to simply stop being subject to the laws of gravity, even though that is a perfectly cognizable thought and not a logical contradiction (or, at least, our knowledge of physics does not indicate that that is a contradiction.) I cannot choose to reduce my core body temperature to exactly 14.6 C. I cannot summon a bacon, lettuce, and cheese sandwich to my hand without, y'know, actually making the thing. (We do actually have some bacon...maybe I can convince the family to have bacon sandwiches tonight...)

I won't belabor it further. If rate of success were the determining factor for player agency, "agency" would be rather severely devalued as a concept. But...there's a critical difference between the examples above and how D&D works. That difference is the GM.

Yes: Player agency is affected by success chances, because success chances are not, and cannot be, perfectly objective. IRL, my chance of successfully persuading someone to make me a bacon sandwich for dinner is, in some sense, objective; no one "sets" that "difficulty," it just is whatever it is. In a game, however, those success chances are often determined, at least in part, by GM preference. This opens the door for denial of agency, not through outright preventing players from doing something, but through making it effectively impossible. This is the mathematical parallel of a similar thematic move, where the GM will "allow" players to (for example) play races the GM disapproves of...but in practice, such characters will be dragged through an intentionally unpleasant and hostile gameplay experience. This is a very old approach, but it certainly hasn't gone away.

In its mathematical form, this "ban by allowing poorly" approach takes many forms. The "roll stealth every single round" form, for example, which is often more a matter of misunderstanding iterative probability. (Having a 90% chance to succeed means you've got better than 50% chance to fail in the first 7 attempts.) It does not always reflect that lack of understanding though--sometimes, the fact that it is iterative is exactly the point, since passing three difficult checks is obviously much harder than passing just one. The "alright, but you have to roll 20" is another common form. A third is to "allow" by demanding an exorbitant price tag, whether in actual wealth/materials or in more intangible things like reputation.

And the tricky thing is...SOME of the time, this is totally fair! Sometimes a thing really should require multiple checks. Sometimes a task really should require that you get a critical success. Sometimes things just really are costly, or the player is asking to do something that really would ruin their reputation. Etc.

The problem comes in when GMs exert this influence for the purpose of preventing behavior, not for the purpose of recognizing that a particular task really should be difficult or costly.

So: IF we presume a consistently fair and reasonable GM (nobody's perfect, but reasonable consistency is a fair expectation), who gives the players reasonable opportunity to learn the difficulty and/or cost, then no, success chance does not particularly correlate with agency. As soon as that assumption ceases to be true--as soon as these things become unreliable in the fairness and/or reasonableness department--we get a loss of agency.

If the GM never uses success chances as a way to soft-ban/soft-block player choices, then no. If they do at any point do that, then yes.

 

[pemerton]

I am really curious about something. Suppose, (for whatever reason), you're sitting down at my table for session zero at the start of a new group or 'campaign'. I give you the broad-brush strokes/bullet points of the game world as I've envisioned it. Nothing massively detailed, something like "Ok, here's a map, here are some major countries, here are some of the major world events from the recent past, and here is where I'd like to start us out at".
‎
‎ As per your preferences, have we already strayed too far from your preferred play style?

It depends entirely on what is going on. Are there more details of the game world as you have envisioned it that you intend to draw on for the purposes of framing and narrating consequences? Then the answer is yes.

If the DM said "You use your ability to try and secure a meeting..." then no. But as long as I'm making the choice.

What you're describing here is the minimum for RPGing to actually be taking place - ie the player gets to declare actions for their PC. Even in a total railroad that happens.

 

[pemerton]

In a dungeon / wilderness it makes sense to stick together.

I think this just pushes the contrivance back one step - why are these people engaged in exploration together? and why are there so many crazily dangerous yet lucrative places for them to explore?

Anyway, the nature and extent of party play in RPGing depends heavily on system, at least in my experience.

For instance, my Prince Valiant game does not involve dungeons or wilderness in the D&D sense. It's a game of Arthurian-style knight errantry. Yet the PCs hang out together most of the time: two are leaders of their holy military order, and the third was more-or-less bullied into going along with them. This corresponds to the fact that Prince Valiant doesn't have robust mechanics for interweaving the concerns of geographically very disparate protagonists. In our last session, the PCs got separated on a battle field - but then reunited at the end of the battle. They acted separately in the castle they then found themselves in, and then two rode out while the third stayed behind as the castle came under assault. By the end of the session, however, they were again reunited.

My Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy games, both Vikings and LotR/MERP, have involved dungeons and wilderness in the D&D sense. But quite often have the PCs separated - separating or joining the PCs is a standard GM-side "move" in this system (requiring spending a die from the Doom Pool), and the size of a player's dice pool depends in part on who they are with (in MHRP the categories are Solo, Buddy, Team; in my LotR/MERP I call them Alone, Companion, Company). But there are robust mechanics for interweaving: the Doom Pool is a common element that impacts all the players, and Assets can be created that can affect geographically separated characters (depending on the details).

 

[mamba]

These are very basic, widely advocated, GMing techniques. Allied techniques include rolling dice behind a screen even when they don't mean anything, and pretending to take a while to decide something even when the answer is ready-to-hand, and pretending to be working from notes even when something is being made up on the spot.

I have never done any of this and see no value in it

 

[Mort]

If what happens next is only what the DM wants, why are they asking? Drama?

Illusion of choice.

I'm certainly not saying all DMs do this. I'm saying it's extremely common

 

[bloodtide]

How is it that the rules constraining the GM is 'oppressive', but the GM having veto authority over all player actions is 'just another kind of agency'?

Because the Gm and Players are not the same and are not equals.

I just don't see how a narrative game can be that much more focused on individual wants in needs that can't also have similar fiction arcs in standard D&D. If we don't see that much in D&D I suspect it's largely because the people playing the game aren't exactly clamoring for it, it's not what they want or need in a game.

I encounter this very often.

A player describes something in some vague terms that they wish to encounter. Then I as the DM make that encounter. But everything I think is 100% different then what the player thinks. So no matter what a player says and "thinks" they are saying, it's not what I think or create.

In a traditional game, all the player can do is complain. This is why narrative type games exist: so there are rules to force a GM to do, make and create what the player wants. The GM in such a game is not free to do 'anything', they have to follow both the game rules and the player whims. And this can work just fine if you make sure the game is made up of only people that all share the same wave length about everything.

Though the vast majority of players don't want to "add" all sorts of stuff to the game constantly. They just want to play their lone character in the game world. And, of course, once you get past that small group of players that shares the GMs wavelength....you get a bigger problem. More then half of the player base are at best sneaky opportunists, and at many are just out right sly exploiters and worse.

Depends on what happens next.

If what happens next is something of the players' choosing then yes.

If what happens next is only what the DM wants to happen next, then no.

This makes it sound like the GM is just a doormat for the players. The players just say random stuff and the GM just says "yes player, it is so in the game".

 

[mamba]

Illusion of choice.

I'm certainly not saying all DMs do this. I'm saying it's extremely common

so how does this work? The players say 'we want to do X' and despite this 'Y' happens and they do not notice it? Or do we run down a long sequence of 'you cannot do that' until they finally come up with one of the two choices the DM could have proposed at the beginning?

Sounds like a pretty stupid approach to things...

 

[Mort]

what exactly do you think happens after the players have been asked what they want to do?

It’s like you try to make this complicated… if I wanted them to do one of two things, I would not ask this in the first place… I am starting to get the suspicion that you guys need to be restricted by rules for your players to have agency, whereas we can just grant the players some agency naturally

Not at all.

You asked a straightforward question, I gave a straightforward answer.

There's nothing complicated about it.

Just that many, many DMs do NOT, in fact give actual choice to the players of what they actually want to do next. If that choice is presented, great - that's real agency.