D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Mort]

if you think that is all trad play is... then I cannot help you there

Sigh.

You are REALLY intent on taking everything I say in some overall worst light.

I meant this specific DM not all TRAD okay.

I said nothing controversial, nor anything the OP would disagree with.

 

[Micah Sweet]

"I seem to recall that . . ."

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:

​

@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.


As per what I've just quoted from Apocalypse World
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.

I never said that your style of gaming is group improv, first of all.

The captioned above, however, combined with the specific guidelines and rules that the GM is required to follow to play in the spirit of the game really seems to me like it would benefit from being called a different sort of game. It really isn't a value judgment.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

I don't believe in illusionism.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think this is up for grabs.

It seems to be true of most TSR/WotC modules since the mid-80s. I'm going to conjecture that it's true of most Paizo/PF modules.

I don't think it's true of (say) White Plume Mountain. In White Plume Mountain, the situation is essentially static. The players' job is to solve it. There is no dramatic need at all (on either player or GM side) - the theft of the weapons is purely a framing/flavour device, like the notion that the earth is under attack from aliens in some Space Invaders variant.

But WPM-type play - or, more generally, classic dungeon-crawling through largely static situations of the sort Gygax addresses in his PHB - has been a minority approach for 40+ years now. Even Gygax's DMG, which is published one year after his PHB, shows signs of the move away from it.

I was just thinking of 5e, but it definitely applies to a lot more!

Just to display different amounts of agency for different games in the same edition.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

While I get what you're saying, I'd much rather believe in the fairness of the GM than to abandon a style I prefer because it technically allows unfairness.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't believe in illusionism.

Would you say you… disbelieve it?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, every published adventure is an example of lower agency play.

Hard to deny that, to be fair.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Would you say you… disbelieve it?

...I would.

 

[pemerton]

The captioned above, however, combined with the specific guidelines and rules that the GM is required to follow to play in the spirit of the game really seems to me like it would benefit from being called a different sort of game. It really isn't a value judgment.

The difference is no greater than between (say) White Plume Mountain and the DL modules, which are published as supplements for the same game system (AD&D). I used AD&D for vanilla narrativist play.

The core of a RPG is the participant structure - GM and player roles, with quite distinct "moves" to make - and the role of the fiction in mattering to the resolution of moves that are made.

There are marginal cases, but Burning Wheel or Dungeon World aren't among them!

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm perfectly happy to accept that there is more play out there than I'm aware of that (using Forge terminology) I would call "vanilla narrativism".

But there are things that make me doubtful.

That's fair.

*I've never heard vanilla narativism

I GMed vanilla narrativist AD&D in the second half of the 1980s, and vanilla narrativist Rolemaster for around 20 years from 1990. When I discovered RPGs like HeroWars, and Burning Wheel, and Maelstrom Storytelling, and read critical accounts of them (mostly on the Forge), I was able to relate what was being described to my own play. And to improve my own play, too. (Eg I cribbed techniques from Paul Czege's Nicotine Girls for use in what was, theme-and-trope-wise, pretty standard FRPGing using Rolemaster.)

My first experience with D&D was some of the CRPG's. Baulders Gate, Icewindell, etc.

I don't think i played my first pen and paper game till 4e.

Later on, when 4e D&D was being developed, I was able (i) to see the influence of those games on its design, and (ii) to use approaches and advice from those games to enhance my 4e GMing.

The correlative of the above is that, whenever I read someone attacking the Forge, or the approach of the games that the Forge analysed and/or produced; bemoaning "player entitlement" or characterising a narrativist GM as "servicing the players" and just "giving them what they want"; and generally asserting the centrality of the GM in establishing the priorities for play, exercising near-unilateral control over the content of the shared fiction, etc; I infer that they are not doing what I was doing in my vanilla narrativist days.

I get that. Though maybe there's alot of nuance in the concepts one will defend and how one's play tends to go.

Generally, from their descriptions of their approach, they seem to me to be GMing games that are similar to those I saw going on around me in the 90s: setting-heavy, with the GM establishing a lot of "behind-the-scenes" plot elements that are then used to drive play; and the players' main role being to identify these things and engage with them via their PCs.

A few thoughts - no accusations.

This point is probably more semantics but most of these discussions seem to boil down to that - at least in part. I think there's a difference between 'creating the world' and 'driving play'. The D&D DM still creates the world in this particular subset of play. Players choose where to go and what to do in that world. But as long as the world is large and accessible enough then that means the players can drive play toward just about anything in a general sense. Now specifics might be a different story. Players don't get carte blanche to drive play toward very specific elements that they come up with - though most dm's will work with them to get something in the ballpark added to the fiction for them to interact with. This later type of 'driving play' seems to be more of what you have in mind, whereas the former is what I have in mind.

Obviously all my inferences here are defeasible. But where's the contrary evidence?

What can be offered for evidence?

*Note I'd say playing this way is definitely a minority. IME it seems most D&D players respond better to a menu of choices and so most of the time a menu of choices is what is provided - but even if it is, most DM's aren't going to force one of the choices from that menu if the players want something not on the menu (obviously in a high DM prep game there's some external consideration given by players toward what's already been prepped - but ultimately they still have the choice of doing things that lead places the DM hasn't prepped for).