D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Mort]

Ok, but does this not cut into the all powerful Player Agency?

It's not binary. It's a spectrum. The DM is honoring the ability. Nothing about it says the DM can't frame it in a fun, difficult way for the player.

If we "must" use the noble bit as you are stuck on it:

The PCs wander into some location in the game. The one Player says "I use my noble feature". So the DM Must alter game reality and say "yes, player there is a noble for you to meet with. All hail the rules".

The DM doesn't have to alter game reality in the slightest. If there's ACTUALLY no noble then there's no meeting. That's not even controversial, you "arrange a meeting with a local noble." If there's no local noble, there's no one to meet with. Or if there is a noble to meet with, that's the start a call to adventure and and decide for shenanigans from the DM

You keep insisting that any time the DM is honoring a player ability that the DM somehow must spoon feed the PC/player and make things ridiculously easy. The DM is not only under no such obligation, but doing so is actually a disservice to the player.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ok, but does this not cut into the all powerful Player Agency?

If we "must" use the noble bit as you are stuck on it:

The PCs wander into some location in the game. The one Player says "I use my noble feature". So the DM Must alter game reality and say "yes, player there is a noble for you to meet with. All hail the rules".

But ok...lets say there was a noble. Well the feature is just "you get a meeting". So if the DM makes an unfriendly noble, won't the player just whine and complain that the DM is not giving the Player Agency?


I know I have said this before....and guess will say many more times: I'm not talking about a rule X on page Y of game Z. Ok...fine some games exist where everyone read and follows "the rules" on the page. Look that is great. And, ok....done.....moving on.

So now in a generic RPG WITH NO RULES WHATSOEVER FOR "PLAYER AGENCY", a Player will STILL demand Player Agency. D&D 5E has NO "other game player agency rules" AT ALL. And YET, a player in a 5E game will whine and complain ABOUT having Player Agency....even though they are playing a game with NO "narrative/storytelling like rules".


Though....oddly...ghost butt boy is not one complaining about "agency".


I do love how you say there no "line or limits"....and then say there "are". But, of course only ones YOU agree with. And sure, if your with a group of people that think exactly like you in nearly every way.......it's great. You think X, they all think X and everyone is happy.

But what happens when your personal "approved list" does not match with someone else's?

And it only get worse when one side is completely unreasonable....and this is very common.


Right, "no one" has a veto......EXCEPT you with your PERFECT list. So you can sit back and get EVERYTHING you want.....as it's on YOUR list. But what about everyone else? Why don't they get a say? Why is YOUR list the only ONE WAY?


Well, sure it works great if you have a group of people that all think nearly the exact same thing. But it will only work for that small group of people.

Are you seriously attempting to claim that it is a bad thing to say that a rape survivor can ask, "Please don't include rape stuff in this game, that would ruin the fun for me"? That it is a bad thing to say that a person of color can ask, "Please don't include racial oppression stuff in this game, I deal with too much race crap in my daily life"?

Is that seriously the position you want to take here?

Because all your snide talk about my "perfect" list and limits I agree with (that you apparently don't) is exactly that.

 

[bloodtide]

Are you seriously attempting to claim that it is a bad thing to say that a rape survivor can ask, "Please don't include rape stuff in this game, that would ruin the fun for me"? That it is a bad thing to say that a person of color can ask, "Please don't include racial oppression stuff in this game, I deal with too much race crap in my daily life"?

I can agree to the first one. But can not ever agree to the second one. The second one is too vague and comes down to "anything the person does not like". I'd jst have such a person look for another game.

It's not binary. It's a spectrum. The DM is honoring the ability. Nothing about it says the DM can't frame it in a fun, difficult way for the player.

Only if more players knew and understood this: to bad it can't make it into an offical book.

The DM doesn't have to alter game reality in the slightest. If there's ACTUALLY no noble then there's no meeting. That's not even controversial, you "arrange a meeting with a local noble." If there's no local noble, there's no one to meet with. Or if there is a noble to meet with, that's the start a call to adventure and and decide for shenanigans from the DM

You keep insisting that any time the DM is honoring a player ability that the DM somehow must spoon feed the PC/player and make things ridiculously easy. The DM is not only under no such obligation, but doing so is actually a disservice to the player.

Well that is good to hear. It did not seem like many others were saying this, but at least you did.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I can agree to the first one. But can not ever agree to the second one. The second one is too vague and comes down to "anything the person does not like". I'd jst have such a person look for another game.


Only if more players knew and understood this: to bad it can't make it into an offical book.

Well that is good to hear. It did not seem like many others were saying this, but at least you did.

Why is it such a problem for a person to say, "I really just don't want to deal with people being racist and naughty word to one another in my free time activities"?

I'm dead serious here. Why is that a problem? It is absolutely not some unrestricted carte blanche like you paint it to be. It's literally just...don't shout racist epithets or put lynch mobs in your game. Like, this is obvious, basic stuff here. Why are you so opposed to it? Why would you never even consider giving this the time of day?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I mention combat because it is a principal locus of player agency in a lot of RPGing - hence why discussions about fudging etc often focus on combat.

Imagine generalising will I kill this Orc? to any other question about what might happen next in the fiction, via a process other than the GM tells you, and you can see what is happening in a high player agency game of the sort I'm talking about.

One way to look at PbtA (at least DW and AW) is essentially that THE ENTIRE GAME is like D&D combat (I mean, not obviously identical to it, but conceptually analogous). The GM doesn't get to tell you that the orc didn't die when you hit it and remove its last hit points. When you leap into melee combat with the orc there's a set of numbers which pretty clearly defines how risky that is, and in general a player has a good idea what the overall tactical situation is and whether or not taking the risk of getting into melee with that orc will be a good idea. In effect all of Dungeon World is a bit like that combat. You can see it, when you actually fight a monster in DW, NOTHING CHANGES, the general rules of action resolution and the move structure that governs the whole game simply handles it.

Now, obviously the processes by which new fiction enters into a D&D combat and how it enters into play in DW are pretty different, and so that's where the focus of the difference between the two is. But you need to keep in mind, a game like DW simply doesn't have anything that is equivalent to D&D exploration/non-combat 'stuff'. Not really.

 

[pemerton]

I found these posts of mine from five-and-a-half years ago that seem apposite in this thread:

The PC is in a bazaar with an angel feather for sale. That's the situation. What does the player make of that? That's up to the player. Nothing is "supposed" to happen here, except in the sense that it's a RPG, so one expects the players to declare actions for their PCs.

When you ask how does the PC even know, you are assuming that the GM is writing everything! The PC didn't know. He wondered, and tried to read the feather's aura. In doing so he learned that it was cursed. (Mechanically, he failed the check. Had he succeeded, no cursed feather would have been narrated.) How did the invoker/wizard PC "know" that you can liberate angels on the Abyss from corrupting taint by opening a portal to Hestavar? Because he's an epic tier invoker, wizard, divine philosopher, and sage of ages! How did the player know it? He didn't know it at all - he made it up! If the checks had failed, then it would have turned out that he didn't know it at all, because the attempt to cleanse the angels would have failed in some fashion.

These are illustrations of what I'm talking about when I talk about player agency over the content of the shared fiction.

Sometimes a player asks but doesn't have a view as to what the answer is. In those situations, they are - in effect - inviting the GM to tell them stuff. At which point, obviously, it is the GM exercising agency over the content of the shared fiction, not the player. Although it is likely the parameters for this exercise of agency will have been established by the player, as an outcome of action resolution.

there is a finite amount of time available in which the GM tells the players stuff. To spend most of that time telling them stuff that speaks to PCs' dramatic needs, rather than stuff that invites them simply to get the GM to tell them more stuff ("You're at an intersection - which way do you go?" "You notice an uneven flagstone on the floor between your table and the bar - what do you do?") doesn't lessen the players' contributions to the content of the shared fiction. It increases it.

<snip>

When you narrate that the PC is in a "neutral place", you have determined where the PC is. If the PC says "I look for a sage - is there a library nearby" you, as GM, tell the player what the PCs sees, and establish the parameters within which the player can make choices. The whole fiction here is GM-authored, and the player choices are all confined within GM-established parameters. As soon as the GM has one of the NPCs s/he is narrating do stuff (eg decides that someone at the library lies about where a sage might be found), the GM is also starting to drive events on some GM-desired course.

The idea that it is more railroad-y to say to the player "OK, you said you wanted to find items - here's a prospective item, now tell us what you think about it!" is bizarre!

It's not more railroading to establish the situation as an exciting one rather than an unexciting one. It's not more railroading for the most salient element in the situation to be "What do I make of this feather-selling peddler?" rather than "Should I look for a bazaar or a sage?" A moral or thematic choice doesn't become more pressing or poignant because framed in terms the GM thinks interesting ("There's a slave being beaten") than terms the player has made salient ("Would you try and steal the feather?" "What do you do when the leader of your cabal asks you to leave town because you're bearing a cursed feather?"). The campaign world doesn't have more depth because more play time was spent asking the GM for information about the fiction, rather than actually engaging with and helping establish the fiction.

An individual player may prefer to be told some fiction rather than contribute to creating some. But that's a property of the player; it doesn't entail any particular properties of the fiction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not even close.


As your post did not say: Do you support this or not?

I'm sure opposed in general to the idea that "no matter what dumb thing the PCs do they find the clue". I play it much more like: "If the PCs capture the evil lords close henchman...and they just kill him...then they LOOSE everything that NPC knows. I do NOT just "drop in" heachman number two that knows exactly what the first one knew...just so the PCs get a chance to learn it.....again.

The same way I'm not about to teleport a clue like a map scroll all over the world so each time a PC defeats a foe they "might" find it.

Though I also never do cartoon or "fan/buddy" stuff like "the goblin falls down dead...and...oh...out of the dead goblin's pocket a sroll rolls out on the floor and unrolls it self so you can read the words "treasure map" on it."


So if a DM tells a player they must play their character one set way.....that is wrong, right?

So....why is it not wrong for a player to do this for the DM? Why does the player get to say "this NPC must be this way and you must obey me DM!"

And what exactly is the check and balance if the DM can't say "no"? A player can just say "oh the shopkeeper gives me everything for free", and the DM just says "yes, player".?

I'm not 100% sure what types of play are falling under the criticisms here, maybe several. I think its a perfectly good position, but in terms of the 'can the PCs get clues' part, this is a known issue with standard trad and other GM-authored "players discover the world" kinds of games. If you were approaching the problem from a narrativist perspective, the whole thing is a non-issue. There's not a specific set of clues, because there's not a specific fixed external objective 'way things are' that the players are simply learning about. I mean, different narr type games are certainly not all the same either, but typically neither the players nor the GM are privy to some sort of 'objective' set of 'facts' within the game world. At the very least there will not be some kind of set path by which things must be revealed. Clues may be instantiated and accessed via a variety of possible methods.

The second part, the whole thing about people 'telling each other what happens', and particularly some weird non-existent game play where players just make up whatever story they feel like and it happens, this is nothing like any narrativist, OR trad/sim sort of play whatsoever (at least that I ever heard of). When a group of people plays something like a 'low myth' game where new fiction is going to be produced on an ongoing basis, there are rules and mechanisms within the game in question which govern that. Usually its left mostly to the GM! Like in Dungeon World, the GM makes up ALL THE FICTION, and a player has no power whatsoever to describe what an NPC does! I mean, maybe if they make a successful Parley move they get something they wanted, but first you have to trigger that move, and it has very specific trigger conditions (IE in DW you must have some leverage on the NPC). Even then, assuming you roll 10+, you aren't getting arbitrary authority over the NPC, you simply get something you wanted from them in a limited scope.

 

[bloodtide]

Why is it such a problem for a person to say, "I really just don't want to deal with people being racist and naughty word to one another in my free time activities"?

There is no problem with the person saying it and finding for themselves a game in a safe space. It just will not be my game.

I'm dead serious here. Why is that a problem? It is absolutely not some unrestricted carte blanche like you paint it to be. It's literally just...don't shout racist epithets or put lynch mobs in your game. Like, this is obvious, basic stuff here. Why are you so opposed to it? Why would you never even consider giving this the time of day?

Because that is not what it is about. It's that Slippery Slope. You think it's easy as you simply won't mention three things that you would never mention anyway...and the game moves on and everyone is happy.

But if the person is on your side, and both of you think nearly exactly the same things and agree on most things in general. And this won't always be the case. A person like myself won't think or agree with such a person on most things: this triggers the person to be "on edge" to try and ruin the game in "revenge". So to ovoid that, I will simply tell the person they can't play in my game.

Though....on the other hand.....if you do Want a "Politically Incorrect" game, I'm down with that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Everyone dances around this point and is vague.

If the player suggests anything and the DM has no veto, then it's forcing the DM to do something...even if the DM is a "fan of the players" and just agrees to do so "right away player whatever you say".

It's exactly like a DM saying "your character must get mad and chase after the gnome", but the player then saying "no, my character will just let it go". No player would want to "ok, my character chases the gnome and is mad because the DM told me to".

And if the player can't suggest, change, alter or create anything....then what exactly are they doing? Just decorations?

Even a "good" player might "suggest" a ton of stuff the DM does not want in the world. So, does the DM just roll over to the players automatically or can they say "no" or "well, not exactly like you said".

And IF they can....they CAN do it EVERY time a player suggested something. Right?

And if the DM can't say "no"...what is the control for the exploitive players or worse? When a player just says "oh...snicker, snicker, the temple of Good is selling healing potions half of today". Does the DM just roll over and say "Wow, cool idea...your wish is so in the game player." ?

I simply don't know of any RPG in existence in which Players simply get to state ANY ARBITRARY THING and have it simply appear as part of the fiction. I can't say there is no such RPG, there's a lot of them I have never experienced, but if so it must be structured completely differently than your trad conceptualization that is underpinning all your statements.

Lets go with an example of a narrativist RPG, Dungeon World, which I know very well. In DW players have no ability to state fiction AT ALL, aside from declarations of the actions of their PC, which must be consistent with the existing fiction. Given that these are 'low myth' games where the current situation/setting may not be fully fleshed out, its often true that players do make tentative assertions. Like in a bar fight a player might say, I run up the stairs onto the balcony and leap down on the big bruiser! OK, there wasn't a staircase or balcony specifically mentioned, but the GM is pretty likely to simply say something like "OK, sounds like Defy Danger CON!"

The GM in DW is NOT a "fan of the players" at all. She's a fan of the CHARACTERS. This is completely different! She's bound to want to see them put in dangerous fantastical situations where they can try cool things. Danger cannot exist where there's no possibility of harm, so harm must be on the table (at least in some situations). In fact "Inflict Harm" is literally a GM move in DW, a hard one, but lets say given the above action declaration for the PC a perfectly appropriate one, potentially (maybe if he fails his DD check).

Now, there is also a formal mechanism for a player to introduce some fiction, its called "Ask Questions, use the Answers" and its a GM thing! So, the GM might ask a player "Is there a shop in town which has what you want?" Why not? I mean, sure, the player is likely to answer 'yes', but that's not a given. Or maybe a better GM question might be "who runs the shop which has what you want?" OK, the player may answer that its his PC's friend, but now I can guarantee that friend is going to need his buddy before too long! There's no free lunch! Nor does the GM in a DW game have to simply accept an answer, he could tell you how the guy got robbed blind last night and you're going to have to go track down the thieves to get what you're after.

The game CENTERS ON the characters, it isn't a free ride for them! In fact quite the opposite, they're almost sure to be constantly in a pickle.

 

[bloodtide]

Clues may be instantiated and accessed via a variety of possible methods.

I don't do the Easy, Cinematic, Cartoon, or Fan/Buddy type clues much. By that I mean a simple, straightforward, direct, easy to understand clue. Like when the typical characters in a movie/TV show just "find" that perfect list of blackmailed people with a note from the bad guy saying "these are the people I'm blackmailing" and all tied in a nice bow.

I like much more "facts" then "clues", where the players have to use their real skills to piece things together. So they might find an odd bank note where one npc transferred a large amount of money to Boss Hog, but it sure does not say "blackmail hush money" in the memo section.

The second part, the whole thing about people 'telling each other what happens',

Guess people were just explaining it wrong and using bad examples.