D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

I still stand by this, too:

the more that the GM is authoring, and the more the GM is authoring unilaterally, then the less the players are authoring. Hence their agency over the content of the shared fiction is reduced.

If the game is mainly about establishing a shared fiction, then it follows that their agency per se is reduced.

<snip>

not all RPGing is about establishing a shared fiction - eg classic Gygaxian D&D is closer to a type of puzzle-solving - but I think that a lot of contemporary RPGing is not classic D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So, what is Dungeon World then? It clearly seems to be a game, it has rules. It has participants who carry out a set of steps defined in those rules. Its clearly a pastime. It also clearly involves role play, in a way very similar to other RPGs (IE each person taking on the role of a specific character and one taking on the role of Game Master). I'm hard-pressed to come up with any name for this except TTRPG... We've already come up with a name for this type of game, Narrativist RPG. I'm perfectly happy with that.

As I said, no one wants their game to have a name that they see as pejorative, which is why I'm not suggesting "storygame", despite it reading perfectly accurate to me, because for some reasons enthusiasts don't seem to like that name.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Maybe, I mean, the fact that D&D seems to have substantially higher sales than other RPGs and generally plays as a trad game out of the box, particularly with modules and such, is, IMHO a decent piece of evidence.

I'm far less sure, particularly anymore, about it being inherently easier to play trad. Or that players mostly just want an easy list of menu items to poke. For instance DW doesn't actually demand a huge amount more than D&D does. You create a PC, which is actually a bit less work than making a 5e PC, ballpark similar lets say. You create 2-3 bonds, which is about the most in-depth part, but no harder than 5e BIFTS.

From there on its just describe what your PC does, answer a GM question now and then, and the game 'just happens'. The GM is going to look at your alignment, bonds, etc. and probably draw from that to present situations, but in terms of how you need to react to them, there's nothing special going on there. If you have a bond "protect the halfling at all costs", well, you can decide because of that you leap in and defend him from the goblin, or maybe your self-preservation instinct is stronger and you let him die. Guess we're done with that bond...

A lot of people don't use 5e BIFTS, so claiming that DW bonds are just as easy isn't really a selling point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Another huge point against it for me. D&D exploration/noncombat stuff is my second favorite part of the game (after worldbuilding).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

That's a characterization of narrativist play which is, at best, misleading. BitD for instance is nothing like this, but the GM is not in charge of making up a scripted set of 'adventures', at all. So any clue you would gain in that game is going to arise out of a player saying something like "I recall that so-and-so often has good information about police investigations, I'll contact him to get some clues." Well, that would, during the info gathering segment of play, trigger a 'fortune roll' where the player will toss some dice against a target number to come up with the information in question. They will have to leverage a contact, RP the actions needed to make the request, and possibly deal with any consequences of failure or something like a devil's bargain that might come up. In any case, the crew gets a finite number of these checks to establish the parameters of whatever score comes out of it, so AT BEST failure here expends a non-renewable resource.

BitD is a pretty brutal game! You have limited resources of various types (gold, contacts, allies, equipment, time, rep, etc.) and MANY 'spinning plates' (represented by clocks) to deal with, plus a stress track to manage. NOTHING about this is easy, but the difficulty in this game doesn't focus on mechanical situation-focused GM derived stuff! I guarantee you though, a BitD game run by a smart principled GM is AT LEAST as brutal as any Basic D&D low level dungeon crawler. MORE SO in fact, because in B/X D&D when you get back to town you pretty much just recover, relax, get back your strength and then go again. There's no such cycle in BitD! The pressure is on the PCs ALL the time! You screw up, you are going to be in deep water fast, and chances are you won't recover. You better play well or else!

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.

I don't think BitD, for example, has clues like that either. Its just a matter of what the origin of those clues is, and what work they do within the process of developing and revealing the fiction. The locus of challenge in BitD isn't in "deciphering the GM's clues" it is in managing all the resources and crises that are going on in the fiction all the time so as to not get yourselves wiped.

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

Look, there's been dozens of such statements made throughout this thread, and 100 threads before this one. Yet this exact myth constantly gets recycled. I mean, pick up a copy of BitD or DW and try it out. I know you say that you don't like these games, but clearly you haven't actually had any exposure to them at all. You might find it illuminating!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As I said, no one wants their game to have a name that they see as pejorative, which is why I'm not suggesting "storygame", despite it reading perfectly accurate to me, because for some reasons enthusiasts don't seem to like that name.

Honestly, if you want to use that as a synonym for 'Narrativist RPG' then be my guest. I really am not generally that much hung up on names. DW, for instance, IS clearly an RPG. If it isn't then the term is pretty much meaningless anyway. So if your label for one flavor of RPG is narrativist or storygame or egg-salad-sandwich, whatever... I personally find my term to be the most useful as its the most widely accepted, but that's just me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Another huge point against it for me. D&D exploration/noncombat stuff is my second favorite part of the game (after worldbuilding).

Yeah, its not that people don't 'explore' or do other 'non-combat stuff' in DW, its just that it doesn't employ heterogeneous subsystems for different sorts of activities. You are always in a sort of 'action mode' at all times. The action certainly can take on the nature of being interactions with NPCs, or traversing dangerous unexplored terrain, or fighting a monster, but it just all follows the same sort of 'action->resolution->description->action' kind of loop regardless of the type. But yeah, how these activities fit into the whole game experience is somewhat different.

 

[Manbearcat]

As I said, no one wants their game to have a name that they see as pejorative, which is why I'm not suggesting "storygame", despite it reading perfectly accurate to me, because for some reasons enthusiasts don't seem to like that name.

The reason why I don't like the term "storygame" isn't related to pejorative (whether the person using it intends it as such or not). Its because "storygame" as typically used tends to be a haphazard binning of games that have very significant, demarcating features. The way people tend to use storygame would bin Swords of the Serpentine and a "storygame" deployment of 5e D&D with BIFTs/Inspiration serving as a lot of performative affectation and color and cues for the GM to curate play toward BIFT-conception power fantasy story arcs for players with a game like Burning Wheel, Shadows of Yesterday, and Dungeon World. While those games share some high fantasy genre and some nomenclature, that is pretty much where it ends.

"Storygame" is, imo, a pretty bad offender when it comes to taxonomic culture. It generates a top of the hierarchy classification and people just stop there without either (a) demarcating the vast differences in what lies below it on the tree or (b) even considering whether lower tier classification descended from a common ancestor.

In Forge classification, SotS and the above depicted 5e game would be called High Concept Simulationism. In The Seven Culture of Play, they would be called NeoTrad. Both of these classifications do considerably greater work when it comes to describing all of (i) what these games generate during play, (ii) how they do it, and (iii), therefore, how to successfully design toward such a game.

Meanwhile, "storygame" (as it is haphazardly thrown around) seems to basically just punt to the lowest resolution description of "these systems aim at generating a story" without talking about the all-important features of design, authority, participant responsibilities, processes of play, and the experience of play derived by the prior...all of which deeply divide them from alternatives. That zoomed-out, information-poor classification would have you trying to design or play Burning Wheel and landing on Swords of the Serpentine (deeply different games, experiences, designs). One of my best friends loves SotS (while simultaneously hating 5e...which, again, just depicts how different such designs are). I couldn't get him to play BW if his life depended upon it.

What the "GM's say" is, what the "system's say" is, what the "players' say" is and what the GM meta and player meta is for these games is deeply divergent. That is why I find "storygame" to be a pretty terrible offender. It offends me not because its an epithet, because its a "conversation-ender" in the worst way possible (people feel like they've landed in an information-rich environment when they've actually participated in net harm to better understanding of just wtf we're each doing when we play various games and how designers design toward those particulars).

 

[Maxperson]

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 do those things and I'm have my doubts that they are "widely advocated" techniques. I've seen them mentioned here before, but not often enough or by enough different DMs to be something a lot of DMs do.

 

[Maxperson]

Normally, the GM manipulates the fiction to produce the desired outcome. Eg the players say "We burn the bodies." The GM's notes recorded that some or other clue was on one of the bodies. Now it is destroyed. So the GM introduces the clue in another context that the PCs encounter.

For a whole lot of us, if the party makes the rather sizable error of not searching the body, the clue is burned and doesn't come back.

Or, eg, the PCs kill a NPC who is high status in the gameworld. The GM then decides that a second-in-command steps up and keeps the dead NPC's plans going, and so nothing about the overall trajectory of the fiction changes.

I have seen WotC modules that set out both the above techniques.

Modules need to do that, though. They can't assume that DMs, especially new DMs, will be able to improvise a greatly altered trajectory. Experienced DMs will often just roll with it and things change.

You can't really use official modules with need to be designed to be useful to as many different kinds of DMs as possible as how people run private games.