D&D General What is player agency to you?

[clearstream]

I think this represents a common confusion between agency and agenda.

To say that sets aside the constitutive nature of game permissions. Agenda informs which permissions the play is fabricated from, intentionally excluding possibilities (such as being a crooked cop) in order to create the distinctive play itself.

I have no problem with the dictionary definition here:

"the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power : a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved" - Mirriam-Webster

It's good to have that pointed out. It's not something I've previously dwelt upon. You can see at once how it falls short of being able to state what agency must be in a game... until you put emphasis on the last five words.

 

[Raiztt]

Fully agreed. I genuinely don't understand your point here @Raiztt. Games that factor in who a character have been, without fail, the most interesting and engaging TTRPG experiences I've ever had--on both sides of the screen (though I admit, on the GM side, I don't really have many points of comparison!)

We've just had very different experiences then. Both as a GM and as a player, the most interesting and fun things that have happened while role playing had nothing to do with a characters backstory or 'who they are'. But it had everything to do with what they did or how they did it.

 

[FrogReaver]

Agency OTOH is a pretty specific set thing, and I have no problem with the dictionary definition here:

"the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power : a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved" - Mirriam-Webster

The notion of a prisoner was brought up earlier. He has no agency to leave the prison. He does have agency around what to do in the prison yard even though his particular options are limited by his circumstances.

Simultaneously this prisoner both has agency and does not - a seemingly major contradiction - of which the only way out is if there are what we might call ‘types’ in any other situation.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

We've just had very different experiences then. Both as a GM and as a player, the most interesting and fun things that have happened while role playing had nothing to do with a characters backstory or 'who they are'. But it had everything to do with what they did or how they did it.

What you do is the actual play itself. But why do you do anything? You can't tell where you're going unless you know where you are, and you have no meaning for your motion unless you know where you've been. The latter is the "who you are" part.

 

[clearstream]

The notion of a prisoner was brought up earlier. He has no agency to leave the prison. He does have agency around what to do in the prison yard even though his particular options are limited by his circumstances.

Simultaneously this prisoner both has agency and does not - a seemingly major contradiction - of which the only way out is if there are what we might call ‘types’ in any other situation.

The game is the prison. Or if one prefers, playroom.

 

[Pedantic]

To say that sets aside the constitutive nature of game permissions. Agenda informs which permissions the play is fabricated from, intentionally excluding possibilities (such as being a crooked cop) in order to create the distinctive play itself.


It's good to have that pointed out. It's not something I've previously dwelt upon. You can see at once how it falls short of being able to state what agency must be in a game... until you put emphasis on the last five words.

This is the ludic understanding of a magic circle. You constrain the means available to players and secure agreement to pursue a goal within those means to make their choices and decisions interesting and meaningful. Without constraint and/or without a goal (a slightly stranger proposition in TTRPGs, probably best constituted by the "agenda" we're discussing) there isn't a game. It doesn't particularly matter to a checkers player that a rook can move orthogonally, because they've entered into different magic circles and are acting under different systems of constraints.

Any discussion of what players want in the context of a game is necessarily bounded by "what have players agreed to?" Agency isn't incomparable however, once you've established those two things. A game that doesn't actually provide the player much impact with the decisions they make within the given constraints to achieve their goals can clearly be said to have lower agency than one that does, i.e. War is a lower agency game than Rummy.

The commonplace we're endlessly stuck on is the question of goal, which is simply not settled nor explicated clearly enough to measure agency across the various systems we're discussing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Great explanation. Though I’ll note it sounds quite a bit different than the now common refrain on these forums that one of narrativism games primary differences from d&d play is about ‘who authors the fiction’.

I’d suggest the difference in that concept and the concept presented in your post here is why people often walk away from these discussions with a flawed idea about narrativsm gameplay.

I guess at times there may have been simplistic descriptions, but I think if read everything in this thread you would have to conclude it is about what the 'locus of fiction' is, character vs setting. Who says what is more of a detail and varies from game to game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The notion of a prisoner was brought up earlier. He has no agency to leave the prison. He does have agency around what to do in the prison yard even though his particular options are limited by his circumstances.

Simultaneously this prisoner both has agency and does not - a seemingly major contradiction - of which the only way out is if there are what we might call ‘types’ in any other situation.

Again I find it vital to differentiate agenda and understand that first. Agency in games is meaningful to the participants exactly as it bears on agenda. In a game where the premise is related to world exploration, geographically imprisonment will clearly thwart that, but if the agenda is related to how the characters deal with difficult psychological challenges like being imprisoned then things will be evaluated differently.

I think you, me, and @clearstream are mostly agreeing, I just use a somewhat different analytical technique. I'm more a process guy, I'm not very hung up on the literal details.

 

[FrogReaver]

This is the ludic understanding of a magic circle. You constrain the means available to players and secure agreement to pursue a goal within those means to make their choices and decisions interesting and meaningful. Without constraint and/or without a goal (a slightly stranger proposition in TTRPGs, probably best constituted by the "agenda" we're discussing) there isn't a game. It doesn't particularly matter to a checkers player that a rook can move orthogonally, because they've entered into different magic circles and are acting under different systems of constraints.

Any discussion of what players want in the context of a game is necessarily bounded by "what have players agreed to?" Agency isn't incomparable however, once you've established those two things. A game that doesn't actually provide the player much impact with the decisions they make within the given constraints to achieve their goals can clearly be said to have lower agency than one that does, i.e. War is a lower agency game than Rummy.

The commonplace we're endlessly stuck on is the question of goal, which is simply not settled nor explicated clearly enough to measure agency across the various systems we're discussing.

I think I understand from context but I’m not familiar with ‘magic circles’.

 

[Oofta]

That's a helpful link, and segues to a comment I wanted to make - or a question, rather: how is agency measured? Measuring agency would be fundamental to knowing if I have more or less agency under some set of rules. As is my wont, I'm going to argue that different groups may both enjoy more of whatever agency is meaningful to them, while still potentially having less of whatever agency is meaningful to others.

With reference to the blog post quoted, I want to say that narrativism isn't about necessarily making more choices, because what counts as "more" depends on how you measure it, but rather more choices of a specific kind.


So the blog post isn't saying that sandbox play offers less agency than narrativism. It's saying that it offers the wrong kind of choices. That straightforwardly endorses my opening hypothesis.

The blog post overall says what the right kind are. There are two conditions. One it states outright - they're choices focused on human issues. This is about premises: problematic features of human existence to be resolved. The second condition is implied, but not overtly stated. I just want to pull in another quote from the blog to explain that.


It turns out the agency can be restricted. During play of the game, I cannot become a crooked cop. That's disallowed. Restrictions are basic to games: that's what rules are all about. Creating the distinct play, rather than just any play!

Does this mean that a sandbox where I could become a crooked cop offers more agency? Not at all. It just points out that the agency we're interested in differs. The second condition is in fact agency over resolution of premises. That's why

Freely doesn't mean "free to do anything", it means that players (not game designer, not GM) are free to resolve the premises however they desire. That is a powerful agency and distinct to narrativism. Coming back to my opening thought: I don't believe it necessarily amounts to more agency, because what measures "more" depends on what I am counting.

Is the measure of agency how many times I as a player get to say something that happens in our fiction or system? Is it the breadth of choices I get to choose between? Is it effect, or how powerfully I can impact the game world? As quoted from the companion blog


So no, it's not just any kind of power. Offering me four apples and one pear isn't giving me more agency than offering me a single pear, if all I want is pears!

I agree, but have a shorter version:

Look hard enough and you can find a blogpost to support your opinion. If you give (player) agency* a narrow enough definition it means that only certain games can qualify as having high player agency.​

​

Maybe I'll revisit this when we have something akin to the Richter scale. Because right now we have one definition that means you have to have a narrativist approach to rank high on the scale and another that just says people that have a reasonable understanding of options and multiple ways of responding have just as high a rank on the scale.

*I don't see the point of splitting player and character agency.