D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Micah Sweet]

There's a lot of pretty strong hints. PC abilities are written as if they 'just work', things like wishlists, players defining quests, the whole way that encounters have well-defined stakes, wincons, etc. both in and out of combat. All coupled with a rich and pervasive system of keywords that allow easy reliable reasoning about what logically follows from what. Why else require such a player empowered design EXCEPT to do Narrativist play?

Given that agenda was rather at odds with the history of the game to that point, one wonders why WotC would steer so hard into it and assume their quite large fan base would all or nearly all be on board?

 

[FrogReaver]

Agency over things you would prefer to not have agency over or do not believe players should expect to have agency over is still agency. In previous conversations you and others have spoken about how binding social mechanics (even ones that just impact the chance of success when going along or going against suggested courses of action) limits agency over and above traditional play norms where players always get to decide what their character think and feel. That I personally do not have the ability to decide what I think and feel all the time does not mean that being able to choose what my character thinks and feels is not an example of agency at the table.

IMO. If that’s the case then all rpgs have an innumerable and possibly infinite set of things they don’t provide players any agency over.

But they also have an innumerable or possibly infinite set of things they also provide agency over.

Which is why I keep going back to the idea that all RPGs have the same amount of agency as long as they have agency in the first place. Infinity + 1 is still infinity.

It’s not enough to point to one area and say ‘see this game gives agency here and the other game doesn’t’. That exercise can actually be done for any set of 2 games in either direction. It’s a flawed ‘proof’.

 

[clearstream]

Falsely so. Multiple posters have stated at length that more agency is not an uber objective and may be balanced with other priorities

If I am reading their posts correctly, some are defining agency monolithically. So agency is one thing, and a player has more of that thing or less of it. I've argued that ludic-agency can be measured only in context. Suppose I am playing Chess, and taking white I have first move. There are twenty moves open to me. Is that a lot of agency, or a little? Is it more agency than an FKR player has over their character at the start of session one? Or less? In my Chess example, if I had to roll a die for which piece I moved, then that could feel like having less agency.

So my concerns are not so much around agency being of more or less value than other priorities, but of agency being defined monolithically without yet seeing how that is justified.

*I don't think all posters in this thread accept that capacity to deal with a situation via declaring actions for one's PC is a hallmark of agency. Because that it is to focus on outcomes of action declaration, at least to some extent, and I think some posters have rejected the relevance of such considerations to agency.​

This sounds possibly important, but I feel like I might not fully understand what you are saying. If time permits would you mind expanding on it?

 

[Oofta]

Thank you for rephrasing your point. That has been helpful.

Denigration is still happening regardless of my definition. Clearly many of those same people have no problem denigrating the agency of other games by calling them railroads or claiming that others people's games of D&D are lower agency than theirs. So it's a bit hypocritical IMHO to be worried about being denigrating others by that metric while clearly doing it to others. If people don't want that value judgment used against them, then maybe they should abandon it themselves when talking about games they feel have less agency.

But my definition of player agency imparts or includes no value judgment that more agency is always better. It's goal is simply to include the play for the widest range of tabletop games as possible. That effort and commitment to descriptive accuracy seems more laudible IMHO than worrying about whether someone's feelings are hurt by their own judgmental double-standards.

Why is it denigrating to say other games have lower agency? Since you agree that agency has no inherent value, saying that a game has more or less agency is not a reflection of the quality of the game. As far as railroading, the OP has admitted that they run railroad games.

But the conflict and confusion here is that you say that your definition of player agency includes no value judgement but then it's immediately followed by calling descriptive accuracy more laudable and telling people that they're holding double standards because you don't agree with their definition of agency.

 

[Oofta]

Agency over things you would prefer to not have agency over or do not believe players should expect to have agency over is still agency. In previous conversations you and others have spoken about how binding social mechanics (even ones that just impact the chance of success when going along or going against suggested courses of action) limits agency over and above traditional play norms where players always get to decide what their character think and feel. That I personally do not have the ability to decide what I think and feel all the time does not mean that being able to choose what my character thinks and feels is not an example of agency at the table.

I'm saying it's just a different form of agency. Just like casting spells in D&D is a different form of agency not available in BitD. They're still rules to a game, neither better nor worse. It's not a question of whether someone has a specific tool to achieve their goal, it's a question of whether they have tools appropriate to the structure of the game to achieve their goal.

No structure, no way of granting agency is inherently better than another.

 

[Pedantic]

I do see an incredibly obvious reason: my agency that I have as a player playing in a given tabletop roleplaying may not be strictly limited to what my character does. That's why. It may not make a difference to you, but that distinction does matter to me. You said it yourself:

I think this point should ideally sit outside the question of comparative agency; we're dealing with two separate design goals (regardless of how effectively implemented) that produce different game states. Agency can still be compared between them, but not as a function of the actions available. Instead, we should be talking about the relative impact of those actions on the proposed goal of both games. That goal is the sticking point: I suspect it's sufficiently different (my earlier point about ludic vs. narrative agency was, in retrospect, driving at this point) that directly comparing what's achieved by a given action isn't meaningful.

That is, if you transposed an action from a game that allowed for player/character separation in action declarations to a game that previously didn't, obviously that new action would be a significant increase in agency, but that isn't actually the meaningful point of comparison. Instead, you should be looking at the relative impact of those actions in their initial context.

Player agency is about what we do as players in the game. What I can do as a player playing in games like Fate, Cortex Prime, Stonetop, Torchbearer, or maybe even Daggerheart is not necessarily limited to what I can do as a player playing at your D&D 5e table. The bounds of my agency as a player playing these games exist outside of the scope of the agency I may have playing in your high agency D&D games or Bloodtide's. I think that any definition of player agency for tabletop roleplaying games must be inclusive, rather than exclusive, of all these different modes of player agency. The problem with your definition of player agency that conflates player agency with character agency is that defining player agency strictly in terms of character agency excludes these other modes of player agency that I may have as a player playing these other games. For that reason, I don't think that your definition is a good or functional one.

To be fair, it's clear that the player agency of a player in nearly any game exceeds that of Bloodtide's.

At the risk of invoking its own acrimonious tangent, I think my point about context is well demonstrated by skill challenges. I have railed against them as a design in the past on the specific grounds that they decrease player agency. They abstract the distance between the current board state and a goal and limit the effectiveness of player actions to resolve the situation through setting thresholds independent of the actions taken. Depending on the precise iteration, they sometimes include enforced metagame requirements for group participation, and/or may end up altering the difficulty of a proposed course of action through reference to the level of challenge, even if the action could be correlated to a known, fixed difficulty. Generally, I find they limit the ability of players to best defeat obstacles, relative to an alternative system that specifies the result/effectiveness of actions preemptively thus that players can string together whatever series of actions they believe will best overcome a problem; the most obvious way this is true is that variance in the amount of checks between a player and success as a result of the player's actions is intrinsic to such a system, and impossible ina skill challenge system.

However, the precisely opposite argument is routinely made about them! Because they allow for resolution of a task with a wide, array of declarations that could encompass more actions than are encoded in even an elaborate skill system, they provide more player input into what happens. Thus, agency requires an understanding of the goal player actions are evaluated in context of.

 

[Aldarc]

Why is it denigrating to say other games have lower agency? Since you agree that agency has no inherent value, saying that a game has more or less agency is not a reflection of the quality of the game. As far as railroading, the OP has admitted that they run railroad games.

I don't think that it is denigrating to say that. However, I do believe that @Micah Sweet is worried that the denigration of games is happening on the basis of "more agency is better." My point here is that the denigration on the basis of lower agency is happening in this thread regardless of the definition for player agency that I am advocating for, which is silent about any and all value people may impart into player agency, and that we shouldn't be worried about it.

But the conflict and confusion here is that you say that your definition of player agency includes no value judgement but then it's immediately followed by calling descriptive accuracy more laudable and telling people that they're holding double standards because you don't agree with their definition of agency.

There is no conflict or confusion if you apply a modicum of reading comprehension to what I wrote. I said that there are double-standards when people fear their games will be denigrated on the basis of a value-judgment about agency while also denigrating other games on the basis of a value-judgment regarding agency. That is the double-standard in question, Oofta. I hope that I have cleared matters for you.

 

[pemerton]

I think people in real life can have a great deal of agency

One form that agency takes is making up imaginary things.

And one way that agency can be exercised is by engaging in structured play in which different participants establish, in various complex ways, a shared set of imagined things.

Some of this structured play is RPGing.

 

[FrogReaver]

If I am reading their posts correctly, some are defining agency monolithically. So agency is one thing, and a player has more of that thing or less of it. I've argued that ludic-agency can be measured only in context. Suppose I am playing Chess, and taking white I have first move. There are twenty moves open to me. Is that a lot of agency, or a little? Is it more agency than an FKR player has over their character at the start of session one? Or less? In my Chess example, if I had to roll a die for which piece I moved, then that could feel like having less agency.

So my concerns are not so much around agency being of more or less value than other priorities, but of agency being defined monolithically without yet seeing how that is justified.

An interesting point - there’s no other games where people argue about player agency.

They might argue that chess is more complex than checkers.

You might see a soccer fan bashing American football for all the start and stop nature of plays.

But you’ll never once see the basketball player tell the football center that basketball gives them more agency.

Why? Because no one cares about levels of agency between different games other than RPGs. Even if everyone agreed on it for non-RPGs - they wouldn’t care because its a pointless thing for them to care about.

So why does anyone care about it in the context of RPGs? Open Question.

I think it’s because of its origins in RPGs. It started as a way of talking about GMing techniques that invalidated player choice but could be considered to be done by the rules. IMO. Most don’t want to be associated with that.

I think the Forge essentially co-opted that term and then either argued that all forms of what they called simulationist play essentially resulted in invalidating player choice and/or that narrative play gave players a brand new dimension to have agency over - essentially what at a high level the game would be focused around.

 

[Oofta]

One form that agency takes is making up imaginary things.

And one way that agency can be exercised is by engaging in structured play in which different participants establish, in various complex ways, a shared set of imagined things.

Some of this structured play is RPGing.

Comparing agency with games that have such different core concepts as D&D and PbtA or BitD is comparing apples and oranges. I did my best to boil it down to something more generic and it's likely just not worth it. All we can say is that they are different.