D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

My games are higher agency because the decisions the players make can have a far greater impact on the overall campaign, often in ways I had not anticipated. The OP is a strict railroad DM, most published modules are linear in nature which lowers agency.

Why is it denigrating to say other games have lower agency?

So, this way that you assert that some other RPGers play games with less agency than yours? I feel the same way about some other RPGers's games too.

 

[soviet]

So, this way that you assert that some other RPGers play games with less agency than yours? I feel the same way about some other RPGers's games too.

Yes but it's not ok when you do it!

 

[pemerton]

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

That's because no serious card player argues that five hundred has as much agency as bridge; or no serious traditional game player argues that backgammon has as much agency as chess or go.

Leaving aside the ability to measure or intuit the spin of the wheel, I assume that few casino-goers argue that roulette has as much agency as blackjack.

In these well-known games, the contrast between "lighter" games that involve more luck and less decision-making, and "serious" games where player decisions play a bigger role in determining outcomes, is relatively obvious.

For some reason, there are RPGers who want to argue that players exercise agency over the game although it is someone else's decisions that are determining outcomes. That's the prima facie puzzle. The solution to it is that they are treating the GM's decision-making as if it were a non-agentic mechanism.

Classic D&D has many techniques - including the implicit obligation on the GM to stick to their notes - to try and render the GM a non-agentic mechanism. Lewis Pulsipher was a great advocate of this in his White Dwarf articles in the late 70s.

It seems obvious to me that a GM who departs from those techniques, and who makes decisions about outcomes based on what "makes sense", is an extremely agentic decision-maker, quite different from the classic model. That many RPGers deny this difference seems to me deeply bound up with play traditions that go back to at least the mid-80s.

 

[pemerton]

Yes but it's not ok when you do it!

Ah, now it's clear!

 

[pemerton]

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

Can we have some textual evidence for this please? (The textual evidence that Ron Edwards regards some simulationist play as illusionist is trivially found. I'm askingfor textual evidence that Ron Edwards, or Vincent Baker, or any other prominent figure at The Forge regards simulationist play as essentially railroading or illusionist.)

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.

Suppose that someone discovered that there is a hitherto unnoticed component or structure to RPGing that (i) is highly important to the play experience, and (ii) that various participants can exercise various degrees of control over. This would be a discovery about an important aspect of, or vector of, player agency.

The fact that someone else hadn't noticed it, and once it was pointed out didn't care about it, wouldn't refute this point.

 

[pemerton]

Comparing agency with games that have such different core concepts as D&D and PbtA or BitD is comparing apples and oranges.

Nonsense. I make the comparison all the time.

Here's an example: the D&D module Dead Gods, as written, is an unrelenting railroad. The same is true of the Mark Rein*Hagen scenario for Prince Valiant called A Prodigal Son - In Chains.

The HeroWars adventure Demon of the Red Grove, as written, is a very clever scenario that supports high player agency. The same is true of the Jerry D Grayson scenario for Prince Valiant called The Crimson Bull.

There you go!

 

[FrogReaver]

That's because no serious card player argues that five hundred has as much agency as bridge; or no serious traditional game player argues that backgammon has as much agency as chess or go.

Leaving aside the ability to measure or intuit the spin of the wheel, I assume that few casino-goers argue that roulette has as much agency as blackjack.

In these well-known games, the contrast between "lighter" games that involve more luck and less decision-making, and "serious" games where player decisions play a bigger role in determining outcomes, is relatively obvious.

I don’t think that’s it at all. They can more clearly say more luck involved or more skill involved without ever needing to invoke the messy concept of agency. Talking agency would only obfuscate these clearly articulable differences. Much the same as it does in our RPG talks.

IMO one can clearly articulate the differences in d&d and PbtA without over needing to invoke the concept of agency.

 

[Oofta]

So, this way that you assert that some other RPGers play games with less agency than yours? I feel the same way about some other RPGers's games too.

When comparing the same game system, yes I can safely say that some campaigns will have more agency than others. Most modules have less agency that sandbox games for example.

Whether agency makes the game better is a matter of preference and the actual game itself. I've had a lot of fun playing linear games over the years, even if I enjoy a bit more freedom.

 

[pemerton]

I don’t know enough of them well enough to have an opinion, but for those that do

Can you rank ‘narrative games’ by the amount of player agency they provide? and why?

What do you mean by "narrative games"?

In this thread I've asserted that Burning Wheel is a higher-agency game than Torchbearer, because of the different role of the GM in the two games: in Torchbearer, GM prep of adventures is a thing that it's not in Burning Wheel.

Part of the difference is that D&D doesn’t offer any mechanisms to keep play centered around those goals - and most d&d games keep player goals less central than they would be in a PbtA game. It’s not outright impossible in d&d, it’s just unlikely. Additionally when the d&d dm puts the players goal at risk via scene framing it can feel like that’s happening due to dm fiat

The way to deal with these issues of practice and expectation is to be upfront about them. I mean, Prince Valiant doesn't have any mechanism to keep play centred around player-authored priorities other than the GM being sure to do this and the game making it fairly straightforward for players to establish and to signal those priorities (because it is at its core a game of Arthurian knight errantry).

Using AD&D, the obstacles to vanilla narrativist play aren't these issues. They can fairly easily be dealt with via communication. The issues are the actual resolution systems.

 

[FrogReaver]

Using AD&D, the obstacles to vanilla narrativist play aren't these issues. They can fairly easily be dealt with via communication. The issues are the actual resolution systems.

Why would you need a different resolution system?