D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Oofta]

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!

You can make the comparison between different games, doesn't mean I have to agree that it's a valid comparison.

 

[pemerton]

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.

Why is there more skill involved? Because player decisions affect the unfolding of the game. (Unlike roulette, where player decisions - eg what number to bet on - don't affect the unfolding of the game.) This contrasts with the skill of, say, cricket, which involves more than just decision-making.

RPGing, like (say) bridge, five hundred, chess and backgammon, and unlike (say) cricket, football and basketball, is at its core an intellectual activity. Players participate by making decisions. The game is deliberately structured with asymmetric participant roles that mean that outcomes of play depend in complex ways upon the interactions of participant decisions. This is why a notion of agency, which attempts to articulate some features of those decisions and their interactions, becomes relevant.

There's nothing magical about the word. Banishing the word won't make the phenomena it is being used to describe and to analyse go away.

 

[pemerton]

You can make the comparison between different games, doesn't mean I have to agree that it's a valid comparison.

How many of the scenarios and game systems I compared have you read, or played? How many are you familiar with?

What's your actual reasoned basis for thinking that there is some error or "invalidity" in the comparison that I posted?

 

[Pedantic]

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

You haven't been hanging out on board game forums. Discussions tend to be a little more precisely technical and focused on randomness, but it definitely happens.

 

[FrogReaver]

You haven't been hanging out on board game forums. Discussions tend to be a little more precisely technical and focused on randomness, but it definitely happens.

so they talk about randomness but not agency?

 

[Pedantic]

so they talk about randomness but not agency?

Both terms are used, but more interchangeably, and something that might be called a low agency game here is more likely to be called "not really a game."

 

[FrogReaver]

Both terms are used, but more interchangeably, and something that might be called a low agency game here is more likely to be called "not really a game."

interesting.

 

[FrogReaver]

How many of the scenarios and game systems I compared have you read, or played? How many are you familiar with?

No offense, but when the discussion reaches this stage i think it’s already over. I’m going to bow out for a while again till I stop wanting to reply with outright snark. It’s not you it’s me.

 

[pemerton]

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?

AD&D's resolution system is overwhelmingly focused on doors (finding them, listening at them, inspecting them for traps, opening them) and on combat. It has other elements, but these are still all oriented towards a dungeon-crawl-ish paradigm of play (eg the reaction system; the evasion system).

How, in AD&D, do we resolve a race? A chase? An archery contest? A poetry competition? Wooing someone over an extended period of time?

It's not coincidence that my forays into vanilla narrativist AD&D also involved bolting on various sorts of skill systems (OA, D/WSG, plus an adaptation to D&D of the RM skill system found in an Australian RPG publication called Australian Realms).

 

[pemerton]

No offense, but when the discussion reaches this stage i think it’s already over. I’m going to bow out for a while again till I stop wanting to reply with outright snark. It’s not you it’s me.

You should do what you need/want to.

But are you really surprised that I would favour my own ability to make comparisons that I routinely make, over claims from someone who is unfamiliar with most of the things being compared that such comparisons are not rationally possible?