D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

I have said this in many more words, but fundamentally you're getting disagreement because people do not believe those are comparable activities.

My point is that comparisons between them are made all the time. I see RPGing compared to a novel, or a play, but you get to script and direct your character! Or compared to a choose-your-own adventure, but the choices are unlimited.

In another active thread, that I think you're also posting in, FKR games (and perhaps RPGs more broadly) are being characterised with the label "tactical infinity", which contrasts with board games.

The notions of choice and control in play are constantly used to describe RPGing, and compare it to other activities which somewhat resemble it. But now, as soon as I want to compare (say) playing Burning Wheel to playing through the D&D module Dead Gods it's an impossible comparison?

EDIT: pipped to the post by @EzekielRaiden.

 

[Maxperson]

I disagree, and the many, many DM horror stories out there (and the almost as common absolutely horrible DM advice out there) would suggest it is not nearly as uncommon as you believe.

Your "many" horror stories are like .0001%(who knows the exact amount, but it's a very small fraction) of the games that are run. There's are just a crapton of games run, so even the very rare DM who does it = a lot of stories given the time D&D has been out. That and people love to complain, but not give kudos, so you see a disproportionate number of complaints on the net.

It is as rare as I believe.

 

[Oofta]

On this particular occasion, you are asserting that certain comparisons that I routinely make, and that I find useful in my reasoning about and reflection on RPGs, are "invalid".

That's not a disagreement over a definition. It looks like a disagreement over the nature of my cognitive processes!

I never said they were "invalid". I said I disagreed with your definition of agency. If you can't agree on a basis of measurement then it's meaningless to argue who's measurement is correct. That, and I have no idea what either module is but it's also not relevant.

 

[Oofta]

Imagine the following game: a group of people sit in a circle, and one of them tells a story. At certain points in the story, the story-teller pauses mid-sentence, at the point where a noun is required (eg ". . . and then she meet a . . . ") and points to one of the other people, who is obliged to provide a noun, which the story-teller incorporates as they go on with the story.

This sort of game happens in primary school classrooms.

Suppose that a child, familiar with this game, then discovers RPGing. According to some posters in this thread - eg @Oofta, @clearstream I think, maybe @FrogReaver - if that child thinks that RPGing is a bit like the story game we play, but it gives me much more choice and control over what happens, the child is making an incoherent, empty or invalid judgement.

Whereas to me it seems that that child is making a perfectly reasonable, coherent and rational comparison of the two sorts of game.

Meanwhile they also accept limitations. That they can only speak for so long before passing along the baton or that they have to stay on a topic. If they play D&D they accept that their role is that of a character in a world, not the author of that world. All games have constraints and limitations. As you keep repeatedly telling everyone you can't just say you do or get whatever you want in a narrativist game.

 

[Aldarc]

Of course, I myself am skeptical of the "tactical infinity" so often discussed, as I find far, far too many GMs are rather more interested in tactical subfinity: "only those things I, the GM, think are possible, regardless of how poorly that reflects either actual IRL possibility, fun gameplay, or engaging narrative." The possibilities are actually more limited than they would be for an appropriately-talented IRL person attempting to do things.

This is my fundamental issue with "tactical infinity." It sounds like a nice idea or buzzword, but it feels far more limited in the realm of actual practice as player action declarations are being filtered through a GM's own finite sensibilities. Over time, players will adapt to the GM and gravitate less towards the theoretical tacitcal infinity and more towards the proven finite set of tactics that they know the GM will likely approve.

 

[Pedantic]

My point is that comparisons between them are made all the time. I see RPGing compared to a novel, or a play, but you get to script and direct your character! Or compared to a choose-your-own adventure, but the choices are unlimited.

And I've historically argued we are generally wrong to do so, because novels tend not to follow ensemble casts the same way and tend to use narrative structures that don't fit well into stochastic resolution models. I've arguably lost that fight, and the trend is much more towards determining how an RPG can better do what novels do and less in exploration of them as a different object.

In another active thread, that I think you're also posting in, FKR games (and perhaps RPGs more broadly) are being characterised with the label "tactical infinity", which contrasts with board games.

The notions of choice and control in play are constantly used to describe RPGing, and compare it to other activities which somewhat resemble it. But now, as soon as I want to compare (say) playing Burning Wheel to playing through the D&D module Dead Gods it's an impossible comparison?

EDIT: pipped to the post by @EzekielRaiden.

Frankly, yes. There is significant space between the activities and they have enough not in common to require differentiation and explication on their own terms.

 

[bloodtide]

Your "many" horror stories are like .0001%(who knows the exact amount, but it's a very small fraction) of the games that are run. There's are just a crapton of games run, so even the very rare DM who does it = a lot of stories given the time D&D has been out. That and people love to complain, but not give kudos, so you see a disproportionate number of complaints on the net.

It is as rare as I believe.

It's not.

As a offical member of the Opposition: It's common. It is at least 50% of all games.

The number of bad GMs out there is HUGE.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To empower neo-traditional play.

Oh you! hmmph! Those silly neo-trads. sillysillysilly.

 

[pemerton]

This is my fundamental issue with "tactical infinity." It sounds like a nice idea or buzzword, but it feels far more limited in the realm of actual practice as player action declarations are being filtered through a GM's own finite sensibilities.

As far as bog-standard FRPGing is concerned, I saw much more tactical infinity in 4e D&D than other systems I've GMed, because there are very useable (though not entirely complete) rules for managing the correlation between fictional position and mechanical effect.

Your observation about the GM's own finite sensibilities sits within the same general zone as my remark upthread about agentic GMing vs GMing as a non-agentic mechanism.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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?

My reading of 4e is that there were deep divisions between different groups within the dev team. Some were afraid of change, some welcomed it. As a result, you have a game that IS narrativist in much of its design, certainly very player empowering, and yet never quite outright commits to it as an absolute. Then MM and his crew came along and wrote those super trad bricks of modules that show off the system in the worst possible light. Well, we know what side of that argument Mike was on.

But, frankly, I think they understood what I've said about 5e, that if you simply stay welded to a part of the community that can't adapt and move on, then you're going to die sooner or later. I'm not an optimist in terms of the long-term viability of D&D itself. I mean, we can criticize various things about 4e, the way it was launched, the failure to actually go ahead and say "play this as a narrativist system" and Mike's backpeddling, but it works and it is a very solid game. I constantly hear from people who are much happier with it now after a few years and are going back and playing it again or for the first time.

Honestly, I can't say how WotC was able to befuddle itself, but if they'd released 5e in 2008, they'd have released a new thing in 2016 or 2018 at the latest anyway...