D&D General What is player agency to you?

[AbdulAlhazred]

The players drive the fiction in my more traditional game as well, but I keep getting told that no they aren't and/or it isn't narrativism.

I think @pemerton's prior post which input human motivations as a primary aspect to narrativism is important not to leave out. My game doesn't focus on those human motivational aspects, but they are very much present.

Right, I think that's an important consideration. I have stated it as 'locus of play' or 'focus' where narrativist games put that on what is going on in the character's minds, what fiction happens next is based on what will reflect on that in the most interesting (agenda affirming) way. In non-narrativist play (or at least simulationist/trad play) character decisions are still the content of the action of the game, and player's can supply any motives they want, but the situations are authored by the GM and even if a GM might think "Oh, this will mess with that PC's head" or "this is what he wants" there's still an overriding concern with situation/setting and an agenda that is focused on other things, like simulating something, or verisimilitude, or a contest of player skill, etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would argue that it IS the story of the journey from Tatooine to the Death Star to the Rebel Base. It's just perspective. A more traditional game is going to look at it as the journey from Tatooine to the Death Star to the Rebel Base with added elements of understanding your place in the world, doing what you must, etc. The narrativist perspective is going to look at as understanding your place, doing what you must, etc., with the added elements of the journey from Tatooine to the Death Start, etc.

Much like the amount of agency you get out of a style or play is going to depend on your perspective and what you want out of the game, the kind of story it is will also vary depending on your perspective, even if we're all viewing the same story.

Right, but Graves, Lucas, etc. would all say you have missed the entire point of mythic storytelling! Its not a 'perspective' on Star Wars, its a missing of the entire POINT OF Star Wars!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which is hilarious, because one of the longest running tongue in cheek ways to refer to D&D (and TTRPGs collectively) is "pretend elfgames" or "Let's Pretend."

To deny that they are comparable is simply that, being in denial.


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.

I see "pretend elfgames" as nothing but a pejorative intended to make less of an issue someone has in RPGs. It actually really bothers me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Right, I think that's an important consideration. I have stated it as 'locus of play' or 'focus' where narrativist games put that on what is going on in the character's minds, what fiction happens next is based on what will reflect on that in the most interesting (agenda affirming) way. In non-narrativist play (or at least simulationist/trad play) character decisions are still the content of the action of the game, and player's can supply any motives they want, but the situations are authored by the GM and even if a GM might think "Oh, this will mess with that PC's head" or "this is what he wants" there's still an overriding concern with situation/setting and an agenda that is focused on other things, like simulating something, or verisimilitude, or a contest of player skill, etc.

All of which are things I want out of RPGs.

 

[FrogReaver]

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.

I'm not so sure the child would be correct , especially about 'more choice'.

On choices - it's estimated there are more than a million nouns in the English language. Even with a story using only 4 nouns that's 1,000,000^4 possibilities. Go up to 50 nouns and it's a 1 followed by 300 zeroes worth of choices.

I don't even know how you would begin to estimate the choices in an RPG to begin a comparison. The first 4 choices a character has in an RPG sure doesn't feel like 1,000,000^4 choices to me but depending on precisely how you count it might be. But that brings us back to the problem of how we should count choices in RPG's to begin with.

On control over the fiction - wouldn't that depend on the particular RPG scenario? Like a complete railroad may involve less control over the fiction than the child in the story game. But even outside the railroad - how does one measure control over the fiction in an rpg? How does one even measure it in a game where the player provides the nouns and the other the rest. In at least one way the player filling in nouns probably provides a greater percent of the fiction than a player does in a typical RPG as framing and describing action resolution generally fill so much more of the fictional space than a player saying my character tries to do X.

I do agree the child is experiencing a meaningful difference between the games - i just don't know that they are correctly articulating it. IMO articulating such differences is hard. If i had to put those differences in words, I think focusing more on what the child gets to choose in each game rather than the number of choices in each is far more explanatory. Likewise focusing on what the child gets to have control over in each game is also far more revealing than trying to talk through which offers 'more' control over the fictional space.

TLDR: there's nothing outside subjective gut feeling that actually quantifies 'choice' or 'control over the fiction' or 'agency'. If we are going to talk about 'more' anything then we really need a metric to measure that thing with. Also Note: the difference between none and some still works without a metric.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

No. You're flat out wrong. Unless you're saying that I've done the equivalent of winning the lottery and had dozens of DMs over the years AND watched several dozen more convention games all without seeing more than once.

You're biased because of how you run your games.

 

[pemerton]

Right, I think that's an important consideration. I have stated it as 'locus of play' or 'focus' where narrativist games put that on what is going on in the character's minds, what fiction happens next is based on what will reflect on that in the most interesting (agenda affirming) way. In non-narrativist play (or at least simulationist/trad play) character decisions are still the content of the action of the game, and player's can supply any motives they want, but the situations are authored by the GM and even if a GM might think "Oh, this will mess with that PC's head" or "this is what he wants" there's still an overriding concern with situation/setting and an agenda that is focused on other things, like simulating something, or verisimilitude, or a contest of player skill, etc.

This is fully consistent with what I first posted upthread at #211:

in the RPGs I know that have higher player agency, the players cannot "alter game reality" in the way some posters in this thread are talking about. Rather, they establish their own goals and aspirations for their PCs (including working with the group collectively to establish the appropriate backstory and setting elements to underpin those goals and aspirations), and then the GM relies on those goals and aspirations as cues for their own narration of framing and consequence.

This same feature which underpins high player agency also brings the focus of play onto the "human issues".

Perhaps it is possible, in principle, to have a game in which the signals the player sends, that the GMthe incorporates into framing etc, don't pertain to human issues. This might be a type of "neotrad" "simulationism". I don't really know what these systems would be - maybe some approaches to Fate or Cortex+? I think these still generally tend towards "human issues" by default, because of the way that Aspects and similar elements need to be able to feed into both success and failure. But a departure from that might be possible.

Anyway, if we avoid the "human issue" in the most straightforward way, by having the GM independently provide the material around which the player will then orient their play of their PC, we have something that looks like a sandbox. And just from that description, we can see the contrast in terms of degree of agency over the fiction exercised by different participants.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I see "pretend elfgames" as nothing but a pejorative intended to make less of an issue someone has in RPGs. It actually really bothers me.

Okay. How about the "Let's Pretend" thing then? Because plenty of people use that one without intending (and, as far as I can tell, without giving) any offense.

There are some pretty clear similarities here.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Okay. How about the "Let's Pretend" thing then? Because plenty of people use that one without intending (and, as far as I can tell, without giving) any offense.

There are some pretty clear similarities here.

I don't see that pertaining to RPGs in any way meaningful to discussion.

 

[hawkeyefan]

A true railroad.

Okay. And then what would be just above that?