D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Maxperson]

Some players move from rugby to American football to Australian Rules football. But I think few players move from rugby to cricket. Why is that? The explanation is found in a comparison of how the games are played, what sorts of skills and abilities they require, etc.

Cricket is more like baseball than it is like football. This is because of features like bowling/pitching and batting; the setting of a field; running after hitting the ball; etc.

Field hockey and soccer can be compared in many respects, and we can look at ways in which (say) soccer more closely resembles hockey or more closely resembles Australian Rules.

Etc.

Even when it come to scores, we can in fact compare particular games as being (for instance) high scoring or low scoring, and relate this to factors like team ability, weather (a wet ground can make for low scores), etc. We can also compare whether games are systematically high scoring and fast in play (say, basketball and Australian Rules) or involve less frequent scoring and "slower" play (eg rubgy). We can also compare the degree to which play might be fast yet scoring low, and consider why that is the case (eg soccer).

All of those things are aspects of agency, not whether agency is high or low. Basketball(narrative play) is very different from Soccer(traditional play). I you like basketball and not soccer, you might be tempted to say that soccer is a low scoring game and basketball is a high scoring game. However, that's the wrong way to look at it. Each of those games has agency and each values different aspects of agency to arrive at how they score their games.

Within basketball a team who scores 70 points in a low(low agency) scoring game. A team that scores 130 is in a high(high agency) scoring game. Go to soccer and if a team scores 1 it's a low(low agency) score, but a team scoring 6 points has a high(high agency) score.

If you who like basketball were to play in a soccer game with it's different sort agency, you might be tempted to think, "I have lower agency in this game. It's a much lower scoring game." The fact is, though, that you have full agency to score in soccer under that style of play. It just FEELS lower to you, because you value the agency that is used to score in basketball. The same would go for me who values the kind of scoring used in soccer. My agency in a narrative game would feel less, because I value different aspects of agency than you do.

In both instances we have full agency. Agency is all or nothing. You have it or you do not. Whether it feels high or low to you depends on what aspects you value out of agency.

 

[Maxperson]

Really? So having only one option means no agency, but having two options is the same as having five?

If you value those two options and don't value the other three, absolutely. Agency is more than just how many options you have. Options are just one aspect of agency and someone who values a tremendous amount of options will FEEL like a game with more options has more agency. Someone who value the quality of his options over the quantity is going to FEEL like the fewer quality options is more agency. In both cases, though, the players have full agency since they are not being railroaded. Only the aspects they subjectively value make agency SEEM more or less.

 

[FrogReaver]

All of those things are aspects of agency, not whether agency is high or low. Basketball(narrative play) is very different from Soccer(traditional play). I you like basketball and not soccer, you might be tempted to say that soccer is a low scoring game and basketball is a high scoring game. However, that's the wrong way to look at it. Each of those games has agency and each values different aspects of agency to arrive at how they score their games.

Within basketball a team who scores 70 points in a low(low agency) scoring game. A team that scores 130 is in a high(high agency) scoring game. Go to soccer and if a team scores 1 it's a low(low agency) score, but a team scoring 6 points has a high(high agency) score.

If you who like soccer were to play in a basketball game with it's different sort agency, you might be tempted to think, "I have lower agency in this game. It's a much lower scoring game." The fact is, though, that you have full agency to score in soccer under that style of play. It just FEELS lower to you, because you value the agency that is used to score in basketball. The same would go for me who values the kind of scoring used in soccer. My agency in a narrative game would feel less, because I value different aspects of agency than you do.

In both instances we have full agency. Agency is all or nothing. You have it or you do not. Whether it feels high or low to you depends on what aspects you value out of agency.

One important question here. Do railroads have agency or not? You often can’t change the main plot line, but you can often advance the plot line using various strategies. Is that agency or not?

 

[Maxperson]

One important question here. Do railroads have agency or not? You often can’t change the main plot line, but you can often advance the plot line using various strategies. Is that agency or not?

In a railroad nothing you do matters. You are being forced down a single rail, so you have no true options. If "options" A-Z all end in the result of AA, then they are effectively one single option with an illusion of choice.

The only time you can have agency in a railroad is if the DM during session 0 says, "I'm going to be railroading you guys. Are you on board?" If they players agree, then they have exercised agency(since they also had the choice to refuse) and the resulting railroad is one that they chose to engage.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

How about "what is the focus of play?" such that we can determine which choices are weighty and bear upon the play agenda, and which are more like 'chrome' and superficial or secondary? If one game allows more freedom to address what is important, to choose more 'ways to be' then it, presumably, gives you more agency.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

One important question here. Do railroads have agency or not? You often can’t change the main plot line, but you can often advance the plot line using various strategies. Is that agency or not?

If it is any form of agency at all (and I am skeptical that it is), it is only at the absolute lowest possible rung.

The whole idea of a railroad is that you cannot change the tracks or stop the ride. You will go where you are required to go and the events that are required to happen will happen. In its crudest form, you're simply subject to constant denial until you choose the correct option. In its more subtle form, you will think you are choosing your own path, but it will be invisibly twisted behind the scenes to ensure that what is supposed to happen, does.

None of that sounds like agency to me. What you have influence over doesn't matter, and what matters, you can't influence.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

NBA teams score more points than NFL teams. Should we conclude that NBA teams are better at offense than NFL teams because they score more points than them?

It’s not that no comparisons can be made between games, it’s that we must be careful around the comparisons which are made because most of them are no better than the one I just made about the NBA and NFL.

This is true in some simplistic sense, but it is verging on a logical fallacy (I say verging since you clearly don't rule out all comparisons). The point being, just because you used a bad methodology to make a comparison doesn't impute the concept of comparisons. It simply acts as a warning to make sure your comparisons are well-made. Like, I CAN compare the Win/Loss ratio of the Cincinnati Reds with the Cleveland Browns. I simply have to do so in the form of a comparison of the number of standard deviations by which they diverge from 1:1 within their respective leagues (or some such, maybe other comparisons are possible).

 

[Raiztt]

This is why it matters to distinguish the player and the character. You, here, are talking about how the character in the fiction comes to find themselves caught up in their struggles. But this thread is about player agency, which is who gets to decide what the fiction will be about, what sorts of things it will include, etc.

Oh, if you want to split things up that way, then I run games what have very little, if any, "player" agency at all. I've been DMing for almost 20 years now and while I'm certainly interested in PCs creativity and the sorts of things they want to see or would like to include, they ultimately have no power to make that determination beyond whether or not they want to play in my game at all.

'Character' agency is 10,000x more important to me than 'player' agency.

 

[Raiztt]

Skimming through the pages of posts that have happened since yesterday I wanted to add a quirk of my DMing style that actually bares on this:

I actually do not let players stop other players from doing what they want to do. For example, let's say the rogue wants to pluck the ruby from the eye of the idol, but the fighter thinks it's a bad idea and says 'I want to try and grab the rogue and stop him'. I literally do not allow it. You can't. The fighter simply fails, no need to roll, because I don't want the game to grind to a hault while people jockey over stopping people from doing things.

 

[clearstream]

How about "what is the focus of play?" such that we can determine which choices are weighty and bear upon the play agenda, and which are more like 'chrome' and superficial or secondary? If one game allows more freedom to address what is important, to choose more 'ways to be' then it, presumably, gives you more agency.

I agree with what I understand to be the general notion here, given due weight to "what is important". I take the word "freedom" in the sense of affording the possibility of addressing what is important.

By my lights, it would be meaningful to say "It's important in game X to do Y, but the designed mechanics don't give players agency to do that, so it doesn't give them enough agency." More agency in this case would mean more agency to do Y, something that matters in game X.

An equally meaningful criticism could be "It's an anti-goal of game X that players should do Y, but the designed mechanics give players too much agency to do it." Increasing agency to do Y in that case would be poor design: correct design would be to remove agency to do Y.

The above kinds of "wrong agency" statements actually do come up in designer conversations around playtesting and balancing. It's not that the agency is wrong because there is too much or too little, truly: it's wrong because of a mismatch between what is important and freedom to do it.