D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

If it doesn’t matter, then I guess we could have saved ourselves 150 pages… This started with the players wanting an audience and not getting it. Same thing.

I don't see it as the same until I have a clearer idea of why the player wanted to have their PC go "over here", and hence have a clearer idea of what, if anything, is at stake.

 

[soviet]

My experience is that the difference between like and love of an RPG session of play is often down to non-game-text factors like group commitment (to the mode(s) of play), skill (in exploiting that game text for their desired mode(s) of play) and social dynamics.

Lack of appropriate ludic-agency can be a factor in enjoyment: lacking power to achieve whatever's important to me in the specific game is almost invariably frustrating! That said, what's important is not black and white, nor static, and ludic-agency itself can be asymmetrical and fluid. Lack of familiarity with a game sometimes leads players to set up their characters lacking the ludic-agency aligned with what's important to them. Or even prior to that, they choose a game text that doesn't offer reasonable utility in meeting their goals. PbtA games do a good job of making the ludic-agencies of a character clear, through the design pattern of playbooks, although the consequences of the overall text are often unclear on initial play throughs.

That all said, I think that "like" and "love" just aren't really nuanced enough to capture the specifics of individual satisfactions with any game. I can be intrigued, horrified, thrilled, cynical, delighted, challenged, curious, appreciative, surprised, lost in the flow, immersed, objective and reflective, and so on. Of all of those, the feeling I most often associate with pleasure in GMing is surprise, while in playing I couldn't really pick one.

What? I was talking about the game text, not my group's session of it. The presumptions you make from that error are incorrect.

 

[clearstream]

What? I was talking about the game text, not my group's session of it. The presumptions you make from that error are incorrect.

@Micah Sweet should have called for folk who would say that they  love both! And undoubtedly too, it's modes of play rather than game texts we should be considering.

What I mean is, the question isn't 5e versus the rest. It's between modes regardless of game text chosen for utility to that mode. I've amended my earlier reply to frame my main concerns.

Ideally, everyone responds based on the game texts and sessions they have loved in play of the mode(s).

 

[mamba]

I don't see it as the same until I have a clearer idea of why the player wanted to have their PC go "over here", and hence have a clearer idea of what, if anything, is at stake.

Not sure why it matters what the reason was. A while ago you said that turning left or right on a hallway is agency, even if you have no information about what lies in either direction. So going ‘over here’ for no reason still is agency.

Given that ‘over here’ was outside the map, I’d say there was no good reason, clearly nothing that matters to the campaign is there. Probably curiosity more than anything.

 

[Oofta]

Really? Moldvay Basic? How would it be done?

I've actually played vanilla narrativist AD&D. I've posted in this thread about why AD&D is not the best vehicle, and about some of the challenges, particularly in respect of action resolution.

This is why I come back to issues around familiarity and experience. Assertion and unreasoned conjecture are cheap. But these are empirical claims: so what's the evidence?

How do you make 4E narrativist then?

 

[Oofta]

I play and enjoy both equally. I find that narrative style games give me more agency in terms of filling out the world, forging my character's path and having a more equal role in developing cooperative experiences. The down side is there can be no coasting on days you're feeling tired and creatively drained. These games often need everyone to be on their toes and fully engaged. The up side is the sense of immediacy and the engagement of the players. It's a lot of fun and adds extra challenge. You really get to dig into who your character is. And it is cool that you know the GM has prepped very little, and players are forging their own destinies. No looking for those plot hooks. But, once again, it requires full attention and can go awry more easily, which even Ron Edwards admits in his annotated Sorcerer.

I enjoy traditional games because discovering plot hooks, solving mysteries in a traditional fashion, exploring ruins or a strange dark forest that the GM has created is fun. There is still plenty of room for character growth and I feel like I'm caught up in adventure. I enjoy free role play without the need to be guided by dice rolls, which can be disruptive. I enjoy having stretches without the constant pressure and busyness of PbtA games, for example. The downside is disengaging from the GM's plot or even plots if it's a sandbox. And sometimes what's important to my character can get lost.

In terms of agency, both styles can have high agency. Narrative games give players more because they are not relying on GM for all the world stuff. But this is not a scale of quality. Many times I don't want agency outside my character. Other times, I really love the story now style.

This got long winded...

Thanks for the explanation. Part of the reason I don't want to play narrative games is because I DM so much. I like just sitting back and enjoying only being responsible for my PC and how they react, I'm grateful that someone else is putting effort into creating the world and making it come to life when I get to play. It just engages different reward centers for me.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I play and enjoy both equally. I find that narrative style games give me more agency in terms of filling out the world, forging my character's path and having a more equal role in developing cooperative experiences. The down side is there can be no coasting on days you're feeling tired and creatively drained. These games often need everyone to be on their toes and fully engaged. The up side is the sense of immediacy and the engagement of the players. It's a lot of fun and adds extra challenge. You really get to dig into who your character is. And it is cool that you know the GM has prepped very little, and players are forging their own destinies. No looking for those plot hooks. But, once again, it requires full attention and can go awry more easily, which even Ron Edwards admits in his annotated Sorcerer.

I enjoy traditional games because discovering plot hooks, solving mysteries in a traditional fashion, exploring ruins or a strange dark forest that the GM has created is fun. There is still plenty of room for character growth and I feel like I'm caught up in adventure. I enjoy free role play without the need to be guided by dice rolls, which can be disruptive. I enjoy having stretches without the constant pressure and busyness of PbtA games, for example. The downside is disengaging from the GM's plot or even plots if it's a sandbox. And sometimes what's important to my character can get lost.

In terms of agency, both styles can have high agency. Narrative games give players more because they are not relying on GM for all the world stuff. But this is not a scale of quality. Many times I don't want agency outside my character. Other times, I really love the story now style.

This got long winded...

Out of interest and since you engage with both styles (and this is an open question to others), I'm imagining narrative games have shorter sessions, generally because of the constant creative mode they are on (referencing back to your "no coasting" comment).
We usually run 6-7 hour face-2-face sessions easy, am I correct in saying this would not be usually common for face-2-face narrative games?

 

[Oofta]

In a sandbox, I declare I (as my character) go over here. The GM consults their notes, or applies their heuristic (random table or extrapolation or whatever) and tells me *Here's what you see."

In a module, I declare I (as my character) go over here. The GM consults the module, sees it has nothing useful to say about what's over there, and so uses their control over fiction and backstory to "bounce me back", and tells me "Here's what you see" where some of what I see is the bouncing.

What is the difference in agency in these two cases?

In my sandbox the character declares "I go over there" and I check my notes for who is there, what they're doing, think about how they're going to react to the PC. Since I'm not running a module, this can upset the whole apple cart so to speak. As the campaign continues to unfold things can go in a radically different direction from what I had originally expected. Enemies turn into allies, they decide to pursue something I just threw in during a moment of improvisation instead of the big bad I had been expecting. I'd say my players go off the rails on a regular basis, but I don't really have rails in the first place.

I don't plan plots. Modules have broad plot outlines that, unless you're just using the module as a source of inspiration, do have to be followed to a large degree. In my sandbox all I ask is that the group decides at the end of a session the general direction they're headed next session so I can lay some groundwork.

So yes, I think players my campaign has more agency. On the other hand, I have agency when I agree to play a module. I know what I'm getting myself into, and that I have to color more-or-less inside the lines for a module. Neither is better or worse to me.

 

[Maxperson]

I read @hawkeyefan's question as being addressed, ultimately, to the player of the character, not to the imaginary capabilities of the imaginary characters. I read @Maxperson as interpreting it the same way, given his references to roleplaying and to mechanics, which are phenomena that obtain in the real world among the players, not in the imaginary world of the characters.

With that perspective established, I take hawkeyefan's implicit point to be that the player of the high level wizard has a great deal of agency to declare changes to the gameworld - creating things, changing things, destroying things, moving different people here or there, etc. Whereas the player of the low level fighter does not have comparable agency.

The fact that the player of the fighter can, through a particular technique, bring it about that the GM forms a view about what should happen to the gameworld seems a much more oblique type of agency to me!

He didn't ask about agency. He asked whether the two had the same ability to influence the game world. Agency is the ability to influence the game world through options available to the player and it's binary. You can do it or you cannot. There are no degrees. If you can influence it, then you have agency.

If you personally value degree over quality, quantity, or some other aspect of agency, then if are playing the wizard may FEEL like he has greater, but he doesn't. Both have the same agency. Just like if the player of the fighter values an aspect that the wizard has less of, that player may FEEL like he has greater agency

 

[Raiztt]

Is this claim based on your extensive experience of doing so?

Or are you just guessing?

Remember when you were saying you didn't need extensive knowledge of every game ever to analyse aspects of them?

Narrativism is literally just playing make believe where each player is a little DM. Literally any game can have that sit ontop of it. I could be playing candy land and sit there and just make up stories and narratives while I did it.

Since DMs and groups are free to enforce or ignore rules at will, I don't see how a style of play could even in principle be prohibited by a game system.