D&D General What is player agency to you?

[hawkeyefan]

Agency in a game is granted by the rules of the game. So I agree that player agency need not be limited to what a character can do in the game if that agency is allowed by the rules of the game. I never said otherwise. In some games agency is implemented via the character because that is how the agency is allowed.

I simply think "player agency" as something separate from the agency the person playing the game can express is a meaningless distinction. Feel free to disagree.

I don’t know how we’re disagreeing based on the above.

 

[hawkeyefan]

yes, declaring actions for my character 'as my character' not 'as a storyteller', not declaring outcomes for my character, or declaring actions for NPCs, or declaring what's in a location, or declaring items or people or places exist or anything else my character isn't doing themselves.

Yes, that’s fine. You have preferred limits to your agency when playing. Nothing wrong with that. Depending on the game and participants, I likely would share the same expectations.

 

[Oofta]

I don’t know how we’re disagreeing based on the above.

Agency in a game is agency, period. The fact that different games have different ways of expressing that agency is irrelevant. There's no difference between the person playing having agency in the game and "player" agency. In either case it's the person at the table that has agency as far as I'm concerned. Not sure what is unclear.

 

[bloodtide]

To extend the metaphor, we preferred passengers don’t think being a passenger is the same as driving, but both passengers and drivers can pick the destination, which is what we (or i at least) consider agency, drivers might have more control over the destination but passengers still get their say about where the vehicle is headed, passengers can say ‘hey driver we want to turn right here’ and if the driver says ‘no this is my car I’m choosing the destination’ that’s railroading

Sounds like an accurate metaphor:

So the DM owns the car, is the one driving and pays for things like gas. The passengers are just along for the ride. The DM picks the destination, not the passengers. And the DM picks the route. A passenger can say endlessly "You shouda took I-99", but they are not driving: The DM is. And the DM will take the route they want to take.

The DM makes the Adventure, and will put time, work and effort into it. The players will refuse to do so. Even if the DM asked something simple: "How about each player make five very detailed encounters for the game?" Most players would refuse, They want to "Side Table DM", but do not want to do any work. The DM makes the destination and route through the adventure, and again has to do all the game related work. So when a player just says "Oh I want to randomly do something", the DM is right to ignore them.

My most basic question would likely be about the character I make... will that matter to play in some way? Will the content of play be significantly different if I play a Noble Fighter out for revenge versus a Criminal Sorcerer who's trying to pay off a debt to a crime lord? Will those things matter to play at all? That kind of thing.

The most basic problem here is does the player expect the whole world to revolve around their special character? And, sure, most players will say an automatic "No", but then in that same breath say "oh, so this game has no player agency".

This really comes down to time. Does the player demand that THEIR story be front and center in the very first session of the very first game? Must their story come up in the first thirty minutes? Must everything be about their story?

What about the other players? Do some have to take a back seat so one player can be in the spot light? Or do all two to six player stories have to happen at the same time?

Player vs DM is different. Neither is more nor less creative for me. It's a difference between a laser focus and turning on a floodlight. Yes, being DM is more work in general because as DM I need to decide monsters, balance encounters, etc.. But a lot of the work as DM isn't particularly creative, it's picking out monsters that fit what I want to represent. It's physically mapping out locations after the creative bits of "what lies over this hill" is done.

Well, it is sure 75% DM being creative and 25% player(s) being creative, on average. But even more so a DM must be creative 100% of the time, and even the creative players can just "sit back and play the game" and not be creative if they wish 50% to 100% of the time. And at least 50% of players can't, or firmly choose not to do much of anything but going along for the ride.

But primarily what I reject is that players are just along for the ride. The role is different but it's just as active.

Well, at least half the players are. But even so most of the creative players are not all that active: they are at best reactive. A DM creates a detailed encounter.....then the player might be a little creative in response.

The idea that active GM curation is needed to maintain consistency is just not true. Plenty of people play games with real time collaborative world building that are consistent, have meaning and are no closer to the sort of clown shoes example you posted than any game you have run. Acting like the sort of play style you prefer is the only way to not reach degrading state is doing you no favors in these discussions.

It's true depending on the type of game everyone wants.

A Simple, Easy, Casual, Cartoonish, Unrealistic, Random or Crazy Senseless type game needs no consistency at all. So if everyone wants to play any game type style like that, then the GM does not "need" to maintain consistency.

I guess there is a rare, near theoretical, where all hard core GM sits down to equally create and play a game in every way though.

The video you posted seems to me to be the work of someone who doesn't trust the people they play with. Not that there are no reasons for active GM curation, but the idea that without the game will inevitably degrade does not bear out in my more than 15 years of running games using more collaborative approaches to world building.

Well, my years and years of gaming....and really life in general....sure do show me players and people will inevitably degrade. A lot of people have trouble staying true and avoiding temptation....even the "good" people.

Allow a player to make Secret Dice rolls....they MIGHT tell you the real number they rolled......sometimes. But much more often they will "Amazingly" always roll just the right numbers at just the right times.....nearly every time. Suddenly they will have more critical hits or other saves or actions...nearly every time. Oh, they get bit by a giant rat and fail their save...hehe....oh but they make all three disintegration saves...amazing how dice work like that.

And even more so, is the creative ways to alter reality. Oh...the player with a wounded character "just happens" to find some potions of healing under a tree. Wow...amazing chance there. And so on.

 

[pemerton]

You're redefining the word agency? So agency in real life is not an applicable definition for games?

In the real world I have the option of going to the Grand Canyon. In the game I can have my PC go to a grand canyon. In the real world I can engage the option to attempt a running jump over the Grand Canyon and fail. In the game my PC can attempt a running jump over the really big canyon and fail. In real life I can die from the fall. In the game the PC can die from the fall. In the real world I can survive the Grand Canyon fall(see the teenager that recently fell off ) by getting lucky. In the game my PC can survive the fall by getting lucky.

Agency is just the players being able to choose options that affect the world. Both examples above will do so as both the real world and the imaginary world react to the fall and survival or death that results.

Talking about what imaginary people can do in imaginary worlds is of no relevance to discussing the agency of players in a game.

A game is an event that occurs in the real world. It is a social event that occurs among real people. The event unfolds in virtue of the interactions among those people. And a game (typically) involves some sort of structure of interaction that the participants impose upon themselves - the rules of the game express that structure.

As in any social activity, involving interpersonal interactions, we can ask of a game who is making the decisions, who is driving play, who is influencing outcomes.

As @hawkeyefan posted most recently, and as I have posted repeatedly including not too far upthread, the decisions and outcomes in RPGing typically pertain to the creation of a shared fiction. (An alternative sort of approach is the solution of a puzzle by the players, where the fiction is more of a means to that end. But no one in this thread, besides me and @Manbearcat, seems to be talking about that sort of RPGing.)

So when we look at the social activity of playing a RPG, we can ask questions like who makes decisions about the elements that are found with in the fiction? (people, places, imaginary events, etc).

How does the group decide what happens to those elements? (eg what happens to the imaginary people and places, which imaginary events occur, etc)

If these things are done by discussion and negotiation, we can ask Who has the most influence in those discussions and negotiations? This is something that @Campbell has been very interested in for many years of posting.

If these things are done via a mechanical process, we can ask Who gets to activate that process, and to establish its various inputs?

All these questions are relevant to understanding the distribution of agency in the real-world activity of playing a RPG. The suggestion that all episodes of RPG play answer them the same way, or will reveal that every episode of RPGing has more or less the same distribution of agency, strikes me as a highly implausible empirical conjecture!

 

[FrogReaver]

We declare actions that shape the shared imaginary space of the game world. That’s how we express our agency.

More nuance is required.

For exploration it's not sufficient that a player authors fiction - he must author the fiction in specific ways and about specific things. Authoring fiction outside of those specific ways and specific things can/will conflict with the intended purpose of exploration.

For example (starting with baby steps): if a player pre-authors all the details about a town and it's inhabitants, then he literally can't explore it because he already knows what's in that town. He could say his character has never been there and then have his character explore it, but that's not the player exploring the town.

How do you explore the pretend world?

You declare fictional actions for your character.

Yes. But not any fictional action can be declared and still be exploration. Some actions preclude exploration. An example: declaring your PC remembers he's been to this location before and knows who and where everything is.

 

[Oofta]

Talking about what imaginary people can do in imaginary worlds is of no relevance to discussing the agency of players in a game.

A game is an event that occurs in the real world. It is a social event that occurs among real people. The event unfolds in virtue of the interactions among those people. And a game (typically) involves some sort of structure of interaction that the participants impose upon themselves - the rules of the game express that structure.

As in any social activity, involving interpersonal interactions, we can ask of a game who is making the decisions, who is driving play, who is influencing outcomes.

As @hawkeyefan posted most recently, and as I have posted repeatedly including not too far upthread, the decisions and outcomes in RPGing typically pertain to the creation of a shared fiction. (An alternative sort of approach is the solution of a puzzle by the players, where the fiction is more of a means to that end. But no one in this thread, besides me and @Manbearcat, seems to be talking about that sort of RPGing.)

So when we look at the social activity of playing a RPG, we can ask questions like who makes decisions about the elements that are found with in the fiction? (people, places, imaginary events, etc).

How does the group decide what happens to those elements? (eg what happens to the imaginary people and places, which imaginary events occur, etc)

If these things are done by discussion and negotiation, we can ask Who has the most influence in those discussions and negotiations? This is something that @Campbell has been very interested in for many years of posting.

If these things are done via a mechanical process, we can ask Who gets to activate that process, and to establish its various inputs?

All these questions are relevant to understanding the distribution of agency in the real-world activity of playing a RPG. The suggestion that all episodes of RPG play answer them the same way, or will reveal that every episode of RPGing has more or less the same distribution of agency, strikes me as a highly implausible empirical conjecture!

We sit down to play games following a set of rules. Either the player has agency to affect the game's fiction or they do not. I see no difference other than a different implementation of how to do that no matter how often you try to create this subcategory of agency you label "player agency".

We just disagree.

 

[FrogReaver]

In what ways does a game that limits action declaration to what the character can believable do/know allow for more agency than a game that allows that and then more?

Given the assumption that agency is not-binary (which was noted as being in dispute)

The proposal is that there are 3 buckets of agency:
Bucket A is what is shared between the games.
Bucket B is the narrative agency over and beyond bucket A
Bucket C is the agency which was given up to obtain the agency in bucket B. (Tradeoffs).

One can say that Bucket A+B > Bucket A, so long as we are talking finite values (infinites are another possibility). But it's not clear at all that Bucket A+B > Bucket A+C. There's no mathematical principle we can rely on here, we have to actually dig into what is in Bucket B and Bucket C and that's simply not been done.

I don’t think it is given the context of RPGs. Because the limits of our agency are up to us to decide. We can change the rules and processes of play to allow for more or less agency.

We are not limited in that regard as a person in the real world may be limited in what agency they have in a given situation.

When I say it's an assumption that agency is not binary and you essentially say 'agency is not binary' - that's not conducive to discussion. I'm all for discussing whether agency is binary or not - that's a good discussion to have and will move us forward - but simply asserting it is and then me asserting it isn't and back and forth again and again isn't going to get us anywhere but frustrated. Do you want to have that discussion?

We’re talking about playing a game that generates a shared imaginary space. That’s what the game is… that’s what we’re talking about in regard to agency. One’s ability to affect the state of the game.

If the game is about player exploration, even if in part, then affecting the state of the game requires the player to be able to explore. Not just the character exploring, but the player. If the player cannot explore something due to directly authoring that something, then authoring fiction has taken away the player's agency to explore.

I don’t think the arguments disputing this hold up very well.

And I don't think your counters to them hold up very well. Do you want to discuss this or just have each of us declare we are right?

 

[pemerton]

Just so I'm clear. You are saying that midgame inventing Bonds do not need to follow from the fiction? They can introduce people/places/things/specific locations and fiction around those things that have hitherto not even been mentioned in the broadest of terms within the fiction?

<snip>

I think Spout Lore is probably the most controversial and hardest to nail down. Sometimes when I ask about that move it can essentially let the player author a specific tower being nearby. Other times I ask about it everything it does must follow from the fiction AND the DM is still authoring and only asks players some questions. I think we could devote a whole tangent to that one move and still wouldn't get it nailed down. So I'm going to skip it for now.

A great example of a player declaration not following from the fiction (nor being a pre authored backstory).

Essentially it is an example at odds with the principle of following from the fiction - which has definitely been the focus for the last 50 pages or so.

I suspect following from the fiction to them may mean something closer to ‘passing a credibility or plausibility test’.

And if that’s what it boils down to that’s fine. But That’s certainly not how I take following from the fiction to mean. It’s such a different concept it’s very misleading (not intentionally I’m sure).

Here is Apocalypse World (p 117) and Dungeon World (p 163) on the GM's obligation, when making a move, to make a move that follows from the fiction:

Always choose a move that can follow logically from what’s going on in the game’s fiction. It doesn’t have to be the only one, or the most likely, but it does have to make at least some kind of sense.

When you make a move what you’re actually doing is taking an element of the fiction and bringing it to bear against the characters. Your move should always follow from the fiction. They help you focus on one aspect of the current situation and do something interesting with it. What’s going on? What move makes sense here?​

It seems to me that the nature of fiction is such that what happens next is never literally entailed by it. There are possibilities. This is what AW and DW are based around: it's possible that the situation could change this way, or that. If what happens next were literally entailed, then the game participants would have no role but for working out that entailment.

As far as the Falcon's Claw, which @mamba mentioned, here are the posts in question (and some were in reply to you):

The only time a player declared a Scavenging test to find a magic item, in my play, was when the PCs, after being marooned in the Bright Desert, had successfully made their way north to the Abor-Alz, and to the tower where the sorcerer PCs had studied with his brother (as per his backstory, which included two Rogue Wizard lifepaths; a hostile relationship with his brother, with the hostility pertaining to the reasons why they had been driven out of their tower; an affiliation with a sorcerous cabal, and a reputation as a minor illusionist; his PC sheet also included a picture of the tower, a photo of an Indian castle taken from the interwebs).

At the start of the session where the PCs had returned to the tower, the player announced an additional bit of backstory - prior to being driven out of the tower, his PC had been crafting a nickel-silver mace (the Falcon's Claw) in anticipation of enchanting it. This did not violate any credibility test, and in fact seemed rather consonant with the already-established character and backstory. The PC therefore searched through the ruined tower, looking for the Falcon's Claw. A Scavenging check was called for, and failed. Thus the PC did not find what he was looking for: instead, he found something unlooked for - cursed black arrows in what had been his brother's workroom, which were significant because they seemed to indicate that his brother had been evil before the downfall of their tower, whereas the PC's plans for reconciliation with his brother had all rested on a premise that it was only afterwards that his brother had been corrupted.

I've given multiple actual play examples, which actually demonstrate how high player agency produces compelling game play with engaging fiction:

<snip>

*In Burning Wheel, Jobe returning to the ruined tower of his apprenticeship under his brother, searching it in hopes of finding the abandoned nickel-silver mace The Falcon's Claw, only to find instead the black arrows his brother was crafting prior to the events that Jobe believed had caused his brother to turn to evil[/indent]

At one stage there was a Belief about finding magic items that would help free the brother from possession by a Balrog. I don't recall to what extent that Belief had changed/developed.

In RPGing, I know of two ways to introduce new content: roll on a table, or have someone make something up.

Burning Wheel does not use rolling on a table. As per the quotes from the rulebook that I set out upthread, framing and consequences are deliberate, and intended to challenge player priorities and give expression to the consequences of those challenges.

So someone has to make it up.

Sometimes the GM makes it up, and incorporates it into framing, or (as the black arrows illustrate) into a consequence. But that is not the only way. The point of a mechanic like Circles, or Wises, or Scavenging - looking for people (or hoping to meet them), recalling stuff, looking for stuff - is to create a framework within which player priorities for the fiction can be given effect to.

<snip>

upthread @Citizen Mane mentioned the passages from the rulebook that speak about "no beam weaponry in the Duke's toilet" and "no superior gear-mongering in the village". What these really are, in my view, are statements of the basic principle of the credibility check. Robin Laws says something similar in the HeroQuest revised rulebook: if the genre of the game is a western, the fact that the cowboy has a descriptor Fast 16 while the horse has Gallop 14 doesn't mean that the cowboy can outrun the horse.

Generally, if everyone is on the same page as to credibility the issue doesn't come up. If there is some uncertainty over what's credible, it can be worked out via conversation among participants. If, despite such conversation, the most interesting action declaration that a player can think of is a Scavenging check to find an unmotivated vorpal sword in a random cupboard, then - to again echo Citizen Mane - the game has gone so badly wrong that we don't need rules to shut down player agency. We need all the participants to revisit the basics - why do the PCs have no priorities? why can the GM not frame interesting scenes? why does play seem to be unfolding in complete disregard of possible consequences?

Once those issues of ethos and expectation are resolved on the part of all participants, then the allocation of roles will do its job: the GM makes stuff up as part of framing and consequence; the players introduce possibilities as part of the declaration of their Circles, Wises, Scavenging, Perception etc tests, and if those tests succeed then the possibilities are realised.

This is not the only approach to high player agency RPGing - Apocalypse World exhibits a different one - but in my experience it works pretty well.

Suppose that the player, at the start of the session, wrote a Belief for his PC: "I will recover the Falcon's Claw from my old tower." (And for all that I can recall, maybe that's what happened.)

That will affect what sorts of actions and roleplay earn Artha. It doesn't make any difference to the basic proposition that (i) it is the player who is making discovery of the Falcon's Claw a possible element of play, and (ii) the canonical procedure for resolving that possibility is a test on Scavenging.

The player didn't forget to mention the Falcon's Claw - he mentioned it quite loudly and deliberately!, and shared what he envisaged its mechanical specs being, and his plans for finishing enchanting it.

And yes, he was one roll away from having his PC find it. What's the problem? Retrieving lost treasures from ruined towers is a pretty standard thing in FRPGing.

I'm not seeing how it fails to follow from the established fiction - a rogue wizard, returning to the tower where he was an apprentice under his brother, searches for the nickel-silver mace, the Falcon's Claw, that he was in the process of enchanting when their tower fell to an assault by Orcs and his brother became possessed by a balrog as a result of a failed attempt to conjure a Storm of Lightning.

 

[pemerton]

We sit down to play games following a set of rules. Either the player has agency to affect the game's fiction or they do not. I see no difference other than a different implementation of how to do that

No difference between what and what?

In all RPGing which is aimed at producing a shared fiction, the players have agency to affect the game's fiction. (If they did not, they would not be playing, they'd just be observers or kibitzers.)

But it seems eminently possible to talk about the degree to which they enjoy that agency, that is to say, the degree to which they can affect the game's fiction. I mean, the whole point of the label "railroad" would be lost if we were not able to make these judgements of degree!