D&D General What is player agency to you?

[FrogReaver]

What do you have in mind?

@Manbearcat and I have raised the idea of agency to solve puzzles in this thread, but no one else seems to have been interested in that discussion.

Others have raised agency to declare actions for one's PC, but as I, @hawkeyefan and @AbdulAlhazred have pointed out, that is common to all RPGs and hence not an interesting point of distinction between them.

I have also talked about the agency of a player to prompt the GM to reveal their (the GM's) ideas about the fiction. That didn't get much uptake as a discussion point.

How about ‘agency in respect of establishing the shared fiction while respecting a DM curated world in the course of playing a RPG’?

 

[FrogReaver]

Here is a definition of the word "agency": action or intervention producing a particular effect. Google attributes this to Oxford Languages.

Merriam-Webster gives the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.

You seem to be asking "Why do we need the word agency to refer to the phenomenon of agency?" Which strike me as an odd question.

Naturally enough, substituting rough synonyms will roughly preserve meaning.

The threat topic is What is player agency to you? To me, it is the capacity to participate in establishing the shared fiction. I have been clear about that since at least post 215 (see my reply to @clearstream just upthread).

Here is my post 219. which sits two posts below your post 217:
I don't understand why you object to me using an ordinary word of English with its ordinary meaning.

All the definitions you cite appear to be binaries. You either produced an action or intervention or not. You either had the capacity or not. You either had the condition or not. You either had the state or not.

Where is your idea of scalar agency found in these definitions?

Also since it was brought up - what I’m saying is that since the word agency is soo contentious, if we want to have a discussion over more than it’s meaning then we should drop the word and talk the concepts without it. I don’t know why anyone would object to that?

 

[clearstream]

Elsewhere I proposed a definition of RPG at the highest level as

"ongoing authorship of a common fiction, through a continuous process of drafting and revising, that all participate in"

So when you say

To reiterate: I am not talking about choice to play a game. I am talking about agency in respect of establishing the shared fiction in the course of playing a RPG. And have been for around 3,000 posts.

Then that is far too general, as should be obvious even from our ability to discern between the (pre)lusory goals of GM Story Hour and narrativist play. We might as well refer to agency in respect of games involving dice.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I can't agree with that. It sounds like you're saying that acting outside your PC in some way is required for the player to have any agency at all in an RPG. Is that what you're saying?

No, I'm just saying that we ALL have that in every game, we get to say what the PC does (well, we can show examples where this is not the case, but I think we all consider such examples to be degenerate forms of play). And labeling it 'character agency' is to my mind quite confusing, as it can obscure things like "does the player have sufficient information?" and that's not necessarily the same as the CHARACTER having sufficient information, for example. So I need to talk in terms of players, and "depicting my character's actions" is ONE of the execution methods for exercising player agency. Its not a 'different form', its simply one mechanism, and we CAN compare agency across such mechanisms.

 

[clearstream]

Others have raised agency to declare actions for one's PC, but as I, @hawkeyefan and @AbdulAlhazred have pointed out, that is common to all RPGs and hence not an interesting point of distinction between them.

Put together with #3159, I take it you contend that participating in establishing a shared fiction in the course of playing is not common to all RPGs. Thus my "definition of RPG at the highest level" is by your lights incorrect. Do I have that right?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Amount of agency to do what?

It doesn't matter, and it is likely to be a choice!

I think what you are saying here (and I do not wish to put words in your mouth, so am happy to be corrected) is that you encountered folk who had (pre)lusory goals that weren't served by GM story hour, and thus apparently felt low agency to enact those other goals in GM story hour. Happily, you were able to diagnose the mismatch and suggest alternatives.

No, you are missing the point, because you think that there is thus the possibility of "more of the kind of agency that exists in GM Story Hour" but that is not possible, because the definition of that type of play MAKES IT low agency! Not 'different agency', it makes it inherently, as a feature of its definition, low agency. It excludes most/all of the 'conduits' by which the player can ACT in the game and thus exercise agency. All agency is 'power to act'. We CAN talk about the means, and there are certainly different means, but there's a root thing that those means enable, and GM Story Hour lacks any means to exercise it (and that lack is definitional, that is 'constitutive' in your lingo).

That is not the same as critiquing agency in GM story hour by the goals of those who intentionally engage in GM story hour. The diagnosis doesn't apply to all patients as not all suffer the malady of mismatching goals.

Yes, it is! It is exactly the same! My goals are not magically different in Narrative World and GMSH. One simply provides the means by which I can utilize my personal human agency, and the other does not. I would draw an example from modern world politics, but I will refrain, but you can easily make the contrast between liberal and illiberal realms.

These two sentences are obviously self-contradicting, except via the exit I've outlined above. That is, GM story hour offers "a relatively low degree of player agency" to play something other than GM story hour.

This is a ridiculous and circular argument. You've tied yourself completely in knots because you've taken up a philosophically and logically non-viable position. Its time to unwind it and achieve some advance in your thinking...

 

[Maxperson]

No. The point @AbdulAlhazred is making is that being able to declare actions for one's PC is the baseline for all RPGs, and hence pointing out that a RPG includes it sheds no particular light on the degree of agency enjoyed by players of that RPG.

Sure, but his problem is that there is no degree of agency. Agency is binary, and as you note is the baseline for RPGs. That's why it's a waste of time to try and compare "levels" of agency in RPGs, rather than aspects of agency that you prefer an RPG to have.

 

[clearstream]

It doesn't matter, and it is likely to be a choice!

Yes.

No, you are missing the point, because you think that there is thus the possibility of "more of the kind of agency that exists in GM Story Hour" but that is not possible, because the definition of that type of play MAKES IT low agency! Not 'different agency', it makes it inherently, as a feature of its definition, low agency. It excludes most/all of the 'conduits' by which the player can ACT in the game and thus exercise agency. All agency is 'power to act'. We CAN talk about the means, and there are certainly different means, but there's a root thing that those means enable, and GM Story Hour lacks any means to exercise it (and that lack is definitional, that is 'constitutive' in your lingo).

Does Chess contain high or low agency to play the highest diamond to a trick?

Yes, it is! It is exactly the same! My goals are not magically different in Narrative World and GMSH.

Okay, that's genuinely surprising. My goals indeed change between different games. That's the reason I play different games at different times. I can see that if your goals never change, you might come to think them as objective.

This is a ridiculous and circular argument. You've tied yourself completely in knots because you've taken up a philosophically and logically non-viable position. Its time to unwind it and achieve some advance in your thinking...

The sort of arguments I am rebutting present subjective goals as objective facts about all RPG. It's beyond time to unwind that and see some advances in thinking.

 

[pemerton]

Then that is far too general

Far too general for what? It's not far too general for me to contrast (say) railroading/"GM story hour" with (say) Burning Wheel played as per the rulebook.

 

[Maxperson]

A person can play Snakes and Ladders, learn (around the age of 5 or so, based on my experience with children) that it involves no player agency, and then decide to play a different game they will find more rewarding. And that comparison of games can be based on any number of considerations, including that a game will be more rewarding if it provides those who play it with more agency.

Yes, Candyland and Chutes and Ladders provide no agency. You simply roll the dice or pick the card and go to where it tells you. Tic Tac Toe does provide agency, and is far more boring than either of the two games.

Agency doesn't necessarily equate to more fun, and there's no such thing as a game having more agency than another game(short of a game having no agency like the two above). Either you possess agency or you don't. All that matter is if a game provides your agency with the focus you prefer. It's the aspects of focus that are comparable from game to game, not agency.