D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Umbran]

If it isn't self-appointed, are you saying it is the players twisting the GM's arm to do it?

No.

Because otherwise, they're willingly taking on that job. Nobody elects them. They choose to do it because they want to. How can that be anything other than self-appointment? It's not like strange women lying in ponds distribute swords to do it.

I already said - there's an offer and acceptance. Both sides have choice - I cannot directly appoint myself to be GM of a particular group. I can only say I am willing to play that role. I can choose to offer to run a game, or not. The players can then each choose to take my offer, or not.

There can even be negotiation over details before the offer and acceptance are finalized. And maybe the players can ask me to run a game, but I still then have choice to agree to do so, or not.

Nobody is drafted or dragooned to run or play. There is mutual agreement to a social contract. That contract, and the agreement, may be, and often is, left implicit, and that can leave the group overall open to misunderstanding. A Session Zero can help make these things explicit, rather than leave them implicit.

That everyone at the table must agree to participate is, in fact, a space for major exercise of agency for all parties. That possible negotiation is a space for agency.

And then, in the end, the various burdens are choices.

Sure, but his problem is that there is no degree of agency. Agency is binary...

What? No!

I may be given a choice at a particular point. With that choice, I have agency.
Someone else might reach that same point, and not be offered the choice. At that point, they then lack agency.

Now, stack up all the particular points. We can have person A, who always has choices, Person B, who has some choices, and Person C who has no choices. Clearly, then overall, we have a spectrum of overall agency, made up of all the individual moments we have it.

But then, even at a particular moment - Person A might be able to choose literally anything, Person B might have a constrained list of choices, and Person C might have no choices.

Our problem isn't that there is no degree of agency. It is that we have no method to measure it in a meaningful way.

 

[Yora]

we point out that the rules give us that power... we do not need to claim anything. You can play PbtA if you want different rules

In PtbA games, the GM still has most of the same power as in any other games.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In PtbA games, the GM still has most of the same power as in any other games.

Sort of. They still describe the environment and they make moves and decide what moves are triggered by players action descriptions. But their goals in doing so and restrictions on what they say are much different. The result is somewhat different from other games, but similar.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In PtbA games, the GM still has most of the same power as in any other games.

The differences are significant if you're a fan of classic or trad gaming though.

 

[mamba]

In PtbA games, the GM still has most of the same power as in any other games.

That is not my understanding, otherwise we would not be having this discussion. If you feel that is not yet far enough, pick Burning Wheel instead. The point remains, it never was about which specific game to pick instead.

 

[pemerton]

To me ‘character agency’ is player agency expressed solely through the character and limited to that which is in the characters control.

<snip>

Narrative games wouldn’t have as much character agency as traditional games.

Are you able to explain why Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World involve any agency that is not "characer agency"? And can you give any illustrations that explain why the second sentence is true?

 

[Golroc]

OK, so we get down to it, @FrogReaver makes it clear that the consensus is that narrativist games (thus a class of system and its attendant culture of play) produces something qualitatively different than other types of RPGs, and your instant response is "well, none of that matters anyway." Yeah, its telling.

Then I expressed myself poorly if that was you reading. Of course styles and systems produce different experiences and levels of agency. But I still posit that this pales compared to the impact made by, say the GM.

If a player complains about lack of agency (as in the example in the original post) the first thing to do should be to approach this from the perspective of interpersonal conflicts and not whether the game system should be changed.

If a player says not being able to actively dodge and have that simulated is a serious problem, my blunt answer is that the problem is one if maturity or that other issues are left unspoken and the chemistry is simply bad. Going narrativist won't fix anything here I believe.

That doesn't mean styles and systems don't matter. Of course they do. Playing what you like matters.

 

[Maxperson]

I may be given a choice at a particular point. With that choice, I have agency.
Someone else might reach that same point, and not be offered the choice. At that point, they then lack agency.

Now, stack up all the particular points. We can have person A, who always has choices, Person B, who has some choices, and Person C who has no choices. Clearly, then overall, we have a spectrum of overall agency, made up of all the individual moments we have it.

But then, even at a particular moment - Person A might be able to choose literally anything, Person B might have a constrained list of choices, and Person C might have no choices.

Our problem isn't that there is no degree of agency. It is that we have no method to measure it in a meaningful way.

Agency is just the ability to make choices that affect your environment. You have that ability or you don't have that ability. If player A has 10 opportunities, player B has 12, and player C has 7, they all meet the full definition of agency.

The specific number of options, quality of those options, scope of the options, etc. are all a matter of preference. A person might prefer to have every possible decision point offer up a possible chance to change the environment. Another person might prefer not to have so many, feeling that fewer quality options are better than a bunch of minor ones heaped on top. The third person might want fewer options, but when options do come up have those options impact the world in a major way. These don't mean more or less agency, but may cause the individual to feel like he has more or less agency, because the aspects he prefers may or may not the focus of the playstyle.

Per my car analogy, all of them have cars that get them from point A to point B, it doesn't matter that one has a better engine, the other a better air conditioner, and the third all-wheel drive. All of them have agency. It's only when you end up in a railroad where you don't have options and are forced down a path that you end up losing agency.

 

[FrogReaver]

What? No!

I may be given a choice at a particular point. With that choice, I have agency.
Someone else might reach that same point, and not be offered the choice. At that point, they then lack agency.

IMO. No issues so far.

Now, stack up all the particular points. We can have person A, who always has choices, Person B, who has some choices, and Person C who has no choices. Clearly, then overall, we have a spectrum of overall agency, made up of all the individual moments we have it.

My first major point is that specificity matters!

The premises:
Person A has agency at point x1, x2, x3, x4, ... , xn
Person B has agency at point x1, x2, x4, ... , xn
Player Z has agency at point x1, x2, y1, y2, y3, ... , yp
Player F has agency at point x1
Player G has agency at points x1, x2

The first question is, why didn't player B have a choice at point x3? Possibility - the choice player B made at point x2 allowed him to bypass point x3. Would this result in him having less agency than player A or the same? There's certainly less points where he has agency, but a greater percentage of them. Which brings me to my next major point.

The issue isn't simply that there's no method to measure agency in a meaningful way, but there's also the question of which metric to use for agency in the first place - of which we have at least 2 (and possibly more).

Let's also look at player B and player Z. This is where player B's choice at x2 and player Z's choice at x2 completely diverge so that player B and player Z no longer share points. Assuming we can map all this out (the measurement problem), we could come up with a particular answer for Player B and Player Z and after picking which metric to use for agency we could answer that question.

Now consider Players F and Player G. Suppose that player F and G both have so few points where they have choice because after their respective points end, they did reach other points but had no choice at them. We could measure both of these and conclude that player 1 had more agency under the percentage method and player 2 had more agency under the additive method. But I think intuitively either of those options just feels wrong. Neither of these players actually get to affect the game itself as after their first move or 2 they are essentially on a railroad. Which is where I want to establish my next major point.

Agency over a point in a game (and agency over all points in a game) and agency in respect to the game itself aren't the same things. Or more generally - agency always must be defined in respect to something.

Side Bar: Another interesting question is what counts as a particular point. For example can point z1 be equal to points x1 and x2 combined? If so couldn't one for example have agency with respect to z1 and x2 but not x1? Or when we are talking particular points is what is actually being suggested the existence of atomic points that cannot be further broken down?

My final major Point.

I'd suggest there's a 3rd and better metric for agency. Agency is always about whether one has a choice with respect to something. Why do I propose it's a better metric? Because it better aligns with our intuitions. It doesn't require us to determine what's an 'atomic point'. It doesn't require us to pick percentage or total. Instead we can determine the answer by simply asking the following question: did player X have the capacity to make a choice that could affect change with respect to thing Y. Or as I've previously shorthanded it - Agency is Binary.

But then, even at a particular moment - Person A might be able to choose literally anything, Person B might have a constrained list of choices, and Person C might have no choices.

I'm not going to go immediately into this after my wall of text above, but I think there's a good argument that more choices with respect to a particular X doesn't of itself constitute more agency.

Our problem isn't that there is no degree of agency. It is that we have no method to measure it in a meaningful way.

I'd suggest it's up to us to choose the metric by which to measure agency, and if we choose the 'agency is binary' metric we can measure it. I've laid out a case for why I think it's the better choice, but ultimately it's a choice we have to make.

 

[Yora]

The differences are significant if you're a fan of classic or trad gaming though.

That is not my understanding, otherwise we would not be having this discussion. If you feel that is not yet far enough, pick Burning Wheel instead. The point remains, it never was about which specific game to pick instead.

My opinion is that the authority and ability to dictate events in the game of the GM is not given by the mechanics of the game.

Different games encourage the GM to give the players different degrees of agency, and that encouragement can come through the way that mechanics work. Though it typically is mostly through the writers telling the GM that that's how they mean the game to be played. But I do believe that games that are considered to be strongly GM-guided can be run with very high degrees of player agency, and games known to be GM hands-off can be played very railroady. While staying true to the letter of the rules, even when it's completely against the spirit of the game.