D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Campbell]

From my perspective artful railroading or like real illusionism is about 1000x worse (for me) than if I know the players' decisions are not going to have much of an impact on how things go. As a player if I believe the decisions I make will determine and shape the direction of play I am putting in a ton of effort and trying to motivate everyone else at the table to do the same. Establishing connections, building alliances, understanding not only how my character's mechanics work but also those of the other players' characters, coordinating and communicating. Investing myself into the struggles and trials of the other player characters and NPCs.

If all that effort I am putting into the game to play it well doesn't result in a capacity to exert my will upon the game's setting is game over.

On the other hand, if I know I'm just along for the ride I can chill and just enjoy the experience for what it is. I can provide some characterization, engage with the mechanics and setting lightly, not really invest myself so much.

 

[pemerton]

We can build this out a bit - agency requires action taken to produce a particular effect. If I didn't know the ogre existed, a choice to take one path over the other isn't agency, because that action was not taken to produce the effect of missing the ogre. Choices made in ignorance do not provide agency.

I don't think this claim is true in general.

Suppose that, for some reason, going left rather than going right is a thing that matters to the player. For instance, perhaps their PC has a blessing that is triggered by going left. Perhaps the player has authored a Belief for their PC such as When I have a choice, I hue to the left path.

Now neither of the above is very likely in the context of D&D play, I will admit. (Though I don't think either is impossible in a D&D context.)

But suppose that the game being played is dungeon-crawling D&D, and the players are carefully mapping the dungeon, and from their map their is good reason to think that by going left rather than going right, they are more likely to fill in useful details of their map that might reveal the parameters of some suspected hidden architectural feature (eg a secret room that they have good reason to suspect is there, given the shape of other elements that they have mapped).

Now we have an example where choosing one path over another may be quite agential, in the context of game play, although the players do not know what their PCs should expect to find (and maybe the GM doesn't know either eg if they are using a die roll procedure to generate wandering monsters).

Once we recognize that agency depends upon what the player wants, it becomes clear that it is a subjective matter.

Why would I recognise that agency depends on what a person wants. Agency is about capacity to bring about change. Capacity to have an impact. Manifesting agency requires having a goal, insofar as the manifestation of agency occurs by dint of making a choice and acting on it. But the presence or absence of agency is not a subjective matter.

One of the most famous literary treatments of this is Brave New World. Part of the point of Brave New World is that it is a world in which nearly everyone gets what they want, but almost no one exercises agency.

Adaptive preferences, as discussed by Sen, Nussbaum and others, are another example that illustrates the contrast between getting what you want and exercising agency.

In addition, even if we ignore that contrast, the fact that what a person wants is subjective (as in, personal to them) doesn't entail that whether or not they are getting what they want is a subjective matter. That's an objective matter of fact.

there's no guarantee of being able to produce that for other people at the table with you - in rather the same way that your personal favorite pizza may not be good for everyone else at the table.

I don't know what you intend by "guarantee" here. If all you're saying is that some players may prefer a more agential play experience while others may prefer a less agential one, that seems like a fairly basic truth that tells us nothing about what constitutes high or low player agency in RPG play.

I expect this is part of why Snarf keeps noting that talking about agency broadly, in general is not useful. Speaking about specific techniques, forms, and modes that can produce or enhance agency becomes more constructive, because producing agency becomes an act of assembling compromise solutions.

I don't see why we would being our discussion of RPGing techniques from the premise that the players have inconsistent premises. We don't generally do that in analysis of other games.

And frankly, talking about player agency in general is quite useful for me, because it permits me to describe various approaches to RPGing and to say what is or is not appealing to me about them.

 

[pemerton]

There are of course different ways to define agency. The subjective one is very common and used for example in management theory. What matters to the individual and the workplace is the feeling of agency. It doesn't matter how closely tied it is to the reality of choice or how comparatively reasonable it is or isn't.

The phrase "feeling of agency" appears to presuppose that there is a phenomenon - agency - that people can feel they are enjoying more or less of.

Now grammar isn't everything, but I want to see some sort of argument that the thing people feel they have doesn't exist outside of their feeling.

Particularly in the context of management theory, which is about exercising control and engendering compliance by those over whom control is being exercised, and so is concerned with making people feel like they are part of decisions that in fact they are not part of.

To me that's also the useful perspective for an RPG. If a player is feeling bereft of agency - that is what matters. If a player has this issue, it is important to figure out why and how the player wants it to be improved. The answer is not to improve some abstract notion of agency.

You keep saying this. I replied to it upthread but you didn't respond, so I'll have another go:

Not all my concerns about degree of player agency are about conflict. To self-quote:

I have left games because I lacked agency in them. I have made deliberate decisions in the context of choosing games, and GMing games, having regard to the effect on player agency. In my Classic Traveller game, as I reported in some actual play reports, there was a sequence of sessions where the game drifted into lower-agency, high GM-exposition, play, and I took deliberate steps to change that.

 

[Cadence]

From my perspective artful railroading or like real illusionism is about 1000x worse (for me) than if I know the players' decisions are not going to have much of an impact on how things go. As a player if I believe the decisions I make will determine and shape the direction of play I am putting in a ton of effort and trying to motivate everyone else at the table to do the same. Establishing connections, building alliances, understanding not only how my character's mechanics work but also those of the other players' characters, coordinating and communicating. Investing myself into the struggles and trials of the other player characters and NPCs.

If all that effort I am putting into the game to play it well doesn't result in a capacity to exert my will upon the game's setting is game over.

On the other hand, if I know I'm just along for the ride I can chill and just enjoy the experience for what it is. I can provide some characterization, engage with the mechanics and setting lightly, not really invest myself so much.

I would never stochastic ogre when the players have efforted a decision - that seems awful.

If they pick a road where they didn't investigate what was down it, I might pop the ogre in either way. (I might have you run into the mad hermit in any of several hexes that are possivle instead of rolling where he's at, unless they had looked into it). If I want them to get a hint and they aren't trying to avoid getting hints I'll have the hint go ing incident happen wherever they are. Those, to me, don't seem awful - but I should let the players know that happens sometimes in session 0 because sometimes folks hate that and should find a different game.

 

[pemerton]

With respect, no, they cannot. Kindness, intelligence, and influence are not even well-defined concepts, much less things whose relative values can be assessed objectively.

Each of these are things that one can have a personal opinion about. And maybe multiple people share those opinions. But objective values do not care about our opinions, individually or as a collective.

With respect, this is not very plausible.

To pick some low-hanging fruit: the Treasurer of Australia and the CEO of BHP both exert more influence over the living standards of ordinary Australians than do I. I in turn, by casting my vote, exercise more influence over those living standards than do my non-adult children.

I supervise research students. Some are more intelligent than others, in the conventional sense that their capacity to read, interpret and synthesise material, the cleverness of what they write, etc can be compared and the most intelligent ones are just absolutely amazing. I've also had the good fortune to know some of the best mathematicians in the world (Fields medal runners-up and the like) and although they are not always the best informed about topics outside their own areas of expertise, their capacity for collating information and reasoning about it is often quite remarkable.

As far as kindness is concerned, I imagine that everyone posting on this board has met people whose generosity, compassion, empathy and the like are beyond the human norm, and likewise have met people who are nasty bullies. St Francis compared to, say, Scrooge, would be easily imaginable figures that mark two ends of that spectrum.

EDIT: pipped to the post by @pointofyou.

 

[pemerton]

Not in any objective sense. I can tell if I think someone is trying to be kind.

Or they may be using fake kindness to manipulate

There can only be fake kindness if there is also such a thing as genuine kindness.

 

[pemerton]

Some folks in your social circle are talking behind your back. Who is kinder? The person who tells you what they are saying so that you can deal with it, or the person who keeps it to themselves so that you're not hurt by the discovery? It entirely depends on the context, and the people involved, and immediately becomes ungeneralizable.

And? This doesn't show that there is no difference between kind and cruel people. It shows that what it takes to be kind is highly contextual. One thing that distinguishes people who are both kind and intelligent is that they handle those issues of context well!

 

[Cadence]

There can only be fake kindness if there is also such a thing as genuine kindness.

Just to clarify. Assuming we can conceive things that don't really exist, there could still be a fake one of those, right? (I'm hoping their exists real kindness, which feels like it would require some level of free will being real, which I would also like to be true).

 

[hawkeyefan]

But do you really think it is that simple? Low agency vs high agency? Agency is the capacity to affect. But to be more specific, I can mention my own tastes. I prefer a more serious style of gaming than a lot of people I know. I usually don't like silly humor or funny external references to be injected into the narrative. I also prefer the game to not be purely hack and slash. But apart from that I'm fairly open to different kinds of gaming experiences.

No, I don't think it's that simple... there are degrees, and there are going to be instances that are very subjective. But that doesn't mean there's not going to be a big ol slice of venn diagram where folks can generally agree, and that can enable discussion instead of going around in the same circles. The idea that there are not degrees to this is what I think is silly. It seems incredibly obvious that there are.

And for the record, I'm open to different kinds of gaming experiences, too.

For me, it is not low agency if a particular session is heavy on story that the GM has created. As long as I can do my thing, interact and I feel that things make sense. I am even ok being railroaded as long as it is done artfully. What is low agency for me, is if there is consensus to not be silly and not have the game all hack and slash - and that's how the game turns out anyway. Regardless of what I do during the game, I won't be able to change those facts. I would feel lack of agency. Another thing that's important to me is that I have agency in creating my character. I can play games with hand-out characters or with very limited freedom of choice in creating a character, but it's not what I prefer.

I don't know if I agree with what you're saying here, though. Not entirely anyway.

You say you'd be okay with a railroad, as long as it's artfully done. But doesn't that just mean that you're fine with the loss of agency, as long as there's some quality that's present to justify that loss? It doesn't mean you're not losing the ability to effect change in the game, it means you don't mind losing that ability.

As for your preferences toward the content of play, I think that's more social contract type stuff. If it's agreed upon beforehand to have a specific type of game, and then things go differently, I don't blame you for being dissatisfied. I don't know how much you may be able to get the other participants back on track, though, so it's hard to read it as a loss of agency in the same way as railroading.

Character creation is a good example of agency, though. Or at least, one would hope it is!

So I think it's unreasonable to simply equate agency with influence on story. There are other elements to an RPG game: tone, interactions, risk, reward, etc. Do we really gain anything from labelling systems and styles low agency and high agency? I think it's weird jab at people who like different things to label their style of gaming 'low agency'. Because at the end of the day, even in a high agency game where the system is built around shared authority and impact, it will only work if there is consensus.

I'm not throwing jabs at anyone. I like 5e. I like many other games as well, but I've almost exclusively been speaking about 5e in this thread. I have no problem recognizing the ways in which 5e limits player agency, and why. Generally speaking, anyway... there's some real fuzziness in spots. And I think that's one of the reasons that 5e is subject to interpretation so much that whatever experience it produces for the participants can vary significantly when it comes to player agency.

It's not just preferences for agency that are unique (and I do agree some people are satisfied with a more passive style of gaming) - it's also what people want to achieve. It's a multi-axis kind of thing - and I'm truly baffled why some posters seem to think that I should find agency irrelevant just because it's relative and individual. On the contrary. It's really important to figure out what a particular individual cares about - especially as a GM because otherwise you risk taking away their agency unwittingly. Or you might take pains to avoid doing things they don't even care about.

I think knowing what people want to achieve in the game is key to understanding what they'll consider a limit on their agency or not, sure.

 

[pemerton]

One thing that I would note is that we cannot just "measure" a concept such as "freedom." However, many international organizations often use a variety of symptomatic appraoches to evaluate how relatively "free" the inhabitants of various countries are, often using a variety of factors: e.g., income, class, laws, incarceration, etc. The same is also true for things like freedom of the press. These institutions will look at various features of the press in various countries: e.g., laws, censorship, health of the press corps, etc. These institutions are not free of biases or problems in how they approach this, but they nevertheless give us a way to gauge something as abstract as "freedom." It's not perfect, but it at least provides a means to talk about these things in a more concrete way rather than handwave everything away with the truism that we can't measure something as abstract as freedom.

But everyone knows that, compared to measuring the amount of agency enjoyed by half-a-dozen people playing a rule-governed game, it's a relatively trivial matter to measure things like the freedom of the press in a country, the average wellbeing in a country, etc!