D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

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).

Perhaps.

I mean, we can talk about fake UFO photos even though there are no real UFO photos. The idea of a UFO can be conjured up purely in imagination.

Whether this extends to all phenomena is a disputed matter.

I don't think there's much evidence that the notion of kindness has been coined in circumstances where people only ever experience manufactured, misleading instances.

And if someone wants to argue that there is no real agency in game play, but only the subjective and misleading experience of imagined agency, I think that's also going to be a fairly hard row to hoe.

 

[Xamnam]

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!

That was exactly my point.

 

[pemerton]

Does anyone actually dispute that there are profound differences in the impact of the decisions players make in different models of play (including different ways of playing trad games [5e included])?

It seems to me that they do. At least the following posters appear to dispute this: @Oofta, @Maxperson and @Umbran. The only way I can make sense of their posts is as denying that there is such a phenomenon of impact of the decisions players make which is amenbable to being known, reasoned about etc.

I am less sure about @Micah Sweet and @FrogReaver. I think the former does not dispute it. The latter's posts, to me, seem to go back and forth on the issue but it's complicated because some of those posts seem to be about the semantics of the word "agency" rather than the phenomenon you are referring to.

 

[pemerton]

That was exactly my point.

I took you to be disagreeing with @pointofyou that it is possible to judge whether one person is kinder than another. (Whether in general, or in some particular context.)

 

[pemerton]

All acts of kindness must be assessed with respect to the mental states of the actor (which you may not have) and the recipient (again, you may not have that), the actual results of the act (which you may not know) and your own moral/ethical codes. There is no way that this assessment, generally made in ignorance, and passed through several subjective lenses, can be an objective thing.

I don't know what you mean by mental states in this post, given that you are trying to argue that a particular property closely related to mental states - namely, kindness - is not epistemically accessible or even cognisable in the abstract.

 

[pemerton]

I've offered plenty of examples from my actual games. I've kept those mostly to D&D 5e in this thread because otherwise the "apples to oranges" dismissals start happening.

I would love it if the discussion moved on to how people go about gaming in a way that provides agency to players. Most folks seem reluctant to actually provide anything from their actual play experiences as examples, though, and instead we get examples that are hypothetical, which are often vague or hyperbolic.

I've posted actual examples, including a discussion of how - in GMing an ongoing game of Classic Traveller - I made certain sorts of decisions as a GM to try and step up the degree of player agency in play.

I don't think anyone has engaged with that example.

I think a hurdle is that in a lot of discussions involving comparing games, the various terms are often jargon arising from someone trying to make their favored game sound better and the other game worse

This prompted two thoughts.

(1) Why is a RPG worse if it involves less agency? By almost any measure, playing a module like the classic DL railroad involves less player agency than carefully working through Tomb of Horrors in class D&D poke-every-square with a 10' pole play, using flying thieves on ropes and summoning monsters to enter the rooms first, etc. The former is like being told a story in a particular medium and getting to chime in from time to time with colourful contributions; the latter is like solving a particularly tedious crossword puzzle really slowly.

Obviously there's going to be no universal ranking here: but speaking just for myself, I've played CoC railroads that were far more fun than properly working through ToH.

(2) Not far upthread the topic of realism has come up. I've been in many discussions about realism in RPGing where interlocutors have never read or played games like Harn, RM, RQ, C&S or the like, which are the "realism"-oriented reactions to D&D as a fantasy RPG. I find that those discussions can be quite frustrating, as people who are not familiar with what is possible within the RPG form make assertions about degrees of possible realism that treat D&D as a norm in that respect.

I think that discussions about the topic of agency can have similar problems. If someone has little or no experience of RPGs that are deliberately designed, using techniques that are innovative compared to the 1980s/90s mainstream, to increase the degree of player agency over the shared fiction, then their conception of what is possible in RPGing may often reflect that unfamiliarity.

 

[pointofyou]

I can make my own personal assessment. That is not objective.

Like, my wife is a veterinarian. Sometimes, she has to help animals pass on. She uses the most humane drugs available, and works to minimize the distress of both her patients and her clients. I would, personally, say that in ending animal suffering, she's engaged in an act of kindness. In sum total, my wife is likely the kindest person I know. And most veterinarians are in the same category.

But, there are folks who feel that ending any life before it passes of its own accord is an act of cruelty - that life is so precious that no matter the pain or distress involved, it is unacceptable to end it. I think they are wrong, but there is no source separate from human feelings or belief systems I can turn to to demonstrate that as a fact.

So, no, I cannot claim there is any objective assessment of kindness. We, as a culture, cannot agree on what constitutes a kind act. And even if we did, some other culture might disagree. For it to be objective, it must be true beyond culture or personal feelings on the matter.



Except, by making that change to one specific given task, you have changed the question so that it isn't about intelligence - many tasks that we might attribute to intelligence, when taken alone, can be done more quickly by rote memorization of patterns, rather than doing analysis. Speed solving a Rubik's Cube is one example. It is about having perfected some specific way to do that specific task. So, it no longer clearly indicates what we were talking about, and is therefore not relevant.



Objectively? Again, no. If you ask several professors of music history who was the single most influential musician of all time, you will not get unanimous agreement, which should be the case if this were an objective fact. Indeed, an alien from Alpha Centauri would also have to agree, if it were objective.



For a thing to be objective, it must be free of influence of any personal feelings opinions, or biases. As noted, "kindness" is a human cultural and emotional construct. It is founded in human feelings, and therefore cannot be objectively defined.

All acts of kindness must be assessed with respect to the mental states of the actor (which you may not have) and the recipient (again, you may not have that), the actual results of the act (which you may not know) and your own moral/ethical codes. There is no way that this assessment, generally made in ignorance, and passed through several subjective lenses, can be an objective thing.

With respect I think most people would look at most cases in the areas you're talking about and be able to point at which person was kinder or more intelligent or which event left more of a mark on history. The quibbly edge cases you and others are clinging to to pretend otherwise seem to me like looking at various shades of turquoise and teal and arguing over where green ends and blue begins. The fact that different people can look at the same shades and one call them "blue" and one call them "green" does not mean that most people can't look at most shades of blue and green and tell which is which.

 

[Xamnam]

I took you to be disagreeing with @pointofyou that it is possible to judge whether one person is kinder than another. (Whether in general, or in some particular context.)

I was disagreeing with the former case of the parenthetical, by arguing it's only possible in the latter. An act is only kind by measure of the circumstances that surround it, so I was saying that in support of the idea that kindness is inherently subjective, not objective, especially once you're including in the assessment whose point of view you are judging the degree of kindness by, yours, the actor, the recipient, or even a third party.

I was not trying to say there's no way to come to a personal judgement on whether an act is kind, or whether you personally find someone, on the balance, to be more kind than another. Umbran said that you can do that in the post that pointofyou responded to. Just that an act or person, devoid of context, cannot be judged on that metric, similarly to the quality of agency within any given game.

 

[Maxperson]

With respect I think most people would look at most cases in the areas you're talking about and be able to point at which person was kinder or more intelligent or which event left more of a mark on history. The quibbly edge cases you and others are clinging to to pretend otherwise seem to me like looking at various shades of turquoise and teal and arguing over where green ends and blue begins. The fact that different people can look at the same shades and one call them "blue" and one call them "green" does not mean that most people can't look at most shades of blue and green and tell which is which.

So then you can tell me objectively how much kindness helping a little old lady across the street is vs. the amount of kindness involved with bringing treats for your friend's dog?

 

[pemerton]

I was disagreeing with the former case of the parenthetical, by arguing it's only possible in the latter. An act is only kind by measure of the circumstances that surround it, so I was saying that in support of the idea that kindness is inherently subjective, not objective, especially once you're including in the assessment whose point of view you are judging the degree of kindness by, yours, the actor, the recipient, or even a third party.

I was not trying to say there's no way to come to a personal judgement on whether an act is kind, or whether you personally find someone, on the balance, to be more kind than another. Umbran said that you can do that in the post that pointofyou responded to. Just that an act or person, devoid of context, cannot be judged on that metric, similarly to the quality of agency within any given game.

To me this seems like arguing that because tallness is contextual (a tall building, a tall tree, a tall child, etc) therefore there is no fact of the matter about whether one thing is taller than another.

There are even simpler cases: whether X is between Y and Z, as a matter of spatial relations, is contextual in the sense that you typically can't work it out just by inspecting X but also need to inspect Y and Z. It doesn't follow that there is no fact of the matter about whether or not one thing is in between two other things.

If you ask several professors of music history who was the single most influential musician of all time, you will not get unanimous agreement, which should be the case if this were an objective fact. Indeed, an alien from Alpha Centauri would also have to agree, if it were objective.

This seems to confuse the issue of epistemic access with the issue of whether or not something is the case.

It also seems to confuse the issue of whether or not something is vague and whether or not something is muti-dimensional with the issue of whether or not something is subjective.

The notion of influence is vague and is multi-dimensional. It's not particularly subjective, however. Suppose we confine ourselves to the classical European tradition, we can ask whether Mozart or Beethoven was more influential, and adduce various sorts of reasons that speak to the various ways in which influence manifests itself. That can be a reasoned discussion even if there is no agreement at the end of it.

If someone wants to broaden out the discussion - and, for instance, make the point that the first human to clap two rocks or sticks together to produce percussive rhythm, or the first human to string some gut across a bit of wood so as to use it to produce a sound, was pretty influential! - well, that's fine too. At a certain point the dimensions of comparison may become incommensurable at least for practical purposes. Or perhaps it might become useful to stipulate some parameters of investigation and analysis.

None of this tends to show that judgements of influence are subjective in any interesting fashion.