D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Xamnam]

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.

But for height there are units of measurement, if agreed upon, that can measure that quality in a way that is not subject to subjectivity. The measurement, done consistently, will come out the same no matter who judges it. There is no equivalent for kindness, and there never can be.

At least, unless it turns The Good Place was an accurate depiction of reality.

 

[Campbell]

But for height there are units of measurement, if agreed upon, that can measure that quality in a way that is not subject to subjectivity. The measurement, done consistently, will come out the same no matter who judges it. There is no equivalent for kindness, and there never can be.

At least, unless it turns The Good Place was an accurate depiction of reality.

Let's not try to use ambiguity as an excuse not to acknowledge that there are degrees of these things. Otherwise, we cannot really talk about anything ever. I think one would be hard pressed to assert that donating your kidney to a relative stranger is not fundamentally kinder than opening a door for someone or that say the fiction of playing an immortal demigod prince involves as much agency (all things being equal) to a thief rotting in a dungeon who is scheduled to be executed in 2 days' time.

Honestly these digressions do not feel all that genuine to me. I think if they were broached outside of the context of this thread very few people would argue the points they are currently making about intelligence and kindness.

 

[Xamnam]

Let's not try to use ambiguity as an excuse not to acknowledge that there are degrees of these things. Otherwise, we cannot really talk about anything ever. I think one would be hard pressed to assert that donating your kidney to a relative stranger is not fundamentally kinder than opening a door for someone or that say the fiction of playing an immortal demigod prince involves as much agency (all things being equal) to a thief rotting in a dungeon who is scheduled to be executed in 2 days time.

Let me be clear. I don't disagree with anything here. You can judge kindness. You can say you find one act kinder than another, and in some, many, cases, be confident that most people would agree.

My only point is that if the starting question is "How kind is X", the only answer you can start with without any other context is, "It depends," and from there there's a whole lot of subjectivity involved. I used the word "You" very intentionally up there.

 

[Cadence]

But for height there are units of measurement, if agreed upon, that can measure that quality in a way that is not subject to subjectivity. The measurement, done consistently, will come out the same no matter who judges it. There is no equivalent for kindness, and there never can be.

At least, unless it turns The Good Place was an accurate depiction of reality.

"Frontiers of Test Validity Theory: Measurement, Causation, and Meaning" by D. Borsboom and K.A. Markus seems to me a solid book on foundational issues in measuring mental constructs.

I'm not sure how approachable it is for someone without a course at least related to something like either educational or psychological measurement, or item response theory, or structural equation modeling (especially as it moves along).

 

[pemerton]

But for height there are units of measurement, if agreed upon, that can measure that quality in a way that is not subject to subjectivity. The measurement, done consistently, will come out the same no matter who judges it. There is no equivalent for kindness, and there never can be.

It's true that history, sociology etc cannot be mathematised. (Which is what units of measurement means.)

That doesn't mean they are subjective.

There's no mathematical proposition that expresses the difference of influence that I and the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia enjoy over the prevailing interest rate in the country. That doesn't mean there is nothing to be said about which of us enjoys greater influence in that respect!

 

[Xamnam]

It's true that history, sociology etc cannot be mathematised. (Which is what units of measurement means.)

That doesn't mean they are subjective.

There's no mathematical proposition that expresses the difference of influence that I and the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia enjoy over the prevailing interest rate in the country. That doesn't mean there is nothing to be said about which of us enjoys greater influence in that respect!

I agree. I am in no way trying to imply that discussion of these topics are impossible as result.

 

[Oofta]

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.

Different games have different methods of implementing agency. The fact that I don't think there's any valid way of measuring different types of agency doesn't change that a feeling of agency is one feature of games that varies. It can vary from one person to the next even if they are sitting at the same table based on what they value and what they consider meaningful decisions and results.

 

[Oofta]

I am literally only talking about 5e D&D games. I am avoiding talking about other games precisely to avoid the “apples and oranges” dismissal.

When playing 5e and only 5e, I can tell when I have more agency in one game than in another and why.

If that’s not essential to this whole discussion, then I don’t know what is.

Which is why I gave the example of 2 people at the same table.

Take Sue and Bob. Both playing D&D 5E at the same table. Sue only care about what their character can do. Can they cast those cool spells or take advantage of something like sentinel on a regular basis. To Sue, being able to optimize their character and use their abilities is agency. The only significant things they do are things involve her build choices. They feel like they have agency if they contribute in combat or if they can successfully sneak past a guard.

Bob on the other hand is concerned about the story and direction of the campaign. Their actual character abilities don't really matter much and certainly don't add to their sense of agency. What matters is if they can convince the king to send additional troops or if they build an alliance with the Hoopah people.

Put Sue and Bob in a game that's very RP heavy, a lot of politics. Combat is minimal and often very "loose" combat with a lot of improvised actions that at the very least bend the rules as long as it looks cool. Sue is going to feel like they aren't contributing much, none of their decisions in combat, nothing about her build matters as much as it should. The RP stuff out of combat just isn't her thing and she doesn't have much to contribute. Bog on the other hand feels like they have a ton of agency and gets super excited when they win alliances and change the course of the kingdom and the campaign.

In exactly the same game, Sue and Bob have different perspectives on what agency means to them. Sue feels like she has no agency because her carefully constructed build's abilities are largely ignored. Bob is loving it. Throw them into a linear campaign where Sue dominates combat and she gets to use her "toys" and the perspective swaps. They both want the choices they make to matter, they just put importance on different aspects of the game.

You can't measure agency across the board because there is no unit of measure since it will always be subjective and vary from one individual to the next.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Which is why I gave the example of 2 people at the same table.

Take Sue and Bob. Both playing D&D 5E at the same table. Sue only care about what their character can do. Can they cast those cool spells or take advantage of something like sentinel on a regular basis. To Sue, being able to optimize their character and use their abilities is agency. The only significant things they do are things involve her build choices. They feel like they have agency if they contribute in combat or if they can successfully sneak past a guard.

Bob on the other hand is concerned about the story and direction of the campaign. Their actual character abilities don't really matter much and certainly don't add to their sense of agency. What matters is if they can convince the king to send additional troops or if they build an alliance with the Hoopah people.

Put Sue and Bob in a game that's very RP heavy, a lot of politics. Combat is minimal and often very "loose" combat with a lot of improvised actions that at the very least bend the rules as long as it looks cool. Sue is going to feel like they aren't contributing much, none of their decisions in combat, nothing about her build matters as much as it should. The RP stuff out of combat just isn't her thing and she doesn't have much to contribute. Bog on the other hand feels like they have a ton of agency and gets super excited when they win alliances and change the course of the kingdom and the campaign.

In exactly the same game, Sue and Bob have different perspectives on what agency means to them. Sue feels like she has no agency because her carefully constructed build's abilities are largely ignored. Bob is loving it. Throw them into a linear campaign where Sue dominates combat and she gets to use her "toys" and the perspective swaps. They both want the choices they make to matter, they just put importance on different aspects of the game.

You can't measure agency across the board because there is no unit of measure since it will always be subjective and vary from one individual to the next.

Do you think Bob would say to Sue that she has as much agency as he does?

I mean, you’re pointing out that they have different levels of agency. I don’t know how this is in any way a disagreement.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Good analogy. The exact same fiction can be completely ruined if the show tacks on the whole, "It was just a dream." Because for some people, it retroactively invalidates the feeling that they had before ... it makes them feel cheated.

I might start a longer thread about this next week based on the concept of the magician. For whatever reason, there are people that feel a particular trick is ruined when they find out how it works, which is why many magicians (of the non-Penn & Teller variety) take such pains to keep the workings of a trick secret.

So...you do realize that this analogy also fits the same pattern, right?

Like let's talk Tolkien here. I think we can agree he knew a thing or two about story writing. And he very specifically wrote about the "just a dream" trope...and why it is inappropriate in most (not all, but most) cases. And it's pretty damning here, taken from his seminal "On Fairy-Stories":

Next, after travellers' tales, I would also exclude, or rule out of order, any story that uses the machinery of Dream, the dreaming of actual human sleep, to explain the apparent occurrence of its marvels. At the least, even if the reported dream was in other respects in itself a fairy-story, I would condemn the whole as gravely defective: like a good picture in a disfiguring frame. It is true that Dream is not unconnected with Faërie. In dreams strange powers of the mind may be unlocked. In some of them a man may for a space wield the power of Faërie, that power which, even as it conceives the story, causes it to take living form and colour before the eyes. A real dream may indeed sometimes be a fairy-story of almost elvish ease and skill— while it is being dreamed. But if a waking writer tells you that his tale is only a thing imagined in his sleep, he cheats deliberately the primal desire at the heart of Faerie: the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder. It is often reported of fairies (truly or lyingly, I do not know) that they are workers of illusion, that they are cheaters of men by “fantasy”; but that is quite another matter. That is their affair. Such trickeries happen, at any rate, inside tales in which the fairies are not themselves illusions; behind the fantasy real wills and powers exist, independent of the minds and purposes of men.

This perfectly comports with what I have been describing. (Unless, of course, you would like to demand of Mr. Tolkien a unit of faerie-taleness. Kilo-pixies? Milli-elvums? What would sound most derisive, do you think?) The notion that it is not totally fictive. In this case, that fictive-or-not question is wholly contained within the fictional world itself.

And yes. I do feel the magic of a trick is ruined when I know precisely how it works, especially if it only works by some weird prop design or the like. Skillful sleight of hand is less susceptible (not immune, just less prone) to this issue, mostly because being walked through how one specific instance of it worked does not mean I now know how all of it did. But there is a key difference here: again, we even call these things magic tricks. It's literally in the name.

We don't do that with illusionism. It presents itself earnestly as being the real deal. Yes, magicians practice their stagecraft and presentation, but it is an open secret that no magic is actually involved. The illusionism GM, on the other hand, not only pretends that there really, truly IS agency involved, she actively prevents players from ever finding out it isn't involved. Sometimes to the point of lying to their faces (see: Matt Colville pre-rolling dice to get the value he needs so he can point to it later and act like the result was out of his hands.) Usually, however, it just involves intentionally misleading but not technically outrightly false statements so as to deceive. If asked point blank, she is put in a terribly difficult position, as she must choose between honesty (and thus potentially revealing that the joy a player felt previously was in fact hollow, poisoning all future such joy and banking a large amount of player distrust!) or further deception (and thus overtly telling an outright lie, rather than simply being deceptive and misleading.) Or she could refuse to answer, I suppose, but I don't think most players asking such a question would take kindly to a total refusal to answer.

The point there was that love = agency. Regardless of whether or not the other person loved you. Regardless of whether or not you found out later and were hurt by it. Did you love that person? If yes, you had agency. Finding out later that they didn't love you back means that the ice cream turned out to be chocolate chip and not chocolate(you prefer love on both sides).

The point is that I am talking about something that is clearly a relationship between two people, in one case (alleged/potential) lovers, in the other, player character and game master.

That relationship can be sincere, or not. It can also feature participants feeling or believing certain things, or not, including beliefs about the other person. An individual's feelings and beliefs are naturally subjective. But those beliefs may, or may not, correspond to the reality of the relationship. Correspondence is yet another objective thing which cannot be "measured" and yet we compare such things all the time.

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])? That your capacity to exert your will differs based on availability of reliable information, connections within the setting, etc.? Does anyone dispute that in a game in which the GM is obliged to frame scenes and scenarios around player character interests/premise/connections to the setting that players have more say over what is at stake in the game?

Not subjective feelings, but actual differences in efficacy. If we disagree here conceptually we can hash this stuff out. If we're in the technique doesn't matter, it's all in the feels we should probably just stop talking because there's nothing useful to talk about.

This. For the love of God, this.

That's a good observation, and one that can lead to friction within many group (especially those that play D&D).

Many tables have some variation of the "no PvP" rule as part of the social compact at their table. However, there are players who feel that this type of social compact somehow invalidates what they want to do. This can be a source of friction.

It gets resolved, as most of the matters are, through social negotiation. Not through people arguing about what form of player agency is superior.

Has anyone done that?

Has even one person said that?

Quote the posts. Show me where someone said that player-agency is simply superior. I'll wait.

When I say a game, a playstyle, or even a particular set of fiction has less snarfgobble than its counterpart it's not intended to be a slight because not everyone wants as much or even the types of snarfgobble I want. There's also cost - the techniques, system parameters and particular sorts of fiction needed to get more snarfgobble also mean there is less pembardle. A choice has to be made between snarfgobble and pembardle. So, we make choices based on what we value.

I think we should have the maturity to realize that different setups provide different tradeoffs. We can disagree on the tradeoffs, but if the idea that another playstyle or game brings something to the table that your preferred one doesn't like bothers you conceptually and yet have no issue with claiming the opposite, we're going to have a problem - that problem being you just do not respect other forms of play.

Completely agreed. Especially the bolded bit. The amount of flagrant disrespect in this thread is staggering.

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.

I have literally said this already, giving specific, concrete examples in a recent post, and more general references in prior posts. I mentioned influence on tone and thematic content (e.g. sexuality) very specifically, and included tools used for making it easier and more effective for players to express that agency. Because, as it turns out, sometimes there are better tools than a full-on face to face conversation in a public place, when the topic in question is sensitive and emotionally charged.

Do we really gain anything from labelling systems and styles low agency and high agency?

Yes, I sincerely believe we do. Not only does it help folks like me clearly avoid games I don't want to play and which would be a very bad fit for me and seek out games that may be a much better fit, it also helps people like @Raiztt in the same way, just flipped turnwise. They do not want "player agency." To include it would be damaging to their fun. Hence, being able to say, "I prefer a lower agency game" is, in fact, quite a useful thing to be able to say.

I think it's weird jab at people who like different things to label their style of gaming 'low agency'.

Not at all. Or at least my intent has nothing to do with that. It has to do with recognizing a meaningful difference in the structure and methods of play, which can directly affect the enjoyment of participants in both directions, some having more fun with more agency, others more fun with less.

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.

Okay? This seems a non-sequitur. I don't see how the presence or absence of consensus is relevant to the question of whether it can be useful to speak of game systems as offering/enabling/supporting (whatever term you prefer) more instances or varieties of agency than other systems. As stated, folks in this thread who do not like "player agency" (they themselves used this term) are more happy with systems that do not offer it. Hence, in terms at least of forms or varieties of agency, these players prefer fewer, not more.