D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Cadence]

If they chat about it they could relay their impression. But you can't say whether the campaign is high agency or low because there is no way to objectively measure it.

If almost all the players in it think it isn't, that feels close enough to me for it to get the label?

 

[Oofta]

They can indeed compare their experiences, and both of them would agree that Bob had more agency than Sue.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.

Two people, different sense of agency. What meaningful measurement can be made? It's even less meaningful across systems.

There's nothing else to say.

 

[Campbell]

Alright. So, at the same time, I was a player in both an L5R game and a Blades in the Dark. The L5R that was focused on an attempt to unravel a conspiracy to start a war between the Lion clan and the Scorpion clan. There was a lot of curated content about our characters, but it largely reinforced our character concepts. Our Blades game was very open ended, @Manbearcat afforded me the opportunity to establish a lot of details about Iruvian culture and my character's place within it. Our agenda was free for us to determine. We got to choose who we wanted to ally with, double cross and go after.

These were the two games I have enjoyed playing the most. Both fit my expectations to a tee (I got exactly what I wanted from each). I had far more ability to shape the outcome of play in the Blades game than in the LFR game. I had far more autonomy. The L5R game provided more serial exploration of the setting, discovery of world building details, more attention paid to individual NPCs.

Is my assessment that I had far more agency in the Blades game flawed (despite getting exactly what I wanted from each)?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Two people, different sense of agency. What meaningful measurement can be made? It's even less meaningful across systems.

There's nothing else to say.

That Bob had more than Sue? Seems to be meaningful enough.

 

[Oofta]

That Bob had more than Sue? Seems to be meaningful enough.

It says nothing about the game .

 

[pemerton]

Different games have different methods of implementing agency.

This is trivially true, because it's just another way of saying that different games use different ways of establishing the shared fiction.

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.

My point, in the post that I quoted, was that (contra @Campbell's conjecture) you do deny that there is such a phenomenon as impact of the decisions players make.

In what I have just quoted you appear to reiterate that denial.

 

[Oofta]

This is trivially true, because it's just another way of saying that different games use different ways of establishing the shared fiction.

My point, in the post that I quoted, was that (contra @Campbell's conjecture) you do deny that there is such a phenomenon as impact of the decisions players make.

In what I have just quoted you appear to reiterate that denial.

What are you talking about? I really don't know how you make my saying "up" means I'm really saying "down".

Agency is expressed by players making decisions using the rules of the game they are playing. Different games have different ways of granting agency to the players.

 

[pemerton]

What are you talking about? I really don't know how you make my saying "up" means I'm really saying "down".

Agency is expressed by players making decisions using the rules of the game they are playing. Different games have different ways of granting agency to the players.

As I said, this is a trivial truth.

The question that is raised in this thread, and that I've been discussing for around 170 pages, is which of those ways of granting agency to players grant them more or less agency.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As I said, this is a trivial truth.

The question that is raised in this thread, and that I've been discussing for around 170 pages, is which of those ways of granting agency to players grant them more or less agency.

Why? If you're happy with the amount of agency you're getting in any given game, what does it matter how much you actually get?

 

[Cadence]

Is the most agency a person (not player in this example) can have about a character writing a novel about that character (in the first person?)? What type of at least two person game comes closest to that?