D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Cadence]

So an option to establish a shared fiction directly, not through the action of their character, is not an additional option people have in the games you prefer comparedto D&D? Guess I just don't understand new math!

Until there is a scientific peer reviewed study on RPGs and agency, I'm going to be skeptical that more options guarantee more agency. Or a better game for most people. But good job on the appeal to authority flex.

I don't think Pemerton has ever said some property might make something "a better game" without some qualifier like "for him" or by some specific criteria.

Attempting to show that every adjective in existence with a positive connotation applies to his favorite games and not to yours could feel like it's happening. But to be fair, I think that something like that only annoys because every one knee jerk wants to think their game has all the positive seeming adjectives.

That general background snark level of many people on here about everything probably doesn't help tamp down that feeling.

 

[Oofta]

I don't think Pemerton has ever said some property might make something "a better game" without some qualifier like "for him" or by some specific criteria.

Attempting to show that every adjective in existence with a positive connotation applies to his favorite games and not to yours could feel like it's happening. But to be fair, I think that something like that only annoys because every one knee jerk wants to think their game has all the positive seeming adjectives.

That general background snark level of many people on here about everything probably doesn't help tamp down that feeling.

This thread stopped being about what agency is, what it means, how it can be implemented and why it matters a while back. I'm done.

 

[Campbell]

I'm not going directly address the conversation here.

At some level I think we all need to move on from how things make us feel and like take a critical look at the actual phenomena at work in a game session if we want to have functional conversations about how play works, how different instances of the same game work across different groups and how to make changes within our own GMing processes to improve our games.

I think it's fine for conversations to start with how something makes us feel, but that cannot be the end of it if we really want to look at the relative impact of game, setting and scenario design. Game design here includes individual elements like the Noble feature.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Is Chess more complex than Go because it has different types of pieces and more rules for how those pieces move? If we look at number of options, maybe Monopoly is more complex than either one! How does scrabble, where you're limited to the words in the dictionary stack up?

Those games have different complexities, just like RPG games have different types of agency. Lacking a type of agency doesn't mean less overall agency. Even if we agree which games have more agency, that doesn't make those game better for a lot of people.

Nobody is disagreeing with anyone who says that people play games for different reasons, including agency and a long list of other ones that probably cannot be fully enumerated. Yes, games have different levels of complexity, and clearly more complex games (and there are formal ways to express complexity, though I don't think they're super useful in terms of what we are discussing here) provide the potential for the exercise of agency in more ways or more often, as a general statement. As I said before, we can measure agency and complexity, not perfectly perhaps, but in ways which offer useful comparisons. We can also observe other traits of games and infer things, like the fact that it requires a massive amount of study to reach high competency in Go or Chess indicates high complexity, while our understanding of the game tells us in which places player's express agency (IE what moves to make).

Given a known official dictionary of allowed words, we can also say equally precise things about Scrabble! It also requires a good bit of skill and its highest level players also practice quite a bit from what I understand. However, Scrabble moves don't build on each other in quite the same way that Go or Chess moves do, and there's an obvious element of luck involved as well. Again, there's a very similar sort of agency involved (which of the available legal moves to make).

I don't think it is any great earth-shaking and controversial statement to say that between these three games the agency of the players is fairly similar. They certainly fall within a category or 'zone' of agency in 'strategy board games'. Clearly checkers, backgammon, and lets say Yahtzee, fall into a different zone. There are less possible available board positions and moves which can be made, and they have less overall impact as there are fewer really distinct games of checkers that can exist vs games of chess. This is a lesser zone of agency, and also of complexity. I think in pure 'closed system' board games the two are pretty heavily correlated, though not identical.

RPGs introduce additional considerations, but there's clearly still a sense in which different 'mechanisms of agency' are provided by different games. And so we can certainly again classify them in various ways into groups with different levels of agency. These are going to be arguable, no doubt, but I think it is very likely that some rough consensus exists and that reasons for the choices can be articulated. These are not value judgements about which games are 'good' or 'bad', etc. They aren't even necessarily expressions of preference.

 

[Oofta]

Nobody is disagreeing with anyone who says that people play games for different reasons, including agency and a long list of other ones that probably cannot be fully enumerated. Yes, games have different levels of complexity, and clearly more complex games (and there are formal ways to express complexity, though I don't think they're super useful in terms of what we are discussing here) provide the potential for the exercise of agency in more ways or more often, as a general statement. As I said before, we can measure agency and complexity, not perfectly perhaps, but in ways which offer useful comparisons. We can also observe other traits of games and infer things, like the fact that it requires a massive amount of study to reach high competency in Go or Chess indicates high complexity, while our understanding of the game tells us in which places player's express agency (IE what moves to make).

Given a known official dictionary of allowed words, we can also say equally precise things about Scrabble! It also requires a good bit of skill and its highest level players also practice quite a bit from what I understand. However, Scrabble moves don't build on each other in quite the same way that Go or Chess moves do, and there's an obvious element of luck involved as well. Again, there's a very similar sort of agency involved (which of the available legal moves to make).

I don't think it is any great earth-shaking and controversial statement to say that between these three games the agency of the players is fairly similar. They certainly fall within a category or 'zone' of agency in 'strategy board games'. Clearly checkers, backgammon, and lets say Yahtzee, fall into a different zone. There are less possible available board positions and moves which can be made, and they have less overall impact as there are fewer really distinct games of checkers that can exist vs games of chess. This is a lesser zone of agency, and also of complexity. I think in pure 'closed system' board games the two are pretty heavily correlated, though not identical.

RPGs introduce additional considerations, but there's clearly still a sense in which different 'mechanisms of agency' are provided by different games. And so we can certainly again classify them in various ways into groups with different levels of agency. These are going to be arguable, no doubt, but I think it is very likely that some rough consensus exists and that reasons for the choices can be articulated. These are not value judgements about which games are 'good' or 'bad', etc. They aren't even necessarily expressions of preference.

I never said anything about the board games and agency, I said complexity. You can't just look at a game and declare it's level of complexity by looking at the rules. Go is one of the most complex and difficult to master games ever made yet has the simplest rules.

But other than that clarification .... I'm still done with this thread.

 

[FrogReaver]

Frogreaver-

The conversation literally doesn't matter. Look, this is nothing more than hobbyists trying to elevate their playing preferences by borrowing terms from other fields.

I think that sentiment goes both ways.

There are people who have taken a serious look at this. For example, there have been empirical studies looking at how players negotiate these power structures in RPGs; these usually divide into two concepts, agency and authority.

For agency, you don't see the term "player agency," but instead would often see "character agency" (what a character is capable of) and "participant agency" (if a character's action have the desired effect of the player).

What is happening is that people are deliberately co-mingling the types of agency and the types of authority that are available. Agency is viewed as how the game participants should negotiate inputs into the game, while authority is how participants resolve the disputes. So arguing that people have agency because there is a different method of distributing authority ... well, that's not how it's being done. But that would require people to actually be interested in what academics are looking at, as opposed to putting a pseudo-academic sheen on their personal preferences.

So if people really wanted to be bothered to have a real conversation about this, as opposed to another version of ¿Quien Es Mas Macho?, they might actually look at what .... um ... actual sociologists have written about this, as opposed to continue the usual hobbyist debates.

But they aren't.

I'd be interesting in reading about that as long as it's accessible. Say a web article that dumbs it down to some degree. At least for a starting point.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm not going directly address the conversation here.

At some level I think we all need to move on from how things make us feel and like take a critical look at the actual phenomena at work in a game session if we want to have functional conversations about how play works, how different instances of the same game work across different groups and how to make changes within our own GMing processes to improve our games.

That probably would be much more productive!

I think it's fine for conversations to start with how something makes us feel, but that cannot be the end of it if we really want to look at the relative impact of game, setting and scenario design. Game design here includes individual elements like the Noble feature.

IMO. The impact of the game, setting and scenario design are all subjective. Those things matter because of how they make us feel. We can try to provide objective sounding reasons for our subjective preferences but at the end of the day no matter what subjective valuations I give about a given game/setting/scenario design there's going to be others that disagree with those because at the core those impacts are subjective and individualized - definitely not objective.

I'm not saying we can't discuss and learn. I think understanding players different than ourselves is important to better gaming!

As an example. If I were to ask @pemerton why he doesn't like 5e D&D he might say because it lacks agency. Then depending on why I asked I'm going to respond one of 2 ways: (1) I disagree, where my motivations might have been to find dissent to my views and push back against them or (2) What makes you feel like you don't have as much agency in 5e D&D?

But what if I didn't initiate, but instead someone else initiates the whole discussion by saying - Game X has more agency than D&D 5e. What's their motivation. Are they just looking for dissent to push back against? Or are they looking others feelings on the matter?

Maybe these discussions are stuck because of the first type of motivation. Because what usually happens is after the first person posts with that motivation and then a reply is made toward that motivation - that reply reads to others that sympathize with the initiator's position as if the person replying is initiating with that same kind of motivation. It's a vicious cycle.

Some take aways if focused on motivation (2). If someone were to introduce a 5e D&D player to a story now game then one should find one that primarily focuses on character motivations/beliefs, and run it in a way where the player is only asked to provide the bear minimum of setting details up front, where there is no or very limited metacurrencies and one where there is no semblance of them authoring setting content during game (especially via character memories).

Likewise, if I wanted to play a game of 5e D&D with someone that prefers story now games, then i'm going to have the players provide some motivations/beliefs for their characters. I'm going to work on intertwining those things together in prep so they logically come up in play more often and when in doubt about framing scenes and consequences I'm going to lean more toward ones related to the motivations/beliefs.

I think those are the basics?

 

[FrogReaver]

No, I would not dispute that the impact different players have in different models of play (which in my experience are more related to the personality and style of the GM than the system, but all things being equal - the same GM would have different expressions of style in different systems so yes, models do of course have an impact). But I would dispute that this impact is equivalent to agency. Agency (to me) is related to whether the player feels empowered, in control, involved, engaged, etc. Not a quantitative expression of impact.

It's also a bit interesting to think about potential scenarios where assuming there was such a thing as actual agency -

Where the 'actual agency' and the 'felt agency' are different. Seems the clearest reason that might be the case is if one only cares about a specific subset of agency. But if that's true then what does actual agency really tell us about games in the first place? Or said another way, why do we even care about it. If it can't even be used as a proxy to explain why some games are preferred by some over others - then what good is it as a concept.

Seems to me the more meaningful concept is does the game allow for the 'subset of agency a given player cares about'. That explains why d&d players like d&d and don't typically view it outside railroads as giving them low agency. It also explains why players that like Story Now games feel like they provide more agency than D&D.

Essentially there's a few things that should be clearly delineated.
1 - Is 'actual agency' binary?
2 - Does 'actual agency' even matter?
3 - What metric should we use to measure agency?
4 - Can we actually measure for that given metric?
5 - Is Agency Objective?

These are all different questions and it seems that in many responses they tend to get conflated.

 

[FrogReaver]

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])?

If you are asking can some player decisions be more impactful than others? I don't dispute that.

I would dispute that player decisions in certain RPG's are inherently more impactful than those in others - but that probably boils down more to how you define 'impactful'.

That your capacity to exert your will differs based on availability of reliable information, connections within the setting, etc.?

I'd probably quibble with you over 'capacity here', but if you simply mean 'does availability of reliable info, connections within the setting, etc have an effect on your ability to exert your will - then no dispute from me.

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?

I think I would ask, what game doesn't have the GM frame scenes and scenarios around player character interests/premises/connections to the setting?

I get that some interests/premises/connections to the setting can be more shallow than others. I'd say D&D is typically on the fairly shallow side there.

So kinda sorta dispute, but kinda sorta not.

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.

IMO. Technique can matter and it still all be feels.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't really understand what you're saying or what point you're trying to make. I don't know of any social theory that asserts that no one ever exercises any agency ever - not even the most hardcore structural explanations go that far.

The interesting discussions are about degrees of agency, whether particular social roles permit any significant agency to be exercised, etc.

I'm asking about the definition provided. The one we were discussing. The one you keep claiming differentiates 'degrees of agency'.

I asked a simple question:
If ONLY one of the following is true: both people have the capacity to choose what they wear, What they eat for breakfast, Where they work, How they allocate their time at work do those people have the capacity to make choices and affect change? Essentially does only meeting one of those requirements meet the provided definition of that person having agency. Your first sentence seems to say yes, albeit in a very roundabout way! Which is what I'm saying - by the definition being used all those people have agency. Period.

Now what we can do with that definition is get more specific and ask - agency over what? And person A might have agency over 7 of the 10 things asked about and person B might have agency over 5 of the 10 things asked about. That's not degrees though, that's just types. On the surface it even appears person A has more types of agency. But counting types when we haven't established they are atomic gets very difficult - not to mention the complications where there might be infinite types and then trying to compare different counts of infinity.