D&D General What is player agency to you?

[FrogReaver]

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.

I answered Campbell above more specifically, but essentially I can read that question in at least 2 possible ways. I agree with 1 way and disagree with the other.

 

[FrogReaver]

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?

I want to take a moment and talk about Objectivity/Subjectivity vs Measurability.

As an example: one metric for service level might be (# of calls answered within 35 secs)/(# total calls). This is objective. However, it may or may not be measurable. Perhaps the system we are using to record data is set to only accept 10 second intervals, such that we could measure # of calls answered within 30 secs or within 40 secs but not within 35 secs. As such the service level based on the 35 sec interval would be objective but not measurable (at least with current equipment). Presumably with the right equipment we could measure this though.

If anyone has ever had a performance review you know that many categories within that review are subjective categories and often they get rated on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale. But still, subjectively assigning a numeric rating is still at it's heart subjective - despite it having the facade of being objective. Even if those numbers are then plugged into an objective compensation formula to determine your end of year raise - that doesn't make the ratings, or your end of year raise objective.

Or to be more general - subjective categories/descriptions are not measurable even though we might assign a ranking number to them (ranking can be used to determine more or less - but that's still not the same as objectively determining more or less). Some things which cannot be measured are still objective.

In relation to our discussion - we can still talk about more or less agency even if it's subjective (just don't expect broad agreement). Agency could also be spoken of objectively as long as we defined it as metric even if it's a metric that currently cannot be measured. I don't think either of those approaches are the best, but they are possibilities.

 

[FrogReaver]

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.

To me, the concept you are describing is fine. I've described it myself a few times. However, I wouldn't describe that concept as agency - agency is different than some combination of the 'level complexity' and 'level of impact'.

IMO Agency is the ability to make choices (no matter how many) - for those choices to matter (no matter how much) - all in relation to some X. And actually there's still a little more to the concept than this, but it's a solid enough starting point.

Is a D&D player able to make choices and have them matter? Yes!
Is a PbtA player able to make choices and have them matter? Yes!

Does the PbtA player make more choices or have more options for their choices? Probably not.
Does the PbtA players choices matter more? Probably some of them like Beliefs/Goals/Motivations.

IMO the concept of degrees of agency revolves around these concepts or counting types of agency. The problem in this thread isn't really these concepts, its defining agency as these concepts.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I mean, OK, you and I can't eyeball that, but as a guy with a math degree and extensive CS knowledge, yeah, there is an objective measure of complexity in games! It probably isn't the most useful thing for our purposes, but the fact that it exists tells me that complexity is very much a thing and can be measured, so it can probably be gauged with reasonable accuracy. Certainly you and I will agree that Tic Tac Toe is much less complex than Checkers, which is much less complex than Chess, which is itself generally held to be less complex than Go. Mathematicians, AFAIK, agree on those relative rankings too. Now, as far as RPGs go, I think we can all agree that there is at least an informal "how complex are the rules and mechanics" measurement that is semi-objective at the worst. Dungeon World is simpler than 5e, for instance, and the 5 page rules of PACE are certainly simpler than either of those. So I'm not really convinced! We might disagree on certain cases, is AW more or less complex than Stonetop? But I think we will mostly agree or at least rate things similarly.

 

[pemerton]

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.

I have told you, repeatedly, that agency as understood in the context of sociology is a scalar concept. It is related, at least in very broad terms, to notions like structure, alienation and anomie. No one that I'm aware of asserts that human beings in modern social structures enjoy no agency. But it is widely (probably not universally) accepted that the enjoy differing degrees of agency. @Campbell gave an example, upthread, of the blue collar worker vs the trust fund inheritor. I've also mentioned, several times now, the Whitehall study.

I have also explained this by reference to the notion of capacity: agency is a type of capacity, and capacities can be enjoyed to varying degrees.

In the context of RPGing, I have referred to players having various degrees of agency. I have compared various sessions of various RPGs that I have GMed - various Traveller sessions, various Torchbearer sessions, Torchbearer to Burning Wheel - and talked about the degree of agency that players have in those sessions of play. I have never asserted that a player in one of those sessions has no agency, and I don't see how a person could play a game at all yet exercise absolutely no agency via that play.

But for that very reason, I don't think declaring that all players of RPGs, in so far as they are playing at all, have agency, therefore end of discussion is very helpful. That won't take us very far in understanding the various ways in which shared fictions are created via RPGing, and who makes what contributions to that in those various ways. Just as no attempt at social explanation that I'm aware of has ever found it interesting to stop at the observation that human beings are agential creatures. The interest is in differing degrees of agency, how these relate to social structures, what sorts of experiences (eg of alienation, or in the Whitehall study of morbidity) result, etc.

 

[Oofta]

I mean, OK, you and I can't eyeball that, but as a guy with a math degree and extensive CS knowledge, yeah, there is an objective measure of complexity in games! It probably isn't the most useful thing for our purposes, but the fact that it exists tells me that complexity is very much a thing and can be measured, so it can probably be gauged with reasonable accuracy. Certainly you and I will agree that Tic Tac Toe is much less complex than Checkers, which is much less complex than Chess, which is itself generally held to be less complex than Go. Mathematicians, AFAIK, agree on those relative rankings too. Now, as far as RPGs go, I think we can all agree that there is at least an informal "how complex are the rules and mechanics" measurement that is semi-objective at the worst. Dungeon World is simpler than 5e, for instance, and the 5 page rules of PACE are certainly simpler than either of those. So I'm not really convinced! We might disagree on certain cases, is AW more or less complex than Stonetop? But I think we will mostly agree or at least rate things similarly.

Last time. Chess has more pieces, more options of how to play the game. Go has 1 piece you do 1 thing with it. Yet Go is considered more complex and difficult to master. A computer could beat a chess master in 97, it was nearly 20 years and an entirely new paradigm later that the same could be said for Go.

You can't just look at the rules of two games and say this game is more complex because it has more options. You can't just look at two RPGs and say this one has more agency because it has more options to express agency for the player.

But seriously, I don't mean to be rude but this horse was dead long ago.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To me, the concept you are describing is fine. I've described it myself a few times. However, I wouldn't describe that concept as agency - agency is different than some combination of the 'level complexity' and 'level of impact'.

IMO Agency is the ability to make choices (no matter how many) - for those choices to matter (no matter how much) - all in relation to some X. And actually there's still a little more to the concept than this, but it's a solid enough starting point.

Is a D&D player able to make choices and have them matter? Yes!
Is a PbtA player able to make choices and have them matter? Yes!

Does the PbtA player make more choices or have more options for their choices? Probably not.
Does the PbtA players choices matter more? Probably some of them like Beliefs/Goals/Motivations.

IMO the concept of degrees of agency revolves around these concepts or counting types of agency. The problem in this thread isn't really these concepts, its defining agency as these concepts.

I was more using complexity and such as examples of relatively objective things, and I got the impression that people WERE equating complexity (and 'impact' which may be rather less objective) with agency, or at least tying them together in some fashion, at least WRT board games. I don't disagree that these are not correlated necessarily, and have said as much myself (maybe it was in the other post I made around the same time, I'm not sure).

 

[pemerton]

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?

In the context of this thread, you don't need to conjecture!

Some posters in this thread were criticising RPGs that allow players to "alter reality". I asked for examples of such games, but none were forthcoming. I provided some examples of play that, in my view, illustrate how player agency in RPGing can be high.

I also said (post 219) that

If all the interesting and important changes are established by one participant, then as I say the other participants have little agency in respect of the game. That is not a redefinition: it is an application of standard meanings of the term in this particular context.​

and

If the impact of what the player decides that their PC says and does is decided primarily by the GM, then this does not seem to me to be a very significant exercise of agency by the player. They are prompting the GM to produce an effect or result; but they are not producing it directly via their own agency.​

That prompted @Oofta and others to assert (1) that the GM always enjoys a veto power (see post 222), and (2) to assert that nevertheless players playing under such processes exercise lots of agency.

The people who mentioned 5e D&D were Oofta and others, not me. My comments on 5e have been confined to explaining that if I were GMing 5e D&D I would run the Noble background ability as written, and also to agreeing with @hawkeyefan that I don't think the game's rules are as low-player-agency as some in this thread appear to assert.

If I were to ask @pemerton why he doesn't like 5e D&D he might say because it lacks agency.

Again, conjecture is not required.

I don't like 5e D&D because I don't think it's combat resolution system is very interesting or verisimilitudinous, and it has no non-combat resolution system other than GM decides what follows from a PC succeeding or failing at an attempted task.

 

[Cadence]

In the context of this thread, you don't need to conjecture!

Some posters in this thread were criticising RPGs that allow players to "alter reality". I asked for examples of such games, but none were forthcoming.

I missed that post, but it feels like there have been lots of threads we've both been in where things like that have been discussed (I think me having you help me think through some things). So I'm kind of surprised fresh ones were needed (although at the beginning of the semester I'm lucky to remember anything at all sometimes).

Doesn't BitD have a flashback mechanic that lets the player declare something was already prepared in the past and is ready to go now (to capture the feel of many heist movies). I believe I suggested that in a non-heist setting that's kind of like being able to wish things into existence. I think there were some other games you play where players could insert connections or backgrounds or what not where in D&D a DM might take the suggestion but could veto it.

I can go search up the specifics if that would be helpful.

 

[Cadence]

I have told you, repeatedly, that agency as understood in the context of sociology is a scalar concept.

I'm pretty surprised agency is scalar and not multidimensional. (Google seems to show a number of papers examining it multidimensionally, but I didn't check what field they're in or the abstracts).