D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

This is from p 276 of Apocalypse World, under the heading "playing with the form":

Here’s a pretty interesting custom peripheral move:

When you declare retroactively that you’ve already set something up, roll+sharp. On a 10+, it’s just as you say. On a 7–9, you set it up, yes, but here at the crucial moment the MC can introduce some hitch or delay. On a miss, you set it up, yes, but since then things you don’t know about have seriously changed.​

This is for times when the player springs things on you in the moment, like “say Rolfball, see that red dot on your chest? That’s the sniper I brought with me” or “oh, of course I gassed the beast up before we left Hatchet City.” This move lets you as MC go with it, but without always giving the player her way. Sometimes you have to say “wow, so you did! A sniper!” but other times you get to say “yeah, about that? You’ve been waiting for that dot to appear, but it hasn’t yet. What do you do?”

It’s not nuts to have a move follow what’s happening at the table in the real world, not what’s happening in the characters’ fictional world, like this one does. After all, a hardholder’s wealth move — “at the beginning of the session” — does the same, with no problems. I will note though that this move in particular changes the creative dynamic of the game. It’s small but fundamental. It means that the players have to be a little less careful what they launch their characters into, and you as MC have to be a little more willing to reimagine situations as you go. It’s not for everyone’s Apocalypse World.​

The need for the GM to be able to reimagine things is particularly relevant to thinking about the balance between the agency of different participants in relation to the fiction.

 

[Cadence]

I don't really see how this relates to the actual examples of RPGs or of play that are being described as "altering reality". No

How do any of the action declarations I've talked about, or the BitD flashback mechanic, involve not staying in character or departing from the spirit of the game?

What does the fact that some people play a game with mechanics that are broken for their purposes (eg they use falling rules that don't deliver the fiction they want) relate to the mechanics of Burning Wheel, or BitD, or Dungeon World, or whatever?

Time is moving forward, I'm planning for the future for my character or reacting to the immediate present and trying to think about the possibilities or declaring actions or taking in what others are doing. When playing a character in a fantasy RPG I don't enjoy having to do things like grab over narration (like 13th age montage) or think deeply about previously unpondered events or name and describe new characters from my background (as opposed to just suggesting something might exist or having to develop it between sessions or when I DM) or to know I have some points I can spend to do something where the points aren't tied to the fiction (inspiration).

The forums would be pretty boring if we all had the same hang-ups and preferences.

(From the DM side, my problems come from thinking about technology and science in modern settings and just about anything with super villains).

 

[Maxperson]

If the only thing that makes an action interesting it its relational properties, yet you insist on ignoring most of those relational properties in your description of it, in my view you will not gain much insight.

A simple example: someone who insists that moving their arm is moving their arm, and hence that there is no difference between the action of doing stretches and shadow boxing and punching someone in the face, is in my view making a stupid claim.

Doing stretches = move a knight. Shadow Boxing = move a bishop. Punching someone in the face = moving queen and checkmate. Go only has put piece on board. It doesn't have different kinds of actions. Only different results depending on the game state.

 

[Pedantic]

I've missed a lot, but trying to catch up with what's relevant to my points:

Though it would be rather an unusual vector, if that were the case. Though perhaps that's my physics perspective talking.

But let us use this vector analogy, really put it to work. The components of the vector are scalar. Either they are boolean variables (1/0, present/absent), or they are not (allowed other number values; amount or degree of something.) In the case of booleans, the analysis is quite simple: more vectors is more vectors, that's all you need. In the case of non-booleans, total magnitude of the scalar matters, but that simply feeds back into the already-discussed "it needs to be meaningful to be agency," so that's just proving something that's already been expected. More vectors of sufficient magnitude are longer, in total, than fewer vectors of comparable magnitudes.

Now: Compare the vector spaces spanned by vectors which only admit x and y components, vs vectors which admit x, y, and z components. Both are (uncountably) infinite, having the same cardinality (there is a bijection between them), but measure theory allows us to talk about their "size" in a meaningful way. For any sense in which their sizes differ, the one with x,y,z components is larger than the one with only x,y.


Alright. That's a reasonable stance to take, in the generic: it is possible to add options that increase agency on one axis and reduce it on another. Keyword possible.

As I have argued previously, I don't see how "narrative" games pay any cost in "character agency" terms. Like, at all. It doesn't seem to be the case that there is any "character agency" offered by "(neo)trad" games that is not also offered by at least those "narrative" games I have personally played. I have said this several times, and I have noted other posters who don't like "player agency" who have agreed with this assessment.

Do you have an example of such a thing? E.g., a place where Dungeon World has had to proverbially "swap out" potential character-agency moments with player-agency ones? Does "character-agency" actually map to your ludic agency? (It would seem to me that "character agency" is rather under "narrative agency" in your classification, only secondarily connected to agency over gameplay elements.)

Highlighting that bolded bit, I basically agree. I don't really think the discussion about the "narrative" vs. "character" question has much to do with agency, and much more to do with picking a goal for play. I've posited a few times that agency can only be meaningfully evaluated in reference to a goal; agency is capacity to do something, and this waffling over more or less really seems to be a proxy argument over what that something ought to be.

Ludic agency is significantly harder to pin down in a TTRPG than other kinds of games that specify their victory conditions and evaluations as part of the preconditions for play, but even with a shifting target, I still think it's easy to observe moment to moment when it dips.

This doesn't seem to dispose of @EzekielRaiden 's argument at all, since you would have to argue that it is IMPOSSIBLE to add agency in one dimension without reducing it equivalently in another. I'm pretty sure you can't support that argument in any practical sense. I mean, I anticipate a flurry of "yes, but in the case of my unique combination of preferences this is how it is" responses, but I frankly discount these out of hand as both motivated reasoning and highly contrived (as well as impossible to prove).

Just "possible" is the extent of my argument. If we stop pretending we've settled on a universal target for agency and evaluate it instead in context of a variety of goals (which seems likely to be the state of play at the average TTRPG table), it seems likely that it will lead to variance. Increased narrative space nearly always means less ludic space, though I'm open to the possibility that isn't a given.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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 think what is missing might be an understanding of subjectivity itself. The temperature in the room is 26C, whether it's warm or cold is subjective, but that doesn't make TEMPERATURE subjective, just the experience of it described by the subjective terms hot and cold. But it's more complicated than that because we ALSO use those terms contextually to refer to objective facts or to refer to facts ABOUT subjective experience. Posters often seem rather unaware of which kind of usage they're intending.

 

[pemerton]

I was looking at a ten year old thread for a different reason, but discovered that my preferences for high agency play and the correlative role of the GM have remained pretty consistent over that time:

I mean, I could just sit back and let the GM narrate the whole story for me - perhaps dropping in my guy's tagline here or there to liven it up - but at that point I'd rather read a book or watch a movie. I don't play RPGs to enjoy the GM's amateur novel or screenplay, and I don't GM to share my amateur fiction with my players. Genuine, rich, joint creation of the shared fiction is pretty important to me. That needs rules that will mediate everyone's efforts at contribution, and that will be robust enough to do that even when what I'm trying to contribute is "The demons just wiped the floor with you and went on to destroy your friends and family too" and what the players are trying to contribute it "On the contrary, we banished them back to the Abyss in the name of Erathis and the Raven Queen."

There are actualy existing RPGs that provide such rules. And at least one edition of D&D is among them!

 

[Oofta]

I was looking at a ten year old thread for a different reason, but discovered that my preferences for high agency play and the correlative role of the GM have remained pretty consistent over that time:

So even 10 years ago you engaged in hyperbole about D&D being "sitting back and having the GM narrate a story to you"? Not sure that's something to be proud of.

It's one thing to have different preferences, it's another to say that the only way to have a "genuine rich story" is by using your preferred style of game.

 

[pemerton]

So even 10 years ago you engaged in hyperbole about D&D being "sitting back and having the GM narrate a story to you"? Not sure that's something to be proud of.

It's one thing to have different preferences, it's another to say that the only way to have a "genuine rich story" is by using your preferred style of game.

You keep imputing opinions to me that I haven't stated. The only thing I say in that post about D&D is that "at least one edition of D&D is among" the RPGs that provide rules as an alternative to GM story time.

If you think that, in referring to GMs telling the players a story, I'm talking about your RPGing that's on you!

 

[pemerton]

it's another to say that the only way to have a "genuine rich story" is by using your preferred style of game.

Obviously one way to have a genuine rich story is for the GM to tell one. In this thread, @clearstream has been advocating the merits of "GM story hour" as set out by Eero Tuovinen here: Observations on GNS Simulationism – Correspondence is about Diligence

Tuovinen correctly identifies DL as a classic example. Upthread I've talked about some of my own convention experiences with CoC story hours.

But the only way to have a genuine rich story with high player agency is to use the techniques that were invented to do that. There are two main sets of techniques that I'm aware of: scene-framing type play (for me, that's Burning Wheel, 4e D&D, Prince Valiant , Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+, Agon, and then classics like HeroWars/Quest, Sorcerer and DitV) and PbtA-style "if you do it, you do it" (that's how I approach Classic Traveller; the classic is obviously Apocalypse World).

I've mentioned several times upthread running high agency AD&D. That was also a broadly "if you do it, you do it" approach; but as I said the system is quite rickety.

 

[Oofta]

You keep imputing opinions to me that I haven't stated. The only thing I say in that post about D&D is that "at least one edition of D&D is among" the RPGs that provide rules as an alternative to GM story time.

If you think that, in referring to GMs telling the players a story, I'm talking about your RPGing that's on you!

But that's pretty much what you said according to the bolded

I mean, I could just sit back and let the GM narrate the whole story for me - perhaps dropping in my guy's tagline here or there to liven it up - but at that point I'd rather read a book or watch a movie. I don't play RPGs to enjoy the GM's amateur novel or screenplay, and I don't GM to share my amateur fiction with my players. Genuine, rich, joint creation of the shared fiction is pretty important to me. That needs rules that will mediate everyone's efforts at contribution, and that will be robust enough to do that even when what I'm trying to contribute is "The demons just wiped the floor with you and went on to destory your friends and family too" and what the players are trying to contribute it "On the contrary, we banished them back to the Abyss in the name of Erathis and the Raven Queen."

There are actualy existing RPGs that provide such rules. And at least one edition of D&D is among them!

Not sure how else to take those statements. You were the one who wrote ":...I could just sit back and let the GM narrate the whole story for me...I don't play RPGs to enjoy the GM's amateur novel or screenplay.... Genuine, rich, joint creation of the shared fiction...That needs rules that will mediate everyone's efforts at contribution..." Then stated that's how D&D works.