D&D General What is player agency to you?

[Maxperson]

From here: Observations on GNS Simulationism – Correspondence is about Diligence

I prefer to use a different term to reduce preconceptions and draw attention to what’s pertinent for our purposes. (“Railroading” was conceived as a deconstructive critique of this practice; it’s the name an enemy grants to the phenomenon.) . . .​

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to put it briefly, I believe that railroading play, despite how common it is, is generally misunderstood to concern itself mostly with the causal “A leads to B” path procession through the GM’s prepared material. This type of railroading theory leads to complex conceptualizations like hub models (alternate roads you allow the players to pick from) and magician’s choice (the players think they’re choosing, but really they’re not) . . .​

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What I would like to offer as a modest alternative to old-fashioned railroading theory is that the purpose. . . is not to cheat and create an illusion of freedom; it is to exquisitely prepare nuanced literary material for intimate consideration. The strength of the railroading game structure is not in hiding the tracks, but rather in ensuring that those tracks travel through scenes worthy of spending some time in. You’re literally only bothering with the railroad tracks because you don’t want to waste time preparing complex content and then just have the other players skip it; it’s much better to take the track as a given and focus on how to make your content worth the trip.​

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I’ve written about this in more detail elsewhere, but the key consideration is treating your game prep the same way an adventure video game does: your core strength is being able to prepare carefully, and the freedoms you give to the player are carefully constrained to ensure that you actually get to show off your stuff. It is still interactive, as the player has the primary control over the pace (how quickly you go over your material) and focus (what parts of your material are particularly observed) of play, even as the GM by definition holds primary content authority. The GM decides what play will be about, but the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness. . . .​

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It is extremely important that the introduced matter is good stuff, creatively relevant to the participants. Tracy Hickman understood this in his magnum opus Dragonlance, pushing the AD&D content delivery chassis to its extreme ends and beyond in an effort to deliver a true high fantasy epic via a game structurally very poorly suited for the purpose; Hickman understood that if there was to be a measure of grace to the project, it would be in the fact that the GM would . . . be delivering actually legit fantasy literature. (Not discussing the Dragonlance novels here, note, but the adventure modules.)​

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You never, ever want to be in a position to deliver . . . trivial material. Respect yourself, respect your friends, and . . . bring something you actually want to tell the other players about. Something that you can describe to them, and then let them ask questions, and then answer those questions gladly, confident that you’re engaging in an intelligent, meaningful activity. If you can’t convince yourself about your material being interesting, don’t expect others to care, either.​

Upthread I've posted about CoC scenarios that I have enjoyed that have exactly this character. And @AbdulAlhazred has often posted about his friend Mike who was an awesome GM along these lines. Eero is talking about, and trying to analyse, this very popular approach to RPGing.

Sure. You CAN run a traditional game like that, but that's not the default state. The above is describing a railroad, not traditional play.

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:
Maybe I can simplify this:

This thread isn't about old gripes about messaging around edition changes. That folks had issue with some of how WotC publicly justified changes between editions really isn't relevant to questions of player agency.

So, please let that drop, and move on. Thanks.

 

[Campbell]

Sure. You CAN run a traditional game like that, but that's not the default state. The above is describing a railroad, not traditional play.

It has a whole lot to do with what a significant portion of the hobby considers to be traditional play.

From The Six Cultures of Play:

2) Trad (short for "traditional")​

Its own adherents and advocates call it "trad", but we shouldn't think of it as the oldest way of roleplaying (it is not). Trad is not what Gary and co. did (that's "classic"), but rather is the reaction to what they were doing.

Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative, and the DM is the primary creative agent in making that happen - building the world, establishing all the details of the story, playing all the antagonists, and doing so mostly in line with their personal tastes and vision. The PCs can contribute, but their contributions are secondary in value and authority to the DM's. If you ever hear people complain about (or exalt!) games that feel like going through a fantasy novel, that's trad. Trad prizes gaming that produces experiences comparable to other media, like movies, novels, television, myths, etc., and its values often encourage adapting techniques from those media.

Trad emerges in the late 1970s, with an early intellectually hub in the Dungeons and Beavers crew at Caltech, but also in Tracy and Laura Hickman's gaming circle in Utah. The defining incident for Tracy was evidently running into a vampire in a dungeon and thinking that it really needed a story to explain what it was doing down there wandering around. Hickman wrote a series of adventures in 1980 (the Night Verse series) that tried to bring in more narrative elements, but the company that was supposed to publish them went bust. So he decided to sell them to TSR instead, and they would only buy them if he came to work for them. So in 1982, he went to work at TSR and within a few years, his ideas would spread throughout the company and become its dominant vision of "roleplaying".

Trad gets its first major publication articulating its vision of play outside of TSR in Sandy Petersen's Call of Cthulhu (1981), which tells readers that the goal of play is to create an experience like a horror story, and provides specific advice (the "onion layer" model) for creating that. The values of trad crystallise as a major and distinct culture of play in D&D with the Ravenloft (1983) and Dragonlance (1984) modules written by Hickman. TSR published Ravenloft in response to Call of Cthulhu's critical and commercial success, and then won a fistful of awards and sold tons of copies themselves.

Within a few years, the idea of "roleplaying, not rollplaying" and the importance of a Dungeon Master creating an elaborate, emotionally-satisfying narrative had taken over. I think probably the ability to import terms and ideas from other art forms probably helped a great deal as well, since understanding trad could be done by anyone who'd gone through a few humanities classes in university.

Trad is the hegemonic culture of play from at least the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, and it's still a fairly common style of play. For an example of a fairly well-thought through style of trad by someone who's been influential on the last 15 or so years, check out S. John Ross's RPG Lexicon.

Both of the next two styles emerge out of problems with trad, especially the experience of playing Vampire (a tradder-than-trad game in its authors' aspirations), but the details of that are larger than this essay can contain so I'm just going to mention it and leave it for another time.

This is the sort of play you see indexed as trad on RPG.net, by many posters here and in my experience in meat space. It's also the sort of play explicitly described in games like Ars Magica, Vampire, Shadowrun, L5R, most editions of Cyberpunk, et al. Before my exposure to Story Now games I simply called it 'a roleplaying game' having come from a late 2e/early 3e/Vampire background where this sort of play was predominant. It's also reflective of the vast majority of play I have personally encountered when looking for games as well as most of the expectations from players I have encountered here in Colorado.

 

[Maxperson]

It has a whole lot to do with what a significant portion of the hobby considers to be traditional play.

From The Six Cultures of Play:


This is the sort of play you see indexed as trad on RPG.net, by many posters here and in my experience in meat space. It's also the sort of play explicitly described in games like Ars Magica, Vampire, Shadowrun, L5R, most editions of Cyberpunk, et al. Before my exposure to Story Now games I simply called it 'a roleplaying game' having come from a late 2e/early 3e/Vampire background where this sort of play was predominant. It's also reflective of the vast majority of play I have personally encountered when looking for games as well as most of the expectations from players I have encountered here in Colorado.

See, I really hate their definition, because that's not how the game was traditionally played, which is why it confuses the hell out of me. How the game was traditionally played is what I describe. What is being described above is linear play.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

See, I really hate their definition, because that's not how the game was traditionally played, which is why it confuses the hell out of me. How the game was traditionally played is what I describe. What is being described above is linear play.

It's the problem when people assign names and typologies.

So, for example, if someone comes into the hobby later, it might make perfect sense to label that style of gaming as "traditional," because that's what they see as the dominant and "traditional" style of gaming.

On the other hand, if you've been around for a while, you are probably more likely to think of that style of gaming as the "Weiss/Hickman Revolution" that first really took hold after the first golden era of D&D (and RPGs) crested. Sure, it was around before that, and first reached a mass market with Dragonlance ... but this was in 1984, so for many people, the WH Revolution occurred after the first boom, and calling it "tradition" just seems wrong... since there was a decade of play with completely different expectations that was the majority of the market prior to that.

 

[bloodtide]

I wouldn't characterise that as genuine, rich, joint creation of a shared fiction. It seems pretty much GM-authorship, player-audience.

I did say you have to remove your own definition of 'joint'. Even more so if your only definition of 'joint' is the game must have special rules that make you as a player feel good.

I don't know about that last bit - about setting free etc - as I continually emphasise the GM's role rather than the player's "special powers". But I agree that I don't see much player agency in what you describe.

Just trying to wrap my head around your long, overly complicated example. I'm not sure if your just doing the massive info dump to hide your use of 'agency' in the game.

You game example describes a game where the players have special rules in the game book they can use "for agency". Though, from your examples, I don't SEE any agency. But maybe I'm reading things wrong?

A lot of your examples are: 1.Player surprises GM with a rule usage. 2.Player makes an offical game rule roll and success. 3. GM then....er....sort of, kind of...does "something" at least vaguely related to that role and the rules used......BUT really the GM does does whatever they want to...like any other RPG...EXCEPT they have to FOOL the player into thinking they did "something" ONLY because of the players rule use and roll. 4.So after the roll, the GM just says whatever.....and the player happily dances around the table because they think and more so feel they have 'agency' in the game.

But really, I just don't get it.

I'm not sure how the GM giving out information is "player agency". But that definition....my game gives out at least twice the information of a standard game (three times if a player can be bothered to read anything). So guess my game is "high agency" as the (good) players know a lot of information.

Then you go on to say it was "good agency" because rolls decided a bunch of actions.....I guess you were saying here is that you like roll playing over role playing LITERALLY because it takes 'power/control' AWAY from the GM. And that is Fascinating...

 

[pemerton]

Sure. You CAN run a traditional game like that, but that's not the default state. The above is describing a railroad, not traditional play.

I don't know what you mean by "default state". It's not a notion I've used.

I also don't know what you mean by "traditional play" as you use it. But I can report that I saw a lot of the sort of thing @Campbell has referenced back when I hung out in RPG clubs and at conventions; and I see a lot of people post about that sort of play on ENworld.

If you don't think that your RPGing is like that, cool. I don't think anyone posted that it was.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't know what you mean by "default state". It's not a notion I've used.

It means that the way the game was written and designed to be run has never been as linear as what you posted upthread. That's something that came later and was rather narrowly followed. None of the groups I played in ran that way.

I also don't know what you mean by "traditional play" as you use it. But I can report that I saw a lot of the sort of thing @Campbell has referenced back when I hung out in RPG clubs and at conventions; and I see a lot of people post about that sort of play on ENworld.

Traditional play is the way it was written to be played in 1e and 2e, which is NOT what you posted upthread.

 

[pemerton]

It means that the way the game was written and designed to be run has never been as linear as what you posted upthread. That's something that came later and was rather narrowly followed. None of the groups I played in ran that way.

Traditional play is the way it was written to be played in 1e and 2e, which is NOT what you posted upthread.

Given that Gygax's AD&D and 2nd ed AD&D set out wildly different approaches to RPGing, they can't both be traditional!

In the blog that @Campbell referenced, the terminology used is Classic (Gygax, Moldvay, Pulsipher - skilled play dungeon crawling) and Trad (which becomes dominant from the mid-80s, as per the "Hickman revolution" and remains very popular as best I can tell).

Obviously a rose by any other name would smell as sweet - but a rose by any other name is not a magnolia!

 

[Maxperson]

Given that Gygax's AD&D and 2nd ed AD&D set out wildly different approaches to RPGing, they can't both be traditional!

They were run pretty close to the same way, even if the rules were different.

In the blog that @Campbell referenced, the terminology used is Classic (Gygax, Moldvay, Pulsipher - skilled play dungeon crawling) and Trad (which becomes dominant from the mid-80s, as per the "Hickman revolution" and remains very popular as best I can tell).

The Hickman Revolution didn't take off very well from what I've seen. Very few DMs have come here and espoused that style of play, and I didn't see it back in the day. In fact, despite buying the DL modules, my players didn't want to play them because of having to run through a preplanned story.

And it is also not traditional play, no matter how people want to redefine traditional.