I'm not sure what you mean by "here".
It's very popular on ENworld. A lot of ENworld posters either play in or GM WoTC and/or Paizo Adventure Paths, for instance.
D&D General What is player agency to you?
- Thread starter bloodtide
- Start date
It's very popular on ENworld. A lot of ENworld posters either play in or GM WoTC and/or Paizo Adventure Paths, for instance.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Here is ENworld and adventures paths =/= forcing people down a story. You can go off path.
Crimson Longinus
Legend
I don't know why I did it, but I finally managed to wade through this gargantuan thread.
Some observations (I had more, but I forgot most of them during the time it took to read this insanity):
Early on a big deal was made about a GM saying "no" vs the rules/dice saying "no". I don't think it is such a big deal and unlike how several people seem to think, I don't think it really affects the player agency. There is the player's say, the GM's say and the system's say. Moving a thing from GM's say to the system's say or vice versa doesn't affect the player's say.
But that is an undercurrent what I detect in a lot of this discussion. Many people seem to be super worried about what the GM gets to decide, much more than what the players actually get to decide.
Also, given the length of the tread I would have imagined there had been more attempt to define agency. @clearstream has done good job and asked the right questions ("agency to do what?" for example,) but consensus doesn't seem to be even near and people keep talking past each other.
@pemerton defined it as "the ability to affect the shared fiction" or something like that. He has also expressed his preference for high agency games. But if that is the case and the definition is sufficient, why do the games he plays have all sort of rules that limit the player's ability to affect the shared fiction? Certainly even higher agency is achieved by just letting the players say what happens, no checks or such needed? No?
Or is it perhaps not that straightforward? Is it perhaps that it is about meaningful choices, and giving the player too much authority erodes meaningfulness of the choices? For example if I was playing a murder mystery and my character could just "remember" clues I wanted into existence my agency to genuinely solve the mystery would be seriously harmed.
There was also discussion about how in narrative games GM frames things in a manner which relates to the characters' wants/needs/fears etc. Now in my experience in most trad games GM does that sometimes too, and nothing in such games prevents doing so. It is just a matter of preference what you want the game to be about. I just don't have the foggiest what GM doing or not doing this has to do with the player agency. Granted, I would again feel that my agency to solve the murder mystery would be seriously hampered were the culprit be decided on the moment of revelation on basis of what would best challenge my character's beliefs!
Oh, and Pemerton, we've been over this many times. It doesn't matter if you try to smuggle the reality editing via "knowing" or "remembering". It is still reality editing and you can dress up basically any setting addition/alteration in such a guise. It of course is fine to such a power to exist in some games, but I really don't get the need to try to obfuscate what's actually happening.
Some observations (I had more, but I forgot most of them during the time it took to read this insanity):
Early on a big deal was made about a GM saying "no" vs the rules/dice saying "no". I don't think it is such a big deal and unlike how several people seem to think, I don't think it really affects the player agency. There is the player's say, the GM's say and the system's say. Moving a thing from GM's say to the system's say or vice versa doesn't affect the player's say.
But that is an undercurrent what I detect in a lot of this discussion. Many people seem to be super worried about what the GM gets to decide, much more than what the players actually get to decide.
Also, given the length of the tread I would have imagined there had been more attempt to define agency. @clearstream has done good job and asked the right questions ("agency to do what?" for example,) but consensus doesn't seem to be even near and people keep talking past each other.
@pemerton defined it as "the ability to affect the shared fiction" or something like that. He has also expressed his preference for high agency games. But if that is the case and the definition is sufficient, why do the games he plays have all sort of rules that limit the player's ability to affect the shared fiction? Certainly even higher agency is achieved by just letting the players say what happens, no checks or such needed? No?
Or is it perhaps not that straightforward? Is it perhaps that it is about meaningful choices, and giving the player too much authority erodes meaningfulness of the choices? For example if I was playing a murder mystery and my character could just "remember" clues I wanted into existence my agency to genuinely solve the mystery would be seriously harmed.
There was also discussion about how in narrative games GM frames things in a manner which relates to the characters' wants/needs/fears etc. Now in my experience in most trad games GM does that sometimes too, and nothing in such games prevents doing so. It is just a matter of preference what you want the game to be about. I just don't have the foggiest what GM doing or not doing this has to do with the player agency. Granted, I would again feel that my agency to solve the murder mystery would be seriously hampered were the culprit be decided on the moment of revelation on basis of what would best challenge my character's beliefs!
Oh, and Pemerton, we've been over this many times. It doesn't matter if you try to smuggle the reality editing via "knowing" or "remembering". It is still reality editing and you can dress up basically any setting addition/alteration in such a guise. It of course is fine to such a power to exist in some games, but I really don't get the need to try to obfuscate what's actually happening.
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Crimson Longinus
Legend
I remembered one more thing I meant to say: So called "character agency," the agency to decide what your character thinks, feels, says or does, was pooh-poohed as an unremarkable baseline. I don't think it is quite as simple. A lot of games (and I'm pretty sure including some of these supposedly high agency narrative games) have mechanics that can affect or dictate what your character should think or feel. Such mechanics are something that I feel violate the sort of agency I personally find important and I don't like games in which such are prevalent.
ALL of the adventure paths I've seen have a near 100% linear story where you go from A to B to C etc.
If the group goes off the path the DM is basically on his own until he can push them back on the path. So sure the group can go off the path, but only in a "we don't really want to do this module/adventure" way.
Ideally, the group has fully agreed to this constraint and wish to finish the adventure path. It needs to be part of the current table agreement.
With respect, adding "in my experience" would be key here.
Because you haven't demonstrated credentials beyond anyone else who gamed during the period (and there's lots of us around here), nor have you cited any decent sources.
So, you know, watch out how deep you want to plant that flag of claiming there was One True Way.
I'd call the ones I've played piecewise linear. You start at A - you can then wander a wide area until you find the narrow path to B. You then get to wander around again until you find the path to C, etc.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Sorry, DragonLance is a 'magnum opus'? Its schlock fantasy! I mean, OK, assuming you are a true genius, and don't want to spend your talent in, say, script writing or as a novelist for some peculiar reason, maybe. But I have absolutely never yet seen that! Not only that, but every RPG adventure designer with any pretense of talent at all didn't write a railroad! Or at the very least they tried to pretend they weren't, or mitigate the necessity as much as they could, because railroads inherently suck, and nobody in this business is that much of a genius that their stuff needs such a showcase. So the entire proposition is a crock.
That's just the start though, because there are much more reliable ways to get good material to result from play! Now, maybe not everyone LIKES the sort of play that results, so this isn't an argument against railroads (or any other type of play) but if I'm actually talented as a GM, and I want to produce really interesting dramatic play? I sure as heck won't construct some sappy linear RR type adventure! One hour of any random PbtA will produce a better story than every module TSR ever wrote laid end to end!
Of course, I did play with a genius story teller that railroaded everyone through his stuff and people were pretty happy with it. It STILL didn't generally have the story quality or drama of good narrativist play. If it did I'd still be there, because I'm sure he's still running the same sort of games to this day, but he's also the one in a million exception that proves the rule. So that analysis is IMHO garbage.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, quibble how you want, I played through basically the whole gamut of these '6 cultures', though I might describe a few things slightly differently. I'd also point out that a lot of variation exists within what is called 'trad' here. It is NOT necessarily railroad or linear in the way you would describe that. It can be a pure sandbox, what matters in this taxonomy is who is building and driving the fiction, where it leads, and what it ends up being about. Trad, in 6C nomenclature, is GM-driven play. The fiction, the story, is ABOUT what the GM wrote. It is set in the GM's scenes and setting, the characters are either authored directly by the GM or their backstories and relationships, and what they know, is approved by said GM. Players may well contribute elements to the story, and which scenes get played out may depend in varying measure on what choices the players make.
As the quoted piece says, this is exactly the sort of fiction that was espoused by DL and RL. It really first materializes in a form in, to my recollection, the A Series of modules. There's a story, its very linear, and its also not something that the players set up, AT ALL, though their exploits, pretty much dictated by the situation, are the subject material. They can even make a few choices here and there. IIRC in A2 there are a couple of paths through the module, and A4 definitely offers a couple options (though they all end with the Big Bang).
We can debate whether 2e was more intended to foster trad or neo-trad play. I would say neo-trad was a bit of an accidental outgrowth of bad attempts to do trad storytelling that got co-opted by players, but late era 2e definitely provides the sorts of options that work well with it. Anyway, I'd say most play after about 1982 aimed at 6C trad.
hawkeyefan
Legend
There’s a significant difference between the two as they're presented. I was young enough when 2e came along that my friends and I didn't always treat them very differently. But looking back with a more discerning eye after the fact, there are many significant differences.
The Hickman Revolution is still the dominant form of play. To be fair, the elements of it already existed in the early days... you can just look at the G-D-Q series for a good example. But once Dragonlance came along, everything that TSR was making shifted toward that model. And then Vampire came along and solidified it even further.
Nothing since then has really removed that play paradigm from being predominant. 5e certainly doesn't do anything to change that. It's very focused on the DM as the primary storyteller and worldbuilder and so on. And 5e is the predominant game in the hobby by orders of magnitude.
Who cares what label they gave it? They provided a clear definition for what they mean, and it's a pretty commonly accepted and used term. Beyond arguing the label, what issue do you have with the description? That it's linear? Isn't that a strength of that style?
So do you have any examples of this from play? Have you run any of the 5e adventures and then gone significantly off-script due to player decisions? If so, what did you do? How did you handle it? Did things eventually make their way back to the adventure?
I like trad play. This is why I get so baffled by people fighting against descriptions of the strengths of trad play. This is the chance to provide examples that show how cool trad play is, not insist it's the same as another type of play.
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