D&D General What is player agency to you?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here is ENworld and adventures paths =/= forcing people down a story. You can go off path.

What % of plays through any given module go 'off path' and don't play through most of the material? I mean, come on!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I think GDQ (which BTW predates even Holmes Basic) is more an example of pure Classic. There's very little attempt to knit together a story at all! You get some BS one paragraph excuse about how some guy sent you to off some giants that are bothering his duchy or whatever, and you go from location to location. You get a map or something at the very last encounter of each module that literally says "go here next" and then the trip to the next location is elided! Yes, there are some names of NPCs given, but interacting with them is meaningless, all they can do is point you to the next encounter location.

D3 admittedly is rather different, you get to the city and basically its just sketched in with the PCs needing to play some sort of intrigue game with the Drow in order to somehow get them to start a civil war, or at least distract them so you can sneak into Q1 (which is again itself just one big location).

I really think the A Series, which was written in the early 1e days, maybe around 1979, is the divergence point. It has a real plot, albeit a very simple linear one, and NPCs that actually kinda fit a story. Its a pretty threadbare and fairly basic story, but there's one there, and its purely to be told as written! The only real question is if the PCs will survive or not, the finale is basically pre-set before the thing even starts!

 

[Campbell]

@Crimson Longinus

System's Say isn't just about dice mechanics. It can just as well relate to the sorts of judgements and the basis of the judgements the GM and/or other players are expected to make. This matters for agency because my ability to anticipate, determine and constrain the sorts of things that can and will be said in follow up is a significant component of agency.

If I know the GM should be making decisions solely based on fictional positioning and their understanding of the NPCs involved it then becomes worthwhile to engage in exploratory play to discover information to leverage.

If I know what the consequence space and odds of success with Go Aggro are than I can consider that when choosing to do something in the fiction that would count as Go Aggro.

Knowing position and effect, stating my intent and knowing my action rating in Blades in the Dark provides me with a whole host of factors that influence my decision making and allow me to make decisions that should forward my aims.

When it comes to all sorts of math rocks it's less about the dice than knowing how those dice can impact what happens next and finding ways to influence what dice get rolled, what that target number will be, how those dice get modified and what happens as a result of those dice rolls.

It's not about dice versus GM decisions. It's about being able to foresee the impact of one's actions in order to make decisions that impact what happens next in predictable ways. There will be unanticipated consequences along the way, but a substantial component of agency involves the ability to anticipate and impact the chances and nature of success and failure.

A fundamental part of agency is that in exercising it you impact the agency of others. Once you have acted everyone else in the conversation is constrained by what you have added to the conversation. They must have a regard for it, and it will dictate and constrain the types of things they are allowed to add to the conversation according to the principles / agreements / system that dictate the terms of the conversation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think GDQ (which BTW predates even Holmes Basic) is more an example of pure Classic. There's very little attempt to knit together a story at all! You get some BS one paragraph excuse about how some guy sent you to off some giants that are bothering his duchy or whatever, and you go from location to location. You get a map or something at the very last encounter of each module that literally says "go here next" and then the trip to the next location is elided! Yes, there are some names of NPCs given, but interacting with them is meaningless, all they can do is point you to the next encounter location.

D3 admittedly is rather different, you get to the city and basically its just sketched in with the PCs needing to play some sort of intrigue game with the Drow in order to somehow get them to start a civil war, or at least distract them so you can sneak into Q1 (which is again itself just one big location).

I really think the A Series, which was written in the early 1e days, maybe around 1979, is the divergence point. It has a real plot, albeit a very simple linear one, and NPCs that actually kinda fit a story. Its a pretty threadbare and fairly basic story, but there's one there, and its purely to be told as written! The only real question is if the PCs will survive or not, the finale is basically pre-set before the thing even starts!

Yeah, that Classic. Definitely my preference, but like everyone else I've played and enjoyed a lot of trad too.

 

[pemerton]

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.

<snip>

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.

You need to let us know what you really think!

In Eero Tuovinen's defence, I have seen people offer this sort of explanation for the appeal of railroading, including in this thread:

I like agency in games. It's important to me, but I've also said "if the railroad goes through Awesome Town, get me a ticket!"

And I certainly don't regret the time and effort I've put into the railroad-y CoC convention one-shots I've played.

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!

I'm fairly sympathetic to this claim. I didn't find the railroad-y AD&D convention one-shots all that appealing.

 

[Arilyn]

What % of plays through any given module go 'off path' and don't play through most of the material? I mean, come on!

Umm, mine often did. I GMed a fair number of Pathfinder 1 Adventure Paths and some of them went so off track, they were no longer telling the same story. My Serpent's Crown campaign ended up in a completely different place, telling a very different story.

I'd adjust to player desires, or expand some little thing into a huge plot line, throw out huge chunks... Probably why I don't do adventure paths anymore.

 

[Aldarc]

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.

I remember a Dungeon article during the 4e era from Christopher Perkins talking about GMs running linear adventures. He said much the same. In truth a lot of linear adventures tend to be less like railroads and more like the PCs searching and wandering off-trail between points of the adventure.

 

[niklinna]

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.

Which "the game" is it that has exclusive claim to an entire culture of play?

 

[chaochou]

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.

Let's play poker then = $10k / $25k no limit hold-em with a $5m buy-in.

We won't deal cards though - that would be system say. As GM, I'll simply decide them.

As a player I'm sure you won't notice a difference.

 

[Aldarc]

One thing that I would note about the nomenclature "traditional." Sometimes "tradition" is not always about the oldest or original forms of something. Sometimes it's about the prevailing forms or the new normal. There are many things that are called "traditions" or "traditionals" that are actually fairly young or that have changed over time. For example, "traditional values" often aren't that traditional or old in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes traditional values are just "contemporary values" that have been supplanted by more contemporaneous, competing alternative values. That's less of an issue about jargon and more an issue with the natural use of language.