D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pointofyou]

I personally would consider the above as a sign that a player was not playing the game in good faith. IE not attempting to fight for what their character believes in. In particular if the character as expressed through play obviously has other things they care about more than the beliefs enumerated on their character sheet than the beliefs on their character sheet need to change. Whether I was the GM or another player I would definitely raise the issue with the group.

My consideration was more that the beliefs not on the character sheet would be either mostly redundant or secondary. I agree that having a character's most important beliefs not on the character sheet would at least tend toward bad faith.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My consideration was more that the beliefs not on the character sheet would be either mostly redundant or secondary. I agree that having a character's most important beliefs not on the character sheet would at least tend toward bad faith.

Then, see my previous post: If these beliefs are redundant or secondary--does that not mean they are, in gameplay terms, irrelevant? And if they are in fact irrelevant, how can they be used to exploit the GM or jockey for special advantage?

 

[Cadence]

I thought you were asking about tactical advantages. I answered by setting out, in brief, the rules for tactical advantages in Burning Wheel.

On task vs conflict resolution, this from Vincent Baker remains pretty insightful nearly 20 years on:

In task resolution, what's at stake is the task itself. "I crack the safe!" "Why?" "Hopefully to get the dirt on the supervillain!" What's at stake is: do you crack the safe?​

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In conflict resolution, what's at stake is why you're doing the task. "I crack the safe!" "Why?" "Hopefully to get the dirt on the supervillain!" What's at stake is: do you get the dirt on the supervillain?​

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Which is important to the resolution rules: opening the safe, or getting the dirt? That's how you tell whether it's task resolution or conflict resolution.​

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Task resolution is succeed/fail. Conflict resolution is win/lose. You can succeed but lose, fail but win.​

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In conventional rpgs, success=winning and failure=losing only provided the GM constantly maintains that relationship - by (eg) making the safe contain the relevant piece of information after you've cracked it. It's possible and common for a GM to break the relationship instead, turning a string of successes into a loss, or a failure at a key moment into a win anyway.​

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Let's assume that we haven't yet established what's in the safe.​

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"I crack the safe!" "Why?" "Hopefully to get the dirt on the supervillain!"​

It's task resolution. Roll: Success!​

"You crack the safe, but there's no dirt in there, just a bunch of in-order papers."​

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"I crack the safe!" "Why?" "Hopefully to get the dirt on the supervillain!"​

It's task resolution. Roll: Failure!​

"The safe's too tough, but as you're turning away from it, you see a piece of paper in the wastebasket..."​

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(Those examples show how, using task resolution, the GM can break success=winning, failure=losing.)​

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That's, if you ask me, the big problem with task resolution: whether you succeed or fail, the GM's the one who actually resolves the conflict. The dice don't, the rules don't; you're depending on the GM's mood and your relationship and all those unreliable social things the rules are supposed to even out.​

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Task resolution, in short, puts the GM in a position of priviledged authorship. Task resolution will undermine your collaboration.​

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Whether you roll for each flash of the blade or only for the whole fight is a whole nother issue: scale, not task vs. conflict. This is sometimes confusing for people; you say "conflict resolution" and they think you mean "resolve the whole scene with one roll." No, actually you can conflict-resolve a single blow, or task-resolve the whole fight in one roll:​

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"I slash at his face, like ha!" "Why?" "To force him off-balance!"​

Conflict Resolution: do you force him off-balance?​

Roll: Loss!​

"He ducks side to side, like fwip fwip! He keeps his feet and grins."​

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"I fight him!" "Why?" "To get past him to the ship before it sails!"​

Task Resolution: do you win the fight (that is, do you fight him successfully)?​

Roll: Success!​

"You beat him! You disarm him and kick his butt!"​

(Unresolved, left up to the GM: do you get to the ship before it sails?)​

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(Those examples show small-scale conflict resolution vs. large-scale task resolution.)​

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Something I haven't examined: in a conventional rpg, does task resolution + consequence mechanics = conflict resolution? "Roll to hit" is task resolution, but is "Roll to hit, roll damage" conflict resolution?​

Thank you!!! I need a less busy day to digest it again, but that feels very helpful and even more than what I was hoping for.

 

[pointofyou]

Then, see my previous post: If these beliefs are redundant or secondary--does that not mean they are, in gameplay terms, irrelevant? And if they are in fact irrelevant, how can they be used to exploit the GM or jockey for special advantage?

I wouldn't expect them to be. I think my discussion with @pemerton et alia was not particularly about gaming the GM though it might have spun off that discussion.

 

[Campbell]

Was that answer supposed to be to me? I was asking if Umbran's comments on Tactical Task Resolution and Conflict Resolution seemed to fit with your experience.

It fits my experience. I know that regardless of success or failure a new scene is going to be framed immediately following this one. The reward systems in place also usually reward failure or risk at least as much as success.

That's not to say that there is not degenerate Story Now play. Only that degenerate play looks different. One example is the aforementioned trying to remove important elements of the character from stakes through omission or not engaging with defined character elements.

 

[FrogReaver]

This is a quote from a blogpost describing the strengths (and some criticisms) of Burning Wheel:

Finally, the GM is obligated to tell you before you roll what the consequence of failure is. But get this: the player isn’t obligated to make that roll. They have to consent to it.

Have you read or played Burning Wheel? This claim is false.

From p 248 of the Adventure Burner (which is reprinted in The Codex):

Once you've stated your intent and task, once your character is in motion and the obstacle has been presented, you're expected to roll the dice. Even if it's too hard! . . .​

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Any negotiation about the appropriateness of the action should be handled when you state your intent. Any questions about rules clarifications and obstacles should be handled before you get to the intent stage. . . . An obstacle isn't a physical thing. It's a metaphor. Once it's presented, you need to confront it!​

In other words, the rule is actually the opposite of what you've stated.

@pemerton
As you can see I didn’t just pull that out of a hat either.

Maybe I should ask why it seems no one that plays burning wheel can agree about how it should be played?

 

[bloodtide]

I don't know what this nonsense is, nor why I and other posters have been moderated for far less. I don't really know what a "Casual GM" is, but I'm reasonably sure that I don't qualify, and I know several other posters in this conversation who don't, either.

I have no idea what type of GM you are.

A Casual GM, typically found in a Casual Game really just does not "care". They are there to "play the game"by hanging out and not playing the game, eating snacks, drinking drinks and goofing off. The Casual GM does not really keep track of details or anything else...not even the rules. The Casual GM has little or no prep, and often just "just makes up stuff on the fly". So they love it when a player does their job and makes something up for them.

I expect that at points in your gaming history, there have been people at your table who had better ideas than you did. Based on what you're saying here, it sounds like you'd either deny that, or else you'd stick to the lesser idea because it was yours rather than incorporate anything anyone else offers.

I'm not sure what you mean by "better ideas"....."different ideas" sure.

I don't really get the 'incorporate' idea, in game play. I make an adventure, so like six weeks in the adventure a player randomly says "It would be cool if the bad guy was a troll", my response would just be "ok, that's nice."

Right, so you don't want to yield control of the game content basically ever. That's perfectly fine as a preference, and if all participants know and accept it, then it's no harm no foul.

Well....for my game it's agree to my way or don't game with me.

There are other folks who enjoy collaboration.

True.

I mean, the parts you're criticizing here are the ones you came up with. I didn't mention a healer or free healing or a 10 GP bail.

Yes, I do add things to posts?

These are the ideas you come up with that your players can't beat, huh?

I don't know what 'beat the players' means in this context.

These kinds of rules exist specifically so that it's not the GM deciding everything. That's the whole point. So you're fighting it tooth and nail and trying to caricaturize it and reduce it to absurdity... but as others have pointed out, there are plenty of rules in D&D and similar games that work following the same basic process. I don't know if you're failing to make that connection or if you're ignoring it, but either way, you don't seem to be managing to follow along.

Putting aside the "player making wishes", it still does make sense. The rules only give the player a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny 'window' to attempt to do something...and all still under the vague limiting rules and the GMs whim. I guess you can say it's a tiny bit more player agency then a game like D&D, if you count things that way.

My first post in this thread was that "Player agency is when a player gets to say what happens in the game" and though it's an imprecise definition (it probably could use something like "with the support of the rules"), I haven't seen anything said since that contradicts it.

This is my point though. Sometimes..and only at very specific times a player can say something very limited in every way, and still subject to a roll and the GM whim, but after all that....the player can make a tiny, limited "thing that happens".

It's like saying "If you got to a Wal mart parking lot and walk around and find a single penny you can say you 'made some money' ". And, yes, officially the money you have goes up by one cent. But it's not exactly much to celebrate.

Here's an example from the Burning Wheel Adventure Burner (p 232):


a group . . . needed to sneak into a well-guarded citadel tower. One player chimed in, "I have Architecture. I want to use my knowledge to find us a secret entrance."

There's intent and task - if it succeeds, the PC finds the secret entrance they are looking for; if it fails, the the GM establishes a consequence

Now this is exactly what I posted about several times. Something several people said would never happen. But it's in the Rulebook?

So a player, can just say anytime "I look for a secret door"...and if they make the check, 'pop' the secret door was there all along. So the character can 'find' a secret door...anytime anywhere.

My example of a player saying "I look for a pile of gold under a tree" would never happen.....but a player saying "I look for a secret door" can happen all the time.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Maybe I should ask why it seems no one that plays burning wheel can agree about how it should be played?

Probably for the same reason that no one plays D&D the same way.

That said, I think that blog post, at least in the section that you've quoted regarding consenting to a roll, is, at best, misrepresenting play. (Especially with the hyperlink back to the post on safety tools, which frames the processes of play in a strange way, at least from where I'm sitting.)

@pemerton's cited the No Fishing guidance from the Adventure Burner/Codex, which covers fishing for better Obstacles (Obs). The sections immediately preceding it are "No Weasels" and "But Weasels," which I think are relevant here, too. The former is derived from Mouseguard, where it's a hard and fast rule. It says that once the Ob is set for a task, you must roll — you can't weasel out of it. Crane resists making it a hard and fast rule for BW in the "But Weasels" section, which says that you can sometimes avoid making the roll, but that means that your characters changed their mind at the last minute, and the fictional situation advances somehow, even if it's just time moving on. The example given is players deciding their characters will climb a curtain wall to gain access to a castle, but, upon finding out the Ob is too high, they walk away and approach the castle from the front gates. In this case, Crane says that what's happening fictionally is that the characters showed up with their gear, ready to climb, looked at the wall, said, "Oh, naughty word that," and tried something else, presumably after ditching their climbing gear, etc. So, there's a reframing of the scene as a result of the players changing their minds. They went to climb, but they didn't. But there is a mild fictional cost to that choice.

Which is all to say that to the extent that you can decide not to roll something as a player after an Ob's set, that refusal to test will manifest itself in the fiction. And really if this is happening on the reg, something's gone wrong — managing impossible Obs is what artha, FoRKs, helping dice, and advantage dice are for — though I'm amused at the idea of a bunch of Burning Wheel characters muddling through a game like George B. McClellan at the beginning of the Civil War ("McClellan could have ended the war then, instead he did nothing" seems to be most of the first couple episodes of Ken Burns's The Civil War).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In context, it wasn't meant as a criticism of any kind of play; it was a claim that all play works this way, with (AIUI) @pemerton claiming that BW play does not actually permit this "secretly exploit the GM purely for player advantage" stuff that had been asserted to be universal. Sounds like you're of the camp that such secret-player-exploitation-of-GM is, in fact, universal?

Well, I did say it wasn't likely to be possible, I was just hedging slightly TBH. In truth perhaps a player can follow an optimal strategy with a given GM, but I don't see how that is even bad play. The problem is, narrativist play is not classic play to challenge player skill. Even in BitD where skilled play is a real thing, the GM piles stuff on, there's no 'winning' in the end, it's just one challenge after another. It's just kinda like life, you don't win.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Now this is exactly what I posted about several times. Something several people said would never happen. But it's in the Rulebook?

So a player, can just say anytime "I look for a secret door"...and if they make the check, 'pop' the secret door was there all along. So the character can 'find' a secret door...anytime anywhere.

My example of a player saying "I look for a pile of gold under a tree" would never happen.....but a player saying "I look for a secret door" can happen all the time.

Not in Dungeon World! There's no rule or process in the game where a player pops something into existence. You can examine an area and trigger Discern Realities, which may, if you roll decently, obligate the GM to answer some general questions like "what here is useful to me?" The GM can basically answer any way they want that fits with the general principles of play!

Now, a very clever player might be able, once in a great while, box in the GM a bit, like by getting chased into a dead end and then searching. The obvious useful result is a secret door. But suppose they rolled badly, now they get hit with bad news AND they're trapped in a dead end!

EDIT: and to elaborate slightly, DW (PbtA generally) is not really an 'intent' resolution kind of system. It is more just you describe your actions, and you 'Do It', so you could say you search an area, but "for secret doors" isn't really a thing. At most you could maybe describe in minute detail the type of searching you do. That would be acceptable play, but it is NOT guaranteed to focus the resulting fiction on secret doors. It might not even trigger Discern Realities, it might bring some other outcome! The GM determines which move is triggered (with the obvious caveat that the table can pretty much reject those determinations if they really want to). The GM, reasonably, might not trigger ANY move when a player describes looking for cracks in the wall and scrape marks on the floor, maybe he just says "as you all focus your full attention on this, some goblins jump you!" or something. Or maybe just "you search until your torches go out." (deprive party of equipment, a soft move probably, definitely allowable).

Now, all that being said, I don't think the idea of a compelling case for a secret door is actually a problem ANYWAY, DW says "draw maps, leave blanks" and this is what the blanks are for!