Is "GM Agency" A Thing?

[Bill Zebub]

I just think if it did, his first statement would be pretty meaningless, given there are a number of trad games that are exhaustive in the same sense PbtA is; its just that all the output is handled by the GM and they're often even more undefined.

Oh, right, that. You already said it.

 

[pemerton]

Yeah, PbtA is an interesting case. On the one hand it seems to cover everything because, by definition, anything that might possibly happen fits into one of the buckets. On the other hand, the rules don't really tell you what to do because, for an awful lot of those cases, they don't really tell you the outcome. Ok, so I either put the player "in a tight spot" or she "loses something of value". Now I have to invent what that means. So I'm really just improvising the outcome after all.

And if the player is the sort that wants to rules to define everything, so that the DM doesn't have too much power, there's a decent chance when I say, "Ok, you succeed, but you lose your grandmother's locket that you've had since you created the character" she is not going to like it.

So that sounds like a hard move. In which case it will have been either prefigured by a soft move (eg "The drug-crazed mutant has grabbed hold of your locket, trying to choke you with it! What do you do?") or else the player has handed a golden opportunity on a plate (eg "I dangle the locket in front of the mutant to try and distract it.")

I guess maybe a player might be fundamentally confused about how the game works, or not understand that the process of play means that from time-to-time the GM will follow through on whatever has been staked by the player; but the game rules are not in any way ambiguous about this!

 

[loverdrive]

I do think there's a lot of value in explicitly empowering the GM to create deliberately. Not as a reaction to whatever players are saying, not as a simulation of a world, but as a deliberate act of creation. Here's a cool story I want to tell, a combat gauntlet I've designed, whatever. It's not in any meaningful way exclusive with player agency, unless you think "I can't do literally whatever I want!" to be a violation of player agency.

I think the main obstacle to GM having a meaningful agency (as opposed to, uhm, unrestricted control) is lack of transparency.

In a hypothetical scenario where GM just allows whatever and merely reacts to input from players while exercising complete fiat ("I want to open a catboy cafe!" "Sure, you'll need [X] gold to rent a place and [Y] permissions from the city council. What ya gonna do?"), nobody at the table is really enabled to act with intentionality: players can't really predict what will happen if they do (or don't do) something, GM can't really predict what the players will do. I've been on plenty of games like that, and they inevitably devolve into a stalemate where nothing really happens, and when something does happen it still leads nowhere.

N.B.: I'm not talking about anyone acting in bad faith or whatever. Don't pull that "trust your whoever" bs on me.

In a hypothetical scenario where GM has a very tight on-the-rails story, where PCs need to travel through a treacherous forest to a tower and rescue a dragon trapped there from a princess, with no option to open a catboy cafe, BUT the players know that, everyone at the table now is enabled to act with intentionality: the players know what they must do, and can put a deliberate effort into, well, doing it, the GM knows what will happen, everyone has a sensible planning horizon.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The book is not self-actualising! In the process of play of the RPG, it is the GM who is telling the players how things are.

So what? Following a script is not exercising agency. I simply do not agree with your definition, I think it is useless. Whose mouth speaks the words is immaterial. Who originated the ideas is what matters. By your definition reading a written by another is exercising agency. That is nonsensical.

I mean, the GM could be quoting their own pre-authored material and the structure of authority, as far as play of the RPG is concerned, would be identical!

You're fixated on the timing for some reason. In such a situation the GM would have had exercised their agency prior, when they created those notes. Why it matters when they did that? What if they improvise the exact same stuff during the play?

 

[clearstream]

When we talk about "Player agency" (which we do a lot around here) usually we are talking about the ability of the players to make informed decisions that impact the outcome of play.

I think this can be answered by first of all addressing the definition. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, it's roughly

the capacity of participants in a game to take actions productive of their intended play

Each distinct game involves a large number of constructive surrenders of agency, productive of the intended and distinctive play. "Play" includes experience of the process itself, as well as any interstitial, meta and final results. A GM will thus surrender agency as and to the extent needed to satisfy this definition, i.e. in light of their intended play.

So when will a GM surrender agency? I can give an example. In my mod of 5e - working title "Gardeners" - in certain circumstances GM accepts an explicit obligation to make an adversarial choice. Here, GM surrenders agency to make a neutral or benign choice. It's done for the sake of the intended play. In our regular Wednesday game night at the table, I as GM needed to choose where a certain MacGuffin was to be found. The circumstances of the choice engaged the relevant rule, obliging me to make an adversarial choice. The placement led directly to a sequence that all players enjoyed (they outright told me at the end of the night that they had a lot of fun with it and were excited to continue). PCs were forced to explore a site they had discovered* but had been avoiding until now. (*Gardeners is low-no-myth, so the process of discovery is different from more usual modes of D&D.)

There's nothing innovative about the rule in question. It's like is seen in many other games, and other threads on these forums have even opened with discussion of a purpose of rules being to make us say things we don't want to say. I first encountered this problem running FKR years ago, so I knew I wanted the rule in Gardeners. At times - given the play is not following a prepped AP or anything similar - what comes next is open and it isn't always clear that it would be right to say something bad for players. Importantly, players of Gardeners are aware of this rule so they know what my job is going to be. I think it leads to better player agency.

All of the above proceeds from the point that every participant in a game surrenders agency for a reason: to foster their intended experience. That includes GM.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I just made some notes for an opening scene for my next Torchbearer session - the arrival of the adventuring friend of one of the PCs, the Elven ranger Glothfindel riding his horse Asfaloth.

In making my notes, I quickly reviewed how JRRT introduces Glorfindel in the Flight to the Ford (the last chapter of Book 1 of LotR). I was particularly interested in how he describes the bells and the hooves, and which it is that the Hobbits hear first.

In terms of names and tropes this is all highly derivative. That doesn't mean that JRRT is exercising agency (from the grave?) over my RPGing.

Only if we want to be poetic about it.

And of course any creative act has influences, but if you choose to plagiarise another creative then you have also seriously limited your own creative agency.

I have also to say that wholesale copying characters from media and putting them into your game that is presumably not set in the world of that media is something I find very strange. I used to do it as kid, but it certainly is not something I would today consider a good practice. YMMV.

 

[Reynard]

So what? Following a script is not exercising agency.

Running an adventure is not reading a script. Like, at all.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Running an adventure is not reading a script. Like, at all.

It is a bit. A very loose script with a lot of room for improvisation in most cases. But insisting that the analogy is not perfect is missing the point. @pemerton thinks that it doesn't matter how much is dictated by the module 15%, 50%, 95%. Doesn't matter at all, still high GM agency situation. That is what I am contesting.

 

[Reynard]

It is a bit. A very loose script with a lot of room for improvisation in most cases. But insisting that the analogy is not perfect is missing the point. @pemerton thinks that it doesn't matter how much is dictated by the module 15%, 50%, 95%. Doesn't matter at all, still high GM agency situation. That is what I am contesting.

That's not the way I read the argument. It seemed to me @pemerton was pushing back against your assertion that using a module means that the GM isn't doing anything besides reading what's on the page.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That's not the way I read the argument. It seemed to me @pemerton was pushing back against your assertion that using a module means that the GM isn't doing anything besides reading what's on the page.

Nope. He claimed that running a module is a high DM agency situation. I said it is not. That's what this was about. At no point I have claimed that GM has no agency in such a situation, merely that they have way more in some other ways of playing, thus that is a poor example of high GM agency play. That's it.

And I have already explained this several times.