Is "GM Agency" A Thing?

[Thomas Shey]

Can it be done? I mean . . . sure, I guess. But why would you bother? You clearly don't want to play basketball as it's intended to be played.

While I generally agree (and this is coming from someone who hasn't on the whole found storygames to his taste) that Celebrim seems more than a little off to me, the answer to this question is that someone got into a particular game because its topic and rough overview seemed interesting to him, but he was so used to doing things in certain ways that he was going to force the one at hand into that, too. This is far from an unknown phenomenon with games with a strong stylistic approach.

 

[pemerton]

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.

if you choose to plagiarise another creative then you have also seriously limited your own creative agency.

I am not talking about "creative agency". As I posted not very far upthread,

I think it is pretty fundamental, if we are going to actually understand how RPGing works, to separate who authors stuff in the abstract from who makes stuff part of the shared fiction as part of the process of play.

When a player rolls up a Dwarf PC and calls that PC Gimli, they are of course borrowing from JRRT. When a player rolls up a paladin PC and decides that their paladin is on a quest to regain the sword that will unify the kingdom, they are of course borrowing from Arthurian legend and all the many authors (including JRRT) who have themselves borrowed from that material.

This shows us the players in question aren't fully original. But it doesn't have any bearing on the degree of agency they exercise as players of the RPG in question.

Likewise for the GM.

I am talking about who establishes that <such-and-such a thing> or <such-and-such a series of events> is part of the shared fiction. The module author does not make the stuff they wrote part of any shared fiction. All they have done is write a book. It is the participants at the table who, among themselves, establish the shared fiction. And in RPGing which allocates roles among those participants in the traditional way (GM and players) and in which a module is being used in the traditional way (ie as a source of backstory that the GM draws upon), it is the GM who is doing the bulk of that establishing, using the module as a source.

In my last Torchbearer session, I used material from the Tower of the Stars adventure in the Cartographer's Companion. That scenario was written by Radek Drozdalski. But he was not exercising agency over my RPG session. A year or two ago I ran a session of White Plume Mountain using an AD&D variant. Lawrence Schick wrote the module, but he was not exercising agency over my RPG session.

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?

I am not focusing on timing of authorship as such. I am focusing on who makes stuff part of the shared fiction. If a GM authors notes, reads from a module, or makes stuff up - if they are principally responsible for establishing the content of the shared fiction, then that's that.

Timing of authorship is relevant only when it feeds into processes of play. Eg in classic dungeon crawl play, authoring in advance so that the puzzle and challenges are fixed in place at the time of actual play is crucial. Gygax's advice to players in his PHB, for instance, makes zero sense if the GM is not bound by the map and key that have already been authored.

And in a very different paradigm of play - "story now" - then there are certain things that cannot be authored in advance, because the process of play demands that they be established in response to inputs and constraints that are themselves generated only during the course of play.

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.

I don't know what you mean by "good practice". I don't feel any shame in the fact that JRRT provides a wealth of compelling tropes and characters that goes beyond what I am capable of. I also don't think that the Greyhawk setting that I default to is so pure that it will be corrupted in some fashion by the Tolkien-esque allusions of me and some of my players.

When you play D&D do you expunge all the Hobbits, Ents and Balrogs?

 

[pemerton]

While I generally agree (and this is coming from someone who hasn't on the whole found storygames to his taste) that Celebrim seems more than a little off to me, the answer to this question is that someone got into a particular game because its topic and rough overview seemed interesting to him, but he was so used to doing things in certain ways that he was going to force the one at hand into that, too. This is far from an unknown phenomenon with games with a strong stylistic approach.

There seems to be a lot of Dungeon World play that approaches it as more-or-less neo-trad play, without using the processes of play the actual game spells out.

If people are enjoying themselves, go for it! But I personally don't think of that as canonical DW play.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

@pemerson, I don't agree with your definition of agency and, frankly, I think it is utterly useless. To me it matters quite a bit who created the things being inserted in the shared fiction. By your definition people reading a literal script are exercising similar agency than ones improvising a scene. That is simply absurd.

Also, my setting doesn't have any of those Middle-Earth elements you mention, and if there were I wouldn't call them by those names and I would personalise them somehow. To me it feels very jarring if named characters and elements from different settings are mixed, unless it is intentionally some gonzo mashup. This obviously doesn't bother you, so it's fine. We are not playing together and this hardly is the only reason why we never should.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There seems to be a lot of Dungeon World play that approaches it as more-or-less neo-trad play, without using the processes of play the actual game spells out.

If people are enjoying themselves, go for it! But I personally don't think of that as canonical DW play.

Well, you can go down a deep rabbit-hole of how important it is to approach a game with the approach its designed for, but at the very least when talking about a game one ought to at least be aware what that approach is.

(This is ignoring games where the GM advice for the game seems completely at odds with what the mechanics seem designed to support for the moment).

(I've also heard there may be some elements in at least the original DW that confuse the issue here a bit, but am not personally qualified to judge).

 

[pemerton]

Well, you can go down a deep rabbit-hole of how important it is to approach a game with the approach its designed for, but at the very least when talking about a game one ought to at least be aware what that approach is.

(This is ignoring games where the GM advice for the game seems completely at odds with what the mechanics seem designed to support for the moment).

(I've also heard there may be some elements in at least the original DW that confuse the issue here a bit, but am not personally qualified to judge).

In no particular order:

There are RPGs that certainly fit your first parenthetical remark! But I don't think Apocalypse World is one of them. It's probably one of the most deliberate and careful of RPGs ever put together.

I've also heard things similar to your second parenthetical remark, but I personally don't see it. I think the writing in AW is, overall, crisper and clearer than DW, but I don't think DW is very ambiguous.

On the non-parenthetical part of your post: for the players, I would say not particular important at all, provided that they're not having a bad play experience as a result. That proviso matters, because if someone reports that game such-and-such sucks and then it turns out that they were ignoring the rules, well I have modest sympathy at best.

But for discussion of a RPG, I think it is helpful to talk about how it was written to be played. In particular, there is a very predominant approach to RPG discussion that assumes that all RPGing involves basically DL-ish procedures of play, with the only differences being minutiae of PC build and action resolution rules. While that assumption is being made, serious discussion about RPGing is pretty much impossible in my view.

 

[Campbell]

I am not super familiar with Dungeon World, but Apocalypse World does not have GM advice. It has an MC playbook with explicit instructions on how to run the game. The basic structure of GM Moves to provoke player action followed by directly asking a player [character name], what do you do? is just as much a rule as cyclical initiative in modern D&D. Sure, you can ignore that text, but it's basically the same as ignoring the text in the basic moves. In fact, doing so pretty much disrupts 6- results which require a GM to make as hard a move as you like.

I mean no game rules are self-enforcing, including mechanical doodads. That doesn't mean roleplaying games cannot specify a structure of play (D&D does) or define the nature and responsibilities of the GM role for their particular game (D&D does).

 

[pemerton]

@pemerson, I don't agree with your definition of agency and, frankly, I think it is utterly useless. To me it matters quite a bit who created the things being inserted in the shared fiction. By your definition people reading a literal script are exercising similar agency than ones improvising a scene. That is simply absurd.

I've not said anything about the agency of playwrights, producers, directors, actors and others involved in theatre. And until you make clear what you think playing a RPG has in common with producing a play, I don't think what I've said about RPGing has any implications for theatre.

I am talking about the play of a game, and the procedures of play. The game I have in mind has, at its core, the creation of a shared fiction. And I am talking about who it is who does that. So far from being useless, this is fundamental to understanding the play experience of RPGing. If I sit down at your table, and you play me through a railroad, it matters not a wit to my experience as a player that you wrote the stuff or that you're working from a module. All the fiction is being mediated to me by you as GM. That makes you the high agency participant, and makes me a low-agency participant, in the play of the game.

The implication of your position is that every table that railroaded its way through Dead Gods was an instance of Monte Cook's exercise of agency. For me, to state that implication is to reveal the implausibility of your position. In the imagined scenario I am not playing a game with Monte Cook. I am playing a game with the other people at the table, including the GM who is delivering all the content.

Also, my setting doesn't have any of those Middle-Earth elements you mention, and if there were I wouldn't call them by those names and I would personalise them somehow. To me it feels very jarring if named characters and elements from different settings are mixed, unless it is intentionally some gonzo mashup. This obviously doesn't bother you, so it's fine. We are not playing together and this hardly is the only reason why we never should.

Do you get this particular to every other D&D player (and designer) who uses Elves, Dwarves, Halfling, Ents, Balors, Orcs, etc - or is it just me?

 

[Umbran]

Following a script is not exercising agency.

If there is no agency to be found following a script, then no actor could ever make a choice that makes their performance of a part different from any other.

 

[aramis erak]

Can’t the same be said of player agency?

Yes. If player agency is maximized, it results in (# of players) different stories, unrelated to each other.