Is "GM Agency" A Thing?

[aramis erak]

Houserule only work because the social contract allows for the particular ones chosen.

Houseruling is actually part of the rules of certain very important games, most notably D&D OE and AD&D 1E.
AD&D 1E even goes to the point of explicitly encouraging changing the rules for a number of reasons - player knowledge of them included.

Gygax later railed against the very attitude he penned into AD&D 1E, because it made each campaign pretty much a new game. That was bad as a brand, but good for GM tweaking.

That said, houserules don't carry the same cachet of authority in all RPG fandoms.

 

[Lanefan]

That'd be more of an issue if I didn't think more players should be invested in the game as a whole, too. In addition, if most mechanical decisions are going to be precedential, I think a proper group is going to recognize that making the decision that serves them in the moment (and remember, it may not be serving more than one of them) will pretty quickly teach them to think about how they're going to feel when that decision comes back around.

I congratulate your optimism here, but experience tells me the in-the-moment-advantage option will nearly always trump the long-term good of the game option if-when players* (no matter how experienced) are given that choice.

* - the exception being those (IME few) who have also done a fair bit of GMing and thus recognize that a long-term view even exists.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Except, at least the way I both see it and run it, they always have the option of abandoning the dragon to its fate and instead going off and setting up a catboy cafe (whatever that is).

And if that's what they suddenly decide to do then it's on me-as-GM to react accordingly (in an ideal world, I'm capable of such) and keep things moving, even if said movement is in a completely unforeseen-by-me direction.

 

[Lanefan]

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'm not so sure it is.

Riffing off of someone else's ideas, or using those ideas as a foundation for your own, is a time-honoured tradition in pretty much all realms of creativity, why should RPG elements be any different?

If I-as-player roll up a character I have - or bloody well should have! - the agency to choose that character's name; and whether I dream up that name from thin air or use a random name or letter-generation table or just name it after a similar, better known, character from fiction (e.g. Gimli) is irrelevant. The agency here lies in my being able to freely choose the character's name in the first place...and to bring this back to GM agency, the same applies when she gives names to the setting's NPCs.

On a bigger scale, what you're saying is that if a GM uses a pre-fab setting, be it from history or fiction or a combination (e.g. 15th-century France, Arthurian Britain, the Forgotten Realms), that GM isn't exercising agency...and yet the GM has exercised agency simply by choosing that setting and can exercise a lot more of it by tweaking the setting to suit the specific campaign she intends to run.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

The setting I used for a previous campaign had Hobbits and Ents (but not Balrogs, I call them Demons and Devils instead) and various other JRRT elements...all set in the Forgotten Realms other than some key bits* I redrew and redesigned from scratch. You might call it a mashup, but if anything it was less gonzo than the FR setting as written.

My current setting contains knock-offs of all sorts of historic cultures (ancient Greek, Roman, Spanish, British, Norse, Sumerian, etc. - the Xena-Hercules setting was kind of a template for this) plus Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits in a Tolkeinic vein, plus a small chunk of (Greyhawk? not sure - whatever B10 Night's Dark Terror uses for its setting) and a few other bits and bobs. So far so good, fifteen years in and counting.

It's my setting and I'll stick what I like in it.

* - basically everything north of Waterdeep and west of the Anauroch desert.

 

[soviet]

No no, the purebred 100% originality of Dungeons and Dragons must be protected against all outside influences

 

[clearstream]

I don't really follow your example?

Your saying as a GM you "surrendered agency" to a rule? You "surrendered to some scribbles on a page?" I mean, ok, you choose to do that....you chose to surrender.

Yes, and that is what my example is emphasizing.

But, a lot of other GMs...like myself...would just laugh at the rulebook. And maybe flick it onto the floor. And then just do whatever I want in the game on a whim. And that rulebook could just sit on the floor forever.

To reflect on that, are there any times that you choose to follow the rulebook? For example, do you follow any part of the rules for character creation? How about for combat? How about for exploration? Of course you might set them aside whenever you like, but are there any times when or ways in which you choose to follow the game text?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

It has quite a bit in common. It is production of a story and people inhabiting and expressing characters. Main difference is that in RPG there is no prewritten story (completely prewritten at least) and it is collaboratively created by the participants.

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.

But you're completely omitting who makes decisions about the contents of the shared fiction. To me decision making is a crucial aspect of agency, and you're completely sidestepping that.

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.

Here we again see this player vs GM attitude. We were not talking about player agency here, this thread is about GM agency. But the structures of the play does limit agency of both, and different structures can have different limitations. It indeed might be a low player agency situation, but it is also a low GM agency situation, as they both are required to follow a prewritten structure to some degree.

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.

Monte Cook is not exercising agency here, but that the GM is following his notes means that the decisions they can make about what to introduce into the shared fiction are limited.

I am actually quite surprised about you stance here. You have talked endlessly about how Story Now games allow greater player agency and one manifestation of this is that the players have greater freedom to introduce things in the shared fiction, such as having their chracters "remember" that tower of a named wizard exists and happens to be nearby. By your logic the exact same player agency would be attained if the player was handed the setting book and they were allowed to quote things from it to introduce into the shared fiction!

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?

I mean it is highly derivative and I prefer settings with more originality. But it certainly is interesting how many things Tolkien introduced have become such household names that they are concidered "generic" and versions of them can be found anywhere. Though usually there is at least some effort for differentiation. For example D&D halflings are no longer just Hobbits with serial-numbers filed off, they have quite a bit of Kender DNA in them and have become their own thing. In any case, it was inclusion of an named character that I found particularly jarring. Like there certainly can be human smugglers in Star Trek setting, but including one called Hans Solo flying Millennium Hawk would be rather bizarre.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I'll add an example to illustrate my position.

Let's say that during the play it for some reason becomes important to know what gods, if any, northern ice orcs worship.

Some ways we can get this information are:
1) The GM decides.
2) The player decides.
3) A book tells us.

To me it is pretty clear that 1) gives the GM agency, 2) gives it to the player, whilst 3) really offers no meaningful agency to either. And I don't really think it much matters who reads the information from the book.

 

[Reynard]

I'll add an example to illustrate my position.

Let's say that during the play it for some reason becomes important to know what gods, if any, northern ice orcs worships.

Some ways we can get this information are:
1) The GM decides.
2) The player decides.
3) A book tells us.

To me it is pretty clear that 1) gives the GM agency, 2) gives it to the player, whilst 3) really offers no meaningful agency to either. And I don't really think it much matters who reads the information from the book.

4) We roll on some tables and let Fate decide.