Is "GM Agency" A Thing?

[Hussar]

"Guys, I've got this dead, lifeless game world where nothing ever happens. Wanna play in it?"

Pitching - and then running - a living breathing game world somehow seems far likelier to generate interest.....

Only when every line has bought into the illusion that the dm dictating events somehow equates with a living breathing world.

“Hey guys, let’s play in a game where I will dictate everything in the world except your five characters and nothing you do actually matters unless I let it matter” would be a hard sell too.

 

[Hussar]

What's the alternative? That there be no consequences stemming from what the players didn't choose to take on? No in-setting cause and effect where, if left uninterrupted, one thing reasonably leads to the next? No evolving backstory above and beyond that which the PCs specifically interact with? And how about campaigns or settings with more than one PC party?

Ideally, a game world doesn't just sit there static waiting for some PCs to show up. It evolves. Monarchs die and are replaced. Storms destroy a small town. A new temple is built to the glory of Jupiter. A war begins in the east, while another ends in the south. And so on.

And, ideally, a game world reacts to what the PCs do in or to it. The PCs kill the evil Emperor, so a five-way civil war erupts between factions looking to fill that void. The PCs destroy an imprisoned deity and in so doing quite literally take away the primary reason the game world is articifially held in its orbit, so the world starts drifting into its natural (and rather unsuitable for life) orbit. Both of these happened (with consequences still ongoing) in my current campaign, and while they've largely left the civil war to its own devices I strongly suspect there's going to be a lot of effort put towards trying to fix the planet's orbit; and not entirely intentionally they've already laid some of the groundwork for so doing.

The alternative is letting the players have access to some degree in determining setting and world building stuff.

 

[Lanefan]

The alternative is letting the players have access to some degree in determining setting and world building stuff.

Including determining the downstream consequences of their characters' actions?

'Cause that's what we're talking about here, and as those consequences (in theory anyway!) somewhat naturally flow from the setting as created the players - having had a hand in creating said setting - will be far better informed as to what those downstream consequences might be than would their characters. And suddenly you've got a metagaming problem to deal with; a problem that was completely avoidable.

 

[pemerton]

The point is that the world being responsive to player choices is a good thing, even if those choice are to not get involved. If player agency is the defining feature of the RPG -- as I believe it is -- then consequences for choices is extremely important. How those consequences are actually determined and articulated is, of course, highly dependent on the individual GM.

When the players (through their PCs) get back to that town it won't be the same.

<snip>

As for player agency, the opportunity for - and exercise of - that came when they decided to do the dungeon rather than the Thieves.

Having to choose between two potentially bad outcomes is still a valid choice.

It’s not about having to choose between two potentially bad outcomes so much as between two GM stories.

What @hawkeyfan said, 1000%.

The GM establishes the stakes. The GM establishes the choice context. The GM decides the consequences. That is not player agency. It's the GM telling the players a story. The fact that the GM might have been prompted to tell a different story had the players made a different choice doesn't change this fact.

 

[pemerton]

The alternative is letting the players have access to some degree in determining setting and world building stuff.

Including determining the downstream consequences of their characters' actions?

Including determining what is staked, what matters, etc.

If the players want to play a game of urban intrigue, they can probably do a pretty good job of helping establish the warring factions etc.

Read my account, not far upthread, of how my Torchbearer game started. Now suppose that 4 players all decide that their PCs are from a Bustling Metropolis. And they create their mentors, friends, enemies etc. We're likely to have some factions and rivalries there. The GM has material to build from, just as I have done in my game, as I've described in that post.

Maybe there is also a dungeon 3 weeks away from town, maybe there isn't. It's doing its thing, whatever that is, just as it has been for lo these many years prior to the PCs starting to be active. If the game of intrigue is firing on all cylinders, it's not remotely clear to me what benefit to the game follows from the GM deciding that right now is also when the dungeon denizens suddenly slaughter all the farmers.

 

[Lanefan]

Maybe there is also a dungeon 3 weeks away from town, maybe there isn't. It's doing its thing, whatever that is, just as it has been for lo these many years prior to the PCs starting to be active. If the game of intrigue is firing on all cylinders, it's not remotely clear to me what benefit to the game follows from the GM deciding that right now is also when the dungeon denizens suddenly slaughter all the farmers.

Wouldn't most reasonable PCs be at least passingly interested in news (and thus players be interested in hearing said news) of what's going on beyond the scope of their own immediate endeavours, much as we in the real world follow news of events half a world away that may or may not ever have any significant effect on our lives?

If yes (and for me that "yes" is a given), then the GM now and then narrating news from elsewhere is a useful thing for said GM to do; never mind it's entirely possible that the contents of said news might affect what the players have their PCs do next, or further downstream. And it reinforces the notion that the setting is a bigger place than just what the PCs see and-or interact with.

For example, the Queen died last year; and while her passing may not matter much to our day-to-day lives in Canada and Australia we all still made note of it as an event when we heard about it. Same would be true in a game setting: if the reigning monarch were to die, sooner or later that would become a topic of local conversation and the PCs will hear about it even through all the intrigues they're planning. How can there be any problem with this?

 

[pemerton]

Wouldn't most reasonable PCs be at least passingly interested in news (and thus players be interested in hearing said news) of what's going on beyond the scope of their own immediate endeavours, much as we in the real world follow news of events half a world away that may or may not ever have any significant effect on our lives?

<snip>

For example, the Queen died last year; and while her passing may not matter much to our day-to-day lives in Canada and Australia we all still made note of it as an event when we heard about it. Same would be true in a game setting: if the reigning monarch were to die, sooner or later that would become a topic of local conversation and the PCs will hear about it even through all the intrigues they're planning. How can there be any problem with this?

I'm not sure when the notion of following "the news" came about, as a cultural practice. My guess would be the 19th century, tracking the emergence of mass literacy. My sense is that it would be quite anachronistic in a FRPG.

But issues of anachronism to one side, I think we can assume that the PCs, as they talk to people, are learning about who grew this year's biggest marrow, whether the local lord broke an arm falling from horseback, etc. Likewise they will know all sorts of other things by direct observation, like who has built a new shed onto their house, and how many kids the publican has, etc.

But there seems no great benefit in making any of this a focus of play. What interest does it hold?

As @Hussar said, right now it may be raining in a Japanese town that I'd never heard of before his post. But I don't follow that. Why, in a game, would I want the GM to spend time telling me comparable trivia that has no existence or meaning outside the GM's imagination.

And once we get to non-trivial things, like necromancers rendering settlements into ghost towns, or thieves' guilds taking over cities, I stand by my remarks upthread, that this is the GM telling a story which is either irrelevant colour or the entry point to a railroad.

 

[Maxperson]

I think it's self-evident that an (imaginary) place with (imaginary) inhabitants has events occurring to those people, and instigated by those people, all the time. As @Hussar said, right now it's raining somewhere in the world that you've never heard of, and someone is praising the freshness of the air or is thankful for the water, while someone else is frustrated that their laundry is getting wet or the hole they were digging is now a puddle or whatever else it might be.

These are Red Herrings. Nobody is talking about things as minor as laundry or holes filling with water on the other side of the world. Your examples are just a distraction from the point, rather than addressing the point.

Suppose that the players don't have their PCs pursue the necromancer. Why did they make this choice? What are their preferences about the sorts of situations they want to deal with in the game? The GM who decides to do what Maxperson suggests is not running a more "realistic" game than the one who decides that the necromancer, thankful to have escaped the PCs' vengeance, decides "never again" and settles down as a farmer instead. The GM who decides that the consequence of the players' choice not to have their PCs pursue the necromancer is that, in the fiction, their PCs are casually responsible for dozens or hundreds of deaths is not adding "depth" any more than the GM who has the PCs come to the town and hear tales of the repentant necromancer who now collects the tithes for the local church.

Nobody claimed that the necromancer's life continuing to happen independently of the PCs was more realistic than the necromancer's life continuing to happen independently of the PCs. Both your example and mine are the same. They are the necromancer continuing to act independently of the PCs in a way that the PCs might possibly find out about later.

What I said my example is more realistic than is the necromancer freezing in place for days, months or even years until the PCs come back into view and then suddenly things pick up where they left off.

The world doesn't freeze once the PCs leave the area.

I know, from both experience as a player and reading others' accounts of their RPGing, that some GMs love to visit "consequences" on the players based on the GM's own imaginings about how the players' choices for their PCs might come back to bite the PCs in this or that way. But that has nothing to do with "depth" or "realism". It's just a choice to impose the GM's vision onto the game.

Perhaps for some DMs, but not me. What I come up with does in fact have everything to do with depth and realism.

 

[Maxperson]

Just to add to that.

While consequences always being negative leads to interesting game play - obviously they are creating adventure hooks which are contextualized for the players- this we choices or consequences have nothing to do with creating a living world.

If they did then just as often those consequences would be neutral or even beneficial.

And they are. I haven't seen anyone claim that things are always negative.

 

[Maxperson]

It feels like it depends on what they are consequences of?

The consequences of not going off to deal with a bad guy somewhere feel like they would result in bad things more than good to me.
The consequences of visiting country X and not country Y feel like they could go either way like you say.

And the consequences of rescuing the daughter of the local artificer could easily mean a nifty gift is waiting the next time the PCs roll through town.