Is "GM Agency" A Thing?

[hawkeyefan]

But people come here and say what techniques they use to create a living, breathing world. I can't recall a single post in this thread where a living, breathing world proponent said, "Well what you have to do to create a living, breathing world is create a living, breathing world." Instead explanations and/or examples are given.

I've found there to be very little of that. Mostly, it's been vague "do what's most likely" and so on. Actual methods and specific examples are pretty few and far between.

Yes it does. If there's a war going on between the countries of Ihateyou and Ihateyoumore, it's likely to last a while and news of it be widespread. When the party goes into a bar to hear rumors, they are likely to hear rumors of it for a long time, even if they don't engage. It's part of what makes the world seem more real.

Whether it's good, bad or indifferent will depend on your group. If you and your group aren't into the living, breathing world playstyle, don't use it.

So when I hear "the party goes into a bar to hear rumors" I read that as "Players going to the GM for plot hooks"... and that doesn't scream living world to me.

But why would they? The DM of the living, breathing world playstyle is far more likely to try and figure out the logical conclusion or very often multiple possibilities and determine them randomly. Often they will assign percentages. The necromancer has a 60% chance to try and enslave the next village, a 25% chance to lay low for a few years in a nearby graveyard, a 10% chance to try and hunt down the PCs and a 5% chance to turn his life around and try and help people. Then a percentile die roll will be had and we see what happens.

Few people have offered anything like this during the discussion. Do you have any other examples you can think of that have come up in actual play?

There are a bunch of different ways to figure out how the world is going to proceed, and "I want it to be that way." is rarely going to be used, and when it is, it will almost always be because the option picked is overwhelmingly the obvious one for the NPC based on what is known about that NPC.

"I want it to be that way" would, I expect, be a very popular answer. Likely right after "That's the way I think it would go."

A DM who is that invested in what he creates shouldn't be a DM. They're the kind that make a DMPC and ruin games. They're also pretty rare. Thankfully, most DMs are okay with the necromancer going the way of the dodo and disappearing. They've got infinite NPCs and don't need to keep one around when it doesn't make sense to.

That's very harsh. I wouldn't say that a DM with a story in mind shouldn't DM. That would invalidate Adventure Paths entirely, which is the dominant play style.

I'm not describing anyone's play as good or bad... just different.

It depends on the thing that is coming up. The war news will travel to the PCs. The necromancer won't unless the DM rolled "hunt down the PCs." He's going to be local to where he was and if the PCs never go back, they aren't going to hear about him.

Maybe the news will travel. It's not necessary for news to travel to depict a living breathing world. Not always. We can also assume that the PCs hear of the far off war, but since they're involved with other stuff, they just don't do anything about that news.

I mean, why would they? Do they have loved ones affected by the war? Are they mercenaries looking for employment?

Or are they PCs waiting for some plot hooks?

No. Railroading comes from the personality of the DM, not the game played. Such a DM is as likely to railroad in D&D as any other RPG, and is also the type of person who demands the group play the board games he wants to play the way he wants to play them. It's not about the game. It's about the person.

No, that's not true. It's a combination of the person and the system. Some systems or processes/practices resist railroading much more than others. They make it much harder to do so. Others make it easier to do so.

If a person has always played a game that makes it easy to railroad, they may not even realize they're doing it. Or they may only see "railroading" in its most extreme versions.

 

[pemerton]

We could have saved a lot of digital ink if you had just plainly stated that opinion a dozen threads ago.

I thought you participated in this thread:

I am talking about the agency of players of a particular sort of game, namely, RPGers. RPGing involves the creation of a shared set of imagined events, people, places, etc, and establishing "what happens next" to some of those people and places.

Agency, in the context of this sort of game, means doing some of that establishing. It is done mostly by saying things, sometimes by writing things. If one participant gets to do all or most of that establishing, then obviously other participants don't have much agency in that game.

Anyway, the topic of this thread is player agency. To me, it seems obvious that if all players can do is establish "inconsequential", "minor" or "not directly pivotal" elements of the fiction - so that all the significant elements of framing, consequence etc are established by the GM - then their agency is modest at best.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I thought you participated in this thread:

I don't consider players acting solely as their PCs to be "inconsequential" "minimal" or "not directly pivotal". You clearly do. This is why we're at an impasse.

 

[Umbran]

The living breathing world assists in attaining that goal for those tables

The "living breathing world" is an element that may be useful in attaining that goal.

If the player immersion is based in character emotional stakes, the world may be irrelevant when compared to personal drama, such that efforts on the world do not work to the end of immersion.

If the "living, breathing" state is produced via means that are themselves immersion breaking, that world may get in the way of immersion.

Dude, you just said above that it's all an illusion, and that there's no real living breathing world. In what universe does that not mean you're denying its existence?

Insofar as we don't have whole worlds? We have little scraps of fictions that we use to imply a world.

 

[Emberashh]

I don't consider players acting solely as their PCs to be "inconsequential" "minimal" or "not directly pivotal". You clearly do. This is why we're at an impasse.

Is my agency being denied because theres a whole bunch of stuff going on in Japan right now?

 

[pemerton]

Because @pemerton sees a railroad in any situation that isn't ultimately player-authored.

This is not true.

I think it is a railroad if the framing, stakes and consequences are all provided by the GM. If they are predominantly provided by the GM, then we may also have a railroad, or at least something rather railroad-y.

I don't see a significant difference between our two statements. What percentage of GM involvement is allowed in your world for something to maybe, possibly, perhaps not be a railroad?

A situation in which the GM does the framing, the player has established the stakes, and the consequences depend on the outcome of the action resolution roll (with the GM being entitled to say what bad thing happens if that roll fails) is not a situation that is ultimately player authored. It is (obviously) co-authored, via a structured process. And is not a railroad.

This is how some RPGs work as per their express rules (eg Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, Torchbearer much of the time) and how other RPGs can be played although their express rules are a bit vague or rickety (eg Classic Traveller, Rolemaster, even AD&D).

 

[aramis erak]

Player agency =/= Player authorship.

Given that the essence of a RPG is establishing a shared fiction, what else would it be?

Authorship is coming up with the fiction.
Agency is making the decisions for the character based upon adequate information

For novelists, agency is only limited by audience expectation, and is otherwise a pure subset of the authorship.
For Trad games, agency exists for players when the GM gives them adequate information and opportunities to make decisions. Authorship ends for either player or GM when they invoke mechanics. Authorship comes back before agency -one has to narrate the outcome (which is authorship), before one can make a new act of agency.

Players, even in high agency games like AW, get to advocate, not dictate, what is truth for the narrative for some elements.
In many games, if the GM plays the rules as written, they, too, advocate for what is true in many circumstances. The arbiter of truth in Combat isn't the GM in most cases, but the combination of dice and rules.

AW based EG:
Player: "I'm putting the SOB down with my FBG..."
GM: "Roll for going aggro"
The player's authorship ends with aiming the FBG. The GM's authorship ends with the same point, but the GM's agency does not - his agency ends with the declaration of what to roll. Both are advocating for a potential outcome by appealing to the Go Aggro move and the needed dice throw. The Go Agro table has no agency, per se. It just resolves the question of whether the SOB is down after the attempt. It then hands back to the GM to implement the result and narrate it into the fiction, or to hand off to the player to continue the narration.

An example of agency without authorship is pretty easy to find, as well... Solo modules.
Tunnels and Trolls, The Fantasy Trip, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf... all use the make a choice from a list, and the authorship is done for you by going to the indicated paragraph. Making the choice is agency... limited, but real... but the player has almost zero authorial power.

There is no "what else". They're separate terms.

Agreed.

And yes, it is shared fiction, but what you're doing is inappropriately conflating the GM's share of authorship with being a violation of the Player's agency when they don't ever actually interact like that.

Not sure I agree with that.

These systemic interactions are what lead to emergence, not just of gameplay, but of narratives. This emergence is what stops either player or GM from wielding all control in a given narrative, because now they have to share authorship with the system itself.

Thats the real value of more robust games that can provide a lot of mechanical interactivity, as they are fundamentally unpredictable to some degree, and when done well, this unpredictability is what results in a great deal of captivating fun.

Agreed.

In games without this robust support, this unpredictability is hard to achieve, and many who reject it outright also do lose the ability to truly be unpredictable.

Disagree. Some of the high complexity games are surprisingly bland. The effort for Leading Edge Games' Phoenix Command RPG, due to the number of rolls involved, the law of averages renders it usually less surprising than D&D. Likewise, the law of averages makes WEG d6 less surprising in outcomes than Savage Worlds.

 

[pemerton]

So you now care about who authors the fiction, not just who says it aloud? Or are there different standards for GMs and players for some reason?

I am talking - as I have been - about who establishes the shared fiction. This is the core of RPG play.

As I posted somewhere, maybe upthread in this thread, and I'm pretty sure in reply to you, a player who names their Dwarven PC "Gimli" is obviously not being original, but that is still them making something part of the shared fiction.

Disagree. This is the players establish that the game is now about regicidal revolutionaries. It will results a completely different game than the characters deciding to leave the empire and to become pirates. Seems pretty player driven to me.

The overall premise or tone may be. But in the example, straight away play turns back into GM-authorship: the players have to learn what the GM has authored about the factions, learn how the GM thinks the factions might be swayed or tricked, satisfy the GM that such swaying or tricking has been done, etc.

 

[Hussar]

In D&D, that is my preference, yes. I'm not covering that up at all. Not placing any objective value here either, and I'm certainly not saying its the best way (outside of my personal preference) to play an RPG. I don't even consider it a deal breaker outside of D&D.

The point being that you do feel it’s a deal breaker inside of DnD.

 

[Hussar]

I still feel that would be a different game. A potentially fun and certainly valid game, but a different one nonetheless.

Then … I know this is controversial…. Don’t use it?

There’s nothing wrong with trad play. It certainly works. I cannot deny that.

By why complain about including non-trad play in DnD as well?