D&D General Renamed Thread: "The Illusion of Agency"

[Bill Zebub]

a) something like "my prep says this a rusted portcullis sealed shut with age. It's a DC18 strength check to slam it up, or with a DC15 passive perception (or active check) the party can spot a lever in the corner. It's a DC15 strength check to snap it up"

So i wouldn't have a passive check for the lever. If the pass the passive check...which doesn't involve a decision...then it's obvious what the right decision is. So the player has never made an trade-offs.

What I might do is say that if the player uses a combat round searching for "a better option" they definitely find the lever. But probably not, because there's no information to suggest that might be a good plan. So not sure here.

b) "uhhh, yeah cool - you want to what, try and lever it up? what's your strength again? 20? heck ya, that thing can't stop you. You heft it up and off you go, the owlbears in pursuit."

In general I might say something like this, but because the stakes are so high it's a missed opportunity to have some decision-making and excitement.

But even in this high stakes scenario if I can't think of something, or haven't prepared something, that gives the player an interesting decision to make I might just go with it.

c) "um, yeah, ok, roll athletics (mentally uses the default DC15 for standard checks)"

No. I would state the DC so they can decide whether to use a round doing this.

d) "Right, you skid to a halt in front of the gate - you can hear the owl bears bellowing as their claws skid off the stone floor. ....oh, yeah, ok so you see the gate and what might be some old machinery in the corner? ok yeah, looking close at the machinery you can see its like old levers and stuff - probably to seal the gate from this side. rusty as heck. Yeah, you can totally see if that lever will open, um - strength check please? but they're going to be on you in a second if you fail."

Again, I would want some kind of tradeoff. You can try to lift the gates with probability X before the owlbear gets to you, or you can use the machinery with a higher probability of success but it will take longer.

e) "Right, yeah, roll +STR but I'll tell you right now an obvious consequence if you don't pick "it doesn't take long" they're gonna be on you."

Dungeon World approach. This works for me.

 

[TiQuinn]

What bothers some people is probably that the Wizard just gets to Bamf through without relying on GM adjudication, because that fits a pattern about casters vs. martials that some people find objectionable.

Doesn't bother me at all. I don't feel that way about casters vs. martials. (And I pretty much always play martials; I hate relying on spell slots, and would have hated having "martial spell slots" in 4e.)

And that's the trick, I think. The adventuring session has to be long enough that if the wizard keeps solving problems through spells, eventually he's going to run out of spells (or the right spells). It also doesn't solve the necessarily problem for the whole party. The barbarian with his skill use can potentially retry, but I like to rule that he has to change the playing field somehow, it can't just be a straight retry.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I think another option so that it doesn't appear to be that the barbarian only has one shot at this is that the owlbears don't want to damage the eggs either.

So if the barbarian fails to lift the gates or throw the lever the first time, the owlbears are now present, but seem hesitant. The barbarian could try to Intimidate them by threatening the eggs with his battle axe, causing the owlbears to back off further, potentially giving him another attempt at the gate or the lever.

I absolutely love this.

 

[Bill Zebub]

And that's the trick, I think. The adventuring session has to be long enough that if the wizard keeps solving problems through spells, eventually he's going to run out of spells (or the right spells). It also doesn't solve the necessarily problem for the whole party. The barbarian with his skill use can potentially retry, but I like to rule that he has to change the playing field somehow, it can't just be a straight retry.

In general I agree with you, but in this scenario if you are fending off attacks from owlbears every turn, it's fine to keep re-trying. The roll doesn't mean "are you objectively capable of lifting this gate?" it is "can you do it quickly while being attacked?"

But this only works if the barbarian (or somebody) is choosing this strategy over another choice. If there's literally no option but raise the gate or die....yeah that's not a decision.

 

[zakael19]

So i wouldn't have a passive check for the lever. If the pass the passive check...which doesn't involve a decision...then it's obvious what the right decision is. So the player has never made an trade-offs.

What I might do is say that if the player uses a combat round searching for "a better option" they definitely find the lever. But probably not, because there's no information to suggest that might be a good plan. So not sure here.



In general I might say something like this, but because the stakes are so high it's a missed opportunity to have some decision-making and excitement.

But even in this high stakes scenario if I can't think of something, or haven't prepared something, that gives the player an interesting decision to make I might just go with it.



No. I would state the DC so they can decide whether to use a round doing this.



Again, I would want some kind of tradeoff. You can try to lift the gates with probability X before the owlbear gets to you, or you can use the machinery with a higher probability of success but it will take longer.



Dungeon World approach. This works for me.

Ok, you're still not quite getting what I'm driving at. Which one of those options is getting towards what you want from your OP? We've got stakes, we've got consequences, what back and forth and GM adjudication is closest to what you want? Once we figure that out, we can extrapolate some broader things.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

By this logic, GMs should never use dice because any dice roll, even ones required by the rules, can nullify the players' ability to make meaningful decisions with their characters. The only way to effectively play would be to ditch the dice and just let the players' characters do whatever the players want, right?

That is not the case. The reason is the DM can make decisions prior to a dice roll that removes agency issues. The issues only arise when the DM uses the roll independent of the actions. At that point the DM is disregarding the player actions and is violating player agency.

We can see this more clearly if we revisit my two examples. First the Wizard who takes amazing notes every night before bed. The recollection roll is only an issue if not adjusted in a meaningful way to account for the player actions. TQuinn noted lowering the DC, I said in my post that you could use a sliding scale of success and give some reward at much lower DCs. Accounting for the player action in these ways eliminates the issue. The issue only comes up when there is no adjustment to the dice roll's ability to determine the outcome. Because in those cases it's a decision by the DM to ignore player actions through using the dice. That decision is stepping on player agency.

On the random combat decisions it is much the same. Simply altering the possible outcomes to reflect that fire is enough to eliminate the player agency issue. Removing all creatures from the random table that are scared or dissuaded by fire, for example. This allows the dice roll to respect player agency. If the players take steps to mitigate the risk of an ambush, lower the chances that the dice produce the outcome that is contrary to player actions. The issue here, again, comes up when you make no such adjustments to the possible outcomes. In that case, you are deciding that player agency means nothing in that case, and that it's actually only about the dice. This is a massive player agency issue, as your player decisions stop having a meaningful effect on the world, which becomes only a random slideshow of dice-decided events.

The proper course of action is to adjust the possible dice outcomes to accommodate the actions of the players. To not do so, would be an admission that the game is really solely about the dice and the players are just along for the ride. Which to me screams as no better than more maligned versions of railroading. The decision to roll dice to decide an outcome is a DM decision and should be held to the same standard as all other DM decisions. This means if that roll violates player agency by not respecting player actions in the possible results, the DM has chosen to step on player agency by choosing to roll.

Putting your decisions in a rollable table doesn't make them immune to player agency concerns.

 

[Umbran]

Ok, I figured that quoting a post in response would preserve context and allow continued discussion on a singular thread...

I think my point still holds, that "meaningful" is a bit of a rhetorical trap.

My statement was in specific response to the statement "nullify the player's ability to make meaningful decisions with their characters." If there's no potential for consequences to the decisions you make, how do you assign meaning?

Well, this ties things together.

Dice rolls don't remove agency, so long as the player knows that their decision leads to the die roll, and what the odds and stakes on that roll are going to be. An informed decision to take a calculated risk is an exercise of agency.

Meanwhile, whether the results of that die roll are "meaningful", and "how much meaning" they carry is context and player dependent, and we can't really speak to it in a general way, because there is no general "meaning" to any of this. The meaning only exists in the particular, not in the general.

Meanwhile, we can speak of player expectations - they made a choice, from which they get a roll, and that roll has massive negative modifiers the GM did not tell the player about. They had expectations about what happened from the choice that weren't fulfilled. The player is apt to feel cheated, and be pissed off, whether or not the result had any overall meaning.

 

[Mort]

I didn't say reliably, I said it's available to use. If a successful roll means you know, with certainty, that the NPC is lying, then every PC in the game will at least sometimes be able to do something superhuman: know with certainty that somebody is lying. You said you wanted some characters to be able to do that.

No, the ones who are not good at it are just guessing. They have no way to truly know if they KNOW the other person is lying.

It's an opposed roll and I don't have to tell you that you were ACTUALLY successful. If you were successful you get the result you wanted, if not the result the opponent wanted. Sure I high roll makes it likely, but not certain (and non-trained people won't often get high rolls regardless).

Not to mention, Glibness and the like are a thing (much as I actually DON"T like that). If you go by the rules, glibness effects beat the skill 100% of the time. I just ran a published adventure where one of the antagonists had a permanent glibness effect (not too high level PCs were around 7th) - so it's certainly in use.

 

[Theory of Games]

Decisions without consequence are meaningless.

Well. If a group wanted, the players could never roll dice, making decisions for their PCs and also determining (on a whim) the consequences of those decisions. So rather than relying on a GM or dice, the players create their own meaningful stories. 100% Player Agency.

I don't play that way, but it's fine if others do.

 

[zakael19]

Well. If a group wanted, the players could never roll dice, making decisions for their PCs and also determining (on a whim) the consequences of those decisions. So rather than relying on a GM or dice, the players create their own meaningful stories. 100% Player Agency.

I don't play that way, but it's fine if others do.

Actually there's quite a bit of writing out there on the pitfalls of "freeform RP" and how the most socially adept player tends to be the one driving things without a whole lot of social contract work and facilitation and such. I would argue that we would not have the vast number of systems we do (many of which specifically exist to model out a very constrained premise to really get into things) if it wasn't for the fact that "unexpected outcomes" tend to provide more meaning to the actions people take in the fictional conversation then simply "I say you say."