GM fiat - an illustration

[pemerton]

That doesn’t answer the question.

I don't understand.

If the player does not even have the capacity to prompt the GM to tell them more stuff, by declaring actions like "I look through the doorway - what do I see?" or "I open the book - what does it say?" or "I walk down the road - where does it lead?", then either (i) nothing is happening, no one is saying anything or else (ii) the GM is just monologuing.

Hence why I say that the capacity I've described in the previous paragraph is the minimal amount of agency for an episode of play to really count as RPGing. Anything less, and we don't have RPGing at all.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What makes the Alarm spell useless in pretty much any setting that has any sort of realism at all, is the spell itself. Insects, rats, mice, etc. are size tiny, so the alarm would be going off every time a fly flew into the cube or a spider crawled by. DMs actually have to ditch what makes sense in order for it not to be completely useless as a spell.

WotC should have made it a size small or larger creature.

Or reinstituted the "Fine" size category.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Let’s just set aside adversarial GMing. I’m not really talking about that… let’s assume good faith on the part of the GM.

The things established by the GM ahead of play can absolutely thwart player agency. Stuff that the player doesn’t know can be used to block an action or a goal. Why couldn’t it?

Sure it can. You want to find the cookie, and open jar three, but the GM has previously determined it is in jar five. No cookie, action blocked. But I do not see this as denial of agency, or if it is, then the dice saying "no" is that as well. We've been over this. Secret fictional positioning existing and it affecting the resolution is not denial of agency.

 

[NN]

Agency isnt binary, most things are neutral.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Sure it can. You want to find the cookie, and open jar three, but the GM has previously determined it is in jar five. No cookie, action blocked. But I do not see this as denial of agency, or if it is, then the dice saying "no" is that as well. We've been over this. Secret fictional positioning existing and it affecting the resolution is not denial of agency.

All right already with the cookies in the boxes.

 

[pemerton]

Sure it can. You want to find the cookie, and open jar three, but the GM has previously determined it is in jar five. No cookie, action blocked. But I do not see this as denial of agency, or if it is, then the dice saying "no" is that as well. We've been over this. Secret fictional positioning existing and it affecting the resolution is not denial of agency.

Well, don't we need to step back and ask what is this play supposed to be about?

If the goal of play is to solve a puzzle (broadly construed), then player agency consists in having the opportunity to solve the puzzle. Given that the puzzle is presented and solved via the medium of a shared fiction, this is crosswords + figure skating. Map-and-key, with its attendant secret fictional positions, is a tried-and-true technique for this sort of play.

But it won't work if the players are choosing blind; or if the "solution" is so baroque that they may as well be; or if the solution requires pushing against strong social pressures (the quest-giver as villain is one generally terrible instance of this last thing).

For the reasons given in the OP, I don't think that the Alarm spell is very well designed for puzzle-solving play. (At least outside of a very narrow dungeon-esque context.)

But anyway, not all skilled-play-focused RPGing need be about puzzle-solving. And not all RPGing need be focused on skilled play. If the aspiration for player agency is something else, then secret fictional positioning might be toxic.

 

[Micah Sweet]

All right already with the cookies in the boxes.

Yeah, I'm getting hungry too.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That could happen. What could not happen in such paradigm however, is the PCs deciding to visit the city of Nyx seven sessions ago, and whilst pursuing other matters stuble on the secrets of the assassin cult, because that information didn't exist then.

I think this is a bit of a broad brush. Yes, it COULD be true for some specific kinds of Narrativist play that the Assassin Guild of Nyx happens to be established as a way of explicating later events. In no way does that preclude the possibility it was established earlier in play.

Furthermore, I am not sure how such information would really even matter execpt as flavour in this fiction after system. Like sure because this time the camp event roll said you were ambushed despite your warding spell the post hoc justification migh be that the ambusher was an Assassin of Nyx, who can bypass such magics. But what do you do with this information is such a system? Next time the dice roll low and you get ambushed, there will be some other post hoc justfications which again is just mostly flavour.

Information matters a lot in such games! Once established it's very likely to come up again. Using TB2e process the GM could introduce these assassins again as a twist, an obstacle, or a camp event. A player might also reintroduce them in various ways, perhaps via Circles, or some other resource acquisition check.

Play in TB2e will develop a whole repertoire of things like this. IME they tend to accrete in play and present a fairly detailed view of the PC's world.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So I have actually played Blades quite a bit, and fiction obviously matters in that game too. But I have to say that myth being malleable and cause and effect somewhat optional means that sometimes it rather feels that whether you're doing things "smartly" doesn't really matter. Like when the dice roll badly, you will get screwed, and the GM can always come up with some justification for it. So the flavour of hurt may be affected by your choices, but the pain itself is random.

Like I get it, it is completely different type of game, and I'm fine with it. But you really cannot do "skilled play" or anything of the sort with it, things are just too bloody random and fluid.

Well, I don't agree that you cannot do skilled play. The skills are slightly different, perhaps. But you better be good at spinning lots of plates and making your resources count in BitD if you want your crew to be around next Tuesday. IME it can be a brutally deadly game, though not nearly as much so as TB2e, which absolutely rivals old school D&D for sheer deadly skilled play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You're talking about things that are predetermined in GM prep rather than things that are decided in the moment.

If you pre-decide in prep that the sports car is behind door one then fair enough, player agency is preserved.

If you wait for me to choose a door and then decide no, that door has a goat behind it after all, I have no agency.

If you wait for me to choose a door and then decide yes, that's the sports car, well done, I also have no agency.

If you wait for me to choose a door and then randomise the goats and sports car I still have agency.

I disagree, a decision made without any information doesn't engage agency because the decision is meaningless. Whether you pick door A, B, or C is no decision at all, rolling dice for it is exactly equivalent to just saying 'A', it is equally arbitrary. Agency requires some means to understand the consequences of your decisions.