GM fiat - an illustration

[Bedrockgames]

Set aside the idea of narrative control... because it is itself a muddy term. I mean, telling the duke to go screw and heading off to the west... that's an exercise of narrative control. It's the players saying that they're not interested in this duke situation, and they want the characters to go west. Surely this will change the narrative.

I'm not getting into the definitional argument here again, but I do want to point out, many of us wouldn't consider this a narrative or a change of narrative. I'm not saying, you shouldn't describe your campaigns this way, but I wouldn't agree with this premise that if a character rejects the duke's concern, and they go west, that means is a shift in narrative. I'd be much more likely to call it a shift in focus or direction of the campaign. It may seem pedantic, perhaps it is, but I also think when stylistic concerns are being raised, it matters

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What I am saying is assume the player had full control and everything was fair into the lead up to that (i.e. the GM didn't plan all along to have the character end up strapped to a table: this outcome was purely because they fought teh Mind Flayer fair and square and lost.


But surely we can examine individual moments. This is just another way of talking about the three door example and blind choices. The issue I am trying to show here is I think there is daylight between a blind choice about a concrete hidden number that results in life or death, and one where the outcome is simply determined by random chance. No one is suggesting this is the same amount of even close to the agency you would feel if you had information about the choice that helped inform your decision. But I think everyone can tell there is a small distinction here that does matter, especially in terms of how it feels in the moment

Yeah I just think all the meat is in how you got to that point. I've no opinion as to the relevance of saving throws or similar, they are simply not where agency lives.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Like what sparked this branch of the conversation was @pemerton describing the bare minimum amount of player agency for a game to be considered an RPG... the player being able to ask questions and have the GM provide answers.

We do seem to be getting very far afield lol maybe getting back to the OP is a wise idea. Posting it below again and will comment on in a separate post

This thread is about identifying and analysing GM fiat as a way of establishing the shared fiction in RPGing. My experience is that, often, many cases of GM fiat go unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon. Here's one example, that I posted in a recent thread:

Rolemaster is a very rules-heavy RPG. If I declare that my PC goes to the market hoping to bump into my long-lost sister; or hoping to find an angel feather for sale; what is the chances of success? How do I (as a player) even know that there is a market place for my PC to visit, or that my PC has a long-lost sister, or that angel feathers exist in the (imaginary) world? That is all up to GM fiat.

In this post I want to present another example, and say a bit about it. My example is the Alarm spell, from D&D 5e:

Casting Time: 1 Minute
Range/Area: 30 ft. (20 ft. )
Duration: 8 Hours

You set an alarm against intrusion. Choose a door, a window, or an area within range that is no larger than a 20-foot Cube. Until the spell ends, an alarm alerts you whenever a creature touches or enters the warded area. When you cast the spell, you can designate creatures that won’t set off the alarm. You also choose whether the alarm is audible or mental:

Audible Alarm. The alarm produces the sound of a handbell for 10 seconds within 60 feet of the warded area.

Mental Alarm. You are alerted by a mental ping if you are within 1 mile of the warded area. This ping awakens you if you’re asleep.

On its fact, this spell looks like something that a player could use to help control the risk environment for their PC. But on closer analysis, it turns almost entirely on GM decision-making that is significantly unconstrained.

For instance,

* Does the player's character have an uninterrupted minute of time to cast the spell?

* Does any potential intruder come within 8 hours, or do they turn up (say) 8 hours and 5 minutes after the spell was cast?

* Does a potential intruder come within the warded area, or open the warded portal? Or do they sneak around the warded portal, or inspect/attack from outside the area?

* If the caster (and friends) are asleep, and are woken by this spell, how much can the intruder accomplish while they rouse themselves?

All of this depends on GM decision-making. That decision-making is largely unconstrained, except by some pretty loose notions of "fair play". By choosing to use the spell, does a player actually affect the risk to their position in the game? Does this happen in any way other than by invoking the GM's notion of "fair play"? Perhaps if the GM is relying on a very precise timeline for introducing threats, the 1 minute and/or 8 hour issue might be obviated. But that still leaves the other issues.

Here is a superficially similar spell from a different game - Torchbearer 2e's Aetherial Premonition:

The caster sets an aetherial alarm in the Otherworld to provide warning against approaching danger.

AETHERIAL PREMONITION EFFECT
This spell wards a camp, house or the like. It creates the sound of a ringing bell in the event of trouble. Cast this spell as you enter camp (before rolling for camp events) and the spell grants +1 to the camp events roll. The watch in camp are granted +1D to tests to avert disaster.

The fiction of this spell is very much the same as that of the D&D Alarm spell. But the gameplay is different:

* The player is permitted to have their PC attempt to cast the spell as part of the declaration that the party is camping - if the roll to cast fails, then the GM might narrate that as an interruption of the casting, but there is no unilateral power the GM to narrate some interruption analogous to something disturbing the caster during the 1 minute casting of Alarm;

* The way the use of the spell affects the risk to which the player's character is exposed is clear, and not subject to GM decision-making: when the GM makes the camp event roll, as part of the process of determining what happens during the camp phase (which can include resting in town - "camp phase" and "camp event" are semi-technical terms), the player benefits from a +1, which reduces the likelihood of bad results and increases the likelihood of good results;

* If disaster strikes (due to a poor camp event roll), the benefit of being alerted is clear: the watch gain a bonus die in their pool when they declare some action in response

It's possible, in TB2e, for a wily intruder to avoid the alarm, but that would be a narration adopted after the camp event roll is made and an unhappy event results despite the bonus. And it is possible for the watch to be too distracted or drowsy or whatever to effectively respond, despite the alarm; but again, that would be a narration adopted after their test to avert disaster fails, notwithstanding the +1D bonus.

The GM is not at liberty just to narrate things in such a way that the spell makes no difference.

Some RPGers might prefer the GM fiat-free Torchbearer 2e approach; others might prefer the approach of the Alarm spell, which puts some parameters around the GM's narration (eg the GM can't just narrate someone wandering into the warded area 4 hours after the spell is cast without also narrating that the alarm is triggered) but otherwise leaves the GM free to introduce a threat, or not, that does or does not trigger the alarm, as they see fit.

But I think the difference between the two approaches is clear.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd say AD&D is a mixture of chance and skill. And some modes of play put more emphasis on one or the other

So you would not, then characterize BitD as not skill simply because dice might determine success or mandate some outcome at times? I just don't understand why some posters insist that only certain types of play can involve skill when the same basic elements are present.

I mean, I am perfectly willing to grant that some games may ACTUALLY require more skill than others. I just fail to see how a game like BitD must, perforce, due to allocation of authority over fictional content be inferior in skill to some other.

 

[Campbell]

Let's start with this - can we all agree that different fictional situations (and the position of the player characters within) provide different levels of agency over the fiction? That for instance, a player who is playing a political dissident serving a jail sentence would have less agency than the player who is playing a prison guard. Less autonomy, less authority, less ability to influence what is going on.

Or that say a scenario with a lot of GM established backstory that impacts the players ability to influence outcomes but is not meaningfully discoverable would result in less agency where there aren't these backstory mines to step on?

 

[Bedrockgames]

So you would not, then characterize BitD as not skill simply because dice might determine success or mandate some outcome at times? I just don't understand why some posters insist that only certain types of play can involve skill when the same basic elements are present.

I wouldn't really be able to weigh in on BiTD because I've only ever read the book once (and that a few years ago now), and have never played. I don't remember the system well enough based off that read, but even if I did, I think until you play a game a lot you can't really say "this game involves skill or not".

But to answer generally, I'd need more information here. My point about AD&D is just that some elements are random (i.e. if I roll to attack, that is a random element) and some are more oriented around skill (i.e. deciding whether it was a good idea in the first place to attack the troll; engaging with the environment to avoid traps, etc).

Also I don't think anyone is saying only certain types of play involve skill. I mean coming up with a cool backstory for your character takes skill too. But skilled play is a term that has emerged that doesn't refer to that, it refers to how certain kinds of challenges are approached in play. I don't think teh point of the term is to say other ways of playing involve less skill. They are just using the most natural language they can to describe a style where you want the player to feel like their skill, not their character's, is being challenged.

I mean, I am perfectly willing to grant that some games may ACTUALLY require more skill than others. I just fail to see how a game like BitD must, perforce, due to allocation of authority over fictional content be inferior in skill to some other.

To be clear here I haven't weighed in on BiTD. I may have stepped into the middle of a discussion between you and another poster, what engaged me was your question of how one might characterize AD&D in terms of skill. And so I answered that. And I answered it using skill to mean 'skilled play'.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Let's start with this - can we all agree that different fictional situations (and the position of the player characters within) provide different levels of agency over the fiction? That for instance, a player who is playing a political dissident serving a jail sentence would have less agency than the player who is playing a prison guard. Less autonomy, less authority, less ability to influence what is going on.

I think agency isn't about starting power. A player who is playing a god, and one who is playing a peasant, both have radically different levels of power. But I see agency more about your ability to make choices that matter and steer the direction within that. So a campaign where you are a prisoner, you don't have worldly power, your character confined, but you are still going to have agency because you are living inside a prison system and there is a social structure and setting there where your character's choices are going to matter a lot. That is all said of course with the caveat that being put in prison can be a violation of agency. If you roll up characters and want to go exploring the western hills, but the GM really just wants to do D&D with Oz vibes, and the GM does things like makes sure a brawl breaks out at a tavern you are at, makes sure the guards show up, makes sure the guards show up in large enough numbers to overpower and defeat you, make sure someone important dies in the brawl and the blame gets pinned on your character so you have no choice but to play D&D with Oz vibes, then that is a case where I would see agency being very much violated and the PC having no agency. On the other hand, if the GM says, what if in this campaign you guys all start out as prisoners. What agency the players have, depends on what kind of meaningful choices the GM is open to after the game starts. I am not saying this would be the greatest premise for a campaign, or that it wouldn't place severe limits on the freedom of the characters, just within that premise they can still have agency (perhaps even more than the guard as he is still bound by law to that system, and the PCs have less to lose)

Or that say a scenario with a lot of GM established backstory that impacts the players ability to influence outcomes but is not meaningfully discoverable would result in less agency where there aren't these backstory mines to step on?

Can you give an example of what you mean. I think GMs can violate agency through misuse of backstory, but it really does depend on the specifics

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It is an incoherent convoluted mess? I don't know, it has been decades since I last played it, and I never player much of it.



All games of course have random elements and old school D&D often had notoriously lot deadly and untelegraphed randomness. Not fan of that.

But how Blades work is that most rolls have some negative consequence and as there is no solid local myth (i.e. this is the floorplan, trap is here, four guards are here, direplatypus is here, the reinforcements arrive at four o'clock etc.) any roll can basically have any sort of bad consequence the GM can make seem plausible at the moment. Like it is sorta pointless to check in Blades whether a safe is trapped for example. Whether it is or not, if you roll consequences when you're trying to open it something bad will happen regardless.

I don't know, to me it just feels different. Like in D&D I feel I can try things, explore and use the things I learned to my advantage more than I can in Blades. And this doesn't mean it is a bad game, and I took "reckless" as my first trauma and stopped worrying about it. But at first It was frustrating when I tried to play it smartly and cautiously. Now I just enjoy the mayhem.

Yeah, I agree that Blades fundamentally is depicting a world where just surviving is hard and almost anything can go bad. I think the skill is thus not focused on how to cover all your bases and be safe. It's more around managing your options, having a backup plan, orienting in threat space so that the bad stuff runs into your strongest capabilities. My Cutter character took the "expend your armor box to perform a superhuman feat, or negate an opponents scale." As soon as the badness came, his twin swords were out and milling the problem to mincemeat with cranked dots of skirmish. When stuff got weirder, I got the option that let me fight spirits with a sword. If I was playing a spider, then I would play to those strengths.

Beyond that it's a game that rewards players for coming up with solutions which are thematic and preparing to deploy them, etc. You have to balance out how to use your downtime, do I heal, indulge, tick some clock to get a project finished, etc. And then there are the crew level choices, do we grab territory, start a war, make peace, which fractions do we align with? I agree, in the end there's always some danger you cannot avoid by play, but you sure can roll a lot more dice if you play well!

 

[thefutilist]

Well, don't think you can really measure agency in a game in "can decide more thing therefore more agency" kinda way. Because certain kind of agency requires some limitations. Otherwise a game with ultimate player agency would be one where the player just produce whatever fiction about their character they wish, unrestrained by established fiction, rules or other participants.

I actually don't think me, you or Micah care about agency at all. As it's conceived of by many of the Narratavists in this thread. I'm still trying to figure out a way of describing what we do care about.

Our basic loop of play is something like 'constrained positioning creates outcomes which creates constrained positioning.' Their basic unit of play is something like 'fictional story material creates player intentionality which creates fictional story material.'

When Hawkeyefan says:

Set aside the idea of narrative control... because it is itself a muddy term. I mean, telling the duke to go screw and heading off to the west... that's an exercise of narrative control. It's the players saying that they're not interested in this duke situation, and they want the characters to go west. Surely this will change the narrative.

It's alien to me. The players telling the Duke to screw and going west has nothing to do with what the players are interested in and is instead a result of constrained positioning (or whatever you want to call it)

I'm still seeing if I can sum it up in a pithy way.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I am going to leave the prior points in this alone, not to avoid engagement but because I just think we are risking going down an endless cycle of back and forth over definitions. But I do want to address this because I think it is important in these conversations.

This, in my view, isn't how definitions operate. They aren't meaning of word 1 plus meaning of word 2 gives you definition. We operate by how those words are used in practice. Especially in something like a hobby space where you can have lots of terms almost completely divorced from the meaning of their core parts.

Also I don't think it is undesirable for players to have agency beyond their character. I said before in my last post, there is nothing wrong with systems that do that. And I have also commented a lot on the game Hillfolk, which I like, and have played, and consider deeply immersive, that gives players considerable narrative control.

I meant that you generally find it undesirable for a game to do that, not that it is or that you think it is undesirable in and of itself.

I feel like you're narrowing the definition of player agency to fit your general preferences. I'm trying to use a definition that is not limited by preferences.

I wasn't trying to say you can't make meaningful choices. I was just talking about how railroad concerns and agency usually refer to concerns about meaningful choice in the game world. I don't even disagree that narrative controls in systems are an answer to the problem of railroading. I just think it introduces a whole other topic that is really best discussed on its own and not folded into this one. You can fold it in, but then we keep having to make that distinction between player character and player agency. it wouldn't be a big deal, except there are style underlying a lot of this conversation and so it is important people aren't being convinced by a trick of language

Yes, but that's why I think it's best to think of the things you can do as a character as a subset of things you can do as a player. The things you can do as a player are what give you agency. Among those things are the things you can do as a character.

It's like you want to say that vowels aren't letters because they're not consonants.

I'm not getting into the definitional argument here again, but I do want to point out, many of us wouldn't consider this a narrative or a change of narrative. I'm not saying, you shouldn't describe your campaigns this way, but I wouldn't agree with this premise that if a character rejects the duke's concern, and they go west, that means is a shift in narrative. I'd be much more likely to call it a shift in focus or direction of the campaign. It may seem pedantic, perhaps it is, but I also think when stylistic concerns are being raised, it matters

I think it does seem a bit pedantic. If I reject the duke's invitation to explore and map his lands (the GM's proposed hexcrawl style game) and instead go to the coast to be a freebooter, that's a shift in narrative. I as a player am able to exert influence over what is happening in the game. If the GM is like "come on man, I made this huge map and prepped all these hexes... can we at least give this a try" then my agency as a player is limited, and it has nothing to do with my character, even if we roleplay the scene out so that the duke convinces my character to do it with a greater reward.

If I can spend a Benny and call upon the duke's trait to be weak-willed and use it to override his request, I'm using agency granted to me by the game to get what I want as a player. Some would say this use of metacurrency is beyond what a character can do, and others would say it's representative of the characters... but that's irrelevant to whether or not it gives me agency as a player.

To use something even more removed from the setting... if I invoke a Devil's Bargain in Blades in the Dark... the GM offers me a consequence that will happen no matter what, but gives me an additional die to roll, that's another form of player agency. It's a resource that I as a player can use to improve my chances in play.

We do seem to be getting very far afield lol maybe getting back to the OP is a wise idea. Posting it below again and will comment on in a separate post

Do you look at the two examples from the OP and see how one could be concerning when it comes to railroading and the like, and the other is less so?