GM fiat - an illustration

[soviet]

It seems to me that different games and play styles do provide different levels of player agency.

It also seems to me that maximal player agency is not necessarily an unalloyed good. One might, perfectly reasonably, play in a manner that gives additional authority to the GM to veto or limit certain player inputs in service of some other goal such as curating an enhanced sense of immersion or a greater feeling of setting coherency. EDIT TO ADD: Saying that such a game offers less player agency than another is not necessarily a bitter criticism that must be defended.

 

[Bedrockgames]

On the agency thing, Monte Cook has an interesting article

 

[Bedrockgames]

Declaring fictional actions for a character to prompt the GM to tell you what he's written down is not solving a mystery.

I think this both misses some of the nuance and frames it in a way that just doesn't match what the experience. It is like describing a boxing match as two men swinging their arms till one falls down. Yes, I can't say it isn't accurate, but it also misses so much. It isn't that you are simply prompting the GM to say something. The GM has modeled a crime, who committed it, what evidence they left, etc. There is a mental map of this thing and that model is what people are talking about when they say it is real (and again, to be clear, no one is saying it takes on real world substance; just that the idea of it is concrete and objective). The process of solving it is also real. The players are deducing facts, they are going to locations in the game, discovering clues, putting those clues together. And they can be wrong or right in their deductions. There is something real they are trying to figure out at the end of all this. It isn't just the players take actions and that prompts the GM. There is an interplay. Whether that is going into a room and asking what you see, and when the GM tells them a desk, a book shelf, etc, you might follow up with "I check the desk drawers". Those notes the GM has in their page are there so that there is a world of mystery to explore. And the same with suspects. There is a Q&A process that can occur in these games where what questions you ask a suspect can matter and can reveal or not reveal information that helps you figure out the mystery. No one is saying this is the best way to do mysteries, or this is the only way, or that what the GM imagines comes into being in the world. They are saying you are really solving a mystery because that is what the players are doing: they are putting clues together, making deductions and trying to figure out what happened. There is an objectivity to this kind of mystery adventure. Whereas in my Hillfolk example, that was fun, but the fun was seeing how things unfolded, not in genuinely solving the mystery

Also that these kinds of trail of clues mysteries are notorious for crashing because the players can't solve them, just shows how agency is relevant, how the players choices and deductions matter. There has been tons of ink spilled trying to figure out ways to manage this very problem. But it is a problem that comes from the fact that mysteries involve choices by the players that can lead to them to solve what is at the heart of it, or never figure it out.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Clearly jumping into the middle of a much longer conversation, but re: mysteries in TTRPGs...

I do, personally, agree that for something to be a...let's call it "sincere mystery" rather than a "true mystery" since that "true" bit there is causing a lot of issues...

Anyway, for something to be a "sincere mystery" to the players, there has to be:

1. An unanswered question that the players really want answered (such as who the perpetrator of a crime was, where a missing person has gone, or what chain of events occurred to result in the observed current situation)
2. A truth-of-the-matter within the fiction: that is, there is a particular answer within the fiction that was true from the very beginning, rather than being authored due to player actions after this specific story begins
3. In-fiction veritable evidence, which may include false leads or intentional deceptions from NPCs, but necessarily must also include evidence which points to the aforementioned truth-of-the-matter consistently, regardless of what actions the players do or do not take

If any of these elements isn't present, then it isn't a mystery to the players. Sort of like how a mystery novel cannot meaningfully be a mystery to the author, because in order for the author to write an effective and compelling mystery narrative for others to read, they have to know too many things for #1 to be true; they already know the answer to the unanswered question.

In the context of a TTRPG, you can have it be the case that there is a genuine unanswered question, but fail to meet one of the other two, which is unlike (most) novels, where it's expected that there be a truth-of-the-matter in most cases and the whole point is to provide a mixture of evidence that the reader must suss out. That is, you can have the group be acting out a mystery from their characters' perspective, but to the players it isn't actually a mystery anymore, it's the group collectively acting as authors for a mystery someone else could experience by reading through a written-down description of what they did. Or, there could be a fact of the matter...but that fact of the matter could be retconned (usually a GM action, but could be a PC action in some games), a form of non-mechanical fudging, in order to heighten tension or the like, but this undercuts the players-solving-a-mystery process because they can't actually understand or analyze the evidence, because what was genuinely reliable and valid evidence one moment becomes false, invalid evidence without any way for them to know this happened.

More or less, in an absolutely rigidly "no-myth" game, I'm saying you can't truly solve a mystery as a player, just as (for example) the character playing Sherlock Holmes in an adaptation of (say) The Hound of the Baskervilles cannot himself be "solving the mystery of the Hound of the Baskervilles" because what he's doing isn't mystery-solving, it's "portraying a character who is trying to solve a mystery".

It's why I don't run a rigidly "no-myth" game with my DW group--and why I don't think DW (or, indeed, most PbtA games, nor most adjacent games like FitD stuff) actually are completely 100% "no-myth" systems. There can be a little myth, but if there is, it needs to be serving a specific and valid purpose; one of those purposes is to craft a mystery-solving experience where the players are not just "portraying a detective doing a mystery-solve", but actually solving a mystery themselves in the process, just as most mystery-solving experiences are about solving a fictional mystery established by someone else (unless it's your job to solve IRL mysteries, of course.)

 

[pemerton]

Characters in novels likewise do not have actual agency. When we're discussing agency for characters in movies or novels, yes, we're talking about their fictional autonomy and capability. Like, we may say that Princess Buttercup has very little agency in The Princess Bride... she is pretty much at the mercy of other characters throughout the story. She doesn't really make any decisions that affect the story, beyond perhaps that she wants Wesley over Humperdink. But it's all really the decision of the author.

Trying to examine player agency in an RPG through the lens of that of characters in novels or movies doesn't really work since the media are fundamentally different.

I agree with your first para, and for that reason don't 100% agree with your second.

A player can choose to play a low-agency character. That is what I did the last session where I played my Dark Elf in Burning Wheel - the agency (in the sense of the active agent in the fiction) was with the other PC, the evil necromancer Thoth.;

But that doesn't mean that I as a player lacked agency. The relative lack of agency of my character was a manifestation of choices I made - eg to go to the street outside the home of the Elven ambassador, and hope that someone would come out to talk to me (in play, a Circles check that was likely to, and did, fail, with the upshot that my PC was approached by guards who moved him on); and to let Thoth boss me around (but in play, doing the things Thoth wants my PC to do still has me making decisions about intent and task, spending artha on my rolls, etc).

So I think that the player/character divide is absolutely basic and fundamental to saying anything meaningful about this; but once we keep that divide in mind, we can say that my character was, in the fiction, a low-agency character (using the same sort of analysis as you apply to Buttercup in The Princes Bride); but I wasn't a low-agency player!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Agreed. Perfect situational awareness is not a prerequisite for having agency.

I think real time strategy games with permanent fog of war when your units aren’t in an area is a good example.

You lose some agency around knowing what units to build at all times compared to games with no fog of war or fog of war that goes away once initially revealed. However, you gain a new vector upon which you can apply agency, that vector is your ability to make decisions around managing the fog of war obstacle such as when to scout what to scout with, whether to progress toward units or buildings with special abilities to provide more information from within the fog of war.

Neither of these style RTS games are more or less agency. You just have more agency over some aspects of the game and less agency over others.

IMHO this line of argument actually does a disservice to your actual position. Less information always produces less agency. This is why propaganda is powerful! What you need to assert, and it's a perfectly valid position, is that maximal agency is not always the best way to achieve certain goals. Again, this is self-evident, governments are instituted on this very proposition!

 

[Bedrockgames]

IMHO this line of argument actually does a disservice to your actual position. Less information always produces less agency. This is why propaganda is powerful! What you need to assert, and it's a perfectly valid position, is that maximal agency is not always the best way to achieve certain goals. Again, this is self-evident, governments are instituted on this very proposition!

I don't think in the context of an RPG this is true. If the GM hands the player the dungeon map, do they suddenly have more agency? I don't think they do (in the sense of what agency generally means in an RPG). Again there seems to be a divide here, I would point people to the Monte Cook article I posted, because it is a closer use of the term to how I and I think how people like @FrogReaver are using it. For me, if the players make choices in the campaign, that lead their character to obtain that map in setting, so they can then exploit it, that is agency. On the other hand, if the GM just hands the map to the players soley to give them more information (not because of something that happened in game), that info doesn't make their choices meaningful. It doesn't enhance agency. It simply shifts their POV from first person to something else. A shift in POV is not an expansion of agency

 

[Emerikol]

On the agency thing, Monte Cook has an interesting article

Monte is dead on in his descriptions. I want 0 of the narrative control in players hands but I am for 100% player control in the game.

 

[Emerikol]

IMHO this line of argument actually does a disservice to your actual position. Less information always produces less agency. This is why propaganda is powerful! What you need to assert, and it's a perfectly valid position, is that maximal agency is not always the best way to achieve certain goals. Again, this is self-evident, governments are instituted on this very proposition!

You are using agency in a way that is unnatural when it comes to the way most of us are using it. I have 100% agency in the real world by the definition I use. I do not know everything or every scenario. Knowing more doesn't increase my agency at all.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think they should always be in the dark. But sometimes they will be ignorant of key information because their characters have a POV in the setting and I am trying to help maintain that. This isn't that radical of a notion. And I am also not averse to pulling back the curtain. But there are times when PCs simply won't know they are being followed by someone for example (I always give them a chance through a skill roll, or if they take needed precautions to discern that)

I think, first, it's worth agreeing that there's something of a continuum here. That is, players can, and surely do, have information that is non-diegetic in nature. This is true for all RPGs. Even in a game that was perfectly scrupulous about converging character and player knowledge, simply knowing the game is a game is huge. Real players in real games know much more than this. I accept that, in the mystery case, which information is established as diegetic and part of the 'myth' ahead of time is relevant. OTOH, either way, there's a lot of air between the player and the character.

But then we still must ask, in a broader sense, what, practically is the difference in general play, and to what degree does the activity resemble a non-trivial game in absence of player information? I think the OP is effectively about this.