An examination of player agency

[TiQuinn]

That been my experience as well. I know many folks who had fun with campaigns that were railroads, and comfortable with the choices they had. Hence my points about considering creative goals with issue of player agency.

And I don’t have any issue with how you positioned it vis a vis the creative goals. I’m more interested in the experience of the game and how well the game accomplishes it with whatever rules it uses, I.E. Mothership for outer space horror, or Blades in the Dark for heist games. A game that prioritizes agency as defined is certainly fine as its own style of play but it is ultimately just another game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Really? Because in that section is this:

“The problem isn’t the playstyle – the presence or lack of agency. However - the claims about it, the illusion that the players’ actions matter in games where any or all of the goals of play, permissible moves, processes of play or results are held by the GM, are untenable.”

In a nutshell, OP is essentially saying enjoy your game if you like (their passing glance towards acknowledging that people can enjoy what they like), but if you do claim to have player agency in your game, you accede to my definition and if you don’t agree with my conclusions, I find your game untenable.

Yeah. There might be an argument with the second clause there ("all") but when you include "any" you've decided to privledge a particular set of traits of the game for "agency" so you can claim anything that doesn't fill it completely has none (and that doesn't even get into what "untenable" is supposed to mean here).

I've seen versions of this before with people who claim that any game that constrains PC design or options in any way aren't even RPGs, but that seems, to say the least, expansive and to serve no purpose but to privilege a subset (and not, best I can tell a large one) of people's taste.

 

[Pedantic]

I came a little late to this, but I think it's probably best to start from the first post.

Player agency is often argued about on these boards. This post will not attempt to reconcile such arguments. It will enunciate the definition of agency that I use and the reasons I do so.


Agency defined

Agency in games is the product of inviolable rules which the players know and can rely on to achieve known goals.

I’ll look at each of these elements in turn – but it’s important to note that these elements don’t stand in isolation. They work in unison. They must all be present to create agency – the absence of even one of them is fatal.

I think this is a bit redundant (any rule that is not inviolable is not a rule), and in light of the rest of your post, I think is slightly insufficient.

Firstly, I don't actually think knowledge is necessary so much as knowability is; there are entire genres of games that are defined by the player discovering rules, or working with incomplete rules knowledge. You could make a case that completely lack of knowledge precludes agency, as the first move in such a game might be made truly randomly, but incomplete knowledge of a knowable system does not preclude agency when acting within it. Choosing a sequence of moves that will, for example, provide information that can be used to logically deduce how an unknown rule works is an expression of agency.

Secondly, "can rely on" is the part I find insufficient; I would use a stronger "can leverage" formulation. A race game wherein I can advance a fixed amount every time I press a button meets your formulation, but does not possess agency. The player must be able to do something with the rules that brings them closer to achieving their goals than some other thing they could do. Agency requires the player be given meaningful choices towards achieving their known goal; that is, they must be able to play badly and well, making choices within the rules structure that bring them closer to or further away from that goal.

Thirdly, and possibly just an expansion of my second point, missing entirely from definition is an evaluation of whether player choices produce variable results. A game with trivial optimization cases could be said to possess player agency, but not a ton. Tic-Tac-Toe technically allows the player several choices, but the strategy is transparent and renders most decisions pointless. It is a quite low agency game.

And that bring us to the final point your definition (and subsequent post) doesn't cover: agency is not a binary state, it's a spectrum. What you've called several times "games without player agency" below conflate games with low player agency and things that are not functionally games.

RPGs and goals

One critical area of divergence between RPGs and most other games are that many RPGs don’t clearly state the goals of play. Chess defines the goal – checkmate the opponent or run out their clock. Football sets goals as the, well, goal. In tennis it’s points, to win games, to win sets.

On this point, I agree wholeheartedly, but draw very different conclusions. I would argue that allowing players to set their own goals and evaluations of those goals is definitional of the RPG form: play continues after goal evaluation, players can set new goals after their previous goals become impossible or are achieved.

What often happens is the breadcrumb trail – endless instructions to go here and do that, and then there and do this, and then being attacked by this thing, and ambushed by that thing. Fetch this, kill that, uhoh there’s a skeleton army on the way. You must destroy it. Fairly soon you don’t need the overt instructions anymore – it’s implicit.

Even when this doesn’t happen the secondary presumption is that the players will choose from a menu of goals pre-scripted by the GM. These are still the GMs goals.

D&D doesn’t ask you to create characters with stuff they need to achieve. It asks you to create blank slates waiting to serve the GM. The GM gives you a hook and you are expected to bite. This is the ceding of your agency – of the infinite things your character could want to achieve and choose to pursue, you are expected to do the things and go to the places and talk to the people that the GM has written this adventure about. D&D gives primacy to the GMs world and the GMs prep. It makes the players, through their characters, subservient to both.

You're conflating the most constrained kind of adventure path play here with everything that happens in D&D, and that's annoying but beside the point; if this is a constriction on agency, then no form of gameplay outside of the RPG could possibly possess it. When I sit down to play 1846, I immediately cede any authority over the game's goal, which always will be to accumulate the most wealth before the bank breaks. Is there some process by which Tom Lehmann setting the goal of play without being at my table preserves my agency but my proposing to my players they might like to stop a plot to murder their beloved queen does not?

In games featuring player agency, the starting point is the creation of characters with their own purpose and their own goals. I may have been outcast for my sorcery, but I will become King. I will avenge my murdered wife, taken from me by an apparition which appears only during a lunar eclipse. The world is secondary. Only once we know the characters, can we understand the world we need to create to bring these exact characters to life. When the players have agency, the world serves the characters, not the other way around.

Your claim is too strong on multiple fronts. Not controlling the goal of play does not preclude a player from having agency (indeed it must not, or no other form of game could possible include it), and further accepting a goal proposed by someone else is not a diminshment of agency either. In the classic plot hook scenario, if a player agrees to a proposed goal, it does not matter whether it originated from the GM or not.

What you're proposing here is possibly a desirable attribute in a game, but it can't be associated with agency in the way you are.

1: Pseudo-resolution processes

When I talk about resolution which players can rely on that means that the outcome is codified into the rules. Taking a piece in chess is an outcome I can rely on. But moving your piece and asking me, the GM, to tell you what happens is completely devoid of reliability. It reliably produces the outcomes the GM chooses – and that is all. Roll a dice and the GM describes what happens gives the same player agency. None. Of course, it is also beloved of illusionist / railroading GMs.

Much of D&D functions in this way – roll a dice, add a number from your character sheet, and I tell you what happens.

I actually have no disagreement with this point broadly, though I point towards a very different set of emerging design criteria. It's a failure of design to leave the GM writing resolution processes in the moment, which is routinely enabled by treating the need to do so as a freedom instead of a burden.

Systems like Burning Wheel and Apocalypse World have codified outcomes. But – and this is critically important – those codified outcomes work in tandem with player-set goals. The elements of agency don’t work in isolation.

So, a common argument is to try and focus in on a moment of resolution – such as a die roll and resulting narration - in a game with agency and a game without. Frequently they look quite similar. GMs from games dictated entirely by them say ‘Aha! it’s all the same’. What they elide is that when the GM has already set the goal – your characters are all tasked with killing A or solving B or discovering C – the resolution process is immaterial. If your goal has been set for you, play is all about doing what you’re told, not what you want.

A game can feature a player-authored goal such as ‘get rich’. But if that game doesn’t feature codified mechanics for acquiring wealth (Monopoly, Acquire, 1830 all feature such mechanics) there’s no agency. It’s the combination of goals and mechanics that are vital. Try playing Monopoly where another player (let’s call them the GM) has complete control of the game’s money supply, asset availability and asset prices – and come back and tell me how much agency you have.

You're still smuggling in "player set goals" as a necessary component of agency again here, which I'll note is outside of your initial definition and apparently unique to the RPG. You also seem to be keen to expand that to a broader claim that "players set goals without any input from the board state" which I also don't see the necessity of.

2: ‘Real life’

People keen to maintain the illusion of agency in their roleplaying games often try to equate gameplay agency with 'real life' agency.

Real life has no person who chooses the weather. It has no person who chose to create mountain ranges or oceans. No person who decides every building in your local town, or everyone who lives within a 10-mile radius of you, or how close the nearest policeman is right now. These things are not determined by individual agency - even though in some cases they may be the accretion of dozens, or thousands, or billions of human decisions.

For these things to be included in a game someone has to decide them. Making stuff up is not analogous to the real-world’s deterministic factors. Nothing about who makes stuff up makes any of it more realistic. Denial of your agency to make stuff up is nothing to do with 'realism' - it's simply denial of your agency to make stuff up. The primacy of GM world-building and GM prep is given cover by claims of ‘realism’ and ‘consistency’. Both realism and consistency are entirely possible (and, in my experience, overwhelmingly likely) in games featuring player agency.

This section is largely irrelevant. Not being able to decide the precise conditions of the board state has nothing to do with a player's ability to act on it. Offloading a bunch of decision making about what the board looks like to the GM is simply one means of solving where that information comes from. You pointed out earlier you could achieve solo play doing the same thing with a series of tables, some games use fixed scenarios that players attempt to navigate using known rules and so forth.

The problem you're pointing towards is that a GM could maliciously use their deciding power to render all player decisions unimpactful to the ultimate evaluation of their goals. The classic "rocks fall, everyone dies" is the most obvious example, or the adventure path with a false choice, left or right will both lead to an ecounter with a bugbear being the more insidious version we call railroading. What doesn't follow is that a GM must do this if they're responsible for creating the content that makes up the board state. Personally, I find the diversity of possible board states that having a GM capable of simulating those questions of weather and people and wall thickness allows is worth the risk.

Mostly the risk here comes from the GM's overlapping responsibilities; GM as worldbuilder, GM as animator of NPCs, GM as adjudicator of rules, and the most frustrating for me, GM as designer of last resort. Ideally those last two should need be invoked as little as possible or not at all, and the GM should treat all of these roles as professionally separate responsibilities that do not impinge on each other. I'd quite like to see a game that completely separates the first two into two different people.

If player agency matters to you, keep your eyes open for inviolable rules which you know and can rely on to achieve your goals. Watch for GMs with opaque processes, resolution which doesn’t give you any actual say in your character’s outcomes, GMs that expect you to agree to them setting your character’s goals for you.

I'm abridging the rest as I don't think you have any new claims in the next few sections. Fundamentally, I think you're trying to paint agency as more binary than it is, leaving out the space of strategic decision making and adding some RPG specific concerns about player goal setting that I don't think are represented in your initial definition.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Mostly the risk here comes from the GM's overlapping responsibilities; GM as worldbuilder, GM as animator of NPCs, GM as adjudicator of rules, and the most frustrating for me, GM as designer of last resort. Ideally those last two should need be invoked as little as possible or not at all, and the GM should treat all of these roles as professionally separate responsibilities that do not impinge on each other. I'd quite like to see a game that completely separates the first two into two different people.

I've often thought all three of those first three would be better served by being different people, but that also probably makes it harder to put a game together, something that can already be difficult for many people. Even just the first two might be difficult (in particular, the worldbuilder might have too little to do during actual play).

 

[hawkeyefan]

Really? Because in that section is this:

“The problem isn’t the playstyle – the presence or lack of agency. However - the claims about it, the illusion that the players’ actions matter in games where any or all of the goals of play, permissible moves, processes of play or results are held by the GM, are untenable.”

In a nutshell, OP is essentially saying enjoy your game if you like (their passing glance towards acknowledging that people can enjoy what they like), but if you do claim to have player agency in your game, you accede to my definition and if you don’t agree with my conclusions, I find your game untenable.

No, that's not what he is saying. It is not that the game is untenable... they even acknowledged having plenty of fun with such games themselves. It is not the game that is untenable... it is the argument, in the absence of those elements provided in the OP, that the game supports player agency that are untenable.

I've bolded the relevant bits above that clearly show this.

 

[pemerton]

If you want that, totally fine. But why do we need to have it? Some people are perfectly content with the GM controlling setting elements for example and managing things outside the characters. There is nothing wrong with this as a preference

I know and I found that section particularly frustrating because he anticipates the concern but dismisses is because he too has played D&D and he's reached the conclusion that in these styles players don't have the agency they think they have. I agree with him: the two approaches are different and the differences are worth talking about. But farming it the way he does just comes off as one true wayism

He is basically saying "Yeah, your way can be fun, so long as you don't care about agency"

I pretty much agree with @Bedrockgames in so far as my preference is concerned. The amount of player agency in a typical sandbox-style game (for example any of Kevin Crawford's Without Number games) is perfect for me, and even the more limited agency of an adventure path can be fun sometimes. The OPs claim on what player agency has to be is too extreme for me to have fun in an RPG with it

When you say that it's paramount, it suggests that the absence or hindrance of it automatically results in a lesser game, which is the problem I have with these threads. Even from the OP's initial post, the framing of his definition of player agency is to view games that fall outside their particular definition as being wrong somehow

From the OP:

I’ve played and run many years of low-to-zero player agency RPGs and had plenty of good times doing so. Observations over 40 years suggest agency isn’t a particularly valued currency in RPGs – the vast majority of players are perfectly willing to cede it in return for subjective experiences such as mystery or immersion.

I’ve also played many high player agency RPGs and had plenty of fun doing so. They have an entirely different feeling of creativity and collaboration which generate their own mystery and their own immersion.

However, there is a very clear difference between the two – and if I want one, I’m going to bounce off the other really hard.

The problem isn’t the playstyle – the presence or lack of agency. However - the claims about it, the illusion that the players’ actions matter in games where any or all of the goals of play, permissible moves, processes of play or results are held by the GM, are untenable.

So clearly, the OP does say that low-agency RPGing can be fun. (And that is consistent with my experience, mostly in the context of vibrantly-GMed CoC play.)

And that play is not said to be "wrong". What is criticised is the attempt to maintain that low-agency play is in fact high-agency play.

it doesn't impede agency (this kind of GM authority is one of the things that can enhance agency). But I think what we are really talking about is a preference of style and different kinds of freedom. If you want a game where players have greater parity with teh GM, fair enough. But I think making it into an agency argument, especially if the point you are making is "these other styles don't have real agency" is just going to piss people off

So in this very thread there are people - eg @Micah Sweet whom I've quoted in this post - who compare degrees of agency in different sorts of approaches to RPGing. Eg Micah Sweet describes an AP as involving "more limited agency" (but agrees with the OP that that needn't stop the play experience being fun).

The OP does nothing different from Micah Sweet, except to make further (and more general) claims of contrast between degrees of agency in RPGing.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So in this very thread there are people - eg @Micah Sweet whom I've quoted in this post - who compare degrees of agency in different sorts of approaches to RPGing. Eg Micah Sweet describes an AP as involving "more limited agency" (but agrees with the OP that that needn't stop the play experience being fun).

The OP does nothing different from Micah Sweet, except to make further (and more general) claims of contrast between degrees of agency in RPGing.

I am not Micah so I can;t speak for them. I can only speak for my own position. I think a lot of people would agree that an AP is thought of as having more constrained agency. But the more I talk to people about sandboxes and agency, the less I think that is a fair characterization (because how someone runs an AP is very important). And I say that as someone who shifted to sandbox out of a frustration with adventure paths during the 2000s. But I don't think adventure paths are all run the same way. And if people are on a path of their own volition, then there isn't an issue with agency at all.

And I don't think the OP and Micah are doing the same thing. The OP is very clearly saying a given style of play might be fun but it has no agency, regardless of what people say or think. There is a tacit accusation in the OP that people are deluding themselves and under the illusion that they have more freedom than they really do. Just given what I have seen Micah say in response to some of my own posts, I am under the impression that Micah isn't that interested in being so antagonistic to another style of play

 

[pemerton]

I think a lot of people would agree that an AP is thought of as having more constrained agency. But the more I talk to people about sandboxes and agency, the less I think that is a fair characterization (because how someone runs an AP is very important). And I say that as someone who shifted to sandbox out of a frustration with adventure paths during the 2000s. But I don't think adventure paths are all run the same way. And if people are on a path of their own volition, then there isn't an issue with agency at all.

I look forward to you taking that up with @Micah Sweet then - clearly you don't agree with him that APs involve "more limited agency"!

 

[dragoner]

From the OP:
So clearly, the OP does say that low-agency RPGing can be fun. (And that is consistent with my experience, mostly in the context of vibrantly-GMed CoC play.)

And that play is not said to be "wrong". What is criticised is the attempt to maintain that low-agency play is in fact high-agency play.

So in this very thread there are people - eg @Micah Sweet whom I've quoted in this post - who compare degrees of agency in different sorts of approaches to RPGing. Eg Micah Sweet describes an AP as involving "more limited agency" (but agrees with the OP that that needn't stop the play experience being fun).

The OP does nothing different from Micah Sweet, except to make further (and more general) claims of contrast between degrees of agency in RPGing.

With the definition I posted, it doesn't mean the players not having unlimited power is low agency. High agency as some describe it can lead to grognardism, and a lot more work mediating between the desires of players. Players have their agency in stations, within limits, as well as the GM. Codifying everything doesn't happen because people don't want a thousand page rule book, it also opens the door to rules lawyering, and the idea that rules can rein in bad behavior.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I look forward to you taking that up with @Micah Sweet then - clearly you don't agree with him that APs involve "more limited agency"!

Yeah I don't think Micah and I disagree all that much. I saw a post where Micah said they pretty much agreed with me. And either way, I am not worried if Micah has a slightly different take than I do