D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

Are we operating on the assumption that not moving beyond the GM's "menu", as you call it, means your players have no agency?

"No" agency? No.

"Not very much agency"? Yes.

You have limited agency at a restaurant ordering from a fixed menu. The more choices, the less limited your agency is--but it always is pretty limited. The chef at a French restaurant isn't going to prepare you authentic Japanese ramen. You might be able to ask for pretty basic "international" dishes, but most such chefs would be at least a little affronted if you asked them to make you a hamburger.

If I may, allow me to turn this question around: Would you say CRPGs offer player agency through dialogue choices and selecting from a menu of adventurable places to go? I had been given to understand that this was seen as a clear mark of CRPGs not offering player agency, because you can only choose from things on a literal menu!

 

[mamba]

If the DM is still setting "you can select from A-G until you've done all of them", that doesn't at all look like a "sandbox" to me.

agreed, it was a 'choose one (or maybe two) of them' not 'do all of them in whatever sequence you like'

 

[Micah Sweet]

"No" agency? No.

"Not very much agency"? Yes.

You have limited agency at a restaurant ordering from a fixed menu. The more choices, the less limited your agency is--but it always is pretty limited. The chef at a French restaurant isn't going to prepare you authentic Japanese ramen. You might be able to ask for pretty basic "international" dishes, but most such chefs would be at least a little affronted if you asked them to make you a hamburger.

If I may, allow me to turn this question around: Would you say CRPGs offer player agency through dialogue choices and selecting from a menu of adventurable places to go? I had been given to understand that this was seen as a clear mark of CRPGs not offering player agency, because you can only choose from things on a literal menu!

Do the dialogue choices offer a different experience to the player, as in the actual play unfolds differently and you experience places, people and events you wouldn't have if you had made a different choice? If so, I would consider that some amount of agency.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Do the dialogue choices offer a different experience to the player, as in the actual play unfolds differently and you experience places, people and events you wouldn't have if you had made a different choice? If so, I would consider that some amount of agency.

Depends on the game. BG3 has dialogue options which allow you to ally with various people, which can significantly change the experience. For example, in the opening act, you can choose to ally with the tieflings (protecting the jerk Druid grove from assault, thus assuaging the druids' concerns), or you can choose to support the Druids cutting themselves off from the world (thus dooming the tieflings, changing subsequent acts in various ways), or you can choose to ally with the goblins attacking the grove. This can affect which allies you have over the course of the story, can turn ally playable characters against you or turn enemy NPCs into allies (e.g. Minthara), and has long-running consequences overall. Likewise, in the final act, you can choose which factions you ally with (none, one side or the other, pretend to ally with all of them, etc.); you can betray previous allies or not, which changes how, when, and sometimes whether you do various content; etc.

It's certainly not as open-ended as it could be. You're generally going to see most of the same places, though not necessarily always, and there are scenes or places you can only see if you take certain paths. But there is agency there. You also have agency WRT your illithid powers and such, and the game actively recognizes this at various points (for example, there's a very difficult save...IF you've ever consumed any tadpoles to give yourself more powers. If you haven't done this, I can't remember if it's automatic success or a near-trivial roll, but either way it's MUCH easier to resist a temptation/compulsion if you're "clean".)

I just wouldn't call any of that anywhere close to a "sandbox"--but that's exactly what a "menu" of options is.

As a different example, the game Wasteland 2 has both dialogue and story options, where choosing path A cuts off path B and vice-versa. I believe there are also dialogue options in there which influence the direction the game goes, I fear I never finished it.

 

[pemerton]

Do the dialogue choices offer a different experience to the player, as in the actual play unfolds differently and you experience places, people and events you wouldn't have if you had made a different choice? If so, I would consider that some amount of agency.

I remember once, a few years ago now, being in a post where someone was implying that a Choose Your Own Adventure book is not a railroad. Whereas it strikes me as obvious that it is nothing but!

 

[Umbran]

I remember once, a few years ago now, being in a post where someone was implying that a Choose Your Own Adventure book is not a railroad. Whereas it strikes me as obvious that it is nothing but!

The classic "railroad" has only one end that the GM actively drives play towards when the players try to deviate.

Choose Your Own Adventure books had several different ends, and the book allows you to go to which ever one you want.

The epitome of the Choose Your Own Adventure genre, may be Ryan North's 2016 book, Romeo and/or Juliet which has over a hundred endings within its pages.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I remember once, a few years ago now, being in a post where someone was implying that a Choose Your Own Adventure book is not a railroad. Whereas it strikes me as obvious that it is nothing but!

No, I'm with you on that one to a degree, but even in such a book I see some agency. The experience does vary in real ways based on your choices.

 

[pemerton]

The experience does vary in real ways based on your choices.

This does not strike me as sufficient for agency. Imagine a game of snakes-and-ladders, played not by rolling dice but by drawing numbers from a hat. The experience would differ depending on which lot a player chooses to pull out; but this change in randomisation method doesn't increase the player's agency.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The classic "railroad" has only one end that the GM actively drives play towards when the players try to deviate.

Choose Your Own Adventure books had several different ends, and the book allows you to go to which ever one you want.

The epitome of the Choose Your Own Adventure genre, may be Ryan North's 2016 book, Romeo and/or Juliet which has over a hundred endings within its pages.

Having owned and read said book: it's a bit complicated, don't you think?

You aren't allowed to choose anything other than what the book contains. Your paths are perfectly fixed from the very beginning. Sure, you get do select which branch(es) you flow along, and you even get a choice of characters at the beginning. But do you have meaningful agency? I'm not so sure. Especially because when people advocate for TTRPGs by talking about how open-ended things are; I would fully expect someone in a conversation on that topic to scoff at any CYOA/"chooseable-path adventure" as being trivially obviously a railroad, just one with lots of potential stopping points. Yet here, where we're starting from a position of defending a position as "well, surely this counts as a sandbox!", a CYOA/"chooseable-path adventure" can't possibly be a railroad because it's got so many possible endings you could encounter.

This is why I laid out a spectrum of options from almost totally superficial agency (Dragonlance, played as "you take on the role of this specific character acting through the pre-written metaplot") to almost absolute agency (an Ironsworn-style experience where a great deal is under the players' control). When people use the term "sandbox", they are almost always trying to communicate a pretty significantly high degree of agency--not absolute, to be sure, but active effort to remove DM control/influence and put player actions first for as many things as one possibly can.

The most committed, "fullest" form of sandbox is difficult to square with some of the game design of D&D and its children/siblings. The centralized role of the DM/GM makes it difficult to get that unrestricted sandbox setup. Players frequently have agency in choosing how and/or when, but not what or why; as Hussar has said, it often still boils down to, "GM offered us this slate of things, we can pick from it but can't pick anything outside it." I certainly consider such a slate/menu/spread to offer players more agency than anything I would call a "railroad", but "more agency than a railroad" is pretty tepid, like saying "warmer than absolute zero"--both 100 K and 1000 K are "warmer than absolute zero", but I wouldn't call 100 kelvin warm by any means. Warmer =/= warm.

 

[Umbran]

This does not strike me as sufficient for agency. Imagine a game of snakes-and-ladders, played not by rolling dice but by drawing numbers from a hat. The experience would differ depending on which lot a player chooses to pull out; but this change in randomisation method doesn't increase the player's agency.

A well-written choose-your-own adventure does not have random coin flips at the junctures, though. There's more logical relation between the choice and result than just drawing of lots provides.