An examination of player agency

[Campbell]

In a lot of cases the GM I want restrained is me. The reason I want myself restrained is to remove things from my sphere influence I do not want to be responsible for. I also kind of want my players to keep me accountable. That instead of focusing on being some mythical Good GM I can just focus on being the best Blades in the Dark GM I can.

What I really like is not having a choice after we go to the dice. That I get to see how things unfold as much as the players do.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'm not super familiar with Blades, but please tell me if this comparison position is accurate:

'Yes I know I just took enough hit point damage to KO my character, and I know part of that is because I chose to take a bunch of additional damage last round, but it's not dramatically satisfying for my character to miss the rest of the fight'.

Is this a different proposition to your Blades example? Would you expect a D&D GM to undo some of the damage?

I would say that it's a pretty good comparison, yes. Stress is a stand in for Hit Points to some extent, but it's more about effort or willpower or some combo of both. There are actual Harm rules that are separate from Stress.

What also makes Stress different is the player can never ever lose it without choosing to do so. It's a player resource that cannot be taken away or reduced by the GM.

But otherwise... yes, when it's gone, you're out of the scene (whether from exhaustion, fear, mental breakdown, temper tantrum, whatever may be appropriate based on the circumstances). Not making the character be out of the scene is definitely along the lines of letting a character who ran out of hit points in D&D continue to act because they ran out while pursuing their brother's killer, and it wouldn't be dramatically satisfying not to have the character face the killer.

In my eyes, it's clearly a disregard for any concern about game... which by default means a disregard for player agency.

Uh, no, not at all. There are certainly GMs who abuse their authority, but this isn't really about abuse is it? The GM has a fundamentally different role from that of a player. To argue that the GM should be bound by the exact same rules as the players is just odd because they have different functions.

Well, it isn't always the same rules. I mean, they have different roles in play. But there are also rules that generally apply to each.

All we have to do is look at combat to see a very functional play space, where there are rules that are expected to be followed and honored. D&D combat is a fine example of a game with mostly clear rules... though sometimes they may be hidden from players. But players can approach combat with pretty stable expectations. If I roll high enough to equal or exceed a target's AC, I hit and roll X for damage. If I cast Fireball, I'll do full damage to those who fail to make a saving throw, and half to those who make the throw... unless they have some exception based ability. And so on.

This allows players to make informed decisions. They know their hit points, they know how many times they can use a given ability, and so on. They likely have a sense of their opponents' capabilities, and they can proceed with the expectation that the rules will work as expected. That the GM won't just say "no, I don't think it makes sense for you to beat this guy... he's supposed to be the greatest swordsman in the land, so I've decided he gets away" or whatever.

There's not any reason that other areas of play cannot work with that same level of expectation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What does codified mean here?

You can use "inviolate" if you prefer, but I'm with @Umbran on stuff like not really being hard-enforcable. Say rather that the constraining rules are clear and intended to be followed as written without deviation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why are you conflating 'the rules of the game aren't under the authority of the GM' with 'players must have worldbuilding powers'?

Someone has to have worldbuilding powers. If not the GM, then who?

 

[zakael19]

Agency over the character's psyche and also resulting dramatic beats.



I think the moments leading to it were perfectly sensible. And I had no issue with my character taking trauma as result of that scene, that ended in a cold-blooded murder and dramatic revelation of regarding my character's past. What I would have had an issue with, was that by letter of the rules my character would have suffered the trauma as result of trivial matter, and would have been removed from the scene in which he was quite integral part of before it had been dramatically resolved. It simply would not have coherently followed from the established fiction either narratively, immersively or logically. My character took the trauma, I was not avoiding that, but it happened in a satisfactory instead of stupid way. And I absolutely think that our call on how to handle it was the correct one.

Now I think that we had to do this in the first place is because how the trauma rules are written, and I think they're bad min this regard. Because you can take stress from some pretty damn narratively trivial things, hell you can even take via flashback, where in the present literally nothing that could trigger the trauma is happening, so instantly triggering it at once when the stress meter is filled can cause unsatisfactory results. So I strongly feel that is better to keep the timing of the trauma acquisition and writing of the character from the scene somewhat more flexible, so that that it easier to keep the narrative sensible.

Hey that's interesting! I'm a little confused at how you'd take stress without opting in and how the trauma could be resultant from a trivial matter since the triggering is in the player's hands, but interestingly Harper has provided some optional rules around Trauma in Deep Cuts that basically leave it more up to the player how that moment of overwhelming stress -> Trauma plays out.

Edit: I see that in reading the last few pages you've discussed this some!

Describe your character’s Trauma reaction in the current circumstance, based on the condition that you just chose. You decide how intense this reaction is, and if it causes a problem for your character.

I think that prioritizing "player agency over dramatic moments" is a totally valid thing to want, we see this show up in the rules of games like Fabula Ultima/Daggerheart around character death for instance.

As an aside, since the Flashback mechanic is intended to replace pre-planning ("oh we totally made a plan for just this occurrence, let me tell you how..." in teh same way Load is "oh I totally packed my lock picks before we left the lair..."), it generally errs on the side of 0-1 stress unless you're doing something that in another system might be a whole set of rolls and multiple scenes (an example given of a 2 Stress flashback is basically fundamentally changing the context of a Desperate engagement roll by talking about how you arranged for there to actually be a bomb in a delivery).

 

[hawkeyefan]

It can be.
At a given table, agency ought to be about the forms of agency those players care about.

Sure!

Yeah, well, I haven't agreed with the OP myself. Assertion in an OP does not equate to truth.

But that's not what I was doing. I was referencing the OP because @MGibster asked the following:

What's even the point of having a GM who is as bound to the rules as a player?

So I referenced the OP, which explains what's even the point.

Inviolable rules may be an excellent way to achieve agency for many people.

I, personally, have never seen a rule in a game book that is "inviolable". Tabletop games in general have no modes of enforcement. Humans can always step outside of game rules, if they want.

Well, sure, the RPG police aren't going to show up at anyone's house and haul them away. But I don't think that it's a crazy idea to consider rules to be enforceable in a game.

Hold on a second.
Just a sentence before, you were saying "essential".
Now, it is that a game is "not one that is all that concerned".

Which leaves the idea that whether or not the game is concerned with it, agency may exist regardless...

Are we trying to determine if a game is "concerned with" agency, or whether agency is actually present in play? Because those are two very different questions! The latter question will include not just the game rules, but also player and GM behaviors that enhance, or suppress, agency.

In the sentence with "essential", I was paraphrasing the OP.

In the sentence where I say "concerned with", I was offering my own opinion. My opinion has a lot in common with the OP, but I probably have a slightly less strict stance about it.

I was likely also trying to soften the language to avoid complaints.

Meaningful, informed choices are one form of agency, but, to use your own idea from earlier - they are not the only form of agency.

As an example - if the GM, at the end of a session, asks the players on the content of B-plots they'd like to see, and includes such elements in the adventure next time around, that's a behavior that supports player agency, even if there is no inviolable rule in the book that the GM must ask for such input.

Sure, but when play resumes, there are likely some expectations about what's done with the information requested, right? That the GM deploy this information in a way that creates meaningful play?

What if he asks everyone for an important contact... and then next session begins with all those contacts being killed! Now play is going to be about the PCs seeking revenge!

That wouldn't be caring about player agency at all, I'd say.

 

[hawkeyefan]

You can use "inviolate" if you prefer, but I'm with @Umbran on stuff like not really being hard-enforcable. Say rather that the constraining rules are clear and intended to be followed as written without deviation.

But... but that's the same thing...

 

[soviet]

And you're saying that the desire for codified rules to constrain GMs has nothing to do with trying to head off "bad" GMs?

Who do you think writes these games? Who do you think GMs them? Do you think they are written by unhappy players and then forced on bad GMs by their groups?

I wrote one of these games. My game Other Worlds states very clearly that the GM cannot override the rules and that all dice rolls and modifiers/difficulties should be open and visible. The stakes of each roll are also declared in advance. Players have metacurrency that allows them to modify/reroll dice.

I didn't do this because I was made to, or for other people to GM, or because I don't trust myself when GMing. I did it because I personally find it fun to GM a game where players have more agency and where the outcome of conflicts are not decided or vetoed by me,

 

[soviet]

Someone has to have worldbuilding powers. If not the GM, then who?

I don't know what you mean by 'worldbuilding powers'. I also don't know why you think they are inherently in conflict with 'the rules are inviolable'.

 

[Pedantic]

I've yet to see much that wasn't covered in the OP:

What I see are a lot of claims of exceptionalism for a certain subset of RPG play. The claim is that these games must feature agency simply because they assert it is the case, irrespective of their hidden processes, unstated rules, ability to write and undermine rules and processes unseen, and willingness to conceal player goals.

Even though transposing any of these features into tens or hundreds of thousands of other games (chess, ludo, Monopoly, tennis, I Spy, snap, poker, basketball, doesn't matter) clearly and obviously destroys the agency of other players, they claim this simply doesn't happen when they play their version of this rpg. Their player agency is different. Their game is the exception.

These assertions, these claims of exceptionalism, are unsupported and - in my view - untenable.

I'd like to think my response here was considerably more structured, especially as I don't give much credence to RPGs as an exceptional class of game. I specifically made the argument that the definition you're deploying can't be cleanly transposed to "traditional" games.

I'm particularly interested in whether you'd contend that agency in an RPG requires additional control over the goal of play in a way other games don't, as that seemed to me to be an implicit claim in your argument. Is "agency" the same conceptually in basketball or Wingspan as it is in an RPG? Why can players bind themselves to a goal set by another party in the former but not the latter without losing it?

I'm open to the possibility the forms are fundamentally different in some way, but I don't find your appeals to other forms of gameplay compelling without accounting for that difference. I suspect I'm closer to your position in some ways than others; I have as little patience as you seem to for allowing the GM to control resolution, but I'm not sure your position on agenda is essential to agency.