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

[pemerton]

Losing control of your character is a form of agency loss.

<snip>

If I fail a climb check, my agency is limited in that my character is no longer able to access whatever is beyond the wall. But we wouldn't call this a loss of agency.

The second example is why I don't agree with you about the first example.

I don't think it's accurate to describe having one's attempted move fail as a loss of agency in playing a game. I've lost a lot of games in my life (and have won some too), but the fact that I lost doesn't mean I didn't have agency. It just means that I played badly, or got unlucky, etc.

The fact that there is so much focus on the player getting to have sole authority over what their PC feels, to me, seems to be a sign of the narrowness of the locus of agency in a lot of RPGing. That the only way the player gets to express their agency is via authoring the colour of what their PC feels.

(And I call it colour deliberately - because in a typical, conventionally-structured RPG it's not as if being able to author your PC's feelings has any effect on the actual outcomes of the actions you declare for your PC.)

I've said exactly what my idea of agency is. I'm applying that same standard to all games. I'm not interested in building up one game over another. As I've pointed out to you many, many times... I play many kinds of games.

The issue is that I have an opinion that you don't agree with, and because it's not the mainstream opinion, you think I should change it.

Too bad. I'm not going to do that.

What's amazing is that at the same time that you expect me to conform to the norm, you're posting about feeling bullied.

These quoted passages characterise my feelings about quite a bit of this thread!

 

[Faolyn]

I don't have a clue why I'm catching drivebys from you.

It's a joke. You have a thing on you, but you still have to roll to see it. Which is like looking for your glasses while they're perched on top of your head.

 

[TwoSix]

If the lion's abilities can be fudged out of existence by any player, does the lion have agency? Or is declaring a roar sufficient?

"If a lion could bring a flask, we could not collect blood in it." -Burning Wittgenstein

 

[Thomas Shey]

They can be used, certainly. But are they? What games? I'm genuinely curious. No game I play or own uses these terms.

I'd have to search through PDFs, but I've seen scene framing frequently (in the end, that can be as simple as talking about starting in media res and the like or how to avoid the whole "you all meet in a bar" thing). Reward cycles only tend to come up in games where the authors take the time to pull back the curtain on their design thoughts and how advancement was designed.

 

[robertsconley]

Throughout the context of this conversation the conception of agency based on conventions of play not in effect in other games has been used to claim that they offer less agency. Would you say that is a mistake?

That question doesn’t reflect what’s actually been going on. People were talking past each other because they were working from different assumptions about what kind of agency matters, not because one group was trying to deduct agency from the other. If you’re genuinely trying to understand, I’d suggest not asking it as a loaded question; it doesn't advance the discussion.

 

[TwoSix]

That question doesn’t reflect what’s actually been going on. People were talking past each other because they were working from different assumptions about what kind of agency matters, not because one group was trying to deduct agency from the other. If you’re genuinely trying to understand, I’d suggest not asking it as a loaded question; it doesn't advance the discussion.

I don't think anyone is talking past each other at this point; we just have a simple disagreement on what the correct usage of the term is.

 

[robertsconley]

I'm reiterating a starting point to describe how we got from the beginning to right now. It's an example of a lack of nuance that drives a lot of the contention, and which you (rightly!) critiqued in your previous post.

If someone uses a term, and someone else pushes back that they use the term differently, the goal should be to understand everyone's use cases so the term can be made more clear, and caveated correctly in further usage.

I’m on board with building shared understanding around terminology. That’s what I’ve been doing by distinguishing between meta-agency and character agency, and showing how different frameworks prioritize them.

But you still haven’t addressed my question: who or what exactly are you critiquing now that makes this clarification necessary?

 

[Campbell]

That question doesn’t reflect what’s actually been going on. People were talking past each other because they were working from different assumptions about what kind of agency matters, not because one group was trying to deduct agency from the other. If you’re genuinely trying to understand, I’d suggest not asking it as a loaded question; it doesn't advance the discussion.

People have literally said things like:

• Your play priorities are self-centered
• It rips out the heart of roleplaying
• It offers no agency
• It is artificial
• It is mechanically focused

While trying to analyze it from the perspective of play conventions that are not in effect. It seems to me that you want us to only analyze your play from the perspective of your creative goals while not condemning those who are addressing other forms of play from the perspective of their creative goals they are bringing in from conventional play and not from the perspective of the creative goals of the games in question, even after those creative goals have been well explained. It seems hard to draw any other conclusion then you want all discussion to be only in terms of your creative goals. Please assuage my concerns.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Being systematic is good.

Saying "I'm describing these principles, because I think they'll make for a strong, distinctive play experience", like that blog post does, or the Principia Apocrypha, or Matt Finch's primer, is how you make a convincing argument in the TTRPG space.

"I'm just describing the way I like to do it" isn't really that helpful. Might be fun for the describer, but not very useful for anyone else.

And yet rigorous, jargon-filled academic discussion is not an agreed upon requirement here. Perhaps we should all keep this in mind.

 

[pemerton]

Throughout the context of this conversation the conception of agency based on conventions of play not in effect in other games has been used to claim that they offer less agency. Would you say that is a mistake?

Can I check that what you're getting at is something similar to what I asked about upthread - that if we relativise agency to the goals and techniques of a particular approach, then it becomes meaningless to try and say (for instance) that AP play is lower agency than sandbox play?