A Question Of Agency?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that what matters most is that the players’ choice has an impact. So if the GM has presented a forking path in their road and says that one goes into the Dark Forest and the other heads to the Grim Chasm, then the results of that choice should be different in some way that matters.

So, if the GM has prepped an encounter with giant spiders in the forest and one with Tuscan Raider type sandpeople in the Grim Chasm, that’s not illusionism despite the fact that these encounters are preset. Nor would it be illusionism if the GM took the choice into consideration, and then crafted an encounter based on that choice.

Where it could be illusionism is if the GM has an encounter with some ogres planned and it happens in the Forest or the Chasm. Likewise, if the GM is crafting details on the fly and uses the same enemy stats, but simply labels the enemies by a different name. So his 2HD humanoids that have a +2 to hit are Orcs in the Forest or Sandpeople in the Chasm....that’s illusionism as well, I’d say.

There needs to be meaningful difference. At the very least the terrain of the encounters and therefore the difficulty should vary.

There can be lots of other factors that can be brought to bear on this...travel time, treasure gained, information learned or known ahead of time....many others. These things can enhance or diminish player agency.

But at it’s very core, it boils down to their decision mattering to the fiction and the game. Can things go differently if they take Option A instead of Option B?

And now we get to the NUT of the OP's original question! It has been called 'illusionism' and 'GM Force' when the GM presents the same encounter to the players regardless of where they go. But what if I said to you this is incoherent? I present to you the thesis that THE GAME WORLD DOESN'T EXIST. What does exist? The NARRATIVE! So it is impossible to say that the GM gave you the same encounter either way. The players chose the Grim Chasm, and they got spiders. They never chose the Gnarly Forest! THERE ARE NO SPIDERS AWAITING THEM THERE. In fact there is NOTHING there, because it is an unexplored terra incognita within the narrative of the game, which is the only thing that is actualized and thus exists.

Certainly from the player's perspective there was no 'force' applied, no illusion at all. The only question, in my thesis, which can be asked, is whether or not the players got WHAT THEY WANTED. Did they encounter a narrative of a type and character which they had asked to be served up by the GM? Did it meet their genre expectations? Did the milieu seem coherent enough to be described and for sufficient suspension of disbelief? Did they 'play to see what happens' when they explored the Chasm? Was it dramatic? These are good questions!

None of this is to say that illusionism and force cannot and do not exist in some forms. It is just to say that we need to be careful, because if we aren't, we will be deluding ourselves by talking about literally non-existent things. See, we cannot even say for certain that the GM WOULD HAVE put the spiders in the Gnarly Forest. That is not a path that REALITY ITSELF took! It is just as unreal, even at the game table, as the imagined world of the narrative is unreal. Yes, the GM might have fully intended to do that, and we might rightly predict it, but he didn't do it. We will never know. You cannot condemn people for things they haven't done. This is a fundamental rule of ethics.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But if the characters really didn't know anything about the Grim Chasm or the Dark Forest before deciding which to go, why does it matter? As long as the encounter doesn't seem weirdly out of place to the players it's all fine.

The actual meaningful choices are not the sort of things like to which direction to go or which door to randomly open, those exist just for the verisimilitude and flavour. The real meaningful choices need to be informed.

And this was the prize! You won it Real meaningful choices must be informed. You cannot say that a blind choice made by a player is in any way shape or form meaningful, and thus cannot deprive them of agency.

 

[hawkeyefan]

D) The NPC was lying but thought she was telling the truth; her own information was faulty, or she herself had been deceived

E) Things changed such that the NPC's information, while truthful at the time, had become outdated by the time the PCs could put it to use

There's a gajillion ways something like this could come about. The trick is just not to try it too often.

I don’t think either of the examples you gave qualify as a lie. Sure, either of these things could be used as a fictional reason to retroactively explain the discrepancy, but I don’t think that was really the concern.

If a GM decides something that a NPC said to the PCs which was intended to be true at the time retroactively becomes a lie, then this likely can be an example of GM Force. It isn’t certain, but it seems like there’d be a good chance.

Because the retroactive decision....while easily explained in the fiction using your examples or earlier ones....you can’t retroactively play out that scene and give the players the chance to detect the lie.

So I think that example was an interesting one because there are so many ways it can play out. Depending on the details and how it was run, it could be an example of allowing player agency, or it could be an example of completely removing it.

Quick aside, my Blades game just finished a daring recovery from Lord Scurlock's abandoned manor in Six Towers about two sessions ago. What I had thought was going to be a fairly straight theft with some loot turned into a real Fall of the House of Usher thing! There was an uncorked spirit well, paintings that tried to steal souls, and a cult now reeling from the disaster their effort to control the well turned into and now reeeeeallly hates the Crew. Oh, and a necklace turned over from some nice loot and a few other trinkets. Most of this because the Hound decided the manor had to have some neat things worth taking to give to his friends at the University so he could by back his good graces and a Whisper that decided his missing ghost friend might be involved with the cult and using the manor for a base of operations. Many failed checks later and the whole thing was blowing up!

I love how Blades goes off the rails in the best ways possible, but, man, sometimes it's work to keep up!

That’s great! I’m a big fan of the game and love how it just gains momentum. It’s definitely challenging to run at times, but in a good way.

I’ve really been trying to broaden my consequences instead of relying on the most readily available (harm, heat, clocks for guards to notice you, etc) and the more I do that, the better the game gets.

 

[pemerton]

By "starting position" I meant a combination of "what happens if the PCs don't do anything" and "where the PCs are." It's part of framing the fiction, I think, and I think that a GM who isn't careful about framing the fiction can find himself in a position where all paths lead to the same place.

I really don't see any evidence for this.

In Apocalypse World, part of the GM's job can be to decide what happens if the PCs don't do anything. This is approached through the idea of fronts, each of which includes one or more threats (AW, pp 136, 143):

The purpose of your prep is to give you interesting things to say. As MC you’re going to be playing your fronts, playing your threats, but that doesn’t mean anything mechanical. It means saying what they do. It means offering opportunities to the players to have their characters do interesting things, and it means responding in interesting ways to what the players have their characters do. . . .

A countdown clock is a reminder to you as MC that your threats have impulse, direction, plans, intentions, the will to sustain action and to respond coherently to others’. When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock. You can also add countdown clocks to threats you’ve already created. . . .

As you play, advance the clocks, each at their own pace, by marking their segments.

Countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive: when something you’ve listed happens, advance the clock to that point. Prescriptive: when you advance the clock otherwise, it causes the things you’ve listed. Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer makes sense, just scribble it out.

For the most part, list things that are beyond the players’ characters’ control: NPCs’ decisions and actions, conditions in a population or a landscape, off-screen relations between
rival compounds, the instability of a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom. When you list something within the players’ characters’ control, always list it with an “if,” implied or explicit:
“if Bish goes out into the ruins,” not “Bish goes out into the ruins.” Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions, not (and again, I’m not [fooling] around here) NOT future scenes
you intend to lead the PCs to.​

Notice that the point of this is to give the GM interesting things to say. It's to support the collective creation of a certain sort of fiction.

In my Cortex+ Vikings game, it's implicit that if the PCs don't act successfully the Ragnarok will come. But I don't have clocks for that. I just make stuff up as we go along.

In my Prince Valiant and Classic Traveller games, there is no overarching threat in the "fronts" sense. In Traveller there have been. At one point the starship-owning PC had his ship mortgaged, meaning that he had periodic repayments to make. (He's since upgraded to a ship owned free-and-clear.) And at one point there was a bioweapons conspiracy that the PCs were (mostly) unwitting participants in, and then became opponents of, but this was never specified with the sort of detail and clocks that characterise an AW front.

But there are no paths, let alone paths leading to the same place. In those games, I (as GM) am not the sole or even principal decider of what happens next. That is determined via action declarations and action resolution.

So, guessing at the mechanism:

GM hasn't prepped (or even considered) what happens if the PCs don't do anything, so when PCs act in ways to change the fiction, the GM doesn't have a starting point. GM reacts to PCs' action/s with the first thing that comes to mind--doesn't consider multiple results/effects--and maybe eventually the story results of success start to look like the story results of failure.

The mechanism that you are positing seems to pertain to a game that lacks robust action resolution mechanics: you refer to the PCs acting in ways to change the fiction, and then you posit that it is the GM who reacts to those actions with the first thing that comes to mind. But where are the players' action declarations? If those actions are being declared, and they succeed, why is the GM getting to make up whatever fiction s/he likes?

This is actually very consistent with what I posted upthread:

If someone is mostly used to systems that don't have robust action resolution (except perhaps for small-group combat), then I see how they might posit that prep is necessary as a curb on the GM, because otherwise the GM might come to the same place no matter what the PCs do. I don't know what systems @prabe is familiar with beyond D&D; but the only version of D&D that has robust action resolution of the sort I'm talking about, across a wide range of possible action declarations, is 4e. Classic D&D is robust for dungeon exploration, and semi-robust for hex crawls, but not for much beyond that; and 5e seems pretty similar to classic (ie AD&D, B/X, etc), to me at least.

I don't know what systems you are familiar with besides D&D, but it seems - on the strength of what I've quoted - that you're not all that familiar with systems with robust action resolution.

To give a concrete example, from a pretty well-known RPG, namely, Classic Traveller c 1977: if the players declare that their starship is jumping from planet X to planet Y, then there is a completely robust rules procedure to work out what happens: check they have the appropriate software on the ship computer, check their ship has the appropriate fuel, check they have the appropriate crew skills, make the misjump and drive failure checks, etc. If all the hurdles are satisfied, and if the checks are successful, then in the fiction, the PCs's starship has arrived at Y with them in it after a week in jumpspace. If there is a misjump, then they arrive at a random place 1d6(1d6) parsecs away.

There simply isn't scope, in that resolution subsystem, for the GM to decide that the story results of success look like the story results of failure.

The game has many other subsystems that are similarly robust (an escape/evasion subsystem; a use of vacc suit subystem; various social subystems, including one for dealing with police, customs officials and other bureaucrats; a collection of interstellare commerce and trade subystem; etc). These subystems take the players' action declarations as input, and produce outputs that establish clear differences between success and failure.

I think I'm a better GM than I was a writer, and I think the interaction/gestalt around the table is most of why.

That's not a strong advertisement for the utility or importance of GM prep!

 

[pemerton]

Certainly from the player's perspective there was no 'force' applied, no illusion at all. The only question, in my thesis, which can be asked, is whether or not the players got WHAT THEY WANTED.

This is why, in my responses to this and the similar example about being flown by the eagles over the woods, I emphasised that context is all-important.

Suppose the game being played is Burning Wheel, and one of the players declares, and succeeds in, a Spiders-wise check to establish that there are great spiders in the Gnarly Forest. And then the PCs head there. The GM who presents them with Orc encounters is coming close to force - not honouring the intended result of the successful check. Whether or not it is illusionism will depend on how well the GM conceals the force. This is hard in BW; there are other systems with weaker action resolution frameworks which therefore make it easier.

Consider a D&D game where the GM has a rumours table, and there are two true rumours on it: that great spiders lurk in the Gnarly Forest; and that the Grim Chasm is dotted with Orc patrols. And suppose the PCs (and thus their players) acquire both rumours. And the players therefore decide that their PCs will go to the Forest, hoping to fight spiders. Finally, suppose that the GM is intending to spring an Orc encounter on the players no matter what! In this case, the whole thing with rumours and apparently giving the players the choice of which place to go to, is all pointless - it has the appearance of mattering, but it actually doesn't.

I think that would be an example of illusionism. And frankly I reckon stuff like that is probably pretty common in the RPGing world. Rather then the rumours serving the function that they once did in Gygaxian play (for the classic Gygaxian rumour table, like in KotB, acting on the rumours actually does make a difference to what is encountered), they are simply there to give an impression of a "living, breathing world". When the PCs hear rumours of spiders but nevertheless meet Orcs, this even allows the GM to drive home how "living and breathing" the world is!

 

[pemerton]

Over the last few pages there has been some talk about an NPC interaction and later deciding that he was lying. This ties to the improv DM and the prep DM. I was thinking that there is some chance of missing something if you improv the lying later at some point. There would be no chance to tell if the NPC was lying with a check or investigation around town or such.

If a GM decides something that a NPC said to the PCs which was intended to be true at the time retroactively becomes a lie, then this likely can be an example of GM Force. It isn’t certain, but it seems like there’d be a good chance.

Because the retroactive decision....while easily explained in the fiction using your examples or earlier ones....you can’t retroactively play out that scene and give the players the chance to detect the lie.

I have no bone to pick with either of these posts - I just wanted to say that they show how contextual things are. We can't just describe an episode of GM narration and determine, in the abstract away from system, established fiction, etc, whether it honoured or fostered or thwarted player agency.

Whether it is salient to make a check or investigate around town or do anything else to determine whether or not some remark from a NPC was a lie, is totally dependent on those contextual factors.

And upthread I already gave an actual play example where it was the decision by a player to do those things (ie seduce the PCs' patron to get more information from her) that made the question of truth or falsity salient, and motivated me to establish the falsity of some of what the patron had said - as this both increased the verisimilitude of the fiction and gave that player (of the spy PC) more fiction to work with.

 

[FrogReaver]

So I don't prepare plots, or adventures, or stories, or scenes, or anything for the PCs to encounter in advance. What I do is come up with stuff on the fly as the game is being played.

I do have a world that the PCs adventure in, sometimes a published setting, such as the Forgotten Realms or the Star Wars Universe. Sometimes a homebrew world made up in my imagination based on the players desires and the premise of the campaign as decided in Session Zero.

Between sessions I do daydream about the Imaginationland that the campaign will take place in. I wander around in it and see the sights. I fly above it and watch as the peeps that inhabit it go about their lives. I think upon what has happened so far in the established narrative and how that has affected the world and it's inhabitants.

But I don't write anything down, or get stats ready, or prepare encounters for the PCs to take part in. I just imagine stuff between sessions, at times even dwell on aspects of the established narrative to make sure that I have that part of the story that was told at the forefront of my mind for the next session.

So this has made me wonder about the existence of meaningful player agency within my campaigns. If I do not plan ahead and plot out various choices for the players to make, this surely means they lack agency.

So my question is whether or not a no prep GM such as myself is actually able to offer my players meaningful choices? Or am I actually only offering them the illusion of choice and thus robbing them of any agency they might have in a campaign that has choices plotted in advance?

Ask yourself “would my world be different if the players acted differently?” If yes then they had agency.

 

[Ovinomancer]

And now we get to the NUT of the OP's original question! It has been called 'illusionism' and 'GM Force' when the GM presents the same encounter to the players regardless of where they go. But what if I said to you this is incoherent? I present to you the thesis that THE GAME WORLD DOESN'T EXIST. What does exist? The NARRATIVE! So it is impossible to say that the GM gave you the same encounter either way. The players chose the Grim Chasm, and they got spiders. They never chose the Gnarly Forest! THERE ARE NO SPIDERS AWAITING THEM THERE. In fact there is NOTHING there, because it is an unexplored terra incognita within the narrative of the game, which is the only thing that is actualized and thus exists.

Certainly from the player's perspective there was no 'force' applied, no illusion at all. The only question, in my thesis, which can be asked, is whether or not the players got WHAT THEY WANTED. Did they encounter a narrative of a type and character which they had asked to be served up by the GM? Did it meet their genre expectations? Did the milieu seem coherent enough to be described and for sufficient suspension of disbelief? Did they 'play to see what happens' when they explored the Chasm? Was it dramatic? These are good questions!

None of this is to say that illusionism and force cannot and do not exist in some forms. It is just to say that we need to be careful, because if we aren't, we will be deluding ourselves by talking about literally non-existent things. See, we cannot even say for certain that the GM WOULD HAVE put the spiders in the Gnarly Forest. That is not a path that REALITY ITSELF took! It is just as unreal, even at the game table, as the imagined world of the narrative is unreal. Yes, the GM might have fully intended to do that, and we might rightly predict it, but he didn't do it. We will never know. You cannot condemn people for things they haven't done. This is a fundamental rule of ethics.

You've fixated on the example and have missed that the example isn't the case, it's the example of a case. The case is that the players are offered a choice, but the outcome is predetermined -- the choice doesn't matter. This is Force. If you hide this from the players such that the choice appears meaningful -- perhaps by spinning the yarn that the other fork didn't occur so only this line matters, despite the fact that it's really the choice that didn't matter -- then you're into Illusionism as a subset of Force. I'm not really sure why you're putting all of this effort into a throwaway example to illuminate the case of Illusionism, but I don't think that your argument -- that since the other fork (or forks) didn't happen there's no there there -- is particularly worthwhile.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Ask yourself “would my world be different if the players acted differently?” If yes then they had agency.

While true, it's too shallow a statement to say much. If there was one choice that would have changed things, then you can say this, the same as if there were myriad choices that did so. It's not a very good yardstick to evaluate agency. This is essentially an OR gate over all choices in the campaign -- it could have been a total railroad except for one thing.

 

[chaochou]

This is why, in my responses to this and the similar example about being flown by the eagles over the woods, I emphasised that context is all-important.

Right. And so what’s important is to define context. And in the case of player agency, the context is this: who is creating the purpose of the character?

That‘s the matter in question. Let’s say the GM creates the purpose of the character(s). If the players object to their predetermined fate, you have force. If they are unaware, you have illusionism. If they are aware, but don’t object (such as when a player accepts a ‘hook’ for a scripted plot line) then you have participationism.

Player agency is player freedom to create the purpose for their character and for the game content to begin, and grow, from that ongoing act of creation. It’s not one and done, the purpose can and should change as the game state changes through resolution. When the game follows the player’s protagonism in this way, then there is agency, and it’s completely obvious.