A Question Of Agency?

[pemerton]

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.

The second conjunct - the game content begins, and grows, from the ongoing act of the players creating the purposes for their characters - is why I see action declaration and action resolution as so important. In practical terms this is perhaps the principal way whereby player purposes are manifested, and hence are able to shape the growth of the shared fiction.

 

[pemerton]

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

I don't agree with this. There was at least one Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book - The House of Horror, I think it was called - where the fiction was different depending on the choices made as a reader. And not just different in terms of the protagonist living or dying, but different in terms of the backstory - the "world" of the book.

Yet in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure the reader has no agency.

Player agency is about being able to determine why and how the world is different. Which relates closely to @chaochou's point about character purpose.

 

[aramis erak]

I think I was more intending that the choices of the players setting things off on new branches that have not been predetermined by the GM. To use a metaphor, the PCs are blazing their own trail rather than following one of those set by the GM. As you point out, the system and the goals and methods of play will matter quite a bit in this regard.

Indeed. But the basic principles behind Burning Wheel can be used in most...

Fundamentally...
only propose a roll when at least two different outcomes are interesting.
Make certain players know the reward cycle
Reward the play you want to see.
Don't let failure stop the action.
Use the rules only when they're useful. (note that that point varies widely, and I'm more likely than most to stick to the rules.)
Say yes or set a difficulty.
Knowledge rolls can be used by players to establish (or disestablish on failure) truths of the fiction state.

 

[Lanefan]

I fail to see why the Improv GM is unable to take notes on what happens. Prep doesn't mean you're incapable of misremembering what's happened before -- that's what notes are for, and Improv doesn't mean you can't have notes on things that have happened.

Nice in theory.

In practice, if I took down notes in enough detail to be worth it I'd spend 2/3 of the session writing...which would mean 2/3 of the session would be wasted time for the players as I'm really no good at either talking or listening while I'm writing.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

That's just it - in the two examples I gave there'd have been no chance to detect a lie anyway, as in both cases the NPC legitimately thought she was telling the truth. Advantage: no need to retcon anything as nothing would have played out any differently.

That said, GMs still need to be careful with this sort of thing as it'd be so easy to mess it up and simply invalidate previous play (as per your example of had the NPC been lying from square one the PCs might have had a chance to detect it); and that is bad.

 

[aramis erak]

That's just it - in the two examples I gave there'd have been no chance to detect a lie anyway, as in both cases the NPC legitimately thought she was telling the truth. Advantage: no need to retcon anything as nothing would have played out any differently.

That said, GMs still need to be careful with this sort of thing as it'd be so easy to mess it up and simply invalidate previous play (as per your example of had the NPC been lying from square one the PCs might have had a chance to detect it); and that is bad.

If the GM's always prepared for the player decision that is made, stats to hand, one very quickly begins to see through the illusion of choice.

Which is why, when I wind up with prep for all the choices, I make certain players are aware of my having prepped more than was used.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Acquiring the rumours is one thing, confirming their truthfulness (and timeliness) is something else again.

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.

Here I both agree and disagree at the same time, and it comes down to intent. If the GM has predetermined she's going to plonks the Orcs in no matter where the PCs go, I agree that's illusionism; and probably not good if the run of play had led them to legitimately expect spiders.

But, if the rumours - while true - are incomplete; and each forest has both Orcs and spiders in it meaning no matter which way the PCs go they have a decent chance of encountering both, what then?

Or the rumours are true ot the best of the teller's knowledge, but in the intervening time someone's gone in and cleared out the spiders such that if the PCs go that way they meet nothing at all. What then?

Or, say the rumours are both true and the PCs will meet Orcs if they go one way and spiders if they go the other; but in either case they're also going to meet a nasty Druid and his pet Displacer Beasts shortly afterward. What then? The Druid's not on the rumours list and thus the PCs don't know he's out there or where he might be - for all the players know he was rolled on a wandering encounters table. (yes this one's illusionism but I don't think it's the bad kind - to me it's on par with a module saying "there are five chests; no matter in which order they are searched the second one will contain [treasure] and the third one will contain a gas trap", which is not at all uncommon in published modules)

I guess what I'm getting at - unclearly, I suspect - is that this question really can't be answered until and unless the PCs take both routes and find out what's where.

 

[chaochou]

The second conjunct - the game content begins, and grows, from the ongoing act of the players creating the purposes for their characters - is why I see action declaration and action resolution as so important. In practical terms this is perhaps the principal way whereby player purposes are manifested, and hence are able to shape the growth of the shared fiction.

Yes, this is critical. Nearly all the examples I see, of choosing left paths or right paths, of orcs or spiders, fail to examine the real questions of agency such as:

• Who created the need for my character to travel at all?
• Who authored where my character needed to go?
• Who created the reason for my character going there?
• What is my character going to do when they get there?

Most discussions on the topic implicitly include the answers:

• The GM
• The GM
• The GM
• The thing the GM says needs doing

In other words, GM force is so heavily presupposed in nearly all the given examples that there's no point engaging them.

Player agency is a loop which has to begin from the first moment of play (or not). From that point on the creation of purpose for the character doesn't change hands - either the player gets to do it explicitly, or the GM does it implicitly.

And if it features agency then play from that point on is, as you describe, a cycle of action declaration and action resolution until the player decides their purpose is achieved or failed or that the character has changed and their purpose has shifted.

 

[Lanefan]

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

In and of itself this statement is correct.

What it ignores is whether the players had the opportunity to act differently, and-or whether those actions-differently would have been somehow blocked by the GM above and beyond the whims of simple random chance.

By this I mean: say a party decides on a whim to sail across the sea. IMO a GM blocks that agency if to keep them here she arbitrarily decides there's no boats available to buy or to book passage on, where if she legitimately rolls for boat availability and the dice come up dry she hasn't blocked their agency at all - they just hit some bad luck which might, given time, pass.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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!

And if it was just left at that it would be a pretty terrible use of illusionism, and I'd have to question why the GM included the rumour table in the first place if they didn't intend to do anything with the rumours.

But let's suppose I want to do this exact thing for some reason. Maybe I intended to prep for both orcs and spiders, but my pet iguana ate the MM pages containing the rules fore spiders so now I have only the orc encounter prepped. Or perhaps I'm just a nefarious power-mad illusionist. Anyway, as the characters arrive to the Gnarly Forest they come upon several slain spiders, and if they investigate they manage to find some arrows of orcish manufacture. But there are no orcs in the Gnarly Forest, and the closest orc settlement in the Grim Chasm is a significant distance away! What are the orcs doing here? This is not just some random orc raiding party, the spiders have nothing of value. Has someone send the orcs here and to what end? So now instead of just one random encounter with orcs on the orc territory, the encounter will now be tied to an emerging sublot. The actions of PCs did affect things, just not in the way they may have anticipated.