A Question Of Agency?

[Crimson Longinus]

Well the entire thread began because @zarionofarabel wanted to know if his style of GMing allowed for meaningful choices for his players. So I’ve been approaching the conversation with the expectation that agency is desired by those that are playing.

They didn't say their players have expressed any dissatisfaction. If they have, then how to address that depends on the exact form the dissatisfaction takes.

The example was literally what if a NPC told something and it was true and then the GM later decides to reveal it was a lie. It’s about the GM altering what’s established on a whim.

Literally it wasn't.

What if the info I give them comes from an in game source, such as an NPC, then later I decide that the NPC was lying and the info they got was wrong. Then I could make up whatever and they wouldn't know any better, but then does that mean they lack agency because of the fact that they made an informed choice based on an in game lie?

There is no mention the there being a decision about truthfulness of the NPC at the moment they were providing the information. It was undetermined and later it was determined they were lying. No change has been made, merely additional details have been added.

I’m sure that you’ll cite how if the actual status of the information’s truth was not known to the players, then how can their agency be affected....and that’s a relevant question. But it absolutely may be affected (may, not must.....we lack sufficient detail to really say for sure) because of how it was handled in the moment. The mechanics of play that were engaged in that moment cannot be changed as easily as the fiction can to explain away this change.

To give a more specific example, let’s say that in the moment of play when the NPC gives the PCs the information, one of the players asks for some kind of check to determine if it’s true. Now, depending on the game, the result of such a roll could be definitively known to the players, meaning they know if this information is true or not. In other games, perhaps they don’t know if they’ve succeeded; the GM simply says “you think he is telling the truth.”

If this information is important to the players so that they can make informed decisions in play, then not letting the results stand is absolutely subverting their agency.

If that doesn’t matter to you, that’s fine....but that doesn’t mean it’s not what’s happening.

Of course this assumes that no successful attempt to determine whether the NPC was lying was made at the moment. If it had, then the wave function would have collapsed then already.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think that "better" or "worse" is the right metric here. When playing Cthulhu Dark, for instance, we know in advance that the PCs' lives will probably get worse (they will have horrible experiences and lose their grip on sanity). But that doesn't stop the players exercising agency in Cthulhu Dark play.

What is key is do the actions the players declare, and the resolution of those actions, actually matter? Because what matters is highly context-sensitive, so is player agency.

For instance, in your example, what is at stake in the players' successful recruitment (via their PCs) of the eagles as a player-side resource? If the goal is to avoid encounters, then the GM who allows the players to believe that they have succeeded, and then springs the orc encounter on them anyway, is negating or disregarding player agency. If the goal is to avoid the exhaustion of travel, then the GM who springs the orc encounter is probably not negating agency: the players get the benefit (be that mechanical, or fictional positioning, depending on system) of confronting the orcs unexhausted.

This illustrates why a useful tool for helping to preserve or enhance player agency is to understand what the players hope they will achieve on a successful check. Eg if it is clear to everyone at the table that the goal of the eagle gambit is to avoid encounters, and the players succeed on the relevant check(s), then it will be crystal-clear what the GM is doing when s/he nevertheless springs the orc encounter. (I think this relates to @Ovinomancer's comments upthread about techniques that avoid illusionism.)

As usual your exposition is quite clear, and it gives me a chance to say something about game design, which might be illustrative:

I designed a '4e-like game', Heroes of Myth and Legend, which we sometimes play. It takes the SC mechanic of 4e and turns it into a universal process. The reason for this is to produce exactly the clarity which you are describing here. In other words, the summoning of the eagles would be a 'Ritual' (or something similar, there are a few categories of such activities). Rituals in this game work as resources in a challenge. So if they Summon Eagles, then there would be an EXPLICIT reason, that is it would be an attempt to achieve a success in the challenge, and the players would have to supply the narrative justification for that. If they stated they were 'avoiding encounters by flying over the wood' then success would plainly indicate they avoided encounters. A GM who didn't honor that would thus be plainly and explicitly violating the process spelled out in HoML. Obviously, as you say, if the players stated that the justification for the success was "to reduce fatigue" then an encounter has not been explicitly avoided, in the fiction, and thus having one is perfectly consonant.

Of course, D&D, which seems to be the primary assumption here, doesn't have any mechanism for establishing when success has been achieved, let alone what position in the fiction is necessarily being established. An experienced DM might carefully make that happen, but it isn't really clear in either mechanics or process. At best there is a subset of cases where mechanics and fiction exactly coincide. An example might be an Athletics check to leap a chasm. Certainly here the goal is clear and the GM would be clearly remiss to have the PC fall when they successfully jumped. Illusionism here might be something lame like "Oh, the ledge on the other side is an illusion, haha, you fall."

 

[FrogReaver]

Again, look at this from a NARRATIVE perspective. What are the PLAYERS asking for? If what they want to do is play to find out what happens when their characters confront the guy who killed their friend, then lying about it so that doesn't happen is kind of a dick move, right? If instead the players want to play to find out what happens when the PCs are betrayed, well, then obviously the lie cannot possibly be disempowering them! In fact it is simply a necessary component of the desired narrative structure.

IMO this sounds like too much focus on the narrative being what the players want. Which while being one way to play an RPG is not a universal preference.

Characters don't exist. They cannot have agency. When you try to talk about agency from a character perspective, it never makes sense. It cannot make sense. I mean, we COULD talk about whether, fictionally, a certain character had control of his or her fate in a given circumstance, and that might be INTERESTING, but it has nothing to do with the agency of the PLAYER. IMHO this is what makes these kinds of discussions difficult.

Do characters not act? Do their choices not alter the world they exist in? That sounds like agency to me.

So what exactly is player agency? Player agency is when a player chooses the actions of his character and those actions have an actual impact on the characters world. But this isn't complete because there is also another kind of player agency where the player manipulates the fictional world via meta-rules giving the player often alot of agency over the fiction, but not necessarily agency over their character's actions.

It's this distinction of agencys that cause issues in these discussions IMO.

Now, there's a position that some will take that says they never ever want to be in 'player stance' and deciding anything based on their motivations and understanding of the game as a player, that it is some sort of anathema to RP. IMHO this is a 'unicorn' type of philosophy. Nobody is ever really entirely in 'character stance'. Every aspect of play is heavily influenced by gamist considerations and by practical considerations that form the 'game contract' between the game's participants.

Or that position just hasn't went through enough critique and reinvention to become nuanced enough to stand up to such attacks. For example, one could view that preference as the Platonic ideal of roleplaying with the full knowledge that all we have in our world incomplete forms and shadows of it - albeit some forms and shadows are more true to its true form than others.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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 would like to point out that in my own analytical technique this kind of statement is meaningless. There is no 'same place' for them to end up, as DEFINITIONALLY the GM has not created such a place to start with! Thus you have only the epistemologically empty statement that you 'believe' that if the players had made other choices the narrative would have been (in some substantive sense) 'the same'. This is of course not a falisfiable statement, and thus can never be anything EXCEPT an unsupported belief. I question whether it even matters, or if perhaps it simply elucidates that the real question is only "who is able to have the most meaningful input into the fiction at the table." Given a 'no myth' starting point, we can never actually be sure. All we can do is observe the process, and if we can agree on what is meaningful, then 'count' the points at which each participant meets the criteria. Still, we can only say that some other method (IE extensive prep) works better in this regard by resorting to experimentation!

So, I can buy that people may 'feel that this is true' and even base that to an extent on reference to their experience with using both techniques, but all that can really be said is "participants of type X get more agency using techniques A, B, and C vs techniques L, M, and Q."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

My underlying point, which maybe isn't fully explicated in this one post, is that subverting CHARACTER choices in-narrative isn't really determinitive. It doesn't establish the existence of force or not. What matters is what the players goals were, and if the results flowed logically from their action declarations and check results (or whatever, depending on the rules in question). This is at least a consistent construction of the idea of force which is not dependent on unprovable assertions about what narrative other choices would have produced.

And I think it IS generalizable. There are certainly other types of scenarios, like: I the GM have decided that this NPC who is about to be defeated will appear again, thus I fudge his attack role so he knocks the fighter down and escapes. This is certainly a type of force. It doesn't involve (much) uncertainty about what would have happened had the GM made a different choice, and it doesn't involve any subversion of a player choice at all. So, what am I saying here? We don't know where the other branch would have gone where the GM didn't fudge the roll? I think its pretty clear (I say it is in this example) that the NPC would be defeated. Still, what if the escape meets the requirements of developing narrative in the direction the players wanted? Well, frankly, D&D at least, isn't very accomplished at dealing with this situation. A player could literally say "we let him go", but there isn't really a mechanism to translate that into fiction. Now in some other games maybe there is. If the GM in such a game were to deny that possibility, then a mechanic/process/principle of play was violated (this might be the case in BitD for instance, as I understand it, though we would have to develop the fiction more to elucidate that).

So, I agree that there are different situation, and different games that work in different ways, but I don't see that my point is invalid or empty.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Right. I have an example. Once I ran a one-shot (using Traveler IIRC, but really it could have been anything). In this one-shot the PCs were on a doomed space station. Nothing the PCs were going to do, no action they could take, was going to alter the fact that when the orbit decayed it burned up, and everyone inside burned up with it. This scenario was, IMHO, in no way shape or form a 'railroad' or example of 'DM force'. I admit, I didn't explicitly indicate to the players that their choices wouldn't materially change the outcome for the PCs. Still, playing through the scenario provided them all ample chances to make decisions, to explore different aspects of their characters, and to answer the question "how would I face an unavoidable death?" This is high concept RP and evoked a lot of interesting play.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And I think it IS generalizable. There are certainly other types of scenarios, like: I the GM have decided that this NPC who is about to be defeated will appear again, thus I fudge his attack role so he knocks the fighter down and escapes. This is certainly a type of force. It doesn't involve (much) uncertainty about what would have happened had the GM made a different choice, and it doesn't involve any subversion of a player choice at all. So, what am I saying here? We don't know where the other branch would have gone where the GM didn't fudge the roll? I think its pretty clear (I say it is in this example) that the NPC would be defeated. Still, what if the escape meets the requirements of developing narrative in the direction the players wanted? Well, frankly, D&D at least, isn't very accomplished at dealing with this situation. A player could literally say "we let him go", but there isn't really a mechanism to translate that into fiction. Now in some other games maybe there is. If the GM in such a game were to deny that possibility, then a mechanic/process/principle of play was violated (this might be the case in BitD for instance, as I understand it, though we would have to develop the fiction more to elucidate that).

This relates to the rather obvious but nevertheless often overlooked fact that what the characters want and what the players want is often not the same thing at all. The characters would probably want to solve any possible issue speedily with ease and avoid any danger or drama. The players however want to experience an engaging fantasy adventure with a lot of thrilling and dangerous situations and dramatic twists.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This relates to the rather obvious but nevertheless often overlooked fact that what the characters want and what the players want is often not the same thing at all. The characters would probably want to solve any possible issue speedily with ease and avoid any danger or drama. The players however want to experience an engaging fantasy adventure with a lot of thrilling and dangerous situations and dramatic twists.

Quite true

 

[prabe]

I would like to point out that in my own analytical technique this kind of statement is meaningless. There is no 'same place' for them to end up, as DEFINITIONALLY the GM has not created such a place to start with! Thus you have only the epistemologically empty statement that you 'believe' that if the players had made other choices the narrative would have been (in some substantive sense) 'the same'. This is of course not a falisfiable statement, and thus can never be anything EXCEPT an unsupported belief. I question whether it even matters, or if perhaps it simply elucidates that the real question is only "who is able to have the most meaningful input into the fiction at the table." Given a 'no myth' starting point, we can never actually be sure. All we can do is observe the process, and if we can agree on what is meaningful, then 'count' the points at which each participant meets the criteria. Still, we can only say that some other method (IE extensive prep) works better in this regard by resorting to experimentation!

So, I can buy that people may 'feel that this is true' and even base that to an extent on reference to their experience with using both techniques, but all that can really be said is "participants of type X get more agency using techniques A, B, and C vs techniques L, M, and Q."

Would you find the statement less objectionable if I said that a GM who isn't careful about framing the fiction might find himself leading it where he wants it to go, regardless of what the players/characters want?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Would you find the statement less objectionable if I said that a GM who isn't careful about framing the fiction might find himself leading it where he wants it to go, regardless of what the players/characters want?

I would say that this is a possible outcome of play, sure. I am not sure it has a lot to do with prep though. I think I join @pemerton and others in being dubious of THAT assertion. Having GMed a vast number of different games, both with and without prep (or some pre-built content) I found that the temptation to put the game on 'rails' leading to said pre-built content was strong. As I said before, I cannot even speculate on what improv leads to, except "whatever it actually leads to." As a rationalist realist I highly value evidence or speculation or anecdote, so I don't put huge credence on people's feelings about how things work. Humans are notoriously good at fooling themselves, better than they are at seeing objective truth.