A Question Of Agency?

[Manbearcat]

Why does it matter?

* The lead post was about no/low prep vs (some level of more than that) prep and attendant agency.

* Force/Illusionism was integrated into the conversation at some point as a component to be examined (and how it relates to prep, GMing ethos, and the downstream effects on play).

* Players (being the humans they are) come with extreme variance in terms of interests, aesthetic tastes, cognitive horsepower, awareness, and investment in play.

* Systems matter significantly (Dungeon World couldn't be further from D&D 5e and they're the same genre...Dogs in the Vineyard and Blades in the Dark are hugely different from each other and hugely different from each of the prior 2 mentioned games despite the fact that (a) V Baker wrote Dogs and (b) Dogs was the GMing/play ethos that inspired his writing of Apocalypse World which in turn inspired both DW and Blades...and Torchbearer is like none of these games!) and that intersects with player archetypes directly above.

* GMs come here to discuss all the various constituent parts of GMing (techniques, ethos, etc), system, and how integral each of those constituent parts are to the trajectory of play and the play experience for the (widely varying) player base...and for themselves and their own tastes/interests/strengths/weaknesses.

If all of these things are true (and they certainly are) then how can it not matter? Why are you actively pushing back against/hostile to analysis? I don't understand this perspective (hostility to analysis and active effort to censor it/shut it down) that so deeply pervades our hobby (or at least a good cross-section of ENWorld).

If your players or your play is not sensitive to (in the "the experience of play isn't impacted one way or another" sense of the word) changes in the systematized aspects of gaming (action resolution, ethos/agenda, GMing techniques, etc) then something is happening at your table (that is specific to your table) to drown out the inherent sensitivity to systematization variance on the experience of play. If you're not interested in interrogating that to discover what lies beneath...then fine...don't investigate it. But these threads are meant to rigorously investigate those things because they matter to the people that post them (the lead poster) and the people that reply to the thread.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If all of these things are true (and they certainly are) then how can it not matter? Why are you actively pushing back against/hostile to analysis? I don't understand this perspective (hostility to analysis and active effort to censor it/shut it down) that so deeply pervades our hobby (or at least a good cross-section of ENWorld).

I am not hostile to analysis, though I feel that often these discussion become a tad dogmatic and prescriptive and lose the sight of things that actually matter for enjoyable gaming experience. And 'why does it matter?' is a perfectly valid question. If you're weighing pros and cons of various GMing methods, then it is pretty valid to ask what practical difference these actually make from the perspective of the players.

 

[Manbearcat]

I am not hostile to analysis, though I feel that often these discussion become a tad dogmatic and prescriptive and lose the sight of things that actually matter for enjoyable gaming experience. And 'why does it matter?' is a perfectly valid question. If you're weighing pros and cons of various GMing methods, then it is pretty valid to ask what practical difference these actually make from the perspective of the players.

If your "why does it matter" was "please further unpack the mystery of x, y, z so I can better interface with your reasoning" then great. The exchange just didn't look that way at all and looked more like "it doesn't matter because n (which is typically some handwave toward "if your table is having fun then who cares and all this analysis is just unproductive or masterbatory navel-gazing) so stop discussing it."

If you truly think analysis of TTRPG play isn't unproductive, masterbatory navel-gazing and potentially of use to some people...then awesome. Carry on.

 

[macd21]

That's just it - if the heavy lifting is done ahead of time there's less (but, alas, still more than no) likelihood of errors creeping in. It's not unplayable, but it can very quickly get unwieldy if not kept on top of.

Which tells me either or both of a) you have a stupendous memory or b) you're nowhere near as concerned with detail and accuracy as I am.

And it's the same if I'm a player: if something in the narration doesn't agree with what we already heard or knew I'm usually the one who flags it.

I’ve played with numerous high-prep and low-prep GMs. In my experience, both make these kinds of mistakes. If anything, the high-prep GMs make more of them, because they’re trying to keep track of a lot of useless information that never comes up in play.

 

[Manbearcat]

I’ve played with numerous high-prep and low-prep GMs. In my experience, both make these kinds of mistakes. If anything, the high-prep GMs make more of them, because they’re trying to keep track of a lot of useless information that never comes up in play.

This is a great point that I used to stress a lot a long time ago.

Forgetting creativity, dynamism, and agency for a moment, detail-intensive cognitive load (the type a high-prep, high-resolution setting GM is continuously working under) can absolutely lead to more continuity errors, not less.

Less prep (especially prep of the extraneous type - the type that never comes up in play or isn't helpful as a focus of play) offloads a significant amount of overhead (onto system, which typically means emergent content as a result of player action declaration meeting player-facing, codified resolution procedures), which can enable more creativity, more dynamism, more thematic focus, and less continuity errors.

GMs have a high variance in terms of mental framework. Some have less continuity errors with less prep/detail-oriented overhead and some have less continuity errors with more prep/detail-oriented overhead. Some are capable of toggling deftly and handling both types of games.

The issue I see is that the D&D community is a culture that is saturated by the high prep/detail-oriented overhead GM who has little to no experience or exposure to the later so they're just working off an untested hypothesis (or at least not tested with any rigor). If they were to actually try the opposite style, play those games and train themselves on inhabiting that cognitive space and train themselves on those play procedures and their attendant outcomes, they may very well be (pleasantly) surprised at the outcome. They may find that they're just as good at running a high prep/detail-intensive sandbox 5e high fantasy game as they are at running a low prep/low-setting-resolution Dogs in the Vineyard game

 

[Lanefan]

As I posted upthread it is possible to use map-and-key techniques in a game that involves player agency, by relying on the phenomenon of time: initial moments of play are low-agency, as the players (metaphorically, at least) turn over the board tiles and learn what is under them; but subsequent moments of play are high-agency, as the players use the information they have acquired to formulate and execute plans for extraction of assets from tiles. Because of the role that time plays in this approach, there are essential constraints that must apply if agency is to be generated and preserved: most importantly, the GM can't change the gameboard once the players start exploring it!

This is fine as far as it goes, but it predicates itself on a very static game world; where events can't occur that alter what the players (think they) know. In many cases this is what happens, but not always...

Hence the fundamental conflict between the sort of play I've just described, and a "living, breathing world". Even Gygax fell foul of this contradiction in his published rulebooks for AD&D: his advice in the PHB, under the heading Successful Adventures, presupposes that the dungeon situation is largely static and hence that players can engage in meaningful exploration and planning; but in his DMG he gives advice on how to make dungeons non-static, which will have the effect of rendering the exploration and planning largely meaningless (unless the dynamics unfold in very predictable ways such that the players can account for them in their planning).

...such as an example where the PCs pass a room in which there is an Ogre; they sneak away, spend ten minutes planning an assault, and return only to find the Ogre isn't there any more. (it has by random chance and for whatever reason moved to another nearby room) Or now there's two Ogres (the first one's mate returned from another room).

I don't see this as invalidating player agency. They had agency at the time they saw the Ogre and made the choices to a) sneak off and b) return later rather than attack right then; and returning later always runs the risk - however slight - of things having materially changed in the meantime.

On a larger scale, the PCs might have visited a town at some point in their played careers, and want to go back there now; but either before or after getting there they learn to their dismay that town's been almost wiped out by some natural disaster. This natural disaster could be either due to GM pre-planning (e.g. notes "Volcano erupts over Fjallsburg three days after midwinter 1088 causing [50+d45]% casualties to each of people and structures" and the PCs go there in 1089) or due to random roll (e.g. GM rolls d% to see how the town's been doing, dice come up 01 i.e. as bad as possible, GM has to dream up what might have happened). Obviously this sort of thing won't be common, but I don't see any reason why it can't be allowed to happen at all.

The only way I know of to combine a "living, breathing world" with genuine player agency is to expressly or implicitly expand the scope of action declaration: we go to place X to achieve goal Y. And if the GM doesn't just say "yes", then there needs to be a meaningful way of resolving this action declaration.

Which takes away the option of "We go to place X without any real goal at all", which is often how exploratory play can unfold: basically the players are for whatever reason(s) asking the GM to set them a new scene with which to interact. Or perhaps the goal is simply to get to place X (i.e. "We go to place X to achieve the goal of going to place X"); or to get away from some element at place W from which they depart.

There are a lot of options here: anything from Wises-checks (as per Burning Wheel), to letting the PCs turn up but framing them into a situation where their goal Y is at stake (my Classic Traveller play often looks like this; so does my Prince Valiant play), to various forms of checks to see how the travel goes relative to the goal (I've done this in Burning Wheel - Orienteering check where the consequence of failure was that a renegade elf had interposed himself between the PCs (who included a rather self-consciously upright elf) and Y - and in Cortex+ Heroic - checks in an action scene to eliminate Scene Distinctions which, if not eliminated, posit that Y has not been attained or remains unattainable), or probably other approaches I'm not thinking of at the moment.

Fine, though all of those seem to be interposing between the PCs and getting to place X, before achieving goal Y even enters the picture. (in other words, the original action declaration might need to be unpacked a bit or broken down into stages)

If the players establish their PCs' goals, and can - via action resolution - attain them, then in my view the players have agency. The GM is not the sole author of the important parts of the fiction.

That, I suppose, depends on the types of goals the players set for their PCs. If a player's goal for their PC is simply to get rich or die trying, then what?

But if all the players can do is change some superficial set dressing - we're in the Gnarly Forest, not the Grim Chasm - but everything that matters is decided by the GM (you meet a druid and displacer beast; you defeat them, but an apprentice rises up to keep their evil schemes alive; the orcs are also opposed to the druid's spider minions, but allying with the orcs just causes grief and backstabbing no matter what you do; etc), then it's obvious that the players have no real agency.

They do and they don't. They have agency over their own PCs and over those PCs' interactions with the game world and events therein. They don't have agency over how elements within the game world are going to react to them and-or what they do. The GM plays the NPCs; and if the PCs are wading into a three-way conflict in those woods between the Druid, some Orcs, and a pack of spiders then so be it - it's on them to figure it out and-or to figure out whose if any side they want to support.

 

[Lanefan]

It depends on what you mean by heavy lifting. I don't think all that great an amount of effort is needed to run things in a more player-driven, improvised way. I do this in my 5E campaign which is based in Sigil, but which uses pretty much the entirety of D&D lore. Now, I know a good amount of lore for D&D, but there are many people who would put me to shame. And I don't by any means pin down every detail ahead of time. I just use my general knowledge to help guide things. So if the players say they want to go to Waterdeep, I have a rough idea what that entails, and I can present their encounters there accordingly.

This is why I don't use pre-fab settings: to avoid just this, and to avoid 'canon arguments'.

One of my big campaigns used FR as the setting, except the core part where the PCs were based and did most of their adventuring (which was pretty much everything north of Water deep and west of the Anauroch Desert) was completely stripped out and re-done. Which meant yes, I too had players go to Waterdeep; fortunately neither I nor they were steeped in FR lore so no real arguments arose.

When they went to Baldur's Gate, however, I ran aground: one of the players had played the video game set there and so I couldn't just make stuff up.

On a smaller scale, but along the same lines, when I play Blades in the Dark, the action all takes place in the city of Doskvol. The setting is evocative, but it's actually very loosely defined. The broad strokes are provided....it's industrial, there are several districts divided by canals, there are many factions in the city, etc. But the details of those elements are largely left for the GM and players to determine through play.

Were it me, if the action all takes place in one city I'd want that city mapped down to the nails before ever starting play.

EDIt to add: and were I a player running a character in that city, the first thing I'd have my PC do is buy or steal an accurate map of the place.

What I have in both these instances is a framework on which to lean and which to draw inspiration so that when my players decide what they do, I can have the world respond in a way that matters and makes sense.

Exactly - and that framework IMO needs to be solid enough such that things can and will make sense not just now but two or five or ten years from now. Therre's no way I'm going to be able to do this during play and keep play going at the same time, so doing as much of it ahead of time as I can becomes the answer. (which is a large part of why I don't start new campaigns very often as thus far each has represented well over a year of pre-play design and prep)

Not to answer for @Ovinomancer , but for me it's not exactly these things. I have a decent memory and I do take some notes as things are established. So do the players. I rely on them to remind me of things from time to time. They often even craft some of the details we have to make note of.

IME players' note-taking is unreliable at best and non-existent at worst; and this includes me-as-player.

Detail depends.....I mean, I am not at all worried about a building being 400' by 600' as opposed to 800' by 300'; this is simply not a concern, an error of this kind (if noticed) can just be corrected.

Where to me that sort of error is close to unforgivable, and red-flags me that if the GM can mess up something this simple who knows what else is going to be messed up as things progress.

That's not the kind of detail our game is concerned with. Accuracy is also not too much of a concern because we know the important stuff, and anything else can be corrected if need be.

Until and unless that correction retroactively affects play; and it's absolutely inevitable that at some point it will.

A simple example: an 800' wall takes longer to run along to get around the corner than does a 600' wall, and if a character dies due to not being able to get to cover in time and then it's found later that this was due to the wall's length increasing 200' by mistake - yeah, that game's on its way over the cliff.

 

[Manbearcat]

I am not hostile to analysis, though I feel that often these discussion become a tad dogmatic and prescriptive and lose the sight of things that actually matter for enjoyable gaming experience. And 'why does it matter?' is a perfectly valid question. If you're weighing pros and cons of various GMing methods, then it is pretty valid to ask what practical difference these actually make from the perspective of the players.

This post has been nagging me and I realize now why that is, so I want to explain.

You say you aren't hostile to analysis but then the first sentence conveys a premise that seems pretty fundamentally hostile to analysis:

"<TTRPG analysis often> lose(s) sight of things that actually matter for enjoyable gaming experience."

That fundamentally disagrees with the post I wrote that you responded to because it seems to presupposes that you can derive some unified theory of "things that actually matter for an enjoyable gaming experience" that people agree upon. The point of this analysis (again, unless you think its just navel-gazing...which someone who is not hostile to this sort of analysis wouldn't think) in the first place is uncovering the significant variance within "enjoyable gaming experience" and then working from first principles to pick (or design) and successfully run games that cater to a particular type of "enjoyable gaming experience"

Then the last sentence asking "what practical difference these actually make from the perspective of the players" seems to presuppose a lot of things regarding system and play ethos such as (i) system is (or should) be mostly/wholly GM-facing and (ii) players don't (or shouldn't) care about how content is generated and the machinery of action resolution.

Let me put this all together to show why this paragraph has been nagging at me (and relate it directly to Illusionism).

Let us say I'm playing (not GMing) Dungeon World. The game's ethos is "play to find out what happens", "make a map but leave blanks (to fill in during play as content emerges as a byproduct of play - no metaplot and no high-resolution setting)", and "fill the character's lives with adventure (by challenge their thematic portfolio - Bonds, Alignment - and through the type of danger and discover inherent to the genre and the End of Session questions)." The robust PCs, the player-facing mechanics, the "ask the players questions and use their answers", the advancement paradigm being heavily predicated upon failure encourages bold, thematic play (it does not encourage turtling).

This arrangement spits out a very specific type of play and is an "enjoyable gaming experience" for a particular type of player.

The deployment of overt Force and covert Illusionism is fundamentally anathema to this game in every way:

a) It fundamentally goes against the game's basic tenants.

b) The game has a beautiful engine for emergent play so you don't need to deploy it anyway.

c) If you try to deploy it (i) the game will fight you (the results will be absolutely ham-fisted...there is no such thing as "deft Illusionism" in Dungeon World) because its so deeply player-facing (from ethos to resolution mechanics) (ii) , as such, it will be bloody obvious, and (iii) the sum of which will be a betrayal of the spirit of play and the players (and your own) investment in playing the game at all (the social contract).

So if you try to impose metaplot by (say) using moves that the game forbids on certain results...it will be obvious and everything falls apart.

If you secretly flesh out the setting behind the scenes and don't let the map (and subsequent maps to that) flesh out through the process of play...it will be obvious and everything falls apart.

If you don't challenge the players along the axis of each of their (and the collective that will emerge through their entangled Bonds and what is established through play) thematic portfolios, but rather propel play through thematically neutral setting stuff (making the setting the protagonist) or through the villain's dramatic need (eg Strahd's dramatic need being the overwhelming/exclusive propellant of Ravenloft games...thereby turning Strahd into the actual protagonist)...it will be bloody obvious and will make for a completely incoherent Dungeon World game, not an "enjoyable gaming experience" and "the practical difference (with respect to orthodox DW play) from the perspective of the players" will be significant and almost surely insurmountable.

I hope that illuminates my issue with your response here.

 

[pemerton]

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 it has been established in the shared fiction that the NPC spoke the truth, then where does the GM get the authority unilaterally to change that?

A fortiori, if that component of the shared fiction was established because a player succeeded in a declared action, where does the GM get the authority to just set aside the outcome of action resolution?

If my questions are treated non-rhetorically, the answer can only be: by using force (whether illusionistically or overtly) and completely disregarded player agency.

 

[pemerton]

D&D, which seems to be assumed in this thread

D&D, which seems to be the primary assumption here

This thread is in General, and so I am very definitely not assuming D&D.

For the reasons you give - ie the lack of robust resolution mechanics outside of combat and a few other context, with the exception of 4e skill challenges - D&D is not a game which is very conducive to player agency, and hence not the best system to support discussions thereof!

That's not to say that D&D has to be a railroad: but - again just as you have posted upthread - a GM will need to work hard and carefully to allow player agency to manifest. And will probably want to drift some of the action resolutions subsystems away from their default presentation, which (in 5e, at least) seems to allow the GM to subvert connections between successful check and player impact on the fiction pretty much at will.