A Question Of Agency?

[Lanefan]

How is it being challenged?

Is there a RPG that you can site that does not allow a player to give characterization and personality to their character?

No; and that plays in to my point.

I don't think that this was dismissed as meaningless to the experience of the game.....indeed, many people may play solely for this purpose. But is it something that some games allow and some do not? Or is it simply safe to accept this as a baseline of playing a RPG?

It's not that it isn't a valid part of the game.....it's that it is not a necessary part of the game as it relates to agency. As was stated, if I'm playing in an old school dungeon crawl Gygaxian game, and I never once emote for my character or speak in character or describe my character's emotional state or any of that, I nevertheless have agency to direct my PC through the game, and choose my actions accordingly, treating my PC entirely as a pawn.

And in so doing you've abdicated the agency the game gives you (or, more correctly, chosen to ignore it) over your character's personality, mannerisms, etc. Fine if you want to do so, but to then turn around and say that the agency you're ignoring doesn't really count as agency is a bit rich.

That this level of agency is (for all intents and purposes) universal across RPGs is irrelevant. It's still agency.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Again the assumption is that the scene events happen the same way... that's the incorrect assumption.

If I play my character as an extremely pious follower of the Moon goddess when interacting with the chieftain of the Moon Tribe Drow and the adventure has it noted that a character who shows reverence for the Moon goddess may be able to convince the chieftain to help him by providing allied warriors while an arrogant one will gain his ire and he will try to hinder him by locking him up... those are two different ways the scene events can take place depending on characterization.

But, if the paradigm of play is "run the AP" or "play the GM's prepared scenario and don't diverge too much if possible" (which I think describe MOST D&D play at least up to a point) then how much is really granted here? The player may not know ANY of this, and it is largely upon the GM to prompt for it. So, either its a non-choice, because the player has very little chance of sussing this out from first principles, or the GM is putting up guideposts, and the player is following them. At this point is the player really saying "My character is an insightful and cooperative guy, he shows reverence"? I mean, OK, but what if he's a loud brash barbarian? What if nothing on the character sheet points either way?

Any old way you slice this, the GM came up with the decision point, and what it would be about, the PC's attitude/sensitivity. If the player is simply coming in blind and playing his character, he doesn't even really have any more agency here than if he came to a T intersection with both directions just leading off into darkness, its a coin-flip. And if the player is faithful to his character concept, then he may have no real agency here at all (that would be like if one branch of the T is flooded and he can't swim).

Granted, RP might matter, but it might not. If the game is, say Dungeon World, then the player's move is "Discern Realities" and he can then work out what to do based on what fiction is established by that move, plus his character's alignment, bonds, and general personality (which is not defined mechanically in DW). But more subtly, this scenario only arises through a series of interactions in which player intent has already been a part. So meeting drow, the Moon Goddess element, etc. are likely to have been established, or at least some of those details will be called out in the fictional presentation of the results of DR. It is practically guaranteed to be driven by RP in a way that gives the players agency of some sort.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think you're disagreeing with me. I think your citing more examples of user error vs system issues...not sure what that proves. If I can show people running BitD or Fate incorrectly, does that really say anything about those systems?

Yeah, but it is less weighty when these are official adventures published by either WotC or major 3PPs that probably should know how the rules should work. Even if they don't, they are certainly ESTABLISHING how they WILL be used by the vast majority of people playing 5e! Admittedly, I've only played with one group, so I have a limited exposure to different ways to run 5e, but... I would also note that these are old time 3.5 players who still play a lot of 3.5. While I'm not a guru on 3.5 rules either, I do think it was written that way, so that approach tends to carry over and be the default for a lot of tables.

 

[prabe]

But, if the paradigm of play is "run the AP" or "play the GM's prepared scenario and don't diverge too much if possible" (which I think describe MOST D&D play at least up to a point) then how much is really granted here?

I've said before (to you? if so, sorry) that I think this paradigm of play is the one D&D 5E is specifically built to deliver (and both versions of Pathfinder, I'd say--though I have no firsthand experience with PF2). I also think it's true that AP-style play is ... pretty nearly a railroad, without much actual agency. The game/s will support other approaches, but the entire table needs to be on board with that (though the GM can definitely lead the way, here).

 

[pemerton]

No one has said that, what are you even talking about?

So how does a railroad impinge on a player's agency to characteriser his/her PC, speak in character, and declare actions?

In what RPG can those things not take place?

 

[Lanefan]

I've never heard of any RPG ever played where mechanics weren't involved when PC survival was at stake. I mean, sure, there is the apocryphal "rocks fall on your head, you're dead." but I hardly think you're defending that as a paradigm of play...

There's the occasional cursed item that all you need to do is try it and you keel over dead - no save (Cloak of Poison in 1e is one; I lost a PC to one of these not that long ago). But yes, I still see it as a rules-free session even if mechanics do arise briefly here and there.

And I never said it is impossible or categorically unwelcome to play out whatever you want by RP.

I don't think you did but others have, or have implied it, in one of two opposite ways: 'jump to the scene' (i.e. skip everything between now and that scene), or 'roll the damn dice' (to short-circuit in-character RP usually in social encounters).

My own rules that I use for "D&D-like play" (based loosely on 4e) have 'interlude' as a mode of play. ANYTHING can happen in one that isn't 'conflict germane to the players' without any dice or any other restriction whatsoever, it is just free 'spiel'. If some sort of tension arises in that process I would expect it would virtually have to be about some conflict that someone cares enough about to toss dice over, and then play switches modes to 'challenge'.

I don;t have anything formalized to near that extent. Sure, there's often a soft switch to what we call 'rubber time' when parties are in town and it's not too important what gets done in what sequence, but there's no formal 'interlude' or 'challenge' delineators. I guess the only such would be when we move into or out of combat initiative.

I guess maybe there's some 'grey area' that might exist? I haven't run into that problem. Its hard to see where the GM wouldn't just let the player decide what color grandma's house is if that's an element of free RP, why choose that as a point of issue? In fact HoML doesn't really have a defined way of resolving such a thing, it is just basically assumed that its an unimportant detail, set dressing. Frankly I'd just go with the "whomever states it first wins" kind of resolution if it ever came up...

I'm not thinking so much about what colour to paint Grandma's house (though we did have a sequence not long ago where a prankster PC [three guesses whose!] hatched a rather elaborate plan to paint someone's castle in shocking pink), but more of things that might or might not have later impact e.g. even something as simple as deciding which PCs are going into the field next and what they want to do when they get there. Completely in character, completely rules-free, completely player-driven, and yet relevant to future play in the campaign.

 

[pemerton]

To me story telling games imply agency over outcome. However, @pemerton's and others gaming philosophy does have a certain principle keeping the players from having agency over outcome - the Czege principle and it's why framing that principle as an absolute whereby one cannot even have a game without it is so important to their conversation. It's the one thing holding back their framework from being collective storytelling.

Who do you think controls outcome in a combat resolved according to the D&D combat rules as set out in AD&D (either edition), Moldvay Basic, 3E (either version), 4e, 5e?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not constructing an entire scenario here just a quick example so you may need to extrapolate certain things... but yes it would probably be possible to learn the Moon tribe worships... surprise, surprise... the Moon goddess and thus I make the choice to play up my piety.

I made the choice to play my character with those characteristics vs others which had a meaningful effect on play... whether the results are pre-scripted or not shouldn't matter as long as what I did caused a game state change through the choice I made.

Stated this way it sounds basically like "character build agency". I picked a personality trait and it had a certain defined effect on the scenario in a given situation. While personality is a virtually infinite expanse of 'options' nobody can ever know if one or another of them will ever matter, so it still seems like a pretty basic thing. Like I have this in all RPGs and it may or may not ever matter. If I had a total choice of 5 personality traits (hypothetically) NOTHING would tell me a priori to pick certain ones as being particularly relevant (well, some genre knowledge might).

You might respond "well the GM, knowing my establishment of the Moon Goddess as my patron engaged with this." and that would be true. To the extent that there are ways (again genre knowledge, or setting knowledge) to establish that this would relate to other possibilities entering or being excluded from consideration, that is moving into real agency territory (IE if I know that the Moon Goddess is the patroness of lovers, maybe I want to explore that) or maybe even just the intensity of the PC's devotion shapes the character's choices. These are things that, assuming the player can count on the GM to engage them, which begin to establish real agency.

 

[pemerton]

How is it being challenged?

Is there a RPG that you can site that does not allow a player to give characterization and personality to their character?

I don't think that this was dismissed as meaningless to the experience of the game.....indeed, many people may play solely for this purpose. But is it something that some games allow and some do not? Or is it simply safe to accept this as a baseline of playing a RPG?

<snip>

The freedom to craft a personality and to express it is present in every RPG, and so is not a meaningful measure of player agency.

I have asked this question of @FrogReaver, @Crimson Longinus and @Lanefan for about 10+ pages now. As of this post of yours, on p 91, I'm yet to receive an answer.

 

[Lanefan]

No, not at all! The path matters, for sure. My point in this is that we can look at two games after the fact, one of which is an absolute railroad and the other consisted of the GM abdicating things on the fly and all participants playing to find out what happens.

That might be another point of dissonance here: looking at games after the fact vs looking at them in the moment. It's way easier to be critical after the fact, for one thing, than it is in the moment; but as in-the-moment is what matters right here right now I'd say it's more important.

For my part, if I-as-player feel like I have agency in the moment that's fine; and if it turns out in hindsight later that I didn't have the agency I thought I did at the time then my reaction will vary depending on the situation and on whether I enjoyed the moments as they unfolded.

For example: ages ago I was a player in an excellent series of adventures; our party bashed its way up and down the coast seemingly in a sandbox, following clues (badly!) and occasionally blundering into an adventure. In hindsight it all turned out to be a complete railroad, but so what? I had a grand time with it in the moment and learning it was a railroad didn't sully my memories of any of it.