A Question Of Agency?

[Umbran]

I don't think that "better" or "worse" is the right metric here.

Well, if you want to be picky/pedantic about it, I didn't say "If and only if...." So, I am not really pretending to give the One True Metric.

I think that I can stand by what I said as true, if not technically all-encompassing, and probably a significantly relevant bit for much of the audience at hand.

Because what matters is highly context-sensitive, so is player agency.

I daresay that is it so context-sensitive that the level of generality required to talk about it will tend to leave the discussion vague and unhelpful. I chose to narrow down into a space that is, in my estimation, likely to be practical, rather than theoretical.

 

[pemerton]

I find that improv tends to mean you are responding directly to what the players are presenting as their characters actions and motivations. Indeed, with no pre determined plot it means that players and GM are in an active dialogue concieving the game and setting in situ with each response - that to me is absolutely Player Agency.

Agreed.

The only way it could be better is if you allowed for players to actively describe setting elements and influence NPC description/action (say via a Action Point system)

Not fully agreed. I've got nothing against such systems - though the ones I use (eg Burning Wheel, MHRP/Cortex+) tend to treat it as part of ordinary action resolution rather than via a separate point-expenditure system.

But games can have full-fledge player agency without those sorts of mechanics - eg Prince Valiant, and (most of the time) Classic Traveller.

I Think this essentially comes down to NPC motivation - even in an pure Improv session with only a very vague plot (say fetch the Mcguffin for the local Noble) the antagonistic NPCs need to have a motivation beyond ‘be an obstacle for the PCs’.
AS DM I should at least know Why they are being obstacles to the PCs. Answering Why is enough to make PCs actions matter regardless of the outcome, revealing the Why acts as another hook for the players.

I tend to take a fairly relaxed approach to this: I will often start with the NPC first, establishing their attitude either by fiat or by reading of some other system cue (eg in Classic Traveller there might be a reaction roll; or if the NPC is the outcome of a roll on the random patron table, then that establishes that they are in the market for some non-standard service providers such as the PCs!); and then build up the details of motivation and backstory as things unfold, both as part of action resolution and in order to keep things moving if they seem to be flagging.

My approach here has been influenced, I think, by this old Forge post from Paul Czege:

I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.​

I don't think my games are very often as emotionally intense as the sort of thing Paul Czege is going for, but the basic approach is one I've found very instructive. I used it at the start of my current Classic Traveller campaign, for example, to gradually build up the details of the bioweapons plot the PCs were enmeshed in (some relevant actual play posts here and here).

This approach helps preserve player agency and avoid illusionism, because consequences and revelations happen downstream of action resolution, not upstream.

I think the only pitfall in total improv, as far as avoiding railroading, is that you as GM might be sub/un-consciously railroading yourself. If you're improvising everything it can be hard to prove either way, but the possibility seems there.

I don't know what "railroading yourself" means here.

As a GM it's natural to frame situations and establish fiction that seem interesting to you (with the hope that they will also interest the players). But if the players are genuinely exercising agency then I don't see where any railroading is going to come from.

If your players feel that they have agency then they have sufficient agency.

I don't agree with this at all, for basically the same reasons as @Ovinomancer.

If the players know how much agency they have, and are happy with that, then I agree that that is sufficient. But feel seems to leave open the possibility of misapprehension, perhaps as a result of deliberate trickery or manipulation ("illusionism") on the part of the GM. As a GM, I'm not interested in that; and as a player I think it's pretty fraught - I've seen games come unstuck when the illusion has been revealed!

If the GM is going to curtail player agency I would prefer that be clear upfront - which can include it being implicit in the system (eg if I play a CoC scenario at a tournament, as used to back in the day, I don't expect to have much influence on events beyond thespianising my character; in return I expect to be entertained by a GM who is able to evoke mood and feeling through effective narration and characterisation of NPCs).

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?

I think there can be good reasons not to retrospectively decide that something was a lie, because this risks destabilising the players' confidence in GM narration, which - somewhat independent of the agency question - can lead to a bit of a downward spiral.

But just focusing on the relationship between the NPC lie, the retrospectivity, and player agency - to me this goes right back to the issue of how is it decided and how does it relate to action resolution? If the decision that the information was false is part of adjudicating a failed check, that would seem fair game.

Or imagine an Apocalypse World game where, at some earlier point, the PC (and hence player) learned such-and-such from a NPC. And then further play has revealed that NPC to be a slimy weasel who's not to be trusted. And then a player succeeds on a check to read a charged situation - maybe the GM gives information that is (i) true, as it must be given the player's success, and (ii) reveals the NPC to have been lying all along! In the right context that needn't be any sort of illusionism, nor threat to player agency - it might affirm the players' emerging sense of the NPC's untrustworthiness and provide them with a valuable edge at a crucial moment (which presumably this is, given that at least one player is having his/her PC read a charged situation).

In the opening session of my Classic Traveller game (linked to above in this post), the players met a patron (rolled by me as GM on the random patron encounter table) who recruited them for a particular cargo-carrying job (made up by me on the spot so as to incorporate both (i) what little established backstory we had out of PC generation and initial world generation, and (ii) a couple of other worlds that I'd rolled up before the session). The story didn't make much sense, and so the "spy" PC invited the patron NPC back to his room where he "interrogated" (ie seduced) her and got more information. I had to make up that additional information, and part of that involved revealing some elements of her initial approach as, if not outright lies, at least less than full disclosure.

This didn't negate any player agency. It affirmed it.

 

[pemerton]

This is the last of my slightly spammy replies, as I catch up on this interesting thread.

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.

Again, I think context is the determinant here.

First, as @aramis erak has pointed out, in some systems the only difference between Orcs and Sandpeople is in the fiction. This is not just Tunnels & Trolls, either - it's largely true in Prince Valiant and can also be true for many "mob" (ie non-unique) opponents in Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic. But if the fiction of whom the PCs encounter is different, and if the game being played is one where that fiction matters (in Prince Valiant it normally will; in White Plume Mountain it normally won't; so this too is contextual), then there is no illusionism: the players chose a trope/theme (forest rather than badlands) and the GM served up the appropriate fiction.

I'm not sure that's the most epic demonstration of player agency ever - the fact that the results are different doesn't tell us much about agency, if the players were choosing essentially randomly. All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be illusionism. (Eg if it's not illusionism and is also low agency, maybe we're seeing a potentially boring sandbox. Not my sort of game, but they do exist and back in the day I've run them - not on purpose, but because at the time I didn't know how to do better.)

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?

My view is that the game can be a total railroad - ie almost zero player agency - and yet your last sentence be true.

Eg if the GM has planned everything out (like the sort of decision-tree @prabe alluded to upthread), and then when the players choose A or B the GM moves down the decision tree, narrates the appropriate outcome, and frames the next choice, things will go differently if the players take Option A instead of Option B. But that game (self-evidently) won't involve any more player agency than a choose-your-own adventure book.

 

[pemerton]

I think that I can stand by what I said as true, if not technically all-encompassing, and probably a significantly relevant bit for much of the audience at hand.

<snip>

I chose to narrow down into a space that is, in my estimation, likely to be practical, rather than theoretical.

I think there's good reason, when discussing player agency in RPGing, to avoid focusing on D&D-type choices like do we fight Orcs rather than Sandpeople? or do we heal (by walking through the blessed meadows) rather than lose hp (by taking the path through the forest of darkness)?

Those sorts of essentially tactical choices are important for the resource management and wargaming aspects of RPGing. But I think that at the core of player agency in RPGing - and where one sees the flash points around railroading, the role of prep, adjudication of alignment, etc - is who gets to decide what matters and what is at stake? Eg if at the start of the campaign the GM tells the players (whether directly, or via a quest-giver, or via a reminder of alignment or divine affiliation, etc) who the big bad is, then I predict that that will be a low-agency campaign regardless of how the GM handles things like choosing how what is encountered correlates to which path is taken.

 

[Manbearcat]

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?

When I think of player agency in TTRPGing, I think of two different axes:

Breadth/Potency

Interesting/Provocative

Here is an example of a decision-point in the style of play you're describing above:

A Whisper (Warlock/Spiritualist/Weirdo-Arcanist type) PC in Blades in the Dark is on a Score within one of Duskvol's Lightning Towers in order to secretly replace some failing infrastructure before it goes critical. A failure in a prior Action Roll yields a Standard Complication; 2 ticks on the "Critical Mass" Racing Clock (vs the Crisis Averted Clock for the PC's Progress). The gamestate has changed (become more desperate) so the attendant fiction has to escalate/change likewise.

There are many ways the GM could go here. Two such ways are:

a) Introduce a Spirit obstacle as the Lightning Boundary winks out momentarily, letting the supernatural manifest. After brief parley, the Spirit offers the Whisper insight into the Ghost Field if a mutually beneficial attunement will be agreed upon so the creature can extract material vengeance through the Whisper for something that happened during its life that went unresolved. If they can't come to an agreement, then Possession is on the menu.

b) Introduce a physical obstacle. The Leviathan Blood Manifold (whatever this is) on the floor above the PCs suffers a containment leak. Let's say in a cost-cutting move, the supernatural material wasn't sufficiently processed and refined so when it comes into contact with the cast-iron framing of the tower, it animates it with the latent vengeance of the beast it was pilfered from. As the PCs ascend the steps, the door flies open and two engineers attempt a screaming escape as a pair of Venom-like tendrils impales one and grasps the leg of the other and pulls them back into the room...

These are going to be interesting/provocative for a Whisper or a Leech while some other type of complication will be more thematically compelling for a Slide or a Lurk.

The Breadth/Potency question is answered by "To what extent is the present gamestate/fiction an emergent quality of prior player decision-point navigation meeting with the game's systematized resolution procedures and ethos (or to what extent is it a subordination/suspension of that navigation/those procedures and ethos)."

The Interesting/Provocative question is answered by some combination (% TBD) of system (eg in Blades "does it hook into a Vice/Heritage/Beliefs/Drives/Backgrounds/Relationships, can it lead to a Devil's Bargain or a Desperate Action Roll, etc), genre, personal player taste.

My personal sense of navigating this question is, agency increases in proportion to fidelity to the question above and agency "feels more meaningful" when its interesting/provocative.

You can have robust agency that isn't terribly interesting/provocative, so good GMing needs to be focusing on honing their craft to produce both at every moment of play.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I think there's good reason, when discussing player agency in RPGing, to avoid focusing on D&D-type choices like do we fight Orcs rather than Sandpeople? or do we heal (by walking through the blessed meadows) rather than lose hp (by taking the path through the forest of darkness)?

Those sorts of essentially tactical choices are important for the resource management and wargaming aspects of RPGing. But I think that at the core of player agency in RPGing - and where one sees the flash points around railroading, the role of prep, adjudication of alignment, etc - is who gets to decide what matters and what is at stake? Eg if at the start of the campaign the GM tells the players (whether directly, or via a quest-giver, or via a reminder of alignment or divine affiliation, etc) who the big bad is, then I predict that that will be a low-agency campaign regardless of how the GM handles things like choosing how what is encountered correlates to which path is taken.

Very true. The actual interesting choices tend to be about bigger things, morals, overall goals, life or death etc. I sometimes use various sort of force, illusionism included on small choices, if it ends up the PCs getting into place where big choices can be made and will matter.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Again, I think context is the determinant here.

First, as @aramis erak has pointed out, in some systems the only difference between Orcs and Sandpeople is in the fiction. This is not just Tunnels & Trolls, either - it's largely true in Prince Valiant and can also be true for many "mob" (ie non-unique) opponents in Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic. But if the fiction of whom the PCs encounter is different, and if the game being played is one where that fiction matters (in Prince Valiant it normally will; in White Plume Mountain it normally won't; so this too is contextual), then there is no illusionism: the players chose a trope/theme (forest rather than badlands) and the GM served up the appropriate fiction.

I'm not sure that's the most epic demonstration of player agency ever - the fact that the results are different doesn't tell us much about agency, if the players were choosing essentially randomly. All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be illusionism. (Eg if it's not illusionism and is also low agency, maybe we're seeing a potentially boring sandbox. Not my sort of game, but they do exist and back in the day I've run them - not on purpose, but because at the time I didn't know how to do better.)

Oh I agree.....my example was very basic, and based on previous comments. I assumed some level of knowledge of the options that made the choice not random, but even then, this is a pretty minor example of agency as it relates to play.

My view is that the game can be a total railroad - ie almost zero player agency - and yet your last sentence be true.

Eg if the GM has planned everything out (like the sort of decision-tree @prabe alluded to upthread), and then when the players choose A or B the GM moves down the decision tree, narrates the appropriate outcome, and frames the next choice, things will go differently if the players take Option A instead of Option B. But that game (self-evidently) won't involve any more player agency than a choose-your-own adventure book.

I suppose that's true if all decision points have been given a set amount of options to choose from, and then the GM simply follows the choice to the next set of options to choose, in a kind of branching pattern. That's not what I had in mind, but that's what I get for trying to sum it up in a sentence.

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.

 

[prabe]

I don't know what "railroading yourself" means here.

As a GM it's natural to frame situations and establish fiction that seem interesting to you (with the hope that they will also interest the players). But if the players are genuinely exercising agency then I don't see where any railroading is going to come from.

I'm not really looking to argue with you, here--I don't think we understand each other well enough for that to be productive--but my thinking about a GM railroading themself goes along with a GM being the victim of their own Illusionism (which I mentioned elsewhere in this thread). If you as GM are in a position where you don't even have the starting position prepped, you might well end up coming to the same place no matter what the PCs do, because you are trapped in your own brain and in the moment; I'm thinking sort of when a GM decides what an "interesting result" would be.

 

[Manbearcat]

I'm not really looking to argue with you, here--I don't think we understand each other well enough for that to be productive--but my thinking about a GM railroading themself goes along with a GM being the victim of their own Illusionism (which I mentioned elsewhere in this thread). If you as GM are in a position where you don't even have the starting position prepped, you might well end up coming to the same place no matter what the PCs do, because you are trapped in your own brain and in the moment; I'm thinking sort of when a GM decides what an "interesting result" would be.

Can you go a bit deeper into what you have in mind here?

Maybe use the component parts of the Blades example that I posted above?

Keep in mind, "Illusionism" is a GM using "Force" covertly to subordinate the trajectory of play as one or more outcomes are an outgrowth of that applied Force rather than an emergent byproduct of players' navigating decision-points + resolution mechanic deployment.

For instance, are you saying in my above scenario, that Blades GM (who is, by system ethos, to prep less and let the system's structure + the creative energy at the table propel play) would be more apt to covertly subordinate the trajectory of play...yet not be aware of it? If so, is this some kind of statement on the alleged values and malleability of games that are more "Structured Free-Form-Inclined" being a bit of a cognitive trap or cognitive boondoggle?

So if I'm GMing that above Blades scenario and the Whisper fails a Risky Attune Action Roll (the Whisper tries to reach into the Ghost Field to experience the last moments of life of a fresh, grisly corpse that was discovered just below the engineering deck of the Lightning Tower), leading to two ticks of the Critical Mass Racing Clock, leading to one of the two Complications I roughed out above. This moment of play becomes vulnerable to being a product of Illusionism because I'm thinking along the axes of thematic, interesting results (which hook into the constituent parts of play - the fiction of the Score to date, the gamestate of the two Racing Clocks, etc)? Is that perhaps what you're proposing? If so, is a GM that also incorporates uninteresting and/or thematically unprovocative Complications less vulnerable to this "you Illusionified yourself silly GM(!)" phenomenon you're depicting?

 

[prabe]

Can you go a bit deeper into what you have in mind here?

Maybe use the component parts of the Blades example that I posted above?

Keep in mind, "Illusionism" is a GM using "Force" covertly to subordinate the trajectory of play as one or more outcomes are an outgrowth of that applied Force rather than an emergent byproduct of players' navigating decision-points + resolution mechanic deployment.

For instance, are you saying in my above scenario, that Blades GM (who is, by system ethos, to prep less and let the system's structure + the creative energy at the table propel play) would be more apt to covertly subordinate the trajectory of play...yet not be aware of it? If so, is this some kind of statement on the alleged values and malleability of games that are more "Structured Free-Form-Inclined" being a bit of a cognitive trap or cognitive boondoggle?

So if I'm GMing that above Blades scenario and the Whisper fails a Risky Attune Action Roll (the Whisper tries to reach into the Ghost Field to experience the last moments of life of a fresh, grisly corpse that was discovered just below the engineering deck of the Lightning Tower), leading to two ticks of the Critical Mass Racing Clock, leading to one of the two Complications I roughed out above. This moment of play becomes vulnerable to being a product of Illusionism because I'm thinking along the axes of thematic, interesting results (which hook into the constituent parts of play - the fiction of the Score to date, the gamestate of the two Racing Clocks, etc)? Is that perhaps what you're proposing? If so, is a GM that also incorporates uninteresting and/or thematically unprovocative Complications less vulnerable to this "you Illusionified yourself silly GM(!)" phenomenon you're depicting?

What I'm getting at, here, is that to the extent GMing is like writing fiction, a GM who has gotten far enough past his prep might be unintentionally taking the story where he wants it to go regardless of what the PCs do, the same way a novelist who doesn't outline or sketch ahead of where he is writing would. I'm not saying it's inevitable--or even necessarily likely; I'm just saying it's possible. I'm certainly not calling any game or playstyle a trap or a boondoggle.