A Question Of Agency?

[Lanefan]

Well if it’s trivial, then I’m not spending time on it. Not significant time anyway.

If you mean something like the PCs are at a door that they think may be trapped and are deciding how to proceed...and you know it’s not trapped (or even if it is, honestly) a simple “okay, let’s go, you opening the door or moving along” should do the trick.

But yeah, if the matter is actually trivial? Why spend any real time on it?

Because I don't want to end up with a situation where the players game me (and they would; and I'd find it hard to blame them) by waiting for me to move them forward when I know something's trivial and then suddenly taking it more seriously when I let them stew. Neutrality says every similar situation should be treated in a similar manner; and as they'd quite rightly complain if I rushed them forward every time and thus sometimes got them hurt or killed, the default becomes to let them stew.

So the impression I get from your posts is that your players are bored by anything that has to do with their characters, and have no patience for any events that are personal to another member of the group.

It kind of amazes me.

You're mostly right on the second part but wrong on the first. We're not usually bored by anything that has to do with our own characters but recognize that others quite likely (and IMO quite reasonably) will be.

Okay, cool. I think that kind of stuff can really help make the world seem like a place that exists independent of the PCs.

I just don’t think that kind of stuff needs to be determined months in advance.

Doing it in advance has another nice benefit: it makes the game a bit more likely to in effect run itself during the session. The more stuff I can put on autopilot ahead of time the better I like it, as I can then enjoy the moment and wile busy reacting to things that come up in the moment I'm less likely to forget something relevant.

That’s cool. I meant more at the beginning. Like, were they aware of all these factions and the likelihood that they’d be stirring up a bee’s nest with this? If not, when you decided it happened, it sounds like you went pretty far with it before they even learned about it.

They weren't aware of any of it...which makes in-game sense given that they were in the field when all of this arose. And while they knew their goal was in theory to find a particular book they had no real idea what the book did or what its powers were/are (and didn't put much effort into asking) other than the Necromancer PC's own guild was very keen on getting it. The PCs did know the guild wasn't exactly hiding its eagerness but never gave it any real thought beyond that.

On the meta level, I-as-DM didn't know any of this was coming until when the party were ready to head back to town it occurred to me just how long they'd taken, and I started thinking about what if any ramifications this might have produced. I used my dice as a guide for whether word had spread (yes) and whether there'd be any reaction from other guilds (again, yes); then for timing and for how rough/violent (ouch!*) this reaction would be.

* - I usually use d% for this sort of thing, and '00' is not anyone's friend.

So, instead of walking back to a peaceful town they found themselves standing into a storm. Fortunately, they have all sorts of friends and allies in town as well. Even more fortunately, on finding the book they stuck it in a Bag of Holding (where it remains still), meaning no-one could scry its location and try to steal it and thus unintentionally saving themselves a world o' scry-buff-teleport trouble during their two-week trip back to town.

Right, this is why I ask. These may be logical reactions to what the PCs have done. But how aware of this logic would the PCs be?

Ahead of time, not at all. Had they been more paranoid and thought things through in that light they may have got to it, but this group just isn't the paranoid sort.

Now, they've been told more than enough to piece together how this all came to happen. Next session will be when we'll see what they do with that info, and with the book.

How can there even be inconsistencies if something is made up in the moment?

Easy: it doesn't match what was made up in another moment.

 

[Lanefan]

I don’t agree with most of this. You can have scenes where no rules are engaged, but entire sessions is pushing it, and entire campaigns means you’re not even really playing a game anymore. You’re still role-playing, but without rules, it’s not a game.

Entire campaigns, no. Entire sessions - IME between adventures there's usually one or two almost-rules-free sessions encompassing downtime activities, treasury division, training (a few rules rear their heads here), and info-gathering and-or debriefing.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't know what the measure of obtrusive is supposed to be.

It's hard to think of a mechanical resolution process in which the rules are more prominent - in the sense of providing the content and the topic and the focus of the conversation - than D&D combat rules: there is generation and discussion of initiative results, to hit rolls, damage rolls, comparison of rolled numbers to other numbers (eg to hit vs AC), adjustments of running tallies (eg hit points lost or regained), etc.

But given that @Lanefan and @Crimson Longinus both appear to enjoy playing D&D, I take it that this is not an example of obtrusive rules.

Truth be told there's many times I find the rules in D&D to be obtrusive and interfering. Over the years I've removed or tempered some of the worst ones, but some - mostly those around combat - can't really be removed without upending the whole system, something I have no real plans to do.

(D&D combat rules are also not very much of a simulation engine. But that's a different point.)

Anyway, the rules of a RPG do the same work as the rules of any other game: they tell the participants what to do and when to do it. This includes telling us when and how to roll dice, and what the consequence is for the game of the result of the roll.

If you game rules tell you to roll dice when you don't want to, then you need better rules!

Situationally dependent, but most of the time this is valid.

The same if your rules don't tell you what follows from rolling this rather than that on the dice.

EDIT: Here's Vincent Baker again:

...

​

So look, you! Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.​

Where I see it as being when the rules can model the game world as a side effect of doing the other things they do, why not let them.

 

[Lanefan]

Or (a) establish a party Caller and (b) set an eggshell timer for decision-points that become session-stalling bottlenecks. 1 minute timer after you've canvassed the situation as the group and the time spent has yielded no forward movement. If you haven't made a decision by then, the party Caller decides for the group.

Around here that would be the highway to hell. The Caller would make a decision, sure; and then the next hour would be lost in in-character arguing with what the Caller decided, out-of-character arguing over the existence of the Caller role at all, and occasional calls to fire that Caller and vote in a new one. Or on hearing the Caller's decision someone would immediately do something rash that may or may not be what the Caller just decided, cuing up another series of arguments.

In other words, chances are it'd slow things down more often than it sped 'em up.

I mean, people used to bitch about 4e Turns (and therefore Combat) taking long. I never experienced the horror stories that people presented (our average 3 PCs Combats averaged about 24-36 minutes with the most intensive ones being around the 50-55 minutes mark) but it can't be worse than the agonized over strategic bottlenecks where 5 minutes turns to 10, which turns to 20 (and so on...all being spent haggling and arguing over a single decision-point)! How is one THE WORST EVER and the other is A-OK?

From the DM side a combat is always more engaging than a drawn-out decision point, as in a combat the DM usually has lots to do. In either case I've learned to just let it all take however long it's gonna take.

 

[pemerton]

Because I don't want to end up with a situation where the players game me (and they would; and I'd find it hard to blame them) by waiting for me to move them forward when I know something's trivial and then suddenly taking it more seriously when I let them stew. Neutrality says every similar situation should be treated in a similar manner; and as they'd quite rightly complain if I rushed them forward every time and thus sometimes got them hurt or killed, the default becomes to let them stew.

I don't know how you're envisaging play.

There can't be "moving/rushing forward" in the absence of stopping. You can just narrate stuff, with whatever back-and-forth is appropriate, until something interesting comes up.

 

[Aldarc]

Yeah, it's the forgetting bit that'd worry me, followed by the "Oh, crap" moment sometime later when realization hits. And it's so easy to do - I mean there's maps in published novels that violate some of these principles and those in theory are done by one person!

This could be done now and then, but if overdone the setting would become like Alice's wonderland - cool as hell to read about, perhaps, but nearly impossible to play in.

I know the lockdowns of 2020 have been hard on us all, but are you really out of pen(cil)s and paper at your house to write these things down? But IME, it happens less than you would think because players also like having a consistent world too, and they can use their own brains to help you remember. A group doesn't have to be a solo act.

Ideally rules should be as unobtrusive as possible - like the stereotypical butler, they should always be present but out of the way, and never noticed until needed.

Ideally rules should help facilitate game play in a meaningful way. This seems true no matter what sort of game that I'm playing, whether it's a card game, a board game, a video/computer game, sports, or a tabletop roleplaying game. I do not want to play a game despite the rules, but, rather, because of them.

Doing it in advance has another nice benefit: it makes the game a bit more likely to in effect run itself during the session. The more stuff I can put on autopilot ahead of time the better I like it, as I can then enjoy the moment and wile busy reacting to things that come up in the moment I'm less likely to forget something relevant.

But that only reflects your preferences. It certainly doesn't work for everyone.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's not really that. It is merely that for choices to matter there must be some constraints and limiting the players ability to affect the setting to that of their character is one possible constraint. People seem to recognise this in a sense that they accept that the game needs to have rules; that a situation where the players can just freely declare anything and have it be so is not optimal. I really want people to answer this: do rules that place limits on how the player can affect the fiction or 'gamestates' reduce the players agency? And if they do, why we have such rules?

This is where we reach the value of the principle which says that no participant in the game should be responsible BOTH for setting the stakes, AND for judging the results of the action. One participant states the intent, narrative action, and what is at stake (maybe not all at the same time) and another participant describes the fictional consequences and adjudges the application of the rules. That isn't always player + GM, there can be various ways of parsing things. The point is, if one participant is running the whole loop, basically framing (or at least resolving) a scene AND determining what comes next, there isn't really a GAME aspect anymore. There is no challenge either, except in some purely notional sense of the character may be described as being challenged, but no tension can result. There is no true interplay of forces.

The goal of a lot of the design of an RPG is around proper allocation to uphold this principle.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Because I don't want to end up with a situation where the players game me (and they would; and I'd find it hard to blame them) by waiting for me to move them forward when I know something's trivial and then suddenly taking it more seriously when I let them stew. Neutrality says every similar situation should be treated in a similar manner; and as they'd quite rightly complain if I rushed them forward every time and thus sometimes got them hurt or killed, the default becomes to let them stew.

Like I said, though, you can do it regardless of if this door is trapped or not. I mean, it ultimately is a matter of preference, but given how concerned you are with boring the players in other ways, I’d assume sitting around talking about a door would be something you’d like to keep brief.

Even Tolkien handled his door puzzle relatively quickly in the actual narration, though it supposedly took hours in the story.

You're mostly right on the second part but wrong on the first. We're not usually bored by anything that has to do with our own characters but recognize that others quite likely (and IMO quite reasonably) will be.

But why? What I don’t understand is the immediate assumption that something’s boring just because it has to do with someone else’s character.

Like this necromancer story you have....I imagine the PC who has the book finds this situation compelling in some way. Is everyone else bored with it?

Stories are interesting or boring independent of being connected to one’s character, I’d expect. Do the players really begrudge someone else getting a little more focus as a reason to check out?

Doing it in advance has another nice benefit: it makes the game a bit more likely to in effect run itself during the session. The more stuff I can put on autopilot ahead of time the better I like it, as I can then enjoy the moment and wile busy reacting to things that come up in the moment I'm less likely to forget something relevant.

Honestly it sounds like a lot more work. The world doesn’t “run itself”. You have to actively track and/or narrate all that stuff. Maybe you have a system in place that makes this relatively easy....Blades in the Dark kind of does that by tracking the progress of different factions’ goals during downtime. The GM can just assume a certain amount of progress, or can make a quick fortune roll and track it according to the result. But even with this in place, they recommend only doing it for factions that have become relevant to play.

They weren't aware of any of it...which makes in-game sense given that they were in the field when all of this arose. And while they knew their goal was in theory to find a particular book they had no real idea what the book did or what its powers were/are (and didn't put much effort into asking) other than the Necromancer PC's own guild was very keen on getting it. The PCs did know the guild wasn't exactly hiding its eagerness but never gave it any real thought beyond that.

On the meta level, I-as-DM didn't know any of this was coming until when the party were ready to head back to town it occurred to me just how long they'd taken, and I started thinking about what if any ramifications this might have produced. I used my dice as a guide for whether word had spread (yes) and whether there'd be any reaction from other guilds (again, yes); then for timing and for how rough/violent (ouch!*) this reaction would be.

* - I usually use d% for this sort of thing, and '00' is not anyone's friend.

So, instead of walking back to a peaceful town they found themselves standing into a storm. Fortunately, they have all sorts of friends and allies in town as well. Even more fortunately, on finding the book they stuck it in a Bag of Holding (where it remains still), meaning no-one could scry its location and try to steal it and thus unintentionally saving themselves a world o' scry-buff-teleport trouble during their two-week trip back to town.

Ahead of time, not at all. Had they been more paranoid and thought things through in that light they may have got to it, but this group just isn't the paranoid sort.

Now, they've been told more than enough to piece together how this all came to happen. Next session will be when we'll see what they do with that info, and with the book.

So a question comes to mind....do you consider the consistency of the fiction to be more important than the players’ enjoyment of the time spent playing?

I know they need not be mutually exclusive, but if it comes down to a choice, which would get priority?

Easy: it doesn't match what was made up in another moment.

I don’t know....do you have like copious notes on all this stuff that you reference during play? So if someone asks “does this river flow North?” do you spend the next 10 minutes flipping through pages to confirm?

For me, this is a question of the juice not being worth the squeeze.

Entire campaigns, no. Entire sessions - IME between adventures there's usually one or two almost-rules-free sessions encompassing downtime activities, treasury division, training (a few rules rear their heads here), and info-gathering and-or debriefing.

Yeah...a session of play with no rules seems like something to avoid, in my book. Like I said, scenes like this aren’t bad, but entire sessions just push it too far. I mean, it’s a game.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

This is where we reach the value of the principle which says that no participant in the game should be responsible BOTH for setting the stakes, AND for judging the results of the action. One participant states the intent, narrative action, and what is at stake (maybe not all at the same time) and another participant describes the fictional consequences and adjudges the application of the rules. That isn't always player + GM, there can be various ways of parsing things. The point is, if one participant is running the whole loop, basically framing (or at least resolving) a scene AND determining what comes next, there isn't really a GAME aspect anymore. There is no challenge either, except in some purely notional sense of the character may be described as being challenged, but no tension can result. There is no true interplay of forces.

The goal of a lot of the design of an RPG is around proper allocation to uphold this principle.

Can challenges and agency exist in the real life? In the real life the universe external to you is not controlled by you. How is this different from a situation where the universe external to your character is controlled by the GM?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't know how you're envisaging play.

There can't be "moving/rushing forward" in the absence of stopping. You can just narrate stuff, with whatever back-and-forth is appropriate, until something interesting comes up.

LONG ago (several years, maybe A FEW years) didn't we have a thread, where the example was something about meeting some dwarves, and then deciding to go on a mission for the dwarves, something something. The upshot was someone, @Lanefan or maybe it was someone else, being convinced that you were railroading the players if you didn't describe every single detail of pretty much everything such that there was a choice to open this or that uninteresting door, etc. even if it had nothing to do with the story and lead noplace anyone had expressed any real interest in.

So, there is your answer. If the agenda is not "resolving the dramatic tension inherent in the PC's conflicts" or something along those lines, then it must basically be "inhabiting someone else's life" and every detail needs to be there. Of course this logic falls apart a bit on closer inspection, because nobody is gaming the choice of which of the row of three privies to frequent, or when to drink some water, or etc. So, clearly, the argument here is over "Level of Detail", with the more narrative agenda being happy to skip over, or at most summarize, any activity which isn't directly germane to that agenda (IE any doors which lead to uninteresting places are either narrated as "you find nothing interesting here", or simply never mentioned/don't exist). Other people, who also interestingly cluster in the "GM is the only narrative authority" camp, want to game out more details, although I don't know exactly what it is that the criteria is for what can be elided.

Maybe this focus on detail is just a way of recovering some form of agency for the players? I mean, if you spend much of your time deciding if the dwarf rides the pony or not, or what type of soup you ask for at the inn, etc. then clearly the GM is unlikely to impose something. I think, at least in some cases, this is the reason. GMs, at least IME, at this juncture are likely to 'blow things up', that is forcefully refocus at some point onto some less fine-grained agenda (IE while you're eating your soup an army of orcs shows up at the front gates, or something like that). I well recall a GM of bygone days for whom this was a trademark type of move. Honestly it wasn't a bad technique, but it smacks a lot more of scene framing than anything else!

In any case, if you look at things at different scales of granularity, there may be less difference between one style and another, in play, but a LOT of difference in terms of the ultimate trajectory of the game.