A Question Of Agency?

[Crimson Longinus]

My point is you compare apples to oranges.

Nah. I compare real apples to imaginary apples.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Doesn't ring a bell, but OK.

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).

Which has several side effects.

First, it still ends up being the GM who decides what, in the fiction, is germane to that agenda. Sure the players/PCs might be setting that agenda but the GM then decides where it'll play out and how - as in by what means - it'll resolve. What this does is deprive the players of any micro-agency in how they approach this resolution point, in favour of macro-agency over what it is that's being put in question.

Second, it makes the assumption that the players'/PCs' agendae are locked in and can't/won't be changed or side-tracked by things encountered en route. This also detracts from agency IMO - perhaps something the GM skips past as boring is a thing the players/PCs would latch onto as highly interesting...or perhaps not, but you've no way of knowing unless you give them the chance.

Maybe this focus on detail is just a way of recovering some form of agency for the players?

As I note just above, it does play into agency.

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!

Eventually IME the players settle on a general level of detail they're cool with, which can vary even from scene to scene. The Dwarf-and-cart was one where we-as-players were happy playing it all out (though the DM wasn't!), but I'm pretty sure once we got the damn Dwarf into the cart (I think via a combination of restraining spells and rope, in the end) that the rest of the journey was pretty much handwaved other than occasional checks to see if the Dwarf had escaped his bonds.

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.

Good point. There's macro-agency (e.g. over the direction of the story. or over setting elements) and micro-agency (e.g. over what gets explored next, or which passage to take). Some of you seem much more concerned about macro-agency; I'm more interested in micro-agency and whether those decisions are meaningful.

And this ties directly into expected speed or pace of play. The existence of micro-agency assumes use of a level of detail that makes it relevant. If those details generally don't exist or are skipped in a desire for a faster-paced game, micro-agency vanishes with them; which means all you're left with is a question of what degree of macro-agency do the players have.

 

[Manbearcat]

Nah. I compare real apples to imaginary apples.

Here is why I haven't engaged in your "real life agency vs gaming agency" compare/contrast (and why I think its fraught and not apt at all):

1) In real life, I have an autonomous nervous system (putting to side the Hard Problem in cognitive/neuroscience for a moment). I am not blind, deaf, dumb, olfactory-impaired et al. I navigate the world through (a) 1st order perception, (b) my hard-earned cognitive biases that translate things to me without "myself" even knowing it, and (c) my vigilance to filter out my cognitive biases.

In a TTRPGing game with a shared imaginary space, none of (a), (b), or (c) is true as a matter of initial orientation to the fiction and gamestate. I'm working entirely through a cipher or the lens of a second party (GM). I'm then having to work through the process of orienting myself to this secondhand perception, sussing out how this cipher/lens has encoded information so I can make it intelligible (to my cognitive framework) and then work through my own (b) and (c) after that process is done.

In no way does this resemble the orientation to agency that a person of full sensory capacity in real life (which is the only type I'm acquainted with as, thankfully, I have all of my senses).

The way I see it, filling in certain details feels (cognitively and emotionally) infinitely more like the orientation to agency that I have in real life because of precisely what I'm talking about above. Now I can't do this for the entire game (or even most of it) for all the reasons that we spoke of earlier; this is a game and creating both setting/situation > decision-point > resolution is no longer playing a game; its authorship.

2) Let us allow for a moment that our actual lived lives are agency-deficient (we live in a simulation and/or our decision-trees are overwhelmingly executed upstream of our frontal cortex coming online; that is to say, our life navigation is overwhelmingly rote programming of which we are not a party to).

Even if that were/is true, that doesn't remotely mean that we would be/are incapable of postulating what an agency-rich existence might entail and then engineering a means (in this case, systematizing through a game's machinery) to achieve it.

---

If you could somehow explain to me how (1) and (2) are wrong-headed, I'll be interested in furthering this corner of the conversation you're pursuing. As of now, I don't see it.

 

[pemerton]

People in real life have agency over their lives. They however cannot affect the external world except via their actions. In a game where the player cannot affect the external game world except via the actions of their character, they have the similar sort of agency over the life of their character

This here is why your comparison is fraught. You make assumptions about what real life is that are not demonstrably supportable and then extend the analogy to a game with finite structures.

I don't know what darkbard has in mind: but in the real world, I live in a place that is appealing to me, and I associate with people who have common interests with me. And I don't achieve those states of affairs by walking up to "the external world" and hitting play on a narration device.

In the real world, word of my deeds travels - via word-of-mouth, via the internet, sometimes via radio or TV - and this brings people into my orbit who are interested in getting to know me, or working with me.

In the real world, I cast votes and answer opinion surveys and sign petitions and write letters to the editor, and all these things shape the actions of actors who - in various ways and for various reasons - care about the opinion of those affected by or concerned with the things they do.

In the real world, given that I participate in a market economy, every purchasing decision I make ultimately influences a producer in his/her production decisions.

In the real world, where tradition and inherited practice continue to be a part of life (dress and language are too obvious examples), every choice I make in respect of these matters shapes the tradition (perhaps confirming it, perhaps challenging or altering it) and this feeds through to the behaviour of others and takes us all the way back to my first paragraph, about the non-contingent connection between the conditions in which I live my life and my interests and preferences.

None of these processes in the real world is remotely comparable to, or resembling of, a GM drawing a map and writing up a key. A RPG in which all I can do, as a player, is trigger the GM to tell me what she has written up - or, if nothing has been written, to ad lib something as if it had been written up - is a type of storytelling practice. It's a more structured version of the kids saying, "Dad, tell us a story about XYZ". This has very little in common with the rest of how I live or experience my life.

I really don't know what this fixation with puzzles is.

The only merit I can see in having the main focus of play be the activity of triggering the GM to tell me his/her notes is that I, as a player, might work something out.

Here's an example of what I have in mind:

A few weeks ago I ran a session like this for my family - one of my daughters wanted to do a murder mystery for her birthday.

I adapted a murder scenario from an old Traveller module, and wrote up some characters (one for each other family member, plus a couple for their entourages, plus a small number of important NPCs whom I played). There was no action resolution in any mechanical sense - the players described what their PCs were doing, and who they were talking to, and I delivered up information as seemed appropriate (eg what they found if they searched a stateroom; what a NPC said if they spoke to him/her; etc).

This is an example of puzzle-solving: the players' goal is to acquire enough information to be able to infer to the hidden bit of my notes (ie whodunnit). It is a different experience from watching an episode of Death in Paradise or The Mentalist, as there is the first-person description element to it. But it doesn't really involve very much more agency.

(One difference from those shows is that they are scripted to try and occlude the audience's access to the relevant information, whereas in our murder mystery I was desperately trying to shovel information out the door. A better comparison might be to reading The Eleventh Hour.)

 

[Crimson Longinus]

@Manbearcat

1) True, but ultimately it is just a matter of resolution and is a difference of degree at most, not of kind.

2) "I want more agency in a game than in the real life" is a perfectly fine answer. I'm sure that in a sense we all do. In a RPG we usually get to choose our character, and we get to choose on what campaign premises to sign up to.

 

[Lanefan]

On levels of detail, and which to elide: I still think that this is a case of the Gygaxian form enduring past its original function.

The classic dungeon has two characteristics relevant to this particular discussion: (1) it is very sparse/austere in its detail - all its relevant architecture and contents can be spelled out in a workable, human-generated and managed, key; (2) establishes a definite sense of what is relevant and what is not.

To a point. While the GM knows what's relevant (because the module says so!), the sense of what's relevant and what is not for the players/PCs often only arises after the PCs (try to) interact with any given element.

That second is a function of tradition as much as anything, but the traditions seems to be quickly established and pretty easily teachable. For instance, doors, floor, ceilings are important in terms of their role in entry, egress, traps etc. But generally the colour of these things is not relevant - which we quickly learn from the absence of descriptions of colour of things in the sample dungeons in Gygax's DMG, Moldvay Basic etc.

Having just run S1 Lost Caverns, which Gygax wrote (though admittedly a few years after the DMG) I can say there's a fair amount of attention paid to colour of walls-floors-etc. at any point where it differs from bland gray stone. What you see as an absence of attention might simply be the presence of an assumed default.

Likewise we don't need to write down in the key, nor narrate at the table, every crack or lip or uneven finish in a wall: that only matters to finding secret doors or climbing walls, and in both cases can be subsumed into the roll for success.

And if a GM starts narrating the colour of room ceilings, or the cracks in the walls, that's a sign that these matter in a way they typically don't.

Where things start to go haywire is the GM who thinks one day I might run a dungeon where the ceiling colours matter and so, to avoid meta-gaming, I'm going to narrate the colour of every ceiling from the get-go. Generalise that to everything else one can conceive of being relevant - cracks in walls, poorly-finished stonework, etc - and we get an absolute nightmare. Take this out of the dungeon and into any realistically inhabited place, and it gets worse - do we really have to key, and then narrate, every bucket, bale of straw, etc in every inn and every peasant hovel?

In an ideal situation, yes. Even better, there'd be a holographic scene presented to fill in all that stuff.

Practicality, however, limits this; and so things that obviously are or might become relevant are narrated while everything else is left for the players to ask about. Where we differ is in the definition of what might become relevant.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

@pemerton I don't understand why you are talking about triggering the GM to reading their notes. I have not advocated for that. Most of the time I don't even have notes.

 

[darkbard]

I don't know what darkbard has in mind:

Not specifically, perhaps, but you've intuited the larger point:

None of these processes in the real world is remotely comparable to, or resembling of, a GM drawing a map and writing up a key.

I think @Crimson Longinus is trying to draw some sort of parallel about our individual philosophies about agency in the real world as shaping our gaming agendas, but I think any such point is tenuous, at best.

 

[pemerton]

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).

Which has several side effects.

First, it still ends up being the GM who decides what, in the fiction, is germane to that agenda. Sure the players/PCs might be setting that agenda but the GM then decides where it'll play out and how - as in by what means - it'll resolve.

Lanefan, your claim here is simply not true.

Actual play example: in Burning Wheel, my PC's sidekick has the Belief I'm not going to finish my career with no spellbooks and an empty purse. That establishes an agenda. Then I delcare an action for her: I think I recall that Evard's tower is around here. The resolution of that action will geneate something that is germane to that agenda. As it happens, I succeeded on the check and so what happened was we came upon Evard's tower. Had it failed, the rules of the game require the GM to introduce something into the fiction that will challenge the character's Belief while not giving effect to her intent - so maybe we stumble upon Evard's tower but see someone heading off with all the spellbooks in a cart, or maybe we find the tower but it is locked with the books inside, or . . .

Another example: the PCs in my Classic Traveller game are trying to disrupt a bioweapons conspiracy. They are in orbit about the world of Enlil - one hub of the conspiracy - en route to Olyx, where the chief conspirators are based. I roll a starship encounter - there is a patrol cruiser arriving at Enlil. Consistently with my self-imposed agenda, I (i) decide that this vessel contains conspirators, who (ii) have travelled from Olyx, and (iii) broadcast sufficient information to the starport authorities on Enlil that the players are able to infer (i) and (ii).

This followed on from a patron encounter in the previous session, where the encountered patron was determined - by rolling - to be a diplomat, and I had narrated this patron's purpose in approaching and engaging with the PCs to have them assist against the conspiracy by travelling to Olyx.

In other words, everything that is introduced into the fiction as part of the game engine's devices to propel things forward - patron encounters, starship encounters, etc - is germane to the players' agenda for their PCs.

And I certainly didn't decide how the PCs' interactions with the conspiracy would resolve!

 

[Lanefan]

Here is why I haven't engaged in your "real life agency vs gaming agency" compare/contrast (and why I think its fraught and not apt at all):

1) In real life, I have an autonomous nervous system (putting to side the Hard Problem in cognitive/neuroscience for a moment). I am not blind, deaf, dumb, olfactory-impaired et al. I navigate the world through (a) 1st order perception, (b) my hard-earned cognitive biases that translate things to me without "myself" even knowing it, and (c) my vigilance to filter out my cognitive biases.

In real life you also have an imagination. This imagination allows you to...

In a TTRPGing game with a shared imaginary space, none of (a), (b), or (c) is true as a matter of initial orientation to the fiction and gamestate. I'm working entirely through a cipher or the lens of a second party (GM). I'm then having to work through the process of orienting myself to this secondhand perception, sussing out how this cipher/lens has encoded information so I can make it intelligible (to my cognitive framework) and then work through my own (b) and (c) after that process is done.

...imagine your PC having all those senses, inputs and cognitions noted above as 1) and then use what you imagine your PC perceiving through those inputs/cognitions to inform what you have that PC do, and why.

Which means [your PC in the fiction vis-a-vis the game world] and [you in real life vis-a-vis the world around you] can thus be seen as at least vague equivalents; and I think* this is what @Crimson Longinus is trying to get at: that because you in the real world can't create hills to the north just by saying they exist, nor should your character in the fiction be able to.

* - CL, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this.