A Question Of Agency?

[hawkeyefan]

I’d love to see some examples of play that are from some of the systems that folks are saying have high agency. I can post plenty of examples from my 5E game, but I’d like to see others.

Instead of endlessly attacking examples of other games in an attempt to prove they don’t have as much agency as their proponents are saying, post some of your own play examples to highlight how your chosen games do promote agency for the players. And I mean actual examples of play, detailed as some of the others that have been shared here. Please no hypotheticals.

I invite @Crimson Longinus and @FrogReaver to be the first to share, please.

 

[prabe]

I’d love to see some examples of play that are from some of the systems that folks are saying have high agency. I can post plenty of examples from my 5E game, but I’d like to see others.

Instead of endlessly attacking examples of other games in an attempt to prove they don’t have as much agency as their proponents are saying, post some of your own play examples to highlight how your chosen games do promote agency for the players. And I mean actual examples of play, detailed as some of the others that have been shared here. Please no hypotheticals.

I invite @Crimson Longinus and @FrogReaver to be the first to share, please.

I invite anyone interested to pull anything from either of the two campaigns in my sig, if you want to talk about those. Those notes are my wife's--she's a player in both campaigns--and she records what happens more than the mechanics involved, so some might find them unsuited to the need.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I invite anyone interested to pull anything from either of the two campaigns in my sig, if you want to talk about those. Those notes are my wife's--she's a player in both campaigns--and she records what happens more than the mechanics involved, so some might find them unsuited to the need.

Yeah, unfortunately it's presented as a journal -- no play interactions are noted. It's not really useful to analyze for moments of agency.

And this is true of any game memorialized this way -- a similar journal about my Blades game would be as opaque to the topic of discussion, although probably an interesting read. I have a burgeoning novelist in my group -- a few books in the self-published community -- but, sadly, she doesn't choose to take such notes, preferring to just play. She takes notes for herself, but not to formalize like this. Actually, you know what, I've never seen her notes, so maybe she does?

 

[prabe]

Yeah, unfortunately it's presented as a journal -- no play interactions are noted. It's not really useful to analyze for moments of agency.

Agreed. Focused differently, so differently detailed. Not great for analyzing agency; superb for helping the DM remain consistent.

Also, it amuses me how a page and a half of prep turns into 9 pages of in-play notes.

 

[pemerton]

Ultimately you don't seem to get that, having narrative power over the setting reduces the ability to be surprised, to explore and make meaningful decisions against that setting.

This is an empirical conjecture. As someone who has relevant experience, I can report that it is false.

Here are two examples, both from my BW game: I was surprised by what Thurgon and Aramina found in Evard's tower (letters suggesting that Evard was Thurgon's grandfather; crates of low-grade metal components (rods, bolts, screws etc) in the basement); and was surprised to see the terrible state Rufus was in when Thurgon and Aramina encountered him in Auxol.

@Ovinomancer it just sounds like the person who can justify their naughty word the best will get their way. So instead of convincing the GM or trying to work within the fictional reality you need to convince your fellow players that the random item you chose is genre appropriately something that could potentially interest the university (not a hard thing to do as the need was so unspecific.)

This doesn't seem like a very accurate description of play. There's no "convincing fellow players" - there's just declaring actions for your PC. You seem to look at action declaration through the lens of should the GM allow this? or is it just bullshitting? A lens of worries about <something, I'm not 100% sure> and hence the need for these GM-enforced constraints. @Lanefan seems to look through a similar lens.

Once the focus of play moves from solving the GM's mystery to seeing how these characters develop - what choices do they make, and what happens to them? then all those worries can be let go.

 

[pemerton]

I invite anyone interested to pull anything from either of the two campaigns in my sig, if you want to talk about those. Those notes are my wife's--she's a player in both campaigns--and she records what happens more than the mechanics involved, so some might find them unsuited to the need.

I posted this in a thread earlier this year, in response to your post:

I read the first page closely and skimmed the next five. It doesn't record anything about the procedures of play, so I can't tell for sure. What follows is conjecture based on your accounts upthread of how you approach RPGs.

My understanding from the list of Dramatis Personae is that the GM was playing the child Turlk and that a player was playing the character Joybell. I therefore conjecture that the player decided what questions Joybell asked Turlk, and that the GM made all the decisions about what Turlk said in response.

Two phrases stood out in particular on that first page: we can’t glean from that where they’re from and we have no way of knowing where their village was. My guess, reinforced by your reply to @Ovinomancer, would be that this ignorance of the relevant elements of the fiction resulted from the GM making unilateral decisions about what Turlk knew and was able to convey.

If my guesses are correct then yes, this looks like RPGing-as-puzzle-solving, and I would say that the GM had almost all the agency in respect of the content of the shared fiction.

This impression is reinforced by a quick look at p 2, where another character who appears to be a NPC controlled by the GM - Jorly - provides information about the Cracked Shield tribe. This then appears to shape the next sequence of play - "We headed off to the Cracked Shields".

Reading on: while it's not clear, I gather that the GM made all the decisions about the compound and the elder called Rask. And decided to provide the players with information about The Masks. The sense of play involving solving puzzles is reinforced by this bit at the bottom of p 4: "We recognized those as Vicious Mockery and Toll the Dead -- which means psychic and necrotic damage. That confirms what Barnett told us about necrotic damage being good against them"

Then, very similar to @Lanefan's hypothetical upthread, we have a description of a street which I assume was all decided by the GM. Thus it would be the GM who established that the street has no place "at all helpful for Fiona and Orryk hanging out for a couple of hours and observing the place."

On page 6 we are told about "one of the most important conversations of Joybell’s life". This all appears to be driven by the GM - eg the idea of "vendetta" which I gather is the crux of it seems to come from a NPC being played unilaterally by the GM.

I didn't read the remaining 10 pages. The consistency of what appeared to be going on in the first 6 pages suggests that they are representative enough.

To me it seems that most of the fiction and trajectory of play is coming from the GM.

 

[prabe]

To me it seems that most of the fiction and trajectory of play is coming from the GM.

As you put it earlier: This is not, at this point, something I want to die in a ditch over; I did, however, make the offer, so here goes (from I hope a much less angry place than I was in a few months ago):

I agree that the setting and the NPCs come from the DM.

I disagree that the trajectory comes from the DM. Everything arose from decisions the PCs made, right to their being in Pelsoreen. I might have mentioned earlier: They were kinda at loose ends, and found out an allied NPC where they were knew of teleportation circles and was willing to move them around; the players asked if they could go to Pelsoreen--which was not on my list of places they could go, but which it made no sense to be unavailable.

I should probably get my notes--though I don't expect you make a lot of distinction between "DM decides beforehand" and "DM decides on the spot" (I expect the "DM decides" part is what matters to you).

I think that some of what you describe in your earlier post as "RPG-ing as puzzle-solving" was the DM providing information to the players. I specifically remember wanting to make sure the PCs knew about the Masked Ones' weaknesses before encountering them. I occurs to me that when you say that, you usually mean the DM is the puzzle, not that there's a literal puzzle in the fiction.

I had placed the Cracked Shields in Pelsoreen--they're in my notes. OTOH, they came up because the PCs asked Jorly about them; had the PCs not asked, I would have put them in a pocket--either for some future thing in Pelsoreen or to use elsewhere.

I'm pretty sure I don't believe the DM figuring a small child wouldn't be able to place his village on a map, and really having a pretty naive outlook in general removes player agency. It seems as though you think a player should have been able to roll to see whether Turlk knew geography? That doesn't seem right, and I have a feeling I'm misunderstanding something and therefore violently misstating your meaning--apologies, if so.

The temple of The Joyful had been established as existing the previous session (I think). The info-dump the PCs got about the orcs ... yeah, that was DM stuff.

Deciding Rask (leader of the Cracked Shields) didn't like the Masked Ones--DM decision; likewise, what comes up later about members of the tribe having a vendetta against the Masked Ones. The decision to recruit the Cracked Shields to fight the Masked Ones, though--that was the players, all the way.

Oh--the Masked Ones themselves: When Joybell's player decided her village had been wiped out, I asked her to describe the ones who did the wiping as Masked Ones; she could have said no--it was just an idea I had that was actually about stuff that showed up later when the PCs went and destroyed the Masked Ones' Forge.

I'm pretty sure the decision to go to Black Irnod was on the PCs; I controlled him as an NPC, I'll grant. I expect that since that was freely roleplayed, you probably don't think the PCs had any particular agency, there.

The bit where party members tried to do stealthy/sneaky/con-artist things in the House of Masks: There were actual mechanics involved, there (let's not turn this into a discussion of Stealth in 5E, eh?). It just happened that the hive-mind things had all sorts of advantages (as well as Advantage) on Perception checks. It occurs to me that this might be an instance you don't object to the DM narrating events, since the PCs didn't win that particular contest?

The fight between the party (with help from the Cracked Shields) against the Masked Ones was a D&D 5E fight. I expect you think such fights have a given amount of agency, and that this one is no different.

If I've misstated your positions somewhere above, I plead ignorance; I intend no offense.

 

[FrogReaver]

I’d love to see some examples of play that are from some of the systems that folks are saying have high agency. I can post plenty of examples from my 5E game, but I’d like to see others.

Instead of endlessly attacking examples of other games in an attempt to prove they don’t have as much agency as their proponents are saying, post some of your own play examples to highlight how your chosen games do promote agency for the players. And I mean actual examples of play, detailed as some of the others that have been shared here. Please no hypotheticals.

I invite @Crimson Longinus and @FrogReaver to be the first to share, please.

I assume everyone is somewhat familiar with at least some flavor of D&D, so I'm not really sure how posting D&D play examples helps anything. What do you hope this exercise adds to this discussion?

 

[hawkeyefan]

I assume everyone is somewhat familiar with at least some flavor of D&D, so I'm not really sure how posting D&D play examples helps anything. What do you hope this exercise adds to this discussion?

A few things, I suppose, though I don’t think any examples must be from D&D. Any game that you think is similar in approach to D&D would do.

Sharing such actual play examples will show how agency is distributed in the game and how its processes are handled. It’ll give us something concrete to discuss instead of the hypotheticals that are offered in these discussions. Hypotheticals can be useful from time to time (I’ve offered plenty myself in this thread) but I think actual play examples are what’s needed, given the analysis that we seem to be looking for.

Also, as you pointed out, most of us are at least somewhat familiar with D&D and the approach that most of its versions use. That’d likely be good for the discussion.

Additionally, I just think it’d be a useful exercise. To actually sit down and think about your own play and scrutinize it as you have others’, and see if it’s actually working the way you intend it to work and the way you describe it here.

And finally, the level of detail from actual play that has been offered by several posters here has been engaging. It would be good to have more of that, with some different kinds of games in mind.

 

[Lanefan]

I suspect, however, that players are not advised in your games to play their characters like stolen cars.

Most of the time such advice simply isn't necessary; lack of balls-nuts gonzo is rarely a problem here.