A Question Of Agency?

[pemerton]

To me, the question ultimately comes back to, why did the player agree to play in a campaign using a playstyle that allows for the possibility of their brother being dead with them having no say in the matter?

Well, I wouldn't. But for some reason me saying that is said to be an attack upon others' playstyles.

 

[pemerton]

Would Old School Agency and New School Agency work?

No. Classic Traveller is a RPG from 1977 that expressly contemplates, right there in the text of its little black books, the sort of player agency that I enjoy in RPGing and that you and @FrogReaver are saying is not part of a "true sandbox".

@AbdulAlhazred was playing club D&D in the mid-70s and - as I understand his posts - does not think that the conception of player agency that you and FrogReaver advocate would have been universally accepted back then.

I don't think it's "old school" at all. I think one version of it solidified in the 1980s, but I think the version that you two are advocating also has a certain "retro" dimension to it. It's not actual "old school", it's a type of re-recreated "old school" that didn't predominate back in the day.

 

[pemerton]

If you or anyone else is interested in the techniques

I didn't mean a lack of sandbox techniques. Rolemaster books are replete with those. I meant techniques for increasing player agency.

 

[Umbran]

If the player didn't want a dead brother, they shouldn't have dressed like that?

Mod Note:

Did you really think likening this to real-world rape was going to work out for you? Because, it did not. At all. The analogy belittles real-world trauma, and should be beneath you.

Don't do that again. Thanks.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I agree. Again, though, I challenge you to reconcile this.

These are no where near the same thing at all

 

[pemerton]

I'll finish my run of posts with a story from life:

In the late 1990s I introduced a friend and housemate of mine to RPGing. He had some vague familiarity with it as a hobby, but had never participated. He joined our second long-running RM campaign at its start.

From the start he took for granted that it was the job of the players, as participants in the game, to contribute content to the shared fiction - especially content relevant to their characters (eg family, backstory, goals, etc).

This player is also the GM of the BW game in which I am a player. That is the only GMing he has ever done.

I think if I showed him @Bedrockgames version of what is "normal" or "typical" in RPGing he would be surprised.

 

[Bedrockgames]

How was it determined that the character failed the exams?

I posted a section from my book on Imperial Exams (a few pages back now I think, but it includes a quoted section on the exams and the tests for them), there is a whole procedure laid out which I used (it basically boils down to attending the relevant exams when they are offered then passing all the skill checks on the list (which isn't easy). That said, that is just the method I opted for and included in my game. I wanted that part of the setting to have mechanical heft. But by this style, a GM could have done that with rulings instead of having a pre-laid out system. The big issue with the exams is the time between them. If you could take them every day, it would be easy enough, but they are an event organized by the empire, and they take them pretty seriously as they are how you gain entry into the imperial bureaucracy. So I've actually had a number of players set out to become great scholar officials and fail (but then this was pretty common with the actual exams they were based on, so it fits for me).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Again with the normative language! I don't even know what this means. What style of RPGing do you think is "invalid"?

All I mean is there is nothing wrong with my style. I am not suggesting others are doing anything wrong in their gaming (and I think I've made that clear)

 

[Bedrockgames]

And I don't know how else I can phrase this and make it clear: you are describing a game in which the player has less agency than I prefer in the RPGing that I participate in (whether as player or as GM).

And the problem is we have a fundamental disagreement over what agency means, and therefore this point is one we just don't agree on (I think the approach I am suggesting offers more agency than yours----we can agree to disagree on that, I don't see an issue with us having different views here)

 

[Bedrockgames]

My eyesight is not what it used to be but I can’t seem to find the part in Rob’s sandbox write-ups where it instructs the GM to kill a PC’a lost brother that they declared they are looking for.

That wasn't the point of linking to Rob's page. I linked because Pemerton mentioned not knowing all the available procedures when he tried it in the past, so I thought it would be helpful to give people a link to a quality blog entry on sandbox.