D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[pemerton]

"Unless there is something at stake in the story you have created, don’t bother with the dice." There's nothing at stake when you're looking for something that should be right out in the open.

Huh?

The player wants a vessel to catch the precious blood that is flowing away. That's something at stake.

Recently I actually saw a version of this scene in the TV show Merlin. One of the character has been poisoned or drugged, and has to be revived by being given the antidote. But the antidote gets spilled. And so one of the aiding characters - I can't remember now if it was Gwen or Merlin - looks around for something to sponge up the spilled fluid and then squeeze a few drops of it into the mouth of the poisoned/drugged character.

That moment of looking around is - in the show - a moment where the tension rises and we, the audience wonder whether something will be found, or whether some other solution will be necessary.

In my session of Burning Wheel, that moment of looking around - at the table, it arises because the player asks, earnestly, "Is there a vessel I can catch the blood in?" - is the moment of tension. The moment of stakes. The moment when the dice get rolled.

 

[Lanefan]

Is your contention that any game mechanic that would prevent the player from deciding every single their character says and does, such as those mechanics modeling anything from morale to willpower to sanity to mind control, is inherently limiting to or a lessening of player agency?

Yes.

It's one of those things where if a PC can do it to an NPC the NPC (if it has the requisite ability or power or whatever) should be able to the same thing right back.

Should a game that purports to center player agency avoid any and all such mechanics?

Complete avoidance isn't necessary but I think, if agency is to be front and centre, it'd need a call-out that there are elements within the game system that can deny varying degrees of agency either temporarily or permanently.

 

[Lanefan]

Who cares if they act on the meta-information? It's just information that's available to them. Let it be a hunch that the character has.

Also, if they fail a roll to find a secret door, who cares if they know it... they failed. They're not finding the secret door. Assuming you don't allow skill dog-piling.

Nothing to do with skill dogpiling but I do allow a different approach to provide another roll.

A good secret-door one from early in my campaign was the party were in a wooden 2-story house and their mapping of the house showed a fairly obvious gap. They failed to find the secret door, and so went to plan B: the Dwarf just took an axe to the place until a wall gave out and revealed the hidden room beyond.

In a situation where they're just looking at a blank wall and are unsure whether there's a secret door present, if they roll a player-side 19 and don't find anything they'll move on 100% of the time while if they roll a 2 they'll find an excuse to try something different. I don't want their subsequent actions to change based on the roll they made; I'd rather their actions be based only on character knowledge, which consists of "we searched but didn't find anything" without knowing whether that failure was due to there being nothing there to find or due to their simply missing what was there to find.

And so, those rolls are done in secret.

Yeah, I find it fills in gaps of information that I fail to provide, and is almost always easily rationalized in some fictional way if necessary.

If I fail to provide some essential info I expect them to ask me for it rather than look to the metagame.

It's my stance that there's only one form of player agency.

There's only one form that matters, to be sure: the agency to freely play the character(s) you have in the setting and have those characters do what they would do, wherever that may lead.

Oh I'm sorry, I figure that rather than staring at each other like idiots, the GM would put the living world to use to do one of the things it's great at... have the world go on even when the PCs don't do anything. So that threat they ignored? Now it shows up. The gnoll pack they did nothing about has now hired some giants, and they attack the town. What do the players do then?

If nothing is happening, it's not just the players who've failed.

With this I agree. Sometimes even in a sandbox the DM has to start the engine; and player enthusiasm waxes and wanes over time depending on the mood of the moment or whether something else is going on in real life that has one or more of them off their game.

 

[Lanefan]

...how can you describe this game as anything but dice-drive?

Apropos of nothing else, Dice Drive sounds like a great name for a car-racing board game.

 

[Lanefan]

Consider a RPG - of which there are several - in which (i) players, as part of the build and play of their PCs, are expected/required to signal what their priorities are for their PCs, and (ii) the GM, in doing their work in relation to setting, situation and consequence, is expected to have regard to those player-determined priorities.

Is that "meta-agency" on the part of the players?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: yes, and the argument then becomes one of whether and-or in what situations this is a good thing or a bad thing.

 

[Lanefan]

You say this:

I do know that, if my players are fixated on some meaningless minutiae and it looks like it's going to result in a lot of boring, frustrating, time wasting in the real world, that no one will enjoy, I'll certainly tell my players and find away to avoid that.

And then three posts later you say this:

Right. Hawkeyfan has spoken. Heceforth no one should waste their time with that and, if they chose to do so, they must be playing wrong.

For some people, it might not be considered a waste of time. That's their call to make, in their own game, not yours.

Which seems a direct contradiction.

If the players are fixed on some meaningless minutae that they think (rightly or wrongly) is important, I say let 'em at it. If they frustrate themselves or bore themselves then so be it, but you don't and can't know this will happen until after the fact, by which time it's too late.

 

[Lanefan]

I am not talking about "input from the meta level". I am talking about rules that govern the GM's decision-making. Just as you are, when you refer to "a consistent world", which is (as best I can tell) a heuristic you advocate GM's use to make decisions about what happens next in the fiction.

I am only talking about the first of these.

I am talking about RPGs like Burning Wheel, Torchbearer and 4e D&D where the GM has authority to frame scenes.

As far as determining what is at stake and influencing tone and theme - if you are saying that, in a living world sandbox, only the GM can do this, then to me that only drives home how great is the GM control that you are advocating for. Given that stakes, tone and theme all follow from GM decisions about their PCs, what they care about, and what they do, as far as I can tell these all sit within "character agency".

To me, a fairly clear example of a player being given meta-agency would be this conversation:

Player: "I look down the alley. What do I see in there?"
GM: "You tell me. What do you see in there?"
Player: "Brick walls, a couple of ladder-style fire escapes leading upwards, several bags of garbage in a pile, and a sleeping tramp or drunk slumped against the garbage bags."

Pure meta-agency.

 

[SableWyvern]

You say this:


And then three posts later you say this:

Which seems a direct contradiction.

If the players are fixed on some meaningless minutae that they think (rightly or wrongly) is important, I say let 'em at it. If they frustrate themselves or bore themselves then so be it,

In the first post, I'm saying, "People can enjoy whatever they like in their own games."

In the second, I'm saying, "This is how I handle a situation where I'm confident there will be a negative outcome unless I step in."

I can't see how that's contradictory, unless you're suggesting that I'm preventing my players from having fun.

but you don't and can't know this will happen until after the fact, by which time it's too late.

I've been running games for this group for about 25 years. All but our very newest player have been with us for at least a decade. One player I first gamed with somewhere around 1994.

I have something of an idea by now how they feel about things and I'll trust my own judgement on the matter. There are times when I will let the group screw around with something that is going to get them nowhere and there are times when I know darn well that if I let them poke at something forever no one is going to be happy about it. Even if the characters prod for far too long, there's no great law that says I have to make the players sit through it all in real time.

 

[pemerton]

You say you’re only talking about character agency, but the systems you reference, Burning Wheel, Torchbearer, and 4e D&D, rely on structured procedures that constrain the referee.

Yes. This is crucial to how they secure player agency.

But that doesn't involve the player doing anything but play their PC. It just requires the GM to follow the rules.

These games give players control that extends beyond just acting as their characters. They also allow players to act for their characters, meaning they make decisions that affect the fiction at a structural level, such as framing scenes or establishing stakes. That is a different kind of agency than simply declaring actions from within the character’s point of view.

This is just wrong.

All the player of a Burning Wheel character has to do is be their character. When I play Thurgon, this is what I do. It is the rules that govern the GM that ensure that (for instance) scenes are framed that speak to the things that I, as Thurgon, care about.

You claim that stakes, tone, and theme follow from what players do with their characters. I agree, but in the Living World approach, those elements are not prepackaged or negotiated in advance.

Nor are they in the RPGs that I am posting about.

Your misunderstanding here appears connected to your early posts about character arcs, story and the like which @Campbell, @hawkeyefan and I responded to.

Eero Tuovinen actually explained the point very beautifully quite a while ago now:

I find that the riddle of roleplaying is answered thusly: it is more fun to play a roleplaying game than write a novel because the game by the virtue of its system allows you to take on a variety of roles that are inherently more entertaining than that of pure authorship. . . .

all but the most experimental narrativistic games run on a very simple and rewarding role distribution that relies heavily on both absolute backstory authority and character advocacy. . . . These games are tremendously fun, and they form a very discrete family of games wherein many techniques are interchangeable between the games. . . . The fun in these games from the player’s viewpoint comes from the fact that he can create an amazing story with nothing but choices made in playing his character; this is the holy grail of rpg design, this is exactly the thing that was promised to me in 1992 in the MERP rulebook. And it works . . .​

What Tuovinen says here is exactly accurate for my experience playing Thurgon in BW. All I have to do is play my character and be Thurgon. The rest is taken care of by the GM following and applying the rules of the game. Your idea that there is "meta agency" is simply false.

What I am distinguishing is this: when a player steps outside of that immediate context to talk about what their character wants in general, or what arc they are hoping to pursue, that is not acting as the character.

To reiterate: as I and @Campbell have posted, in reply to you, the things that you describe here are not part of narrativist/"story now" RPGing.

They are not part of any RPG that I play.

Players are not told what the stakes are. They find out through play.

How would players being told what the stakes are count as an exercise of "meta agency" by a player? It would seem to be a purely receptive role.

Tone comes from how the world responds, not from a shared declaration. Theme arises after the fact. You only seem to recognize player impact when the system gives players structural control. I recognize impact when it emerges from consistent decision-making within the world.

You appear to be talking about the players prompting the GM to make decisions: about how the world responds to declared actions, about what is at stake in the resolution of declared actions, about what thematic significance (if any) will emerge. It does puzzle me a bit that you seem oblivious to the extent of GM control over the shared fiction that you are describing here.

But anyway, I don't know what you mean by "structural control", unless that is a jargon term for the GM follows the rules of the game.

your usage of character agency folds procedural guarantees into the definition. You say you are not talking about meta-level input, but you only seem to acknowledge agency when the system provides formal control mechanisms.

By "formal control mechanisms" and "procedural guarantees", I again take you to mean rules (and principles and the like). Yes, rules that govern the GM are important for player agency - these are what permit the players to declare actions with a sense of what impact they are then having on the shared fiction.

Why you characterise rules as "player meta agency" I have no idea, though. That makes no sense to me.

As for Blackmoor, you say it was not railroady because players could predict the consequences of their actions. Yet Blackmoor lacked formal procedures for resolution.

So? Formal procedures are one way of understanding consequences and what is at stake. They're not the only way. I've posted about this quite a bit upthread already, with reference to classic dungeon-crawling and Gygax's essay on Successful Adventures.

If Blackmoor had agency, then Living World campaigns do as well.

Well, that would depend on the heuristics that the referee is using, how those relate to the players' knowledge of the setting and how the setting and the heuristics and that knowledge have all been built up together, etc.

Just to give a simple example: asking completely novice players to play through a Gygax-esque dungeon with ear seekers, trappers, pit traps that open when the floor 5' in front of them is tapped, etc would be an extremely low agency experience. Those players would have no way of making meaningful choices to navigate that dungeon and gather information.

But for players who have built up their knowledge of and expectations around dungeon tropes in the context of extensive play, with the GM simultaneously over the course of that play pushing boundaries, coming up with new tricks and monsters, etc - then it may be a quite agential experience.

This is a particular illustration of the general point that informal heuristics are very context sensitive. My understanding of Blackmoor is that it developed analogously to my paragraph just above - Arneson extended the scope of the game, the ideas, the tropes etc in parallel with the players developing their familiarity with and experience of the game.

I have no idea how much of your "living world" play is like that.

 

[pemerton]

To me, a fairly clear example of a player being given meta-agency would be this conversation:

Player: "I look down the alley. What do I see in there?"
GM: "You tell me. What do you see in there?"
Player: "Brick walls, a couple of ladder-style fire escapes leading upwards, several bags of garbage in a pile, and a sleeping tramp or drunk slumped against the garbage bags."

Pure meta-agency.

OK. And what does that have to do with what @Campbell, @hawkeyefan and I are talking about?

The RPGs that I've discussed in this thread are Burning Wheel, Torchbearer and D&D (AD&D and 4e). None of them rely upon this technique.

Consider a RPG - of which there are several - in which (i) players, as part of the build and play of their PCs, are expected/required to signal what their priorities are for their PCs, and (ii) the GM, in doing their work in relation to setting, situation and consequence, is expected to have regard to those player-determined priorities.

Is that "meta-agency" on the part of the players?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: yes, and the argument then becomes one of whether and-or in what situations this is a good thing or a bad thing.

So where is the "meta" in this? The player signals something about their PC - a relationship, a hope, a fear, a value. That's not meta - that's just making decisions as one's PC, about what one hopes and fears and values.

And then the GM does stuff - that is not the player doing anything!

So where is the "meta-agency" on the part of the player?