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

[Gimby]

Well, I honestly don't know of really any games that actually allow one PC to force another PC to think or act a certain way due to failed die rolls without magic or similar being involved.

5e Battlemaster - Menacing Attack. To a lesser extent Goading Attack

 

[AlViking]

I was replying to a post that said that players in D&D decide what their PC's mental capabilities are.

I said "mentally capable of" which in context it was discussing emotions and controlling their response. Similar to how a soldier likely doesn't want to get blown to bits but will still charge the enemy line. Not sure what you're trying to turn that into.

 

[Maxperson]

I guess in your games it never happens that, for instance, you discover secret doors, or have people die. You just learn what the numbers are on dice that are rolled.

How is a secret door or people dying about his character? What he said was he doesn't "find out" things about his character. Probably because he determines it and doesn't need to "find out" things.

 

[hawkeyefan]

That’s not what I’m doing.

I’m not redefining player agency to fit only one kind. I’m analyzing it into parts: meta-agency and character agency. Player agency, as you describe it, still exists in my framework. I’m not replacing it, I’m breaking it down so we can understand what’s actually happening in different kinds of play.

Oh, I have no issue with you breaking down agency into different types like this if you want to examine them individually or what have you.

My point has only been that they still fall under the category of player agency. And I think claiming that a game that only allows one type allows more agency than a game that allows both is flawed. That part... that need to advance your chosen play style... that seems driven more by ideology than analysis.

Which is fine! But I've been accused several times of forming my opinions based on ideology, yet I think I am clearly being less partisan in this way.

An RPG isn’t just the rulebook. It’s the system, the play culture, the referee’s procedures, the campaign structure, everything that shapes the actual experience. If you focus only on "the game" as a closed ruleset, you miss the bigger picture. That leads to shallow or misleading analysis.

But I'm not doing that. It's hard to know what's happening though, when you don't specifically describe the processes, but do so in only a vague way. Because to me, the most important aspect of player agency is the players' accurate understanding of the state of the game... that includes the fictional situation of the game world, but also the processes used by the GM and the factors considered in those processes.

I don't know what you'd consider that... meta- or character-agency... to me, it's both. The player needs to understand these things just as he needs to understand the rules of soccer and what constitutes a foul and so on. He needs to be informed so that he can make decisions on how to play. Likewise, the character would be informed. They would have access to more than a GM can accurately present. This is why I dismiss concerns of "but the character wouldn't know the exact number" because the character would have a better idea in most cases than whatever the GM can detail.

Having unknown processes, hidden rolls, undeclared target numbers, and the like... this is all anathema to player agency, however you want to break it down.

It’s also why looking at RPGs purely as “games” in the conventional sense can obscure what’s really going on. Yes, some campaigns are run exactly like a game: players pretend to be characters, they have adventures, and everything flows from the mechanics. But not all campaigns are like that. In many cases, the rules are just one layer among others, important, but not the whole story.

I don't think that what you're describing means in any way that we can't look at RPGs as games. I think denying that they are games and can be analyzed in that way is for more likely to obscure things.

 

[hawkeyefan]

How is a secret door or people dying about his character? What he said was he doesn't "find out" things about his character. Probably because he determines it and doesn't need to "find out" things.

How do you find out if your character dies in D&D? How do you find out if you locate a secret door?

Because of a dice roll.

Saying that you don't find out about a character if their emotional or mental state is determined by a die roll seems to contradict the idea that you can find anything out that way. No?

 

[Maxperson]

It's totally different! Trust me, I've played this kind of thing every which way. What you get in Narrativist play is far more directly engaging with the characters, and thus the players. I would not really call it a committee design. More like no 'design' at all. Note that the real world is also NOT designed! There's a lot of added authenticity here where you get a more realistic feel of a milieu that is not the product of a single mind with a single aesthetic. The world is filled with conflict and messy compromise.

This is not at all your fault and I'm not blaming you, but Gygax used that word so often that it became super annoying to me. And now I've just discovered that I get annoyed when anyone uses the word.

 

[Faolyn]

5e Battlemaster - Menacing Attack. To a lesser extent Goading Attack

Fair enough.

Edit: Although in looking over the maneuver, it's still one that's only rarely going to affect PCs--I don't think many DMs give NPCs Battlemaster maneuvers, so it's mostly going to happen during PvP. Not entirely, of course, but mostly.

 

[Lanefan]

I feel the need to point out that you often take this “oh it’s too complex / more complex than your statement” tack - which is really frustrating. If everything is so complex we must write essays with every permutation considered, we can never discuss things. To say that “well we can’t know how much agency a player is given just on the basis of the rules without first unpacking the totality of “system” would suggest we can never really examine agency.

Also, a RPG is a game. It’s in the title . Once you’ve moved beyond free-form roleplay that functions purely on social consensus and added mechanics, you’re playing a game that can be analyzed using game theory and other tools. Edit: with the simple caveat of “we cannot account for all table cultures.”

The "game" part is there in order to abstract those parts that can't be role-played. The "role-play" part does the rest.

If-when you try to shove the "role-play" parts under the "game" umbrella with binding social mechanics then you're ripping the guts out of the role-playing part of the exercise.

 

[Maxperson]

I 'liked' this post but don't agree the shift is from sandbox to linear. It shifts from player-driven to DM-driven but if you-as-DM are initiating things by dropping a bunch of hooks down and letting them choose, to me that's still sandbox enough for rock'n'roll.

Linear is when you only drop one hook.

Yeah. I didn't say it goes to linear, but that it loses sandbox and becomes more linear. To me DM driven isn't sandbox play.

 

[Lanefan]

5e Battlemaster - Menacing Attack. To a lesser extent Goading Attack

Against NPC opponents, sure - but does it work if-when used by NPCs on PCs, or by one PC on another?