Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay

[Maxperson]

Three things:

1) Agency, as a concept in social science, requires both the ability to make an autonomous decision and then to enact it with the same autonomy. Merely the ability to navigate a decision-point independently is not sufficient.

Under that definition, it is also not sufficient if there are rules involved. Anything that limits the ability to enact the decision, such as rules saying how to go about enacting the decision, would take away agency, unless you are equally limited in making those decisions in the first place.

 

[prabe]

If my character is a hallmage (eg in Burning Wheel I am playing a spirit-binder who can summon and control the spirits of hallways; or in Cortex+ Heroic I am play a character with the Sorcery trait who has a SFX that augments all effects created by using sorcery while in a hallway) then the real action might be getting my character into the hallway as opposed to having my character lured through the door into a chamber.

I feel as though you might have misunderstood me. When I said:

If the next encounter is [THING], whether you kick open the door or go down the hall, I don't think you really have agency.

The important bit wasn't where the encounter is. Yes, if you are playing a character with special magical mojo in corridors, you probably want encounters to happen there. The important bit was that whichever way you went you'd find [THING]. The choice you make isn't making a difference to the fictional state--you're encountering [THING} whatever you do, whether you want to or not. If your character has that magical hallway mojo going, and he comes to a branch, he'll find [THING] whether he goes left or right; the choice won't matter.

 

[Libramarian]

An Apocalypse World GM or a Burning Wheel GM is not a neutral arbiter in the way a B/X referee is. They have agendas laid out by those games they are supposed to follow. It's an active role. Not a passive one. It's like night and day.

So much this! It's why I'm a bad OSR-type referee.

I think the extent to which B/X refereeing is passive is perhaps being exaggerated here. When running my B/X game I do generally wait for the PCs to come to the challenge (i.e. it's a sandbox), but in resolving them I'm often guided by a sense of what would make it most satisfying for the players; I'm not always strictly following my notes or extrapolating based on a sense of realism. Classic D&D of course has many gonzo elements that are not really conducive to a purely realistic approach.

An example from a recent session: in an evil wizard's library the party find a reference to the word "Fahoorth". Later in the dungeon, they come across NPCs trapped in cages with bars made of a magical chitinous substance. "Fahoorth" is the password that causes the cage bars to part. I realize the players won't get this without a clue. I wait until the characters happen to say words with "Fuh", "Hoo" or "Th" sounds, and narrate that the bars quiver, seemingly in response to certain sounds being spoken. After much guessing and repetition, a player remembers the password and triumphantly announces it. I could have anticipated this and predetermined the clue, but I didn't feel like I was out of bounds in doing it on the fly.

The party are now escorting the prisoners back to town and I'm playing the prisoners' leader as annoyingly haughty. She could become a useful contact but I'm trying to goad the PCs into abandoning her. Again I'm guided by a sense of challenge, rather than simulation; I didn't have any notes beforehand about her personality. (I also just enjoy the subversive aspect of making powerful NPCs hard to deal with, whereas in most fantasy RPGs progressing the story is all about finding the quest-giver, hearing their info dump and then doing their bidding.)

 

[S'mon]

From accounts I know @S'mon runs a game that affords players a very high degree of agency over the fiction.

I don't think that's exactly right. I afford players a very high degree of autonomy in deciding what their player characters do, and this can heavily impact the world-state* in ways I don't attempt to foresee or control. Often this results in highly dramatic and compelling narratives. But I don't run a game of group story creation. I run "You are the Hero - What do you do?"

*I think calling it "the fiction" is detrimental to what I want, which is you-are-there immersion in the fictional world.

I avoid GMing railroads** like the plague, especially these days (I occasionally used to run chain-of-sandboxes linear campaigns, akin to GDQ). PCs need to be adventurous types, but beyond that they can set their own goals - marry the Queen of Quodeth and become Prince-Regent. Defeat the Black Sun and forge a mighty empire across Altanis. Stomp all the dragons & get the biggest pile of loot ever. Become the Arch-Techno-Druidess of Golarion. Kill Runelord Sorshen. Create a Pan-Thulean alliance against the Great Doom.
Some players & PCs have achieved some of the above goals.

**Although I am using some Paizo APs in my Runelords campaign, I treat Varisia as a big sandbox where PCs can do what they want, so entire books get ignored (eg Runeforge in Sins of the Saviours). PCs are currently in the Spires of Xin-Shalast and there was a credible chance a couple sessions ago that the PCs would ally with Runelord Karzoug against fellow Runelords Zutha & Krune, after accidentally saving the world and winning Karzoug's favour. I'm planning to use parts of Return of the Runelords, but with one PC sworn to kill Sorshen it is bound to play out wildly differently than in the AP.

Varisia: Rise of the Runelords

'For if the greatest prize of Thassilon's first ruler cannot save Varisia... what can?'

smonscurseofthecrimsonthrone.blogspot.com

 

[pemerton]

Who controls the actions of the pc? Who is deciding what that pc is going to do in the game and follows through by actually having the pc take that action on the game?

imo character agency and player agency are linked. you can’t have character agency without player agency.

Character agency is a fictional state of affairs - contrast (say) a PC who is charmed with a PC who is not.

Being part of the ficiton, character agency is basically indepenent of player agency.

Some examples form different systems:

* In D&D 4e, a Deathlock Wight has a horrific visage which can make a viewer recoil in terror (mechaincally this is psychic damage, and a push effect with the fear keyword). In recoiling in horror, a character may well be exercising agency (ie there is no need to narrate it as literally involuntary). But the player does not exercise agency at ths particular point of resolution. Once the GM has roled the dice and scored a hit, and the player has not deployed any resources (eg an immediate or free action) to negate the outcome, the player has no choice.

* In Burning Wheel, if a PC fails a Steel check the player gets to choose how to respond: stand and drool, fall prone and beg for mercy, swoon, or run away screaming. This is a reasonable degree of player agency. But in the fictin the response is of course an involuntary one - especially if the character swoons, or stands and drools (ie the character is not exercising agency).

* In my Burning Wheel game, one of the PCs was dominated by a Dark Naga (the spell is called Force of Will; it states that "The caster’s words become thoughts, permanently embedded and resonating against the victim’s personality for the rest of his/her days, as if the victim had formulated them him-/herself; this enables the caster to implant forceful commands into the victim’s mind"). To give this mechical effect, I worked with the player to change one of his PC's Beliefs to reflect this state of affairs - which then gives the player incentives to engage the ficiton having an eye towards that Belief. Following that,the player has played his PC just as normal. Here we see a character with very constrained agency but no particular burden on the player's agency.

* I once played - for a short while - a 2nd ed AD&D game in which the characters had agency (our PCs were awake, undugged, not dominated, etc) but we as players did not: whatever actions we attempted the GM would contrive a reason in the fiction why they didn't work, unless they were the particular action thiat he wanted us to take so as to fit into his predetermined adventure plot. This example shows that there can be character agency without player agency.

 

[S'mon]

From accounts I know @S'mon runs a game that affords players a very high degree of agency over the fiction. I suspect @prabe does too. I do not think the Fifth Edition is a great asset in that regard.

5e works pretty well for my kind of sandboxy play; it does lack some of the resources of older editions but these have been partly brought in over time, like the XGTE wilderness encounter tables. And that stuff is easy to import.
5e does not fight me the way 3e/PF does, or the very different way 4e does, so I'm happy enough with it. I do enjoy running a variety of systems though; currently I have running:

5e Princes of the Apocalypse - limited scope sandboxy, focused on fighting the Elemental Cults but no linear path.
5e Primeval Thule - on lockdown hiatus - full sandbox, Quodeth based but PCs range all over. Tons of politics, romance, and other non-dungeony stuff.
Mini Six Primeval Thule - full sandbox, with focus on Claws of Imystrahl.
1e AD&D Forgotten Realms 1359 DR - pretty much a full sandbox, albeit big focus on Damara region. I'd be a bit sad if PCs wanted to leave Damara entirely. Hoping to bring in a lot of the Game of Thrones as PCs rise in level.
5e Runelords Epic 20 - focused on fighting the various Runelords, but much more of a "superhero sandbox" than the original APs. I think of it a lot like the Avengers films.

 

[pemerton]

I think the extent to which B/X refereeing is passive is perhaps being exaggerated here.

I would probably choose "neutral" rather than "passive". Your examples put some presssure on that too. I still think there is a meaningful contrast here, because I know I can run the sorts of games that I do, and I know that I can't run OSR-ish type stuff.

Maybe I should say that it's located more in upstream framing - ie in my sort of game there really isn't much framing that is literally "upstream" of play. Even that may not quite work, especially because I know that you are into "unrealistically" interesting rooms and dungeons. Perhaps its the very deliberate lack of neutrality in the orientation of the framing towards the PCs' distinctive characters, and then the way this affects narration of failure, that is key?

 

[pemerton]

imo, failure changes the scene even if nothing in the scene changes other than PCX failed

That seems a bit orthogonal to what I posted. But whether it is true or false depends (again) on system details.

In BW failure changes the scene, because the GM is obloged to do this in narrating failure.

In AW failure changes the scene, because the GM is obliged to make a move, preferably a hard one, if a player's roll fails.

In AD&D a failed check to pick a lock normally changes the players' available resources (because checks are rationed at one per level vs a given lock) but needn't change the scene: it may be that the PCs are still there in front of the locked door. A famous dungeon which has a lot of room for failure not changing the scene is ToH, because that module doesn't use wandering monsters or any other sort of "clock" to drive things forward.

 

[Ovinomancer]

As written without utilizing techniques and agendas curbed from other games or other versions of Dungeons and Dragons I do not think Fifth Edition is focused on providing player agency over the fiction. I think it is focused on providing satisfying linear storytelling. The advice in the DMG, the assumption of DM driven pacing, the adventures they have released, mechanics that have no real teeth, and their organized play program all point towards a focus on storytelling over game play.

You do not have to run it or play it in that fashion, but the game is tuned for GM story in my opinion.

From accounts I know @S'mon runs a game that affords players a very high degree of agency over the fiction. I suspect @prabe does too. I do not think the Fifth Edition is a great asset in that regard.

I know I will get blowback for saying this, but I think Fifth Edition does a phenomenal job at enabling GM storytelling. The only mainstream game on the market that is better for that purpose is Numenera.

I think this last is widely true, but not fully true. First, I fully agree that this is what the published adventures do, no doubt. However, if you read the rules and then try to build a game that works best with them, you end up with a location framed challenge game more similar to B/X than the published adventures. @Iseith is a champion of this kind of play in 5e. I think that there's a lot of inertia to how people play D&D, and the style of play you present became popular long before 5e. It's a large reason why so many bounced off 4e.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Character agency is a fictional state of affairs - contrast (say) a PC who is charmed with a PC who is not.

Being part of the ficiton, character agency is basically indepenent of player agency.

Some examples form different systems:

* In D&D 4e, a Deathlock Wight has a horrific visage which can make a viewer recoil in terror (mechaincally this is psychic damage, and a push effect with the fear keyword). In recoiling in horror, a character may well be exercising agency (ie there is no need to narrate it as literally involuntary). But the player does not exercise agency at ths particular point of resolution. Once the GM has roled the dice and scored a hit, and the player has not deployed any resources (eg an immediate or free action) to negate the outcome, the player has no choice.

* In Burning Wheel, if a PC fails a Steel check the player gets to choose how to respond: stand and drool, fall prone and beg for mercy, swoon, or run away screaming. This is a reasonable degree of player agency. But in the fictin the response is of course an involuntary one - especially if the character swoons, or stands and drools (ie the character is not exercising agency).

* In my Burning Wheel game, one of the PCs was dominated by a Dark Naga (the spell is called Force of Will; it states that "The caster’s words become thoughts, permanently embedded and resonating against the victim’s personality for the rest of his/her days, as if the victim had formulated them him-/herself; this enables the caster to implant forceful commands into the victim’s mind"). To give this mechical effect, I worked with the player to change one of his PC's Beliefs to reflect this state of affairs - which then gives the player incentives to engage the ficiton having an eye towards that Belief. Following that,the player has played his PC just as normal. Here we see a character with very constrained agency but no particular burden on the player's agency.

* I once played - for a short while - a 2nd ed AD&D game in which the characters had agency (our PCs were awake, undugged, not dominated, etc) but we as players did not: whatever actions we attempted the GM would contrive a reason in the fiction why they didn't work, unless they were the particular action thiat he wanted us to take so as to fit into his predetermined adventure plot. This example shows that there can be character agency without player agency.

Going out on a limb, but I'd say character agency does not exist at all. Characters cannot choose, being not real. Any choice made is by the player. Lacking one of the foundations of agency (ability to choose), characters can't have it.

I think this gets confused because we imagine the character, and can imagine the character making a hard choice. But, it's still actually us making the choice, not the character. This is a matter of play and how and where player agency is applied in game. If you play such that the player can only exercise agency through the character (very common in D&D), then this is easier to confuse. Other games, where a player can exercise agency through a game mechanic not associated with their character (FATE points spent to add to a scene, frex), it's more clear cut.