Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
Happy gaming!
Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay
- Thread starter Retreater
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Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
I agree with this. If it is based on honest consideration of the fiction and players can expect it to be all the time there is no issue. There are plenty of other reasons to go to the rules. It is just not necessarily one of agency.
I do think there is something to be said here for removing temptations or making it obvious when the GM intercedes in the way Blades does.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
I think GM decides serves an opposing design goal to making GM intercession obvious (or removing temptations). I say this because GM decide games put the vast majority of the work on the GM and little on the player. This allows players to be much more casual while playing. Blades, on the other hand, requires a great deal more from the players and so can constrain the GM more tightly. I don't think you can get the ability to service casual players with a tightly constrained GM at the same time. Or, at least, I haven't seen a system that does this.
To add clarity, that D&D supports casual players is not meant to suggest that your D&D game is full of casual players.
Manbearcat
Legend
Let me ask you this.
Say you're a skilled Magic the Gathering player and you're playing a complex deck with lots of interactions that generally has a 40 % win rate (therefore 60 % loss rate) across the population distribution of games against a less complex deck that is fairly straight-forward deck. However, extremely skilled deployment of your deck (and you're well toward the tail of the population distribution of skilled MtG players) can increase that win rate by up to 33 % (putting you, personally, a bit north of a 50 % win rate in the same scenario).
If, before play, someone is privy to (a) both deck archetypes being deployed (even though neither player is aware yet) and (b) the orthodox win/loss rate between these two decks AND that someone is vested with the authority to unilaterally decide that the less complex, higher win rate deck wins before initial hands are even drawn and a single card is played...
...do you find that there is no difference in both actual agency between that and actually playing it and perceived agency by the participants (especially the player of the complex deck)?
We've talked a lot about actual agency, but perceived agency is also enormously important (particularly as moments of play aggregate toward a narrative) in TTRPGs.
Secondarily, but related...
I think you're significantly underselling the agency-significance of all of the other aspects of system (and how they perpetuate agency) that go into the "roll the dice" portion of "say yes, or roll the dice" vs merely "GM decides."
There are many examples from enumerable systems, but lets just stick to Blades because that is one that a lot of commenters have some level of familiarity.
A Lurk (Rogue archetype) PC has the following:
- Special Ability - Shadow: Expend a use of your Special Armor to (a) Resist a Consequence from Detection or Security Measures or (b) Push yourself for a feat of Athletics or Stealth.
- 3 Dots in Prowess (the physical "saving throw" of Blades to resist consequences - so roll 3d when resisting a physical complication).
- 2 Dots in Prowl (so roll 2d when you traverse skillfully and quietly).
- The Stress economy (including all of the agency in manipulating/leveraging/mitigating it...or not).
- The ability to Push, accept a Devil's Bargain, deploy a Flashback and/or receive a Setup or Assist move from a Crew member if the fictional positioning warrants it.
They're on a Stealth Score that features 2 Competing Clocks. If the Mission Clock is filled up before the "Sound the Alarm" Clock is filled up, they succeed at the Score. If not, they may still succeed at the score, but their ability to do so becomes hugely threatened and the knock-on fallout accrued will threaten them for a while to come (more Heat which feeds back into the system, likely a Clock with a faction that has to be resolved in Downtime, other Complications that can emerge through play such as increased Stress, Trauma, Harm etc, etc).
At any point in the above scenario where the Lurk has the ability to (a) deploy Shadow to Push himself for a feat of Athletics (thereby not eating the stress for an extra 1d), now giving him 3d, is positioned to have an ally perform a Setup to change the Lurk's Position from Risky to Controlled (perhaps its a Whisper who manipulates the Ghost Field to distract a Sniper positioned in a Lookout tower in an overwatch position above the courtyard), and can then Resist any Consequence on a 4/5 or 1-3 result (now reduced due to the Setup move) with that beefy 3d from Prowess....OR they can use Shadow again (if they have another box of Special Armor) to resist it.
Or...they can deploy a Flashback.
And remember...all of this tech is player-facing so the GM doesn't get to hide DCs or procedures (which can allow them to use covert Force).
Is it really your position that the above scenario (which, again, I can use any number of player-facing systems for this), with all of the intricacies of its decision-tree and dice rolling, that said dice rolling is yields just as much/little agency/capriciousness/whim as an overwhelmingly GM-facing, GM-decides approach?
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Manbearcat
Legend
It is a good question and I agree with @Ovinomancer 's answer.
I want to write a lot more about "Delve Agency" and "addition by subtraction (or constraint)", but I don't have the time to coherently port my thoughts to a post right now so I'll try to do so in the coming days.
I meant the character within the fiction/fictional world having agency. Same way Pemerton used character agency. For some reason you "don't recognise" this concept, of fictional characters having fictional agency, but that's all I meant.
I'd say player agency was player ability to exert change in the world-state. I would NOT necessarily say that players always have agency when PCs are in combat - if the GM fudges to ensure the combat ends in PC victory or defeat, the players are deprived of agency. Following a linear path when required to do so does not give players any agency, even if the world state at the end of the path is very different from the world state at the beginning of the path. OTOH, players certainly don't need control of the metagame as in story-games in order to have player agency.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
I'm struggling with this. I think that it's framed in a way that really highlights Blades' strengths against a caricature of GM decides. The focus on decision mechanic hides a few things. I still thinking through this, so the below is not going to be tight and it'll be muddy as I puzzle through it. I might end up not agreeing with myself. But, I think that my opening statement has some merit and I'm going to go look for it.
The Blades player has less authority over their character, and so has less agency in manipulating the state of the character for which they're supposed to be advocating. This is a contrast worth noting. As a GM in Blades, I can essentially declare and enforce actions for your character if the mechanic is a hard fail (and a bit on a success with complication) and still be in the lanes -- this wouldn't be degenerate play. Doing so in a GM decides game is degenerate, because PCs are hands off outside of fixed mechanics. In GM decides, I'd have more authority over character action inputs.
Yes, there's more player input and control and therefore agency in the action resolution mechanics, but much less agency for the GM. This might, at first blush, appear to be good for the player, but it concurrently places a great deal more responsibility on the player. In Blades, that responsibility is further constrained by the requirements to lean into the game and to risk the very concept of your character. That framework puts a lot on the player and does act to constrain their authority in ways a that don't happen in a GM decides game. The price of the clearly agency in resolution is an increased cost in player effort and risk to the character. To put this another way, the player is pretty much required to play aggressively in Blades, to put their character at risk in often crazy ways, and to share some control over that character in a way that might radically alter the PC. These are all limits on agency that don't exist in a D&D game.
Lastly, the nature of the resolution engine in Blades means something always happens. Any action that invokes the mechanics will always alter the fictional state in a definitive way. This means that other players, when exercising their agency, impinge on yours to a greater degree. This is present in GM decides game, sure, but usually not to the same degree and certainly not as often. The danger snowball effect in Blades means that players are always trying to impose agency on a shifting and chaotic scene. In GM decides games, this is much less common, and the feeling of control and agency is increased (provided fair GM). This is mixing actual agency with perceived agency a bit, but I think both are impacted.
In summation, I agree that the player-facing nature of Blades is very clear who has authority and therefore increases agency. But, this isn't free. You don't build that kind of resolution mechanic without a cost somewhere. And that somewhere is the limitation of the player's agency over their character and the additional overhead the player takes on to play the game in a narrow way. I love Blades, precisely because I love it's laser focus. The system is adaptable to other genres, but that laser focus remains. Every attempt I've seen to broader that focus using the PbtD tech has muddied up the system in ways that lose that mechanical perfection (I looked for awhile for a way to get a D&D/Blades hybrid -- doesn't work).
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
Thanks for the clarification. I do, indeed, think character agency doesn't exist, although I made that case the page before I tagged you, so if you were reading around the tag, you might have missed it. It's pretty simple. Characters are fictional creations. Fiction cannot choose. Choice is a key foundation of agency. Therefore, if you cannot choose, you cannot have agency and character agency doesn't exist.
That said, I like your second paragraph.
So, leaving aside the fact that I'm not a skilled Magic player--I never learned how to draw the right cards ... ;-)
In baseball (and sports in general) there's a saying: "That's why they play the games." It usually comes up in broadcasts when there's an upset--especially if said upset involves unlikely on-field events. It seems apt here.
What you're describing sounds like the win-probability analysis that I see in baseball (and that so often seems to be wrong, but that's less relevant, and probably comes down to my shrinkology and not the models). It would be a shame if baseball (or any other sport) resorted to using those instead of playing the games, because of all the chaotic interactions; OTOH, if they knew that was how wins would be determined they could plan for that and build for it. This isn't entirely unlike knowing your GM as a player, and knowing how they're likely to rule.
In TRPG play, what you're describing isn't quite what I'm describing, or what I think @Campbell was describing. We're talking about the GM deciding the outcome isn't in doubt, which in the win-probability world would mean a win probability that was exactly 100% or 0%. That said, I won't deny that not being allowed to roll might diminish the perception of agency, especially if the result was negative. (While the GM deciding on success might do just as much to reduce actual agency, I suspect most players would be less likely to complain.)
You haven't seen my dice at work.
To answer your question more seriously, I think what you're describing shows that the player in Blades in the Dark has many explicit ways to shape the odds--what seems to me like adjusting the fictional framing, though I may be misunderstanding what you and/or others have meant by that. In a system that is entirely GM Decides, any of that would have to be through persuasion of the GM. This is less mechanical and less guided by rule, but it's there. I mean, people play diceless systems and don't complain there's no agency there (at least, that I know of--the closest I think I've come is a session or two of Prime Time Adventures, which looking back I don't remember dice being involved, but it was more than ten years ago and my memory is foggy).
My position would be that a player in a D&D 5E game that I was running, playing a rogue trying to do something analogous would have other characters to provide buffs (same as the Lurk), would have similar freedom in describing their actions, and would have good knowledge of the odds (because at my table Proficiency lets you know the DC of an Ability Check before you roll); they wouldn't have the ability to hurt themselves to improve the odds (the Stress economy), but they might be able to describe their actions so that they have Advantage on a relevant roll, and they might have the Lucky Feat or some other mechanic that gives them the specific ability to reroll bad rolls. So my position is that the player at my D&D 5E table would have a similar amount of agency--and the only thing I can think of that is explicitly GM-side there is setting DCs for rolls. The only difference in capriciousness I see is that a d20 is swingier than a d6.
I'm snipping and responding to this, because while I didn't really think about why I was reacting so negatively to BitD while I was reading the SRD, this seems likely to have been at the root of my distaste. I guess I don't feel as though the trade-off/s seemed worth it. I don't think this is because I am a lazy player--it felt more visceral than that. I mean, my first two thoughts as to how I'd probably play were to goldfish (do as little as possible) or to intentionally get my character killed; neither is exactly good play, and I know myself well enough to read those particular tea leaves and stay away from the game. I am genuinely happy that y'all who love BitD love it, but it's clearly really not for me.
