Yes it does. At a minimum, it requires the GM to establish situations which permit the player to
paint a picture of his/her character that is clear and powerful; which permit the player to
express his/her PC's personality, interest and agenda.
This is why, for instance, one might open a campaign with the PC in a bazaar with an angel feather being offered for sale - this permits the player to paint a clear and powerful picture of his PC, expressing the PC's interest and agenda - rather than in a "neutral" setting where the first action declaration ("I look around for a bazaar") doesn't really do any of those things at all.
What does this rogue think and feel? What is his/her agenda? Why is s/he trying to get into the castle? What might s/he sacrifice to do so?
The situation you describe does not involve advocacy of the sort that Eero Tuovinen talks about. As you present it, there is barely a
character there at all!
Eero Tuovinen distinguishes advocacy (broadly, first person inhabitation of the PC) from authorship (broadly, thining about the PC as a protagonist in a story). This has no bearing on action resolution. Nowhere does he say that players can't declare actions which might succeed!
By talking about "1st level characters" you're already assuming a particular sort of RPG system.
It is part and parcel of agreeing to play a D&D game (or a game with a similar level device) that story elements are, in some fashion, level-relative. In the "story now" context, this makes long-term pacing a signifcant element of play; and its workability depends upon there being appropriate ways at all levels for the players to engage their dramatic needs at al levels of play in a way that both maintains verisimilitude while not making the later levels of play redundant. This is a non-trivial design challenge. Of level-based games that I'm familiar with (which are D&D and its variants, T&T, RM and DW) I think 4e really pulls this off the best, because of its thorough integration of mechanics with cosmology via the "tiers of play". (Though I may be being unfair to DW here - I don't have the best handle on exactly how its level advancement works.)
Of course not; not every move in a game is guaranteed to succeed. But failure
because the GM decided that the fiction was otherwise certainly does.
In your example, the rogue player's contribution is to say "I search carefully." And then to ask the GM to relate a few things that the GM has authored. That is
extremely modest agency. The rogue player didn't actually establish any fiction except a few facts about mental states and bodily movements of his PC, which ended up having no impact on the actual state of the game.
The reason why the rogue failed is really irrelevant here with regard to player agency. Whether the GM knew ahead of time, decided it in the moment, or it was the result of a failed skill check, it just doesn't matter.
It may not matter to you. It is fundamental to me.
Imagine we were talking about a combat between the rogue and the orc - and that you posted "The reason why the orc killed the rogue doesn't matter - maybe because the GM got lucky in the combat rolls, maybe because the GM decided on the spot that the orc was a better fighter than the rogue, maybe because the GM had written that down ahead of time." I think most RPGers would actually dispute that claim.
Well, I dispute it in the case of the secret door
for exactluy the same reason. Given that the principal activity of RPGing is sitting around telling one another made-up stuff, the question of
who gets to make up which stuff is fundamental.
I ask again, have you done it?
I can tell you why I don't think it can be done with the Caves as written - because (with the possible exception of the cutlist cave) they don't engage with any dramatic needs nor express any thematic content.
Maybe someone could take one of the orc caves and do the same thing to it as I've done with the cultists - turn it into the site of activity in a game in which war with the orcs is an underlying premise. But that wouldn't be to use the module in anything like the way it is is written or presented for play. (The contrast with Night's Dark Terror, by the way, is very marked here. The goblin caves in that game are very different in this respect, and lend themselves much more straightforwardly to "story now" RPGing - for a start because they are smaller, and separate, and so can be played with a thematic dynamism that doesn't risk swamping the PCs nor turning the thing into a purely operational/logistical slugfest.)
Or you could read the post I linked to - then you'd actually be able to learn what happened instead of making it up!
The issue is not whether the story is compelling or not. It's that what you're describing here does not fit the model.
You have not identified any scenes framed to speak to your PCs' dramatic needs (a fighter who wants to test his skill and help clear the region of monsters in the hopes he'll be able to one day build his own keep, a wizard is looking for some rare ingredients and components, a cleric wants to aid his friend the fighter in his quest, and a thief who is a childhood friend looking for a way to fast riches with little work). Your chapters 1, 2 and 4 contains nothing that speaks to any of this. And nor does your chapter 3 - just one sign of this is your use of the plural pronoun ("they conceal their treasure", they lie about the caves, etc - how does lying about the caves even fit with the agenda of the fighter and cleric? and where is the mage's agenda in all this?).
And that's before we get to any discussion of
consequences, and how these might be established given the mechanical and fictional components of the module.
To get "story now" play out of the Caves of Chaos would require a complete rewriting from the bottom up.
OK. Part of my issue is the fact that I still don't think Agency is a good term because it can mean too many things to too many people. In my comments, I was referring to agency as what the player is allowed to do within the context of the game.
So when the rules allow something, and the DM blocks the ability to use that. In most cases people complain about this when the DM alters the rules because they've decided something is too powerful. This is fine before players make their characters, but if somebody has been playing a character for several levels, and was looking forward to using that ability. It's simply referring to the DM shifting the rules in the middle of the game. So it makes no difference what game you're playing - Snakes and Ladders, D&D, whatever. Your agency is what you are allowed to do within the rules of the game.
Obviously, this isn't the way everybody else is looking at it. Fair enough. Instead of a comparison of the rules of the game compared to what the DM is allowing/changing mid-game, this part of the discussion is attempting to compare the amount of different things, or the amount of control, that the player has in the game, or, if you prefer, the amount of agency they have within the game.
Here's my problem with that. The games are very complex. While one game may give more agency in the narrative, they may provide less agency in regards to character creation, mechanical options, whatever. I think it would be virtually impossible to compare whether this game provides more agency than that game, because you'd have to find some way to compare the games as a whole. Perhaps you all feel that's possible, but I'm not sure I do. That's why I've been saying that I prefer agency to be something that is related to the context of the game itself.
Having said that, I'm still just not really understanding the difference in some of our examples. I don't really care if we agree on the agency thing, but I'm interested in seeing how what I do differs from what you do. Or, more importantly, whether what you do would improve what I do.
In my campaigns, I have lots of things that are "set" in the setting. I use a lot of the published materials more or less as is. For example, places in Waterdeep that are in
Volo's Guide to Waterdeep. Others are things that come from earlier campaigns, since I've been running the majority of my adventures (unless we've tried something different) in this campaign since 1987. So players that have been here for earlier sessions "know" things because they've been there, or their characters still live there, etc. There are tombs where prior PCs have been buried, etc. I also have lots and lots of notes that I use as tools, to help me flesh things out while improvising. These are usually simple things that popped into mind at one point or another, and I make a note of them, and they go back decades. Most have never been used, and probably won't be.
The majority of the time, what actually happens in this campaign is developed on the fly, in response to the actions of the PCs. While some places might exist, if there has been a period of time since the last time characters were to that location, or seen that NPC, then things can/will change. That's done as a combination of what makes sense for the given person/place combined with the motivations and actions that "the NPCs and rest of the world take" in that time. Otherwise it's in direct response to the PCs. Until something actually enters the campaign, nothing is set in stone.
Most of the sessions are probably 60-80% of the players talking, whether role-playing, making decisions, taking actions, etc. The rest of the time is me responding to them, answering questions, explaining what they see, etc. My responses are based on what's going on in the campaign, what the players have said (including what their goals, motivations, etc. are), randomly determined things, or from my notes (which may or may not change at that point depending on how all that fits together in the moment).
For example, I don't get how a character can fail, if the DM doesn't have the ability to set up a situation where they might. I don't get your statement that "the rogue didn't add anything to the fiction." The example was minimal, sure, but that's not the point. Where are they lacking agency? Maybe they aren't interested in "writing" something significant in the fiction. This is also a single point of a much bigger picture, it's a part of the ongoing fiction. In my example, it was a high level look at the basic directions the players decided to go for various reasons, and the steps that led to those scenarios. For example, the rogue suggested that if others knew that the caves actually existed, and that they had found some treasure, then others would try to get to it first. So they decided to try to keep it a secret from the others in the keep for as long as they could. Secretly, though, the player of the rogue was hoping to learn more about the what's going on in the keep, figuring that there had to be some reason why the Lord hadn't taken care of things yet.
Also, your example about the DM deciding ahead of time that the orc killed the road doesn't make sense to me. There's a difference between writing whether something is there or not, and whether an orc beats you in combat. Within the rules of D&D that would clearly be taking agency away from the player.
Things that "exist" within the fictional world are one thing. The results of actions made by the players is entirely different. Yes, searching for a secret door is an action that's taken by the characters, but the expectation is that a successful result is dependent on a secret door being there in the first place. That has not been established from the character's perspective yet. In reality, when a character is searching for a secret door, it's not entirely to find it, but to determine if one even exists. The action is engaging the rules, and the result is dependent in part on the GM determining that a door actually exists. I don't really understand why it matters whether they determined it ahead of time, or in the moment, other than perhaps it helps prevent situations where the GM says "yes" and then realizes later on that there's a problem with that answer, if for no other reason that the logic of a secret door existing in that location falls apart later.
Fighting an orc is a totally different thing. The game clearly gives the player the "agency" to engage the rules to see who wins the fight. Determining the results of that ahead of time is clearly taking agency away from the player. Deciding ahead of time that the orc is a better fighter (higher level) is one thing, even overpowered which might require a different tactic or even a retreat on the part of the PCs. Yes, I get that this is providing some direction in the fiction as well, although the reactions of the players may be quite different than what the DM thinks it would be. At least that's what I've always found. Back when I was running published adventures, or writing adventures in the style of published adventures, the players always did something different, went a different direction, etc. So I've come to see my job as a DM in part as a facilitator. I describe the setting, events, and creatures, and they determine what they do, and I react to that. It's kind of the root of a TTRPG, I think. And I'm not going to say it's a "neutral" environment. I, as the DM, am neutral. But an NPC, for example, might be trying to hunt them down and kill them. The worldbuilding aspect comes into play because the framework for what the NPC is capable of doing is related to that. In some cases, such as adventuring in outer planes, the setting itself might be hostile to their survival.
Going back your complaint is that the PC will fail to find a secret door because the DM determined ahead of time that there is no secret door there. From what I understand, you're saying that the player deciding that they will search for a secret door here should be possible simply because the player has decided that it's important to the fiction at that point in time. At some point the GM, or somebody, is saying "no." No? That not everything a player decides to introduce into the fiction is actually introduced? Or they can just randomly decide that they will go collect the wand that's hidden in that tree, or the hidden cache of gold in that log, or a secret door into the armory of the king. At what point does a player go beyond their narrative agency? And who decides that? Because all of this continues to sound exactly like what Eero was warning against.
So how about this - can you start an example of how you'd start a scenario, so I (and maybe others) can respond as a character and see how this really plays out? Maybe a new thread? I participated in a thread like this for Dungeon World and it showed my how, although the mechanics were different, and how the DM adjudicated things differently, we could end up with the same results. It highlighted a few things I liked (most of which I was already doing, although didn't always recognize), and some that I didn't like in that game's design. It's not just to see how it plays out, but after each step explain to us what you're doing and how.
It could be vampires, or liches, or my dear departed grammy come back to cook awesomely delicious brisket for the PCs.
