The Delta Theory of Meaningfulness

[Quertus]

Agency only applies to places where the character has choice, IMO. The character *never* has a choice in what treasure appears (except in those instances where games/GMs are to ask their players for a treasure list to help populate loot based on the PCs needs). Just like the player never had a choice in the creatures that held the loot that contained the Quantum Wand. It is simply not in their purview. What they choose to do with the loot thereafter is...because agency, to me, is deciding what your character does, not what happens to your character. So, no player choice = no agency impact = no delta. The choice to seek out the Wand of Grease still exists.

- M

Yeah. My point was just, "let's not conflate 'odds of getting this cool story' or 'ability to get this cool story' or even 'ability to get different stories (through random die rolls)' with 'Agency / Delta', because they're not the same thing". And your response is, indeed, exactly why.

[Devils_Advocate]

Naively, multiple viable options would seem to be at odds with CaW triumph through cleverness, which requires superior, winning options. The trick, of course, is that (a) there's nothing clever about picking the clearly superior choice, and (b) the various options in roleplaying games are actually pretty hard to balance. So, as it turns out, balancing stuff as well as is feasible generally serves both purposes.

It's hard to have a dilemma where, even on investigation, neither option seems better than the other. And, hey, that's fine. Trying to force that sort of situation is liable to feel, well... forced. So if that's Narrativism, maybe it's not such a great goal. On the other hand, it's easy to have a situation where different options seem better to different people.

OTOH, if the scenario is "do you apply the car battery to your genitals, yes or no?", and all of my characters would make the same choice in this binary, then regardless of how impactful that choice might be, no, I don't think that's the best stuff.

"At this point, you're given the choice of fleeing the town with either the friendly rebels or the people who just tried to give you a Viking crewcut. I only know one person who took the second option, and only because his housemate had already taken the sensible choice and they wanted to see what happened if, theoretically, one had the brain of a deck chair."
- Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, reviewing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

And this is not about vilifing the guy.

You contrasted his methods to adjusting things "with an eye towards making the game more fun", implying that fun wasn't his goal, and characterized his behavior as competition with a player. I feel like it casts a GM in a negative light to suggest that he chooses to compete with players in a way that he doesn't expect them to like. "Vilify" may be a strong word for it, but hopefully you grasp my point. You impugned motives, not just methods.

Let's assume that by increasing disarm trap by 10 points, the same character has decreased his AC by the same value (again, relative to some assumed "party/scenario average"). Is the same GM who might be tempted to make the traps 10 points tougher also going to decrease his monsters to-hit values by 10 as well? No? Why not?

Because that makes the other PCs too hard to hit. And as a rule all player characters get involved in combat. Whereas traps may well be handled exclusively by the designated party scout, especially if that character is known to neutralize traps reliably.

(Thanks for anticipating and preemptively responding to the above reply, by the way. It makes this section of our conversation much more efficient!)

Or, we could even speculate that the GM... what? Fudges the values, but only when attacking that one character?

Gives the character an AC-boosting item that only works for him. Not too odd for a GM to throw a bone to a gimped PC like that.

But in this particular case, there is a middle path: Instead, give the party an AC-boosting item that works for anyone. And explain that enemies can generally target who they want and prioritize their most vulnerable foes, so the party is best off spreading AC around instead of concentrating it all on a few characters. And then, if they still decide to boost the full plate guy's AC, let the min/maxed character get killed; they asked for it.

Agency only applies to places where the character has choice, IMO.

Characters only have agency when they have choices, but players can have agency even when their characters don't, e.g. in determining backstory. We're generally more directly concerned with player agency.

To illustrate the difference: Suppose that a group of players decide that they want to play a sequel campaign, so the GM makes one, and the players are excited to take on the new villain now threatening the world. Their characters, on the other hand, might have opted not to defeat the previous villain if they knew that some extradimensional overdeity was going to counteract that accomplishment by replacing the old villain with a new one.

Sequels can be very unfair to characters in this way, reinstating the problems they worked so hard to solve. Sometimes this is even distinctly contrived, which feels a bit like adding insult to injury. (See Home Alone, Speed, Gremlins, etc.)

agency, to me, is deciding what your character does, not what happens to your character.

I'd say that agency is choices leading to desired outcomes, with the latter being the more important part if anything. Sartre observed that, even if fully physically restrained, one can still choose how to interpret one's situation. And that fair enough. But the sort of freedom that can't be taken away doesn't distinguish between different situations. Agency is the degree to which one can manifest one's will. Power, in short. The two terms are synonymous in their relevant senses.

[gbaji]

Agency only applies to places where the character has choice, IMO. The character *never* has a choice in what treasure appears (except in those instances where games/GMs are to ask their players for a treasure list to help populate loot based on the PCs needs). Just like the player never had a choice in the creatures that held the loot that contained the Quantum Wand. It is simply not in their purview. What they choose to do with the loot thereafter is...because agency, to me, is deciding what your character does, not what happens to your character. So, no player choice = no agency impact = no delta. The choice to seek out the Wand of Grease still exists.

Right. This is why I was cautioning about GMs trying to hard to customize loot (or other things in the game) to what they think the player wants for their charcter. That can reduce agency, despite the GM thinking they are leaning in to it.

And, as I was trying to get across with my example, it may actually increase it (to not customize things). Anything that increases the options available to PCs at any given time, has the potential to increase player agency. The player has more choices of what they may choose to do with their character. Thus, more agency. The blaster wizard can still choose to blast, but if he's got a wand of grease, and the situation makes that useful to use, now they have another choice they could make if they want.

The player thinking "I could use this wand of grease, but I really prefer blasting, so I'll just use one of my blasting spells" is using player agency in that moment to make that choice. Take away the wand of grease, and he has one fewer choice available to make (he's now just choosing from his set of blaster spells, which is the same next choice he makes in the first scenario). That's what I'm kinda getting at here. GMs should not be afraid to put things into the game that don't directly align with what the PC concepts are about. But, as with all things, it's a balance (see the counter: Putting in no undead for the anti-undead focused character to fight, or no magic sword for the swordsman, or no elveny boots for the stealth character, etc...).

You contrasted his methods to adjusting things "with an eye towards making the game more fun", implying that fun wasn't his goal, and characterized his behavior as competition with a player. I feel like it casts a GM in a negative light to suggest that he chooses to compete with players in a way that he doesn't expect them to like. "Vilify" may be a strong word for it, but hopefully you grasp my point. You impugned motives, not just methods.

I've then followed that up with multiple posts clarifying that in many cases, the GM may take an action believing that they are increasing fun, but the effect is the opposite. It's possible for the GM to fall into "GM vs players" competition without directly intending it. We had a GM for a while who really honestly believed that "wouldn't it be fun if every melee fight the PCs got into was an ambush scenario, at night, when 2/3rds of the party was asleep to really make things a challenge!", and "wouldn't it be fun to have every daytime combat involve the NPCs hiding up in the hills raining missile fire from hidden locations so the PCs can't attack back and have to take huge damage to get to the bad guys!", and "wouldn't it be fun if, after slogging through annoying combat after annoying combat like this, and finally getting to the main bad guy, he would always escape, so that he could be a fun re-occuring villian!".

Newsflash: It wasn't. Not even a little bit. But he honestly believed that by nullifying character abilities in combats (either removing armor/prep for folks sleeping, or making melee combat not an easy option), this would make things "more fun" (it certainly was more challenging, but in an annoying way). And yeah. Recurring villains is a thing that has to be handled carefully. He didnt.

And you are correct about the encounter balance issue (you mentioned this in one of your previous posts). It's a tricky thing. On the one hand, one of the jobs of the GM (in most games anyway) is to balance the encounters to be "challenging; but not impossible" for the PCs to overcome. If everything in the game is too easy, then it's also not fun for the players ("ho hum. Another set of wmipy opponents we waltzed though. We've saved the kingdom again. Yay us...."). But on the other hand, and as I've previously detailed, there are ways to up the challenge to encounters other than simply nullifying skill levels the PCs spent points for. Adding more opponents to handle by using your powerful skills/abilities/weapons/spells works well. Creating greater risk/reward for success failure can work as well. But actively crafting things so as to nullify things that the PCs can normally do is generally not a great approach IME. You can do that occasionally, but if it's all the time (like bumping the difficulty of ever trap in the game), that's not going to work well.

Because that makes the other PCs too hard to hit. And as a rule all player characters get involved in combat. Whereas traps may well be handled exclusively by the designated party scout, especially if that character is known to neutralize traps reliably.

(Thanks for anticipating and preemptively responding to the above reply, by the way. It makes this section of our conversation much more efficient!)

Yeah. Done the interwebs for a while, and it was not just an easy counter, but was literally the argument running through my own head while I wrote that.

I like to run through the mental progression and mention them, even the dumb ideas along the way. For no other reason than to ensure that I don't run into the "but you didn't consider <dumb idea>!" counter.

Gives the character an AC-boosting item that only works for him. Not too odd for a GM to throw a bone to a gimped PC like that.

But in this particular case, there is a middle path: Instead, give the party an AC-boosting item that works for anyone. And explain that enemies can generally target who they want and prioritize their most vulnerable foes, so the party is best off spreading AC around instead of concentrating it all on a few characters. And then, if they still decide to boost the full plate guy's AC, let the min/maxed character get killed; they asked for it.

Eh... Yeah. I get this approach. But I think it's a less than ideal one. What you are effectively doing is re-writing the characters abilities, but without discussing it with the player. So you allow the character to be introduced with a higher disarm skill than you want, and lower AC than you think is healthy. So you respond by increasing the DC of all the traps, effectively lowering the PCs skill to what you think it should have been, and then handing the PC (or party) some item to offset/raise their AC to make it what you think it should have been. The result is the more balanced character you think the player should have created rather than the unbalanced one they actually did create.

How is that different from just changing the values on the character sheet? If the GM really thinks that the player has built an unbalanced character to the point where they may consider doing something like this, that's when you have a session zero conversation and hash this out. Allowing the character and then "adjusting" it after the fact is not the right approach IMO. If the player absolutely insists on playing this unbalanced character, despite you warning them that "your character is going to die the moment you're exposed to combat", let them play. Let them have their godly ability to disarm traps. But also let them die when a combat situation comes up in which that is the natural (unmodified) result.

It's not the GM's job to protect the PC from poor choices which the GM has previously warned them about and told them exactly what the consequences will be. As a GM, you should not be punative about this, but you should also not pull punches either. Doing so allows the player to manipulate you into allowing them their unbalanced advantages while assuming you will prevent the negatives for them. And yes, there are players who will totally play this game if you let them. Play Champions for a while and you'll see this. Heck. Any game that allows players to buy some kind of character/build points by taking flaws/disadvantages can lead to this.

To illustrate the difference: Suppose that a group of players decide that they want to play a sequel campaign, so the GM makes one, and the players are excited to take on the new villain now threatening the world. Their characters, on the other hand, might have opted not to defeat the previous villain if they knew that some extradimensional overdeity was going to counteract that accomplishment by replacing the old villain with a new one.

Sequels can be very unfair to characters in this way, reinstating the problems they worked so hard to solve. Sometimes this is even distinctly contrived, which feels a bit like adding insult to injury. (See Home Alone, Speed, Gremlins, etc.)

I think this can be a problem if the new villian is more or less a retread of the original one (or, worse, part of the same organization, like say Umbrella Corp). But IME, players have no problem with new threats showing up in the same game world/setting, and that their existing characters (or new ones if they want) now can/have-to deal with. There is no universal "happily ever after", there's the point at which the current story ends. There's always new antagonists, and a new story. IMO, that's what breathes life into a campaign world.

My players are always excited to see a new adventure, and learn what new and (hopefully) interesting thing I've come up with. And they love both playing their previous characters in these new adventures and creating new ones to play (or some mix of the two). This has just never been a problem. I mean, I can see how it could be, depending on how it's presented, but... generally speaking this is kinda why the players made adventurer/investigator characters and are playing the game in the first place. I think most players would be far more upset if I said "Ok. You defeated the big bad, and that begins a several century long peace. Your charcters never have anything else significant to do in their lives and all die peacefully of old age. Now roll up new ones for the new scenario, taking place in the future, when a new big bad comes along".

Nope. They'd much rather I continue to present new problems for their characters to deal with. At least that has been my experience.

[Mordar]

Right. This is why I was cautioning about GMs trying to hard to customize loot (or other things in the game) to what they think the player wants for their charcter. That can reduce agency, despite the GM thinking they are leaning in to it.

And, as I was trying to get across with my example, it may actually increase it (to not customize things). Anything that increases the options available to PCs at any given time, has the potential to increase player agency. The player has more choices of what they may choose to do with their character. Thus, more agency. The blaster wizard can still choose to blast, but if he's got a wand of grease, and the situation makes that useful to use, now they have another choice they could make if they want.

The player thinking "I could use this wand of grease, but I really prefer blasting, so I'll just use one of my blasting spells" is using player agency in that moment to make that choice. Take away the wand of grease, and he has one fewer choice available to make (he's now just choosing from his set of blaster spells, which is the same next choice he makes in the first scenario). That's what I'm kinda getting at here. GMs should not be afraid to put things into the game that don't directly align with what the PC concepts are about. But, as with all things, it's a balance (see the counter: Putting in no undead for the anti-undead focused character to fight, or no magic sword for the swordsman, or no elveny boots for the stealth character, etc...).

I was referring only to the Player providing the GM a list of what treasures they might like to see...I still hold that the GM selecting a particular item, for whatever reason other than such a list, does not alter the Player/Character agency because they never had any choice to make in this regard. If we're going to discuss GM domain decisions altering Player/Character agency I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency...like the lack of a Magic Mart that doesn't have every item in every book at base list price available, or limiting spells to those appearing in first-party published books, or any of a host of other campaign structure decisions.

I absolutely agree that characters not getting things that exactly align with their stated concept can encourage innovation, I don't agree that swapping the Wand of Grease for a Wand of Magic Missiles changes the options available at all - it might alter one specific option (from Grease via Wand to MM via Wand), but firing MM from Wand is different than firing MM from a spell slot, and actually speaks back to the resource management component that was once so important in (A)D&D.

- M

- M

[gbaji]

I was referring only to the Player providing the GM a list of what treasures they might like to see...I still hold that the GM selecting a particular item, for whatever reason other than such a list, does not alter the Player/Character agency because they never had any choice to make in this regard.

We are in complete agreement on that. IMO, player agency exists in the realm of choices made by the player, with regard to character choices/actions, but within the "world" that the GM creates. And that world includes "what is there". Which in turn includes "what's in the loot pile".

That's not to say (as I've mentioned) that the GM can't lean in to presumed PC preferences/needs when considering loot, but the GM is absolutely under no obligation to specifically tailor loot to the wants/desires of the players. If a player comes up to me saying "I'd like there to be a <specific magic item> in the dragons horde", that's going to get a very funny look back from me. That's well beyond player agency IMO.

I have the same opinion on story arcs and adventure plots as well. Players may absolutely come up to me with ideas in terms of what their characters want to do. But I'm under zero obligation to make that happen for them. Most often my response will be "Ok. What is your character going to do to try to make that happen?".

I don't hand wishes to the players.

If we're going to discuss GM domain decisions altering Player/Character agency I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency...like the lack of a Magic Mart that doesn't have every item in every book at base list price available, or limiting spells to those appearing in first-party published books, or any of a host of other campaign structure decisions.

Yup. Same/similar logic as above. Some people will, however, insist that it is a violation of player agency though, so I guess everyone's mileage may vary here.

I happen to believe that presenting PCs with a fair and balanced set of "this is what is there", which will never be "everything you want/desire", allows for much more interesting play. It also creates avenues for PC initiated quests for "things that aren't available in the local magic mart". IMO this enables player agency, since it gives them things they want/need, but can't just get handed to them, so they have to actually.... you know... play things out in the game to get/accomplish them.

Getting handed exactly what you want every time you want it is not actually an enhancement of agency. And IMO, most players will rapidly become bored with the result.


And yes. I'm fully aware that some of this can come off as a kind of arrogant "I know better what the players really want than they do" bit. But that's not actually it. What I do often know better is what will make for a game that is more engaging and enjoyable long term than most players do. Especially players who insist that "player agency" requires me to hand them whatever loot they ask for, and ensure that every adventure I write is scripted to result in their own magic happy rainbow ending complete with the exact pot of gold they asked for.

That's... not going to happen. I create a game setting with people, places, and things in it. You want something? Figure out how to get it. Player agency comes in that whatever decisions and actions you make will be honestly accessed within the context of the game setting, and the results will be fair and reasonable. And yeah, I'll even work with the players quite a bit to facilitate their plans and objectives (at the very least giving hints in terms of what might work, might not, definitely wont, etc).


Heck. This happened, just last night, in a game sesson. One of the players at the table brought up another old character of his, that had been kinda stuck/cursed some time ago (not in the current adventure) and was kinda updating me on what this character was doing off in the background, and was lamenting the problems his character was likely experiencing as a result of his cursed condition (there is actually a really long history of this character, how he got into his condition, who did it, the pretty darn significant and nasty retribution he enacted in response which lead to an entire empire being in turmoil and civil war for a few decades, and he'd basically really leaned in to the whole situation in the past). I honestly hadn't thought about the character in some time, and it had never come up directly (was a different GM that created the issue in the first place, and we play in a semi-open world). But we were in a scenario where the topic came up as to what was going on with this character (and the whole civil war kinda finally dying down and him deciding to bug out before things got really bad for him). But yeah. I put on my thinking cap and suggested a few different places/people he could go to which would likeliy result in removal (or at least mitigation) of the curse. He was very happy, and left the topic saying he'd think about what he'd have that character do in response.

Done. Easy. Point being that when his character was initially aflicted (it was an attempt to kill him by folks involved in an evil plot, who had used him for a part of it and wanted to silence him), he responded by embracing his curse, and then launching into his revenge. Now that's that's over, his priorities and objectives have changed a bit, so he want's to go in a different direction. Informing him of the potential cure back then was not done for two reasons: 1. I wasn't the one running things at the time, and 2. he seemed to really be enjoying this whole "revenge against those who harmed me, and their little dogs too!", so it seemed inappropriate to get in the way of that (actual player agency at work there). But once he decided he was done, and was looking for solutions, now I'm going to step in and provide options for that path.

Note. I didn't create a solution out of thin air. That solution was always available within the rules (but a player might not have thought of it). I just provided that information to him now that his character is spending time and effort looking for a solution. His character can research and discover the solution, now that the player has decided to have his character actually do that. IMO, that's how player agency should manifest.

[NichG]

The blame angle isn't so useful here I think. What you do might piss a player off, or not, depending on so many different things. So stuff like 'is choosing not to have a magic mart curtailing player agency?' I think is not a very useful way to frame things.

The better framing is to say, as a GM you want to design a campaign that the players can find meaningful. This delta theory suggests that if you want to do that, you need to ensure there are a good number of ways for the choices of the players to change the direction of events (my addition: in ways that they can reasonably anticipate those changes when deciding what to do, and in ways they can look back and say 'my choice made this happen').

That doesn't mean that the best thing to do is to make every single choice with an eye to maximizing the total possible delta, always. But it means that if you find that your campaign seems to not feel meaningful, a place to look to diagnose that is 'do my players have opportunities to make choices that change the direction of things, and can they understand the consequence of those choices before they make them, and are the consequences of their past choices legible in how things currently are going?'. And then adjust the number or style of agentic decisions correspondingly, until 'my players don't find the campaign meaningful' isn't your biggest issue. Or, while designing the campaign in the first place (or any homebrew stuff, or the system, or in choosing what things to focus on), look for places where it would be easy for you to draw the gameplay towards potential choices that could be meaningful, and just use the existing stuff more efficiently. Or more broadly, adopt ways of looking at the campaign structure as a whole that make it easier to have those sorts of meaningful choices happen - in the sense of elements you can reliably pull in that are rich in these sorts of choices.

But like, 'according to this idea, my GM sucks because they didn't let me go shopping, and that would have been an agentic choice' isn't really a sensible criticism. Were there lots of other agentic choices you had other than this one? Then there's still plenty of opportunity for meaning, just maybe not in this particular thing in this particular way.

[KorvinStarmast]

The blame angle isn't so useful here I think. What you do might piss a player off, or not, depending on so many different things. So stuff like 'is choosing not to have a magic mart curtailing player agency?' I think is not a very useful way to frame things.

+1

...you need to ensure there are a good number of ways for the choices of the players to change the direction of events (my addition: in ways that they can reasonably anticipate those changes when deciding what to do, and in ways they can look back and say 'my choice made this happen').

I like a mix of both. Sometimes, since the world also acts independently of the characters beyond their zone of influence, they can do things that have a ripple effect elsewhere and then discover "wait, what? When we did this that happened?" Mostly apply the other version (linkage to "in zone of influence" stuff) but I usually provide a lot of "what's going on in the world" news tidbits such that the ripple effect stuff fits into the lore for that campaign.

... look for places where it would be easy for you to draw the gameplay towards potential choices that could be meaningful, and just use the existing stuff more efficiently.

And the chance of failure, or making a poor choice, needs to be available. It is possible to have choices and still make poor ones, or ones that have a chance to fail, that have consequences.

Spoiler: Troublemakers in Salt Marsh please avoid

Show

My Salt Marsh group did that, made a choice, and in making that choice the clock kept ticking and the foe was better prepared when they got around to dealing with him ... and it really wasn't their fault. They chose to delay a day so that the druid could cast scrying. Had the saving throw failed, it would have provided some very useful/key information. But since the save was made (highly improbably, but the score was a 20) that info wasn't available when they began to execute their plan. But they are pretty good at adapting so I doubt they will not eventually uncover the larger problem that they are currently unaware of.

...my GM sucks because they didn't let me go shopping, and that would have been an agentic choice' isn't really a sensible criticism.

Concur.

[NichG]

+1

I like a mix of both. Sometimes, since the world also acts independently of the characters beyond their zone of influence, they can do things that have a ripple effect elsewhere and then discover "wait, what? When we did this that happened?" Mostly apply the other version (linkage to "in zone of influence" stuff) but I usually provide a lot of "what's going on in the world" news tidbits such that the ripple effect stuff fits into the lore for that campaign.

Well again, in the theme of the previous post, its not that 'all things must be this', its that 'you should have some of this'.

You can have choices whose outcomes are surprising or unpredictable. Those are in a sense less agentic choices for the players, but they serve a different purpose of making it seem that the world also has agency. You can want your campaign to pull off both having meaningful choices for the players and feeling alive and inhabited, that's not incoherent. So some of the stuff you add will serve the one purpose, some will serve the other, some will serve both simultaneously, etc.

[Mordar]

The blame angle isn't so useful here I think. What you do might piss a player off, or not, depending on so many different things. So stuff like 'is choosing not to have a magic mart curtailing player agency?' I think is not a very useful way to frame things.

*looks around for blaming* Did I miss it? Is this like that "shaming" thing?

The better framing is to say, as a GM you want to design a campaign that the players can find meaningful. This delta theory suggests that if you want to do that, you need to ensure there are a good number of ways for the choices of the players to change the direction of events (my addition: in ways that they can reasonably anticipate those changes when deciding what to do, and in ways they can look back and say 'my choice made this happen').

That doesn't mean that the best thing to do is to make every single choice with an eye to maximizing the total possible delta, always. But it means that if you find that your campaign seems to not feel meaningful, a place to look to diagnose that is 'do my players have opportunities to make choices that change the direction of things, and can they understand the consequence of those choices before they make them, and are the consequences of their past choices legible in how things currently are going?'. And then adjust the number or style of agentic decisions correspondingly, until 'my players don't find the campaign meaningful' isn't your biggest issue. Or, while designing the campaign in the first place (or any homebrew stuff, or the system, or in choosing what things to focus on), look for places where it would be easy for you to draw the gameplay towards potential choices that could be meaningful, and just use the existing stuff more efficiently. Or more broadly, adopt ways of looking at the campaign structure as a whole that make it easier to have those sorts of meaningful choices happen - in the sense of elements you can reliably pull in that are rich in these sorts of choices.

But like, 'according to this idea, my GM sucks because they didn't let me go shopping, and that would have been an agentic choice' isn't really a sensible criticism. Were there lots of other agentic choices you had other than this one? Then there's still plenty of opportunity for meaning, just maybe not in this particular thing in this particular way.

Please explain "...understand the consequence of those choices before they make them...". My immediate reaction was "doesn't this require accurate prediction of the outcome of the choice?"

I am approaching this discussion from the standpoint of "If your group wants this style of campaign" in all elements, and I think certain games might lend themselves better to this sort of campaign than others (from the Duh! file). The biggest sticking point I seem to have is the idea of agency in outcomes (or "destiny") or the idea of "I didn't choose that outcome, so I didn't have agency".

- M

[KorvinStarmast]

Well again, in the theme of the previous post, its not that 'all things must be this', its that 'you should have some of this'.

I agree.

You can have choices whose outcomes are surprising or unpredictable. Those are in a sense less agentic choices for the players, but they serve a different purpose of making it seem that the world also has agency. You can want your campaign to pull off both having meaningful choices for the players and feeling alive and inhabited, that's not incoherent. So some of the stuff you add will serve the one purpose, some will serve the other, some will serve both simultaneously, etc.

Yes. It all contributes to the 'feel' of a game and of a campaign.

As an aside, or as an example: one of the things that the GM can do, for Blades in the Dark, is consult the tables for "so what were the other factions doing while the Crew did this?" We found this very helpful in making the city of Doskvol "come alive" since the position of various factions wasn't static.
In our case, the Grey Cloaks make a successful move to take over a territory that was too close to our lair, and where we had done a few scores, so we moved our lair. We had lost some rep with them and didn't need additional complications from that quarter, plus we had just gotten a little more territory elsewhere.

Another thing we found out was that if we switched one of the players to GM from Player, we kept the Crew together and the new GM more or less picked up where the old one left off. He had the tools to both carry on our old arcs and open up new ones. (Our current problem is the infamous "Scheduling!" bogey.

[NichG]

*looks around for blaming* Did I miss it? Is this like that "shaming" thing?

Talking about players blaming the GM for curtailing/failing to provide specific avenues of agency like magic marts. E.g. when you said "I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency..." that shifts things a bit towards talking about what players will criticize (branding as) rather than about the GM trying to make their campaign have good stuff in general. And since gbaji also responded in that direction with multiple paragraphs about players feeling agency being curtained vs getting exactly what they wanted vs knowing what they want or not, well, it felt reasonable to point out that this doesn't have to be about what people will criticize for at all.

Please explain "...understand the consequence of those choices before they make them...". My immediate reaction was "doesn't this require accurate prediction of the outcome of the choice?"

I am approaching this discussion from the standpoint of "If your group wants this style of campaign" in all elements, and I think certain games might lend themselves better to this sort of campaign than others (from the Duh! file). The biggest sticking point I seem to have is the idea of agency in outcomes (or "destiny") or the idea of "I didn't choose that outcome, so I didn't have agency".

- M

Yes, if you can accurately predict the outcome of the choice, that (for me) will feel much more agentic. It completes a loop - 'I wanted to drive the car to the left, so I turned the steering wheel, and indeed the car went to the left!'. If I want to drive the car to the left, turn the steering wheel, and it goes to the right instead then I might feel like my actions are having an impact, but not that I have agency over the motion of the car.

That doesn't mean that all things in the campaign always have to be like that. It means that the campaign should contain some things like that. It is also allowed to contain things that are not like that too! It's somewhat additive - the presence of the latter doesn't diminish the value of the former (unless its so much so that it drowns it out, or goes strongly against players' expectations of where they should have agency - like the GM talking for their characters or things like that - so that the absence is attention-grabbing)

[KorvinStarmast]

That doesn't mean that all things in the campaign always have to be like that.

If they all are, the campaign can easily become "push button, get banana" and lose some of the depth and creativity that surprises and unexpected outcomes offer.

I wonder if we are discussing agency or control?

[NichG]

If they all are, the campaign can easily become "push button, get banana" and lose some of the depth and creativity that surprises and unexpected outcomes offer.

I wonder if we are discussing agency or control?

As far as formal mathematical definitions of these things go, they're tightly interconnected.

[Quertus]

If one GM gives you the option between [Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue], while a second lets you choose between [Commoner, Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue], you have more options under the second, but is that really significantly more usable agency for the average Playgrounder? And what about a third GM who offers [Commoner, Expert, Adept, Warrior, Noble, Druid] - that’s even more options than the first two, right? Or consider a 4th GM who gave you homebrew choices of [Monk of the North, Monk of the South, Monk of the East, Monk of the West, Monk of the Sea, Monk of the Sky, Traveling Monk]? Or a 5th who let you choose between eight options: [Transmuter, Necromancer, Abjurer,… you get the idea.

What if you really love your parents, and want to run a character with that same mindset, but your options are to run a Commoner, or a Barbarian who slew their parents in a fit of rage, or a Cleric who slew their parents as heretics, or a… you get the idea. Even if they *technically* let you choose any class, they’ve set things up such that the choices you’ll use are quite limited.

And this is not unlike adding limits to stores. If a store sells apples, bananas, and carrots, you have the option to buy ABC, and/or to grow ABC (and/or to steal, travel elsewhere, etc etc). But if the store only sells Apples, you have reduced the players options to buying A, and/or growing ABC (and etc). Reducing options reduces options, plain and simple. It’s egregious doublespeak to try to claim that reducing options somehow increases options.

Note that juxtaposition of ideas. Yes, I recognize full well that there’s a difference between options players might reasonably take, and “fake” choices. Yet, even so, “buy vs craft your own” is a real choice, such that different players, different characters, and different campaigns will produce different results.

There is a different feel between “craft your own because you choose to” and “craft your own because you have to”. Sure. But realize that, to railroad that feel, you’ve reduced options, lowered agency, and spent effort. If a GM’s going to spend effort, as a rule I’d prefer they spend it on increasing player agency over decreasing it, y’know? And I certainly don’t want the GM spending effort on doublespeak trying to claim that reducing agency somehow increases it, or worse, on convincing themselves that that lie is true.

Now, is “maximum agency, all the time” optimal? No, even I’ve pointed out ways it’s not, and NichG has already made smarter, saner comments than you’ll get out of me on this specific subtopic, so I’ll not “reiterate it, but worse”.

Instead, I’ll simply point out that limiting agency is limiting agency; the GM should be aware of this, and should use the utmost care when their actions serve to limit agency. IME, most GMs I’ve observed limiting agency (“this town doesn’t sell X”, “core only, for balance”, whatever) would have run a better and more coherent game had they instead just allowed everything. IME, most GM’s world building really is just that bad. Because once you introduce such limits, it introduces the opportunity to ask, “why?”, and, odds are, the GM isn’t going to have produced a good enough answer to hold up to scrutiny, especially if they’re not the foremost expert at the table in every field involved in producing that answer.

So “delta agency” isn’t just a good tool to use to ask, “have I really given my players the opportunity to make meaningful choices”, it also serves as a test for places to ask, “am I sure this will have the effect I intend? Will core only really produce balance? Will making all these encounters ambushes really make things more fun? Does a town that doesn’t sell food really make sense?”. Done right, limits can create themes and increase fun, even while reducing agency. Just… they’re rarely done right, IME. So handle them with appropriate care, and admit they reduce agency. If a GM can’t even see that, it’s doubtful they can see enough to otherwise understand and predict their impact. Which is part of why I’ll poke at even such early game (pre-game) abridgments of agency, to see if the GM has the mindset and the skill to handle them appropriately.

[kyoryu]

Please explain "...understand the consequence of those choices before they make them...". My immediate reaction was "doesn't this require accurate prediction of the outcome of the choice?"

I am approaching this discussion from the standpoint of "If your group wants this style of campaign" in all elements, and I think certain games might lend themselves better to this sort of campaign than others (from the Duh! file). The biggest sticking point I seem to have is the idea of agency in outcomes (or "destiny") or the idea of "I didn't choose that outcome, so I didn't have agency".

You do not need to be able to predict with 100% accuracy the outcome of every choice, no.

If you choose to back the Brotherhood of the Blade over the Sisters of the Staff, you should be able to predict:

1. You'll go on missions to help the Brotherhood out.
2. If you are successful, there's a better chance the Brotherhood will succeed in whatever struggle is happening
3. If the Brotherhood wins, they'll exert influence in a manner consistent with the known character of the Brotherhood, unless another another event happens (internal conflict, etc.). If the Brotherhood doesn't like magic, for instance, they might enact policies to suppress magic. We might not know what those policies are - they could be anything from "nothing" to potentially "kill all mages" - but we should have an idea of how extreme they are likely to be, and we wouldn't expect to see mages raised to being the rulers of everything by the Brotherhood.

It's fairly important in this type of game to not overly-negate the choices of players with "behind the scenes" stuff. If the players decide to depose the Duke of Badness because he's going to start a war, his successor probably shouldn't start that war. The successor might do other bad stuff, but having them just go ahead and do the thing the players didn't want to happen feels like you're negating their choices and impact.

Players have some input into how things develop - so do you, as the GM, via your NPCs. The "scale" of the PCs should also impact how much impact they have on any given thing - street rat PCs probably aren't going to have much impact on who the King is. But a bunch of noble knights should be able to severely impact the future of a small town's politics if they decide to get involved. The best games of this type are ones where the adversaries are at roughly equal level, probably slightly tougher, so that it's an uphill battle but the PCs can have a notable impact.

[KorvinStarmast]

It's fairly important in this type of game to not overly-negate the choices of players with "behind the scenes" stuff. If the players decide to depose the Duke of Badness because he's going to start a war, his successor probably shouldn't start that war.

Or the successor could start a war with someone else/different, for different reasons (and possiblhy reasons that the PCs are on board with).

The best games of this type are ones where the adversaries are at roughly equal level, probably slightly tougher, so that it's an uphill battle but the PCs can have a notable impact.

Agree. I am running into the problem of the Tier 3 PCs dealing with an issue that involves some serious friction between two kingdoms, but they are approaching the point where we either end the campaign or we have to begin 'dealing with beings from other planes' things.

[Mordar]

Talking about players blaming the GM for curtailing/failing to provide specific avenues of agency like magic marts. E.g. when you said "I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency..." that shifts things a bit towards talking about what players will criticize (branding as) rather than about the GM trying to make their campaign have good stuff in general. And since gbaji also responded in that direction with multiple paragraphs about players feeling agency being curtained vs getting exactly what they wanted vs knowing what they want or not, well, it felt reasonable to point out that this doesn't have to be about what people will criticize for at all.

Ah. This was about expectations, I think, and what makes "agency" and what makes "good stuff" and what, if any, is the overlap. For what it is worth, meaningful choices to me are going to be of the "do we kill the Baron or trust to the courts?", "Do we help the farmers or help the elves?", "Do we join that strange Thieves' Guild or do we keep working for this Du Lac guy?". Loot division, shopping, things like that, are seldom meaningful in the long run, and that's probably informed my snipe.

Yes, if you can accurately predict the outcome of the choice, that (for me) will feel much more agentic. It completes a loop - 'I wanted to drive the car to the left, so I turned the steering wheel, and indeed the car went to the left!'. If I want to drive the car to the left, turn the steering wheel, and it goes to the right instead then I might feel like my actions are having an impact, but not that I have agency over the motion of the car.

That doesn't mean that all things in the campaign always have to be like that. It means that the campaign should contain some things like that. It is also allowed to contain things that are not like that too! It's somewhat additive - the presence of the latter doesn't diminish the value of the former (unless its so much so that it drowns it out, or goes strongly against players' expectations of where they should have agency - like the GM talking for their characters or things like that - so that the absence is attention-grabbing)

The ability to accurately predict the outcome does not, to me, relate to agency. You and I don't get to control outcomes in our lives outside very narrow bands. Your car explanation tracks within those narrow bands, but pulling back focus to a broader outcome - say, "I want to make our dinner reservation on time, so I am going to turn left down 6th because it will be faster than going down Broadway" and then running in to an accident delay that pushes us back 15 minutes. I did not achieve the desired and reasonable outcome, and yet in no instance was my agency curtailed.

Now, I suppose in a game where our party wanted to rush to a destination to intercept the bad guys and the Bad GM intentionally tossed up obstacles on any path we tried to take other than the one that ran through the ambush we might have a legitimate beef - one accident delay is luck, but an accident delay plus a sudden street fair plus a house on fire plus a little old lady walking 30 ducks across the road is something else.

So yes, things should work out the way we plan sometimes, and not other times. But it would be nice if people (self included) also recognized that failure is agentic when you make decisions...

- M

[gbaji]

Talking about players blaming the GM for curtailing/failing to provide specific avenues of agency like magic marts. E.g. when you said "I think there are a lot of choices that are absolutely reasonable that will be branded as curtailing agency..." that shifts things a bit towards talking about what players will criticize (branding as) rather than about the GM trying to make their campaign have good stuff in general. And since gbaji also responded in that direction with multiple paragraphs about players feeling agency being curtained vs getting exactly what they wanted vs knowing what they want or not, well, it felt reasonable to point out that this doesn't have to be about what people will criticize for at all.

Yeah. It's not just about what people may criticize for. I think that's definitely something to try to avoid (when the criticisms are realistic and reasonable, of course). I think the better approach is to just normally always respond to any player request/idea/suggestion by asking "Is this something that can exist/happen in the game setting?". If the answer is "yes", then ask "Ok. How could this thing exist/happen in the game setting?". And then move towards making that happen.

But my approach is that these steps are informational. Actions require... well... action. Someone has to do something to make that thing happen/exist in the game setting (again, assuming this isn't something that's already there by default). And that's where a bit of almost negotiation should happen between the GM and the player. "So you want to play a Troll in Human Town. Ok. Well, there aren't Trolls normally living in Human Town, but Trolls do exist in the setting. The nearest Troll Town is 500 miles away. Let's work out some backstory for your character that would explain why this Troll is hanging out in Human Town and has decided to work with the <mostly human> other members of the party".

I've actually found that almost without fail, by going through this kind of process, the player actually comes up with a really great backstory for the character, the game world gets expanded on a bit, interesting details and motivations show up, additional ideas for adventures pop into my head, etc. Things that might not have happened if I'd just accepted the troll character and said "Ok. You're hanging out with everyone else at the local bar, when...."

Similar deal with item requests. It's quite rare in my game (we tend to do a decent job at handing out relevant and useful loot, and RQ is a much more flexible game in many ways for this sort of thing), but on the occassion a player comes to me and says "Gonthor the mighty is quite skilled, and reasonably mighty. But his armor kinda sucks. I'd like to see if there's anything I can do about this". Now, in response, I might look at the stock solutions. What resources does Gonthor have? What groups/guilds in the area may be able to fashion magic/enchanted armor for him (and can he pay in some way?). Gonthor's been adventuring a while now, and has a number of reasonably powerful friends and allies. He may have started as a barbarian from the wastelands, but he's a barbarian with serious worldwide contacts now, so there's possibilities here. So that's one avenue. Or... if that's not sufficient or feasible (maybe Gonthor spent all his money on other things), perhaps he speaks to the local high priest of his deity and is pointed in the direction of some old rumors and legends of a hero long ago who possessed mighty armor that no man could cleave (probably an exaggeration, but we all know how ancient folks just loved to do that). Now, we've got a quest thingie going on. I can totally work with that and in fact love to work with that because now the player has provided me with an adventure hook to use. I don't have to come up with some random bad guy of the season to be a problem, and I have a great excuse to run Gonthor and his adventuring buddies all over the place, tracking down ancient clues and whatnot, so he can get some decent armor and not constanty faceplant everytime he decides to go berserker warrior or something.

Again. If I'd just looked up some WBL chart and said "well here's your +3 armor, cause that's what you should have now", it would be... well... boring. Same deal with magic marts. Gonthor will just cash in the dozen or so items he has that are interesting and occassionaly useful, for the armor he wants, and he's done. Again. Boooooring. This way, we get a whole adventure out of this (and there'll probably be other treasures as well), Gonthor gets some niftey new duds, and he's still got those other items that maybe aren't armor, or a weapon, but provide some other odds and ends that actually flesh out his character as well.

Yeah. I'm just not a fan of magic marts for a number of reasons. The above is one. But a side effect is that it even more narrow focuses characters than many games already do. I like the fact that, over time, my characters will pick up a number of random magic items that have nothing at all to do with my "character concept". Those don't detract from anything, they add to it. But if you introduce a magic mart, then the expectation is that these items are just cash to be traded in for things that are directly in line with said character concept (and in some games, you're basically holding yourself back if you *don't* do this). Yeah... not a fan. I think those odds and ends items are what add extra flair to characters. It's what distinguishes this level 12 fighter form every other level 12 fighter. Otherwise, we're left with generic stat/item blocks and not actual unique characters.

Yes, if you can accurately predict the outcome of the choice, that (for me) will feel much more agentic. It completes a loop - 'I wanted to drive the car to the left, so I turned the steering wheel, and indeed the car went to the left!'. If I want to drive the car to the left, turn the steering wheel, and it goes to the right instead then I might feel like my actions are having an impact, but not that I have agency over the motion of the car.

That doesn't mean that all things in the campaign always have to be like that. It means that the campaign should contain some things like that. It is also allowed to contain things that are not like that too! It's somewhat additive - the presence of the latter doesn't diminish the value of the former (unless its so much so that it drowns it out, or goes strongly against players' expectations of where they should have agency - like the GM talking for their characters or things like that - so that the absence is attention-grabbing)

Yeah. As with all things, it's a balance of factors. To me, agency is 100% about what the PCs choose and the actions they take. That agency diminishes gradually as we move from "direct results" to "less direct results" to "indirect results" and so on. Obviously, if you turn the car left and it doesn't go left, that's a violation of agnecy. Also, if you turn the car left, and it goes left, but turning left doesn't get you to the freeway onramp you were trying to get on, that's also a violation of agency (slightly less, but still a major problem). To follow the analogy, you should have full control of the car, and be able to navigate where you want to go on the roads with that car. Now, whether you get to your destination before someone eles does is more of a question. Whether there are other drivers/traffic which might get in your way is also an issue.

The flip side though, is that if every time you try to drive somewhere you get a flat tire (yeah, still using the analogy), you're going to start to get (quite reasonably) annoyed. If every time you drive to the store, it's closed, same deal. At a GM, you can (and should) have obstacles that need to be overcome to achieve desired outcomes (that's what makes the game actually fun/interesting to play). But those obstacles must be reasonable and "fit" the setting being played in. If the player starts to feel like you're just forcing them to wade through sand to get anywhere, they're going to not appreciate that at all.


But yeah. Gimme gaming isn't fun either. So finding something in between that works for the players is the key.

[icefractal]

Re: Magic Shops (and support services from NPCs in general, such as casting for hire) -

They increase player options while present, but if you want to have the PCs become major players in the setting on a personal level (as opposed to a political level), then they're going to hit a point where they outstrip the available shops / services and have to mostly rely on themselves or on arrangements with specific allies.

For example, say you set up the level curve like:
Common (1-4), Uncommon (5-8), Rare (9-12), Legendary (13-16), Mythic (17-20)

That's already a taller (as in, higher level NPCs) curve than many people say they follow ("most NPCs are 0-level"), although in practice I find that claim is usually false for NPCs where their level actually matters. If the 15th level PCs piss off a rich noble and he sends 12th level "hired thugs" after them, then it doesn't matter how theoretically low-level are some background NPCs, this is a world where 12th level is still "hired thug" territory. So when I say "9th+ level is rare", I mean it - nobody can have an "army" of 10th level soldiers, because there simply aren't the people to fill it.

So this has upsides for the PCs - getting to high levels substantially changes their relationship with the rest of the world, and people can't just be "prepared" for the kind of abilities they have, because both those abilities and their counter-measures are extremely rare.

But it does also have downsides - since Mythic is "so rare that even most sages doubt they exist" then True Resurrection is not something that's going to be available for purchase. Because as far as almost anyone knows, it's not even a spell that exists! Raising the dead perfectly without a trace of the body? That's not mortal magic, that was either divine intervention or faked. (And yes, being able to do it yourself would be enough to convince most people you're a divine avatar). Even finding someone who can Raise Dead is a non-trivial task and you're probably facing a fair amount of competition for their services.

So this impacts magic items as well, obviously. For items that need a high-level crafter, there's very few being made, and the people making them probably have all the gold they want anyway. Sure, occasionally they're lost in battle and then found, and could be sold, but the supply will be very scarce, and most buyers won't put them back in circulation.

To me (as a player) that's worth it - I'd rather have the potential to become a world-shaker (by my own abilities, not by fate) and have to make my own items or do without, than to be a well-supplied Shadowrunner - powerful on a personal level, but ultimately an ant to the Powers That Be.

But I'd agree that if the premise is "You're ants to the Powers That Be and always will be, and magic items aren't for sale," then that's the worst of both worlds.

[NichG]

Ah. This was about expectations, I think, and what makes "agency" and what makes "good stuff" and what, if any, is the overlap. For what it is worth, meaningful choices to me are going to be of the "do we kill the Baron or trust to the courts?", "Do we help the farmers or help the elves?", "Do we join that strange Thieves' Guild or do we keep working for this Du Lac guy?". Loot division, shopping, things like that, are seldom meaningful in the long run, and that's probably informed my snipe.

The ability to accurately predict the outcome does not, to me, relate to agency. You and I don't get to control outcomes in our lives outside very narrow bands. Your car explanation tracks within those narrow bands, but pulling back focus to a broader outcome - say, "I want to make our dinner reservation on time, so I am going to turn left down 6th because it will be faster than going down Broadway" and then running in to an accident delay that pushes us back 15 minutes. I did not achieve the desired and reasonable outcome, and yet in no instance was my agency curtailed.

I would strongly disagree with this. The cases we fail to control things in our lives are extremely salient and shocking, so you might overemphasize them in your memory, but 99% of the time we're controlling things in our lives extremely well and it just passes without notice. I want to eat pasta tonight, all sorts of stuff happens during the day, but I still end up eating pasta tonight. I want to be in London next week - a ridiculously complex chain of collaboration has to happen between people, involving things like my bank agreeing to transfer currency to the airline, the airline getting the information that 'this person has bought a ticket' to the places it needs to be so that I'm allowed on the plane, the mechanics fixing up the plane, the pilot flying it competently, me making it to the airport on time, etc, etc.

Despite the incredibly complexity of that chain of events, it only actually results in 'I'm not in London the week I planned to be' like 5% of the time at most. I might get there an hour late, I might be missing my luggage, I might have financial troubles down the road because I bought an overly expensive airline ticket, but 'going to London' is something that people with a few thousand dollars and some mode of transportation to the nearest airport can *just do*, and generally speaking it just happens.

If I went and made a plane reservation to London, but then my car was crushed under a tree and I couldn't go, yeah I would feel that my agency has been curtailed. Not by any sort of person, just, here's a decision about an outcome that I *expected* to be able to make, and now I cannot. The contrast between expectation and reality is what makes this a case where my agency is *curtailed*, versus simply not existing in the first place.

So it doesn't mean I can control the majority of things I see in front of me. And it doesn't mean that if lots of stuff happens in the world that I can't control, my agency has been curtailed. But this is also why I was saying to move the focus away from things being *curtailed*, and more onto providing agentic decisions. Fixating on stuff being curtailed caps the experience of the game to the existing expectations of the players, it doesn't let you actually go above and beyond that and make a game in which players get to have the experience of expecting *not* to have agency over something and then discovering that they do in fact have it.

And again, I feel like I have to repeat this, its not about one 'virtue' applied to all things in a game. It is not our job as GMs to avoid the sin of curtailing a player's agency. It is our job as GMs to provide interesting, evocative, and meaningful gameplay. *Giving* agency is a tool to achieve that end. It is not the only tool. But we don't need to call all good things player agency and all bad things railroading, and insist all things be optimized on that one spectrum.

But I would say that if you gave me a game constructed to make sense under the philosophy of 'you don't control most of your life' - not just using it as an offhand explanation about one thing or another not being controllable, but as an overarching pattern, then yeah I would likely not find participation in that game meaningful even if you give me thousands of choices. That's what I'm saying about the choices needing to be informed, and that informed nature necessarily meaning that the choices grant some ability of control - a thousand choices that don't do anything, or a thousand choices all of which have unpredictable outcomes, is - to me - no choice at all.

If one GM gives you the option between [Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue], while a second lets you choose between [Commoner, Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue], you have more options under the second, but is that really significantly more usable agency for the average Playgrounder? And what about a third GM who offers [Commoner, Expert, Adept, Warrior, Noble, Druid] - that’s even more options than the first two, right? Or consider a 4th GM who gave you homebrew choices of [Monk of the North, Monk of the South, Monk of the East, Monk of the West, Monk of the Sea, Monk of the Sky, Traveling Monk]? Or a 5th who let you choose between eight options: [Transmuter, Necromancer, Abjurer,… you get the idea.

What if you really love your parents, and want to run a character with that same mindset, but your options are to run a Commoner, or a Barbarian who slew their parents in a fit of rage, or a Cleric who slew their parents as heretics, or a… you get the idea. Even if they *technically* let you choose any class, they’ve set things up such that the choices you’ll use are quite limited.

The mathematical formalism I tend to use for agency (coming from information theory through empowerment stuff by Daniel Polani; stuff about semantic information from David Wolpert; and into a sort of recently solidifying view from Martin Biehl) sort of resolves these 'bunch of bad choices' situations. But I think it would be hard to actually talk about that precisely here unless everyone is comfortable with information theory.

Basically, in this framework, an 'agent' is part of a system that is more efficiently described and predicted by talking in terms of its goals, as opposed to talking in terms of its microscopic physics. So e.g. its easier to talk about a person who is thirsty doing things to get a drink than it is to talk about a neuron-level description of their brain and cell-level descriptions of their biology that end up implementing the 'you feel thirsty', 'you stop prioritizing what you're doing and go get a drink' sorts of behaviors.

So agency is a measure of how well something's actions can be predicted from their goals, conditioned on the information they can possibly possess about the environment. If they know nothing about the environment (e.g. none of their choices are informed), then the only actions that you can predict from their goals are the actions that basically 'always work' regardless of context - which is a much more limited set, and often empty, compared to the actions they can take if they have enough information to conclude that the actions will successfully advance their goals. This is the connection to control - the model we use to talk about things as agents is to assume that they take actions they believe will control the world to achieve their goals, and then we look back and say 'what actions would those be?' and to the extent that that actually works and is accurate, its *useful* to describe those things as agents as opposed to just dynamical physical systems or whatever.

Then, if we want to talk about agency independent of a specific agent, we have to introduce some sort of distribution over goals that someone could reasonably have. That is to say, we imagine 10000 players all being given that choice. If everyone would always make the same choice in that case, then the choice does not give us information about the specific player out of the distribution of all players - basically, observing that choice does not actually help us predict the player's other actions in the future, nor does knowing the particular player's goal make any difference in predictive power in this situation.

This generalization, that we want to talk about the agency of a scenario independent of the specific player playing it, is what creates these sort of corner case counter-examples. If we had a specific player in mind, we could look at agentic decisions as being those moments of the game where that player passing through those moments and making choices actually teaches us things about the player we did not already know. And that will depend on the alignment between the decisions and the player's particular goals (which also include OOC things like having fun, mind you). But, if we have some sense of the distribution of players and their goals, we can still talk about things which are likely to be agentic given that distribution (and may just hit or miss on given players).

[Mordar]

I would strongly disagree with this. The cases we fail to control things in our lives are extremely salient and shocking, so you might overemphasize them in your memory, but 99% of the time we're controlling things in our lives extremely well and it just passes without notice. I want to eat pasta tonight, all sorts of stuff happens during the day, but I still end up eating pasta tonight. I want to be in London next week - a ridiculously complex chain of collaboration has to happen between people, involving things like my bank agreeing to transfer currency to the airline, the airline getting the information that 'this person has bought a ticket' to the places it needs to be so that I'm allowed on the plane, the mechanics fixing up the plane, the pilot flying it competently, me making it to the airport on time, etc, etc.

Despite the incredibly complexity of that chain of events, it only actually results in 'I'm not in London the week I planned to be' like 5% of the time at most. I might get there an hour late, I might be missing my luggage, I might have financial troubles down the road because I bought an overly expensive airline ticket, but 'going to London' is something that people with a few thousand dollars and some mode of transportation to the nearest airport can *just do*, and generally speaking it just happens.

Rather than just disagree, I will reframe: The majority of things we can control in the world are trivial and self-facing. This isn't to say we are puppets/pawns/always subject to the whims of fate, rather it is to say we can control decisions we make, but we can control little of events outside of ourselves. In this era, eating pasta, going to London, getting plastic surgery, ordering a new video game...these are trivial and self-facing. Even so, I likely cannot control the quality of the pasta in a restaurant, the annoying person sitting next to me on the plane, the exact time and date the surgeon is available, or the quality of the game. Imagine the difficulty of most of those things 100+ years ago...control becomes much less likely.

Enter other bodies with agency into the picture and the controllability of outcomes decreases significantly, particularly if they have motivation to interact. I have the agency to pump fake, drive right and pull up for the 7' jump shot, with full intention of banking it off the glass and in. How many factors now come in to play about the outcome of that decision/action? How many more if instead of 1-on-1 we're playing 5-on-5? How much is that magnified by taking on the evil wizard and his band of demons from beyond to stop them from their plot to overthrow Good King Bron?

If I went and made a plane reservation to London, but then my car was crushed under a tree and I couldn't go, yeah I would feel that my agency has been curtailed. Not by any sort of person, just, here's a decision about an outcome that I *expected* to be able to make, and now I cannot. The contrast between expectation and reality is what makes this a case where my agency is *curtailed*, versus simply not existing in the first place.

So it doesn't mean I can control the majority of things I see in front of me. And it doesn't mean that if lots of stuff happens in the world that I can't control, my agency has been curtailed. But this is also why I was saying to move the focus away from things being *curtailed*, and more onto providing agentic decisions. Fixating on stuff being curtailed caps the experience of the game to the existing expectations of the players, it doesn't let you actually go above and beyond that and make a game in which players get to have the experience of expecting *not* to have agency over something and then discovering that they do in fact have it.

I was surprised by the array of definitions I just read discussing agency. Several do imply outcome, though most focus/limit to the capacity to act. I think we are on the adjacent ends of that array. I disagree that you agency was curtailed...other than there being conditions beyond your control (agency) to prevent, like the wind/beaver/momentum resulting in that tree meeting that car...just that your outcome did not meet (reasonable) expectations. As I suggested about the ambush scenario...if you had 4 back up plans and all 5 efforts met with uncanny failure, then there is something amiss.

And again, I feel like I have to repeat this, its not about one 'virtue' applied to all things in a game. It is not our job as GMs to avoid the sin of curtailing a player's agency. It is our job as GMs to provide interesting, evocative, and meaningful gameplay. *Giving* agency is a tool to achieve that end. It is not the only tool. But we don't need to call all good things player agency and all bad things railroading, and insist all things be optimized on that one spectrum.

But I would say that if you gave me a game constructed to make sense under the philosophy of 'you don't control most of your life' - not just using it as an offhand explanation about one thing or another not being controllable, but as an overarching pattern, then yeah I would likely not find participation in that game meaningful even if you give me thousands of choices. That's what I'm saying about the choices needing to be informed, and that informed nature necessarily meaning that the choices grant some ability of control - a thousand choices that don't do anything, or a thousand choices all of which have unpredictable outcomes, is - to me - no choice at all.

Strongly agree with the first. Philosophical framing on the second...I would never suggest that as a philosophical underpinning of a campaign. But if we're both playing a relatively unconstrained game (like an RPG) using a wide array of dice, involving other players, and actors within the game that have different motivations, and I reassure you that we'll follow almost all of the rules and conventions of the game, I think that would match both of our expectations.

Why? Because failure to hit the dragon, or climb the wall, or beat the bad guy to the McGuffin by evading his ambushers would be the result of your character's skill, luck, and your skill as a player to deploy options, tactics and strategies to mitigate that luck. And I wouldn't drop trees on your car to stop you from going to London (unless the Angry Awakened Beaver was your sworn enemy, of course).

- M

[NichG]

Rather than just disagree, I will reframe: The majority of things we can control in the world are trivial and self-facing. This isn't to say we are puppets/pawns/always subject to the whims of fate, rather it is to say we can control decisions we make, but we can control little of events outside of ourselves. In this era, eating pasta, going to London, getting plastic surgery, ordering a new video game...these are trivial and self-facing. Even so, I likely cannot control the quality of the pasta in a restaurant, the annoying person sitting next to me on the plane, the exact time and date the surgeon is available, or the quality of the game. Imagine the difficulty of most of those things 100+ years ago...control becomes much less likely.

Enter other bodies with agency into the picture and the controllability of outcomes decreases significantly, particularly if they have motivation to interact. I have the agency to pump fake, drive right and pull up for the 7' jump shot, with full intention of banking it off the glass and in. How many factors now come in to play about the outcome of that decision/action? How many more if instead of 1-on-1 we're playing 5-on-5? How much is that magnified by taking on the evil wizard and his band of demons from beyond to stop them from their plot to overthrow Good King Bron?

I was surprised by the array of definitions I just read discussing agency. Several do imply outcome, though most focus/limit to the capacity to act. I think we are on the adjacent ends of that array. I disagree that you agency was curtailed...other than there being conditions beyond your control (agency) to prevent, like the wind/beaver/momentum resulting in that tree meeting that car...just that your outcome did not meet (reasonable) expectations. As I suggested about the ambush scenario...if you had 4 back up plans and all 5 efforts met with uncanny failure, then there is something amiss.

This still feels to me like you're in a 'defend my choices' position rather than a 'understand how to make something good' position. Like, what does it matter what's realistic 100 years ago? Lets say you run a game set in Dark Sun and everyone is a slave and basically 95% of what the players want to control they have no hope of ever controlling. Well, that's definitely defensibly verisimilitudinous based on the setting and genre. But that wouldn't prevent a player from saying 'you know, I don't feel like anything we're doing here matters', and it wouldn't prevent this particular theory from suggesting a way you could fix that. Would the fix be in tension with trying to run grim and gritty Dark Sun realistically given the setting conceits? Yeah, that's a thing that can happen. Sometimes when you over-optimize towards realism you sacrifice fun.

Similarly, it doesn't require an adversary to say that agency was curtailed. There doesn't have to be something amiss. Sometimes your agency just gets curtailed because of random stuff - that doesn't mean it wasn't curtailed. Its an event that happened, we don't need to say like 'no one is out to get you, so you still have all your agency see?'. We can acknowledge the reduction in agency and move on. A tree falling onto my car curtails my agency even if the tree is not maliciously trying to prevent me from going to the airport. The malice perspective only makes sense to me in the viewpoint of defending your choices to your players as a GM and not wanting to be blamed - again, why I'm saying to really systematically reject the 'is this blameworthy?' framing of game design. Defensive designs tend to be really bland, whether its fear of something being unbalanced or fear of players accusations or whatever - I cannot recommend that approach. It may take conscious effort not to fall into.

Or if this is a wider philosophical point, then I guess my response is 'yeah, I think the average human life in the modern world is more meaningful than the average human life 100 years ago, and thats because there are more choices we can make and things we can achieve if we decide to'. We're less likely to just randomly die of a disease when we're 12, or spend 5 years building up a farm to have it be ransacked by the army of a neighboring province whose baron wants a little more power or whatever.

Strongly agree with the first. Philosophical framing on the second...I would never suggest that as a philosophical underpinning of a campaign. But if we're both playing a relatively unconstrained game (like an RPG) using a wide array of dice, involving other players, and actors within the game that have different motivations, and I reassure you that we'll follow almost all of the rules and conventions of the game, I think that would match both of our expectations.

Why? Because failure to hit the dragon, or climb the wall, or beat the bad guy to the McGuffin by evading his ambushers would be the result of your character's skill, luck, and your skill as a player to deploy options, tactics and strategies to mitigate that luck. And I wouldn't drop trees on your car to stop you from going to London (unless the Angry Awakened Beaver was your sworn enemy, of course).

- M

Its kind of mu? Those assurances aren't at the right scale to actually tell me anything about the availability of meaningful decisions in the campaign. I mean, I have some confidence in my ability as a player to create novel unanticipated directions and push on them, but that's either me being nice to the DM or me being cruel to the DM depending on the DM. Even then, there are lots of factors that will determine if this is going to be a game denser in meaningful choices or less dense, and 'I will follow the rules' isn't really relevant to those factors. Is there a tight timeline and an existential threat to the extent that characters differing in priorities are just wrong, or is there a lot of give around the edges of the scenario for players to even differ on what a desirable outcome looks like? Is it a world more focused on realism, coupled with a historical era that makes the ability to actually make changes highly unrealistic, or is it a campaign centered around a flashpoint where something is collapsing or making way for the new, and there are all sorts of opportunities suddenly coming into being?

[kyoryu]

I was surprised by the array of definitions I just read discussing agency. Several do imply outcome, though most focus/limit to the capacity to act. I think we are on the adjacent ends of that array. I disagree that you agency was curtailed...other than there being conditions beyond your control (agency) to prevent, like the wind/beaver/momentum resulting in that tree meeting that car...just that your outcome did not meet (reasonable) expectations. As I suggested about the ambush scenario...if you had 4 back up plans and all 5 efforts met with uncanny failure, then there is something amiss.

At the extreme, ability to act without impacting outcome is just railroading.

The trick is that you can't generally control outcome, though you should be able to influence it. Not perfectly, and in some cases that might be thwarted, but you should have influence, and you should be able to see that.

[Mordar]

This still feels to me like you're in a 'defend my choices' position rather than a 'understand how to make something good' position. Like, what does it matter what's realistic 100 years ago? Lets say you run a game set in Dark Sun and everyone is a slave and basically 95% of what the players want to control they have no hope of ever controlling. Well, that's definitely defensibly verisimilitudinous based on the setting and genre. But that wouldn't prevent a player from saying 'you know, I don't feel like anything we're doing here matters', and it wouldn't prevent this particular theory from suggesting a way you could fix that. Would the fix be in tension with trying to run grim and gritty Dark Sun realistically given the setting conceits? Yeah, that's a thing that can happen. Sometimes when you over-optimize towards realism you sacrifice fun.

I'm not sure if you mean me specifically in "defend my choices", and I'm not sure what you're suggesting with the "understand" line. So I'll assume the most generic and generous interpretation.

What does it matter? It matters because the likelihood of the outcome you desire from each of those actions is radically changed based on the era in which we live, but your agency is unaltered.

Help me with the point of the Dark Sun example - I 100% agree with the final line, and I would certainly want to both run and play in a game where we actually did have a chance to throw off the shackles...but if we failed it wasn't ultimately because we didn't have agency.

Similarly, it doesn't require an adversary to say that agency was curtailed. There doesn't have to be something amiss. Sometimes your agency just gets curtailed because of random stuff - that doesn't mean it wasn't curtailed. Its an event that happened, we don't need to say like 'no one is out to get you, so you still have all your agency see?'. We can acknowledge the reduction in agency and move on. A tree falling onto my car curtails my agency even if the tree is not maliciously trying to prevent me from going to the airport. The malice perspective only makes sense to me in the viewpoint of defending your choices to your players as a GM and not wanting to be blamed - again, why I'm saying to really systematically reject the 'is this blameworthy?' framing of game design. Defensive designs tend to be really bland, whether its fear of something being unbalanced or fear of players accusations or whatever - I cannot recommend that approach. It may take conscious effort not to fall into.

If I said adversary I didn't mean to...I don't see that I did. I said other bodies...others acting in the same world/space, even without consideration of their goals or intentions. Something amiss was in reference to being in a game where everything you try (other than perhaps the one solution the Bad GM decided upon) is blocked. Using that in your car trip to the airport was reaching for the point that if everything aligned against such a trivial action you're probably in a movie or game where someone has scripted your inability to make it to the plane on time.

The tree no more curtails your agency than someone has curtailed my agency by making it so I cannot teleport or fly under my own power. The falling tree made it such that your car was not a functional conveyance. Your choice to drive to the airport has failed to achieve the desired outcome. Now you must make a new choice.

Where is this blame thing coming from? Defensive design? Either as a player or a GM I expect and accept a given framework of reality in which we can make our decisions. Without that framework, we might be playing something more akin to little kid imagination games (said absolutely without prejudice), but I presume we're discussing RPGs as traditionally represented by D&D, VtM, Star Frontiers, whatever. If this a G vs N issue at the root?

Or if this is a wider philosophical point, then I guess my response is 'yeah, I think the average human life in the modern world is more meaningful than the average human life 100 years ago, and thats because there are more choices we can make and things we can achieve if we decide to'. We're less likely to just randomly die of a disease when we're 12, or spend 5 years building up a farm to have it be ransacked by the army of a neighboring province whose baron wants a little more power or whatever.

As mentioned above - same agency (well, maybe not quite depending on the flavor of plastic surgery) but different likelihood of outcome aligning with intent.

Its kind of mu? Those assurances aren't at the right scale to actually tell me anything about the availability of meaningful decisions in the campaign. I mean, I have some confidence in my ability as a player to create novel unanticipated directions and push on them, but that's either me being nice to the DM or me being cruel to the DM depending on the DM. Even then, there are lots of factors that will determine if this is going to be a game denser in meaningful choices or less dense, and 'I will follow the rules' isn't really relevant to those factors. Is there a tight timeline and an existential threat to the extent that characters differing in priorities are just wrong, or is there a lot of give around the edges of the scenario for players to even differ on what a desirable outcome looks like? Is it a world more focused on realism, coupled with a historical era that makes the ability to actually make changes highly unrealistic, or is it a campaign centered around a flashpoint where something is collapsing or making way for the new, and there are all sorts of opportunities suddenly coming into being?

I think I better understand this point now...more about the framework of the story than the options that exist within the rules. If I am following, you're suggesting that a game that is "Escape the Nostromo" has less baseline opportunity for agency as you use it than does a game of "Political Intrigue in World of Darkness Chicago" wherein you are playing the role elder vampires...assuming all other things being equal.

Both, to me, can be great or not-so-great. Frankly, even heavily scripted games can be much more "good stuff" than wide open games with PCs as the World Shakers. Because this is just one slider on what can make a game great or not-so-great, and the players bring in a third axis on all of those sliders.

At the extreme, ability to act without impacting outcome is just railroading.

The trick is that you can't generally control outcome, though you should be able to influence it. Not perfectly, and in some cases that might be thwarted, but you should have influence, and you should be able to see that.

I never said impact, I said you can't control outcome. In fact, I stated (or at least implied in pretty clear terms) that you can improve your chances of success by your actions. So, in effect, we're on 100% the same page.

- M

[Quertus]

So agency is a measure of how well something's actions can be predicted from their goals, conditioned on the information they can possibly possess about the environment.

Eh, I don't think I agree on this.

So, first, here's what I heard: If we give people the core 3e D&D classes, and the players say they want to run a jock, a nerd, and a woodsman, and you instinctively think of a class or two that fit that, and, after reading over the core classes they do indeed make choices that match your list of expected classes, then they had Agency, they had the Agency to make choices based on their goals that were predictable.

And I disagree that that's a good measure.

If, at the beginning of the school year, a very small boy meets a girl and decides he likes her, he may, IRL that I can think of, declare that he likes her, say that she's cute/pretty/whatever, give her a gift, not talk to her, punch her / throw rocks at her, declare that he's going to marry her some day, punch anyone else (especially boys) who talk to her, and I'm bored listing examples.

Point is, given his goal, you cannot predict his response much beyond "treat her differently". Yet he clearly has Agency to (attempt to) pursue his goals in a great many ways.

On the other side of the spectrum, if you have a Cunning Strategist (TM), about the only thing you can guarantee is that you won't be able to predict their actions given their goals.

To hit that from the flip side, determining goals based on actions? My classic example is, "(when it looks like combat may begin) Armus moves to place himself between <person with better defenses> and <threat(s)>". The only one of the 6 (or so) goals that Armus has in taking that action that Playgrounders have (accidentally?) divined in all the years I've mentioned it is (in 3e parlance), "Armus was provoking a response, in order to enable his own Sense Motive roll, to gather information about the <threat(s)>".

Still, given that goal, could you have predicted that Armus would choose to implement that goal by choosing to "move to protect <individual with better defenses>", when there's so many ways he could potentially have accomplished that same goal?

Further, so many other goals might well map to that same action (Armus, after all, has 6 (or so), so we know there's at least that many, and I can think of plenty more).

So I feel this is only true for the naive case, that how well we can predict someone's actions is only high when they have "just enough" agency to be predictable; give them sufficiently more agency (where they have more valid approaches to achieve the same goal), or sufficiently less (where they don't know enough to make an informed decision so their choice is effectively random, or their options don't give them the agency to pursue their goal).

Have I completely missed the mark? Are we talking about remotely similar things?

[NichG]

I'm not sure if you mean me specifically in "defend my choices", and I'm not sure what you're suggesting with the "understand" line. So I'll assume the most generic and generous interpretation.

I guess I'm picking up on a lot of things of the form 'but I still think its reasonable to do X' or 'but X makes sense because of realism'. Since I'm not saying 'don't do X', I'm saying 'maybe consider also doing Y', it feels odd. Also, justifying X on the basis of reasonableness or realism or whatever doesn't answer 'X isn't a thing of type Y, and things of type Y may help players form meaningful connections to a campaign', its kind of a non-sequitur.

What does it matter? It matters because the likelihood of the outcome you desire from each of those actions is radically changed based on the era in which we live, but your agency is unaltered.

Strong disagreement here. Your agency absolutely is a function of your environment as well as your self. Someone in a prison cell has less agency than the exact same person as king of a country.

Help me with the point of the Dark Sun example - I 100% agree with the final line, and I would certainly want to both run and play in a game where we actually did have a chance to throw off the shackles...but if we failed it wasn't ultimately because we didn't have agency.

If I said adversary I didn't mean to...I don't see that I did. I said other bodies...others acting in the same world/space, even without consideration of their goals or intentions. Something amiss was in reference to being in a game where everything you try (other than perhaps the one solution the Bad GM decided upon) is blocked. Using that in your car trip to the airport was reaching for the point that if everything aligned against such a trivial action you're probably in a movie or game where someone has scripted your inability to make it to the plane on time.

Right, but this idea that the thing that makes it agency or not is 'whether its amiss' is what I mean by a defensive position. Like, trying to say that a reduction of agency that's justified isn't a reduction of agency. But in the case of the tree, no one is doing it, so there's no 'justification'. It's still a reduction of agency. Without my car I have less agency than I have with it (reduction); and, I expected to have that agency but now I don't (curtailment). It has nothing to do with a GM, because there is no GM here. There doesn't have to be a GM doing a bad thing for agency to be reduced.

I had 5 bits of agency, now I have 4.5 bits of agency. My agency is now less than I thought it was. That's it.

The tree no more curtails your agency than someone has curtailed my agency by making it so I cannot teleport or fly under my own power. The falling tree made it such that your car was not a functional conveyance. Your choice to drive to the airport has failed to achieve the desired outcome. Now you must make a new choice.

I now have less agency than I thought I had, based on my model of the world. So I experience my agency being *curtailed*, as opposed to just experiencing my agency being relatively small compared to a person with a car. My model of the world does not include 'I should be able to teleport', so not being able to teleport is not my agency being *curtailed*. But certainly my agency is less than it would be if I could teleport. Gaining the ability to teleport would be an experience of my agency increasing (well, specifically my empowerment) in an unexpected way. My agency, specifically, would also increase if I actually decided to put my teleportation ability towards pursuing some goal, which would almost certainly happen.

It's just a measure. Things we find reasonable or unreasonable can increase or decrease that measure equally well.

Where is this blame thing coming from? Defensive design? Either as a player or a GM I expect and accept a given framework of reality in which we can make our decisions. Without that framework, we might be playing something more akin to little kid imagination games (said absolutely without prejudice), but I presume we're discussing RPGs as traditionally represented by D&D, VtM, Star Frontiers, whatever. If this a G vs N issue at the root?

No? Maybe? Its an issue of something being a non-sequitur. Like, if you run a game with some rule that ends up making everyone at the table bored, 'sorry but that's the rule' won't make people not find it boring. If your design goal is to make your players not bored, you might need to change the rule. Saying 'well, we have to have rules or we're playing imagination games' is sort of... dodging responsibility for the design choice? Rejecting the premise? Something like that...

Like, if I found myself trying to run a really realistic game about being medieval peasants but reached the conclusion 'gee, it wouldn't really make sense for these characters to actually be able to get away with much or change things, everything I can think of involves basically some noble ordering them around in various ways', then I'd say 'aha, maybe I shouldn't try to run realistic games about medieval peasants - that setting conceit isn't helping me run a fun game, its getting in the way. Instead maybe I'll run a realistic medieval game where the PCs are all second sons of noble houses, that will give them more options and more ability to direct the course of events, so it'll be more interesting.'

Similarly, the Dark Sun example, the conclusion I'd draw is 'oh, doing a slave start without an escape or slave rebellion happening within the first few games might have been a mistake; that's not going to give the players very many meaningful choices. Maybe I need to add something that the players know that their masters don't, that will make sure they have some leverage - game starts with them having heard some blackmail information, or the assassination plans of one noble towards another, or something valuable that they can decide who to give it to and what to trade it for. Ah, now they have some ability to pursue their own goals even though they're still slaves at the start.' Doesn't mean they can just say or do anything or beeline towards any goal, but now they have some actions which have predictable outcomes and which can change the course of the story and navigate them towards some goals (including freedom if they like). I didn't need to remove all of the non-agentic X stuff about the setting (characters are slaves, lots of being told what to do, etc) as long as I ensure that there's agentic Y stuff that can have significant and at least somewhat predictable impacts.

As mentioned above - same agency (well, maybe not quite depending on the flavor of plastic surgery) but different likelihood of outcome aligning with intent.

So this seems to be our irreducible disagreement. To me, this is very much not the same agency. Having less chance that outcome aligns with intent directly means you have less agency, as I see and experience agency.

A game that gave me lots of what you're calling agency but none of what I'm calling agency (e.g. something where there are lots of choices, but those choices have very little in the way of predictable outcomes that align with the sorts of goals I might choose to have) would be very unsatisfying to me. It becomes like the classic example of a false choice: 'you can go left, or you can go right, but nothing you can observe here about either path even reasonably hints at what lies along them'.

I think I better understand this point now...more about the framework of the story than the options that exist within the rules. If I am following, you're suggesting that a game that is "Escape the Nostromo" has less baseline opportunity for agency as you use it than does a game of "Political Intrigue in World of Darkness Chicago" wherein you are playing the role elder vampires...assuming all other things being equal.

Both, to me, can be great or not-so-great. Frankly, even heavily scripted games can be much more "good stuff" than wide open games with PCs as the World Shakers. Because this is just one slider on what can make a game great or not-so-great, and the players bring in a third axis on all of those sliders.

For me, the heavily scripted game might as well not be played (or alternately its not so heavily scripted that I can't force other things to matter on my own, in which case that's how I will play if I find myself in that position - possibly to the frustration of the GM).

Like, you can have other things that are good about a game, but this one is a multiplier. If there are some (what I'm calling) agentic choices, then that can multiply other aspects like how inspiring or evocative or interesting the game is, or how the challenges feel to navigate. Give me some Y, and you can have your X. But if you set that Y to zero, or make it so small that I'm feeling bottlenecked on it, well I'd rather read the awesome bits in a book or watch it in a movie because any motivation I have to actually participate goes away.

If someone tells me 'I want to run a heavily scripted thing', my first question is going to be 'how do you feel about me trying my hardest to break that script?'. If thats a problem, I won't play. If they say 'well I will make sure you don't, I won't play. If they're like 'sure, I'm just using the script because I'm out of ideas' I'll say 'okay, I'll make sure to play someone who is proactive and gets into enough trouble that you can be more reactive'.

Eh, I don't think I agree on this.

So, first, here's what I heard: If we give people the core 3e D&D classes, and the players say they want to run a jock, a nerd, and a woodsman, and you instinctively think of a class or two that fit that, and, after reading over the core classes they do indeed make choices that match your list of expected classes, then they had Agency, they had the Agency to make choices based on their goals that were predictable.

Specifically, if they made choices that my specific knowledge of those players as compared to other players let me predict better.

Like, if there's a choice where I think Quertus will pick A *because* A enables A* and I think Quertus likes A*, but, dunno, kyoryu would pick B because it enables B* and I've heard kyoryu talk about B* a lot, then that choice (assuming its binary) gives me ~1 bit of information about whether my player is Quertus or Kyoryu - and it does so in the context of a model of those people as being driven by particular goals (A* vs B*).

If its a choice between 2 things, but every player will pick A, then there's no mutual information between the random variable corresponding to the choice, and the random variable corresponding to the goal. Even if conceivably someone could pick B, and it would make a huge difference to do so, my prior that someone would ever pick B is basically zero, so I as the external observer don't learn anything about the player from their choice - they just confirm my preconception that everyone will always pick A.

In the extended view, I have an unknown player, they pick A in the case where some go A and some go B, and that tells me that in the future when choosing between C and D, they will pick D, because A and D both lead to goal A* and B and C both lead to goal B*. That's the utility of the measure - the expected agency associated with a choice is telling me how much additional power I will gain to predict the future behavior of that player on the basis of what they choose here. E.g. it measures how much that option teaches me about the player. Or, turning it around, it measures how much opportunity for expression that choice gives the player.

There's some give in the definitions between actual prediction and post-hoc explanation, because it takes a sort of omniscient view rather than something strictly temporally ordered. I think proper causal versions could be constructed, but this gets way into some mathy weeds (if I start talking about which filtrations to apply to the distributions over which to evaluate choices, I seriously doubt it's going to make what I'm saying any clearer, even to me...) and anyhow whether you'd want to or not depends on the particular application, which is generally much broader than tabletop campaign design...

And I disagree that that's a good measure.

If, at the beginning of the school year, a very small boy meets a girl and decides he likes her, he may, IRL that I can think of, declare that he likes her, say that she's cute/pretty/whatever, give her a gift, not talk to her, punch her / throw rocks at her, declare that he's going to marry her some day, punch anyone else (especially boys) who talk to her, and I'm bored listing examples.

Point is, given his goal, you cannot predict his response much beyond "treat her differently". Yet he clearly has Agency to (attempt to) pursue his goals in a great many ways.

Note that those examples are a very small set of actions compared to all things they could possibly do. If you can at all increase the probability you assign to those specific things and decrease the probability you assign to other, unrelated things, then that KL divergence is the information gain you've gotten about the boy's actions from learning their goal. The number of bits you gain here is going to be surprisingly high, even if it seems that the predictions aren't amazingly specific, because we're looking at the difference between two relatively large numbers. If you reduce a million possible actions down to a thousand possible actions, thats ~10 bits worth of information - quite a lot for a single choice!

Furthermore, when you see how the boy treats her differently, that gives you information that narrows down the boy's goal in a way that makes the next prediction even better.

So I feel this is only true for the naive case, that how well we can predict someone's actions is only high when they have "just enough" agency to be predictable; give them sufficiently more agency (where they have more valid approaches to achieve the same goal), or sufficiently less (where they don't know enough to make an informed decision so their choice is effectively random, or their options don't give them the agency to pursue their goal).

Have I completely missed the mark? Are we talking about remotely similar things?

I think its the gap between colloquial discussion and actual quantitative math. Like, with the 'cunning strategist' its not that the agency measure would be low, its that the cunning strategist specifically is trying to obscure their true goal from their enemies. But a strategist who is so cunning that they fail their true goal just to make sure no one ever could have known it isn't such a cunning strategist in the end. From the point of view of the mathematical analysis, there is a 'true goal' or 'best fit goal' and you can do the analysis at the point after all is said and done, then look back at the actions that led there and treat it like a compression task - 'could I describe these actions more efficiently by just literally saying each one, or by saying that they were taken by a cunning strategist who eventually managed to become king?'. Regardless of how cunning the strategist is, there are fewer action sets that lead to becoming king than there are possible action sets, so knowing that they eventually became king (or wanted to become king) always tells you something and helps you compress the explanation of the system better, unless them becoming king was really just totally random.

Whether it tells you enough to pay for the additional information you have to include to *use* the goal, that's trickier. But generally humans are very comfortably within that bound. Even surprisingly non-agentic things tend to just sit at the edge of the bound rather than being far on the wrong side of it - like, 1700s and 1800s physics has all of these variational accounts of things like 'light wants to take the shortest path' which if you calculate it out, is basically neither more or less efficient than writing down something like Snell's Rule. So its zero gain giving an agentic account of even something like a photon, not like a massive loss. Then when you get more complex systems, you can start to suffer more of a loss if you draw the boundary wrong, but the gain when you draw the boundary right gets bigger. This has to do with modularity and something called 'non-trivial informational closure' - if you just have a single degree of freedom, you can't really subdivide it much, so all accounts of it are equally efficient more or less. But when you have many degrees of freedom, if the dynamics are modular, you can find subsets of variables which very efficiently predict other members in the same subset; but which don't necessarily predict (or are predicted by) variables outside of the subset.

Those closures correspond, in general, to places where you can gain efficiency in modelling a system by discarding irrelevant details. So the agentic picture is one particular kind of closure whose summary statistics are 'goals', and where the particular set of variables under consideration are sensor states, goals, actions, and memory.

Not sure if getting into this formalism is actually useful for the tabletop discussion? If you want more precision than I might be able to deliver off the top of my head, this is the most recent paper about this particular direction: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.01619

[gbaji]

I think this discussion is veering off into tangents about broad definitions of the world "agency", and kinda missing how the word is typically applied in a RPG environment. Sometimes, you can get lost in the weeds of definitions and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Agency, as used in RPGs almost always is about the degree to which the GM may aid or hinder the player's ability to make changes in the game world as a result of actions taken by their characters. At the very most basic level it is the players ability to control the choices and actions of their own characters. If you don't have that, you effectively have zero agency in the game world at all. You're just a spectator watching someone else act out the scene for you.

Past that, we get into degrees of agency, and what is acceptable. And in my opinion this has less to do with any sort of absolute determination like "can I achieve the desired outcome?". That's not a useful metric, because not all desired outcomes are equally realistic or achievable. "I wish to become ruler of the universe" may be a desired outcome, but it's not terribly realistic, and no GM would be accused of "curtailing player agency" by failing to grant that outcome to every player who requested it. Well, not by anyone behaving in a reasonable manner anyway.

To me, agency is the following: The degree to which PC choices and actions produce results in the game setting which are consistent with the existing game setting rules and standards as compared with similar action/outcome sets when taken by other characters (both PC and NPC) within the same game setting.

In other words: How much is the GM putting their thumb on the scale in specific response to PC choices and actions? To me, both are equal violations of the principle of agency: "I will ensure this fails because you are a PC", and "I will ensure this succeeds because you are a PC".


I think many people make the mistake of thinking that agency is only about "getting what I want", and the more you get what you want, the more agency you have. But IMO, that's not really the case. If something works, despite the fact that it shouldn't have based on the rules and standards of the setting, is just as much a violation as if something doesn't work, despite the fact that it should have based on those same rules and standards. Both are the GM manipulating things, rather than allowing the players to actually play their characters in the game world. And yes. I get that some might think "how is it decreasing agency to allow PCs to be more successful than they should be?". Well, is it agency if you didn't actually do it? If the only reason you can flap your arms and fly is because some external benevolent deity is levitating you, and it has nothing at all to do with your own actual abilities, is that actually agency? I would say that it is not.

Similarly, a "gimme GM" is not actually increasing player agency. Sure, the players are getting everything they want. But it's hollow. They didn't get it because they made choices and took actions that got those things. They'd have gotten them no matter what choices and actions they took. Which effectively makes their actual choices and actions meaningless in the game. Thus... zero agency.

That may be a bit different than how most people use the term, but that's how I view things. Agency is more about "expected relationship between action and outcome" than about "what do I get?".

[NichG]

I think this discussion is veering off into tangents about broad definitions of the world "agency", and kinda missing how the word is typically applied in a RPG environment. Sometimes, you can get lost in the weeds of definitions and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Agency, as used in RPGs almost always is about the degree to which the GM may aid or hinder the player's ability to make changes in the game world as a result of actions taken by their characters. At the very most basic level it is the players ability to control the choices and actions of their own characters. If you don't have that, you effectively have zero agency in the game world at all. You're just a spectator watching someone else act out the scene for you.

Past that, we get into degrees of agency, and what is acceptable. And in my opinion this has less to do with any sort of absolute determination like "can I achieve the desired outcome?". That's not a useful metric, because not all desired outcomes are equally realistic or achievable. "I wish to become ruler of the universe" may be a desired outcome, but it's not terribly realistic, and no GM would be accused of "curtailing player agency" by failing to grant that outcome to every player who requested it. Well, not by anyone behaving in a reasonable manner anyway.

To me, agency is the following: The degree to which PC choices and actions produce results in the game setting which are consistent with the existing game setting rules and standards as compared with similar action/outcome sets when taken by other characters (both PC and NPC) within the same game setting.

In other words: How much is the GM putting their thumb on the scale in specific response to PC choices and actions? To me, both are equal violations of the principle of agency: "I will ensure this fails because you are a PC", and "I will ensure this succeeds because you are a PC".

This is why I'm pushing against that definition of agency, because it really makes things about 'what things must the GM not do?' versus 'what are some things the GM could do, that would help people make a greater connection to the game?' If you think in terms of norms, expectations, etc, then all that lets you talk about is the errors. 'Violations', 'curtailing', 'what is acceptable', etc. But I think that's a bad way to think, its inherently a defensive position where you're looking to excuse things you're doing as part of your job to people who might criticize it. Its an easy stance to fall into on a message board like this, because its basically the first thing that's going to happen if you say you did anything. But ultimately I think its unhelpful.

It would be better, IMO, to say 'what are some neat things I can add to a game, and how can I know which ones are likely to work better?'. Rather than seeking justification for the game you were going to run anyhow, the focus is more on having more tools to run the game maybe you wish you could. So like, instead of looking at a situation where a player strongly asks to achieve something unreasonable, look at the situation where you have a player who is playing somewhat passively and reactively. Maybe you don't directly know what it is they want at all, what sort of things can you add to your game that will give you a higher chance of catching their attention, getting them excited and participating actively, and caring about the outcomes of the campaign?

Thinking about agency - I would claim specifically thinking about it in terms of informed decision points which allow different goals to be expressed in the resulting trajectory the campaign takes - can help analyze what might be missing, and picking between different elements you could add to the game to help engage that player.

In specific cases where something flubbed - maybe you had an important decision point but no one cared - then understanding the importance of the 'informed' part could help you diagnose that issue and improve the impact the next time there's a big decision to make. Or maybe there are big decisions with their consequences quite telegraphed, but there's an obvious best decision that everyone would want to take; okay, so now you need to figure out what sorts of decision points your players might actually disagree on the best path for. Maybe you have an issue where people aren't personally invested in decisions because everything is done by committee - well, the analysis in this framework will tell you that when everyone collectively makes a decision its going to be harder for each person to 'see themselves' in the resulting chain of events. There's less possibility to look back and say 'I did that' vs 'we did that'. If you want to use the math, there's less entropy in the distribution of group consensus goals than individual goals and that means less total information gain is possible.

This sort of framing, not in terms of justifying your GM-ing but in terms of giving tools to achieve goals as a GM, makes the stuff about magic marts or gimme GM-ing basically irrelevant. Because its not saying 'here, in this particular case, everything but this is a GM sin'. It's saying 'hey, here's how to troubleshoot players feeling disconnected from your game'.

[KorvinStarmast]

The trick is that you can't generally control outcome, though you should be able to influence it. Not perfectly, and in some cases that might be thwarted, but you should have influence, and you should be able to see that.

Hence my question about agency or control. There is some overlap, yes.

[Quertus]

@NichG - Where to start?

For the Cunning Strategist, it's not goalpost moving, it's not missing the point, it's... a really odd miscommunication? So, for our "spherical cows in a frictionless vacuum", let's assume in a conversation about Agency that there is no "noise", and all... Agents(?) successfully achieved all Goals that were valid / possible in the scenario. Does that... no, that doesn't work with what I said, either. Sigh. I see that, juxtaposed with the "child romance" example, one might assume that "Cunning Strategist" was a joke, but I actually meant it seriously, as in "someone who achieves their goals through unconventional and unpredictable means" (obviously that's not a definition of that term, simply an explanation of what I meant to imply in that context, rather than the opposite of a "cunning" strategist, whose actions are unpredictable because they're (unsuccessful and) dumb).

Anyway, that aside, what are our knowns and unknowns in this... example? conversation? theory?... you are describing? My limited experience in this field involves the company starting with only data, attempting to locate patterns, attempting to hypothesize names (ie, "goals") for the buckets of patterns that were created, manipulating the environment (in this case, the code) to attempt to facilitate these hypothetical goals (or to facilitate the company's goals, given said hypothetical customer goals), and observing the results. In other words, the worst, dumbest blind Business Analyst through Data Analysis I can imagine. Is my roundabout way of saying, warning: I'm a bad audience, because my experiences have left me biased against this field.

ANYway, what I was asking was, with what you were describing, what were the inputs, and what were the outputs? Are you walking in with a finite set of modal goals, and trying to parse the data for patterns that allow you to sort users into modal buckets? Because it sounded to me like one of the outputs you described was "these are the decisions that matter for differentiating between goals", but I was uncertain what you were claiming were the required inputs in order to achieve that output.

You know, I think I break character more when talking with you than with anyone else.

What makes this particularly complex is that, with sufficient X (am I committing the Fallacy of Four Parts or otherwise obfuscating differentiatable details if I call X "Agency"?) there are multiple paths to goals; someone with goal A may usually take action A*, and someone with goal B may usually take goal B*, but someone with goal B could take action A* when taking a different path to B. Or someone with the goal not!A could take action A* simply to obfuscate their motives if their goal was "not to be detected" (someone with an unpopular goal, a spy, someone trying not to show favoritism, or my favorite half-remembered example where a girl points out to a (depressed?) woman that her love interest talks to everyone but her -> he's in love with her too and trying to hide it. And, yes, there is so much data in each choice (I'm reminded of the 12 spheres puzzle), compounded by the fact that "becoming king" could be a goal for one person / character, but a side-effect for another's choices.

So, yeah, with all that said, I'm struggling to ascertain just what modern data theory can tell us in this setup. But I do like the way you framed it in terms of Expression - any elaboration along those lines would also be welcome.