Tag: Running A Game

Player Agency

Player Agency is a concept I mention frequently, but not one I’ve ever defined for myself. Other bloggers have defined it so well that it feels arrogant of me to even try. Courtney of Hack & Slash (with whom I share many readers) is responsible a definitive work on the subject. Taken together, his writings on player agency could fill a thick chapter in a textbook for game design. Add to that all of the other game designers who have written on the subject, and putting my own thoughts to digital paper begins to seem redundant.

But lets be redundant. Perhaps it’s a waste of text; but at least the exercise will help me organize my own thoughts. If I’m lucky, two or three other people might even benefit from it!

In discussions of ethics there is a term: moral agency. The term is useful in distinguishing between those who are capable of guilt and those who are not. When an alligator kills a person they’ve really done nothing wrong, but when a person kills a person they’ve committed one of the most heinous acts imaginable. What’s the difference? Murderers have moral agency, alligators do not. A moral agent is one who is able to make meaningful decisions about their actions, with regards to right and wrong.

I bring this up because moral agency is easy for us to understand. Even if a person doesn’t grasp the nuanced “philosopheese” definition of moral agency, they still understand in their gut what it means. And starting from that gut-understanding of moral agency, we can begin to understand the more abstract concept of player agency. Moral agency is to ethics, as player agency is to tabletop RPGs. Which leads us to the following definition:

A player with agency is one who is able to make meaningful decisions about their actions, with regards to the game world.

 In practice, this means more than letting  the player control the actions of their character. That’s so obvious as to be trivial, and not worth my time nor anyone else’s to discuss. I’m certain there are terrible GMs out there who will casually exert direct control over their player’s characters; but such absolute disregard for the spirit of the game isn’t a problem I’m interested in addressing.

The far more subtle, and far more relevant issue of player agency is that the choices the players make must be meaningful. If the players are exploring a dungeon and reach a “T” intersection, they’ve been presented with a choice of turning left, or turning right. What they experience beyond this intersection mustdiffer based on their choice if agency is to be maintained. There should be a room which is on the right, and a room which is on the left, and those rooms must be the same before the players make their choice, as they are after the players make their choice.

A few ways agency might be subverted in this situation:

  • Rather than preparing “right” and “left” rooms, the GM has prepared “first” and “second” rooms. Whichever way the players turn, they will enter the “first” room first, and will only be able to visit the “second” room once they’ve already seen the “first” one.
  • The GM wishes for the players to face as certain encounter here. And while it was originally placed in the room on the right, the GM will secretly move it to the room on the left for the sake of maintaining the ‘flow’ they wish to impose on the game.
  • An out-of-place door which cannot be opened, unlocked, bashed down, or damaged at all blocks the players from entering the room the GM wishes for them to visit second. It remains impassable until the players visit the room the GM wanted them to enter in the first place.

These are just a few simple options. I’m sure you can think of more. The above scenario is a textbook example of agency robbing behavior. It is constructed so that the loss of agency is obvious. Unfortunately, not all scenarios where the GM is in a position to steal agency from their players are so clear cut. In fact most are quite subtle.

Consider traps, for example. I recently designed a magical trap which I thought was magnificently clever. So clever, in fact, that I included a cryptic hint about how to overcome it early in the adventure. When my players reached it, however, they stumbled through a loophole I had not considered. They bypassed the trap entirely, without ever engaging with the clever mechanisms I had been so proud of.

It would have been a simple matter to force them to engage with my trap. All I would need to say is something like “Your hammer bounces off the glass without leaving a scratch. Some sorcery has made it stronger than steel!” And in fact, that did occur to me, but I held my tongue. The players had outsmarted me. Forcing them to witness the cleverness of my trap would not be better than the sense of accomplishment they would feel from subverting it entirely.

If retroactive changes are made to the game world in order to invalidate the player’s choices, the players have no agency.

And it’s not as though I can’t use the trap again some day. I doubt I’ll even alter the flaw my players found. I doubt other groups would think of the same plan, but if they did, it would be equally impressive.

Having followed Courtney’s writings on player agency for a long while now, I’ve become familiar with a common response to discussions on the subject. I believe I may have even offered it myself at some time in the past, but have since come to view it as incorrect. Rather than wait for it to be brought up in comments, I’d like to address it here in the post.

“My players don’t know what’s written on my notes, so they won’t know when I change something.”

The common response to this is “You may think they won’t notice, but they will.” And there is some truth to that answer. Players are not stupid. When the ogre is taking a sound beating, then suddenly roars and starts hitting the PCs with twice his previous strength, nobody is fooled. Everybody at the table knows that the GM was frustrated that their monster was dying too quickly, and decided to give the creature a last second boost to their stats.

But I think that response is a little simplistic as well. The truth is, the GM probably can fool their players if they’re quick on their feet and have a good poker face. But just because the players don’t realize they’re being fooled, doesn’t mean the game isn’t being harmed. When every encounter is just the right amount of difficult, when the players can never subvert the mad wizard’s puzzles, when the villain manages to escape at the end of every single encounter…the game becomes stale.

Part of the excitement of tabletop games is the chaos and the unlimited possibilities. When I’m playing a video game, I’ve been given a very limited set of ways to interact with my environment. My solution to every problem must stem from those limited abilities I’ve been given. In a tabletop RPG, I can attempt to solve problems in any way I choose! Perhaps I’m too low level to fight the troll king toe-to-toe, but if I can drop a boulder on his head, why shouldn’t I be able to kill him?

In the era of video games, player agency is what makes tabletop games worth playing.

Introducing New Characters to Your Campaign Milieu

Introducing a new character to an ongoing campaign is always a challenge for me. Maybe it’s because I place too much emphasis on making the game world coherent. I suppose if I wanted, there would be no real problem with introducing new players the same way videos games do when you plug in a new controller. “Player 2 has joined the game.” I don’t actually know if it would bother my players to have new characters suddenly appear as if placed there by the gods. For me it would be jarring; I like the world to feel consistent. I’m curious to know how other GMs handle this.

There are two situations when a GM is typically faced with integrating a new character into the game. Either a new player has joined the game, or a regular player’s character has died and a new one must be introduced.

On the one hand, I don’t think characters should simply appear. Adventurers wandering through a desert should not suddenly find themselves with a new companion by their side. There should be some “in-game” explanation for the character’s appearance, and for the character deciding to join the adventurers. Players wandering through a desert might find their new companion unconscious and dehydrated. Once the party saved the new arrival’s life, the new character could join the party out of gratitude. One of my time honored methods of introducing new characters is to have them enter the game as henchpeople of NPC quest givers. The NPC sends their trusted servant along to ensure success, and once the adventure is over, the character can choose to stay with the party if they please.

On the other hand, players should not be left sitting on their hands while they wait for the rest of the party to find them. They’ve come to your game table to play a game, not watch helplessly as others do so. This is particularly true for new players. Most players will approach a new group with justified trepidation. We’ve all heard horror stories about terrible GMs. Making a new player sit around for fifteen or twenty minutes doing nothing is a good way to end up as one of the subjects of those horror stories yourself.

So, introducing a new character is a balancing act between maintaining a logical world, and keeping players engaged in the game.

Within my last three gaming sessions, I’ve had to introduce two new players into my established gaming group. The first player entered the game just as the party was starting a new adventure. The party had ended the previous session by returning to a lone wizard’s tower with the magical reagent he had asked them to find. They accepted his offer to rest and resupply there, and in the morning as our next session began, he offered them a new quest. He needed a relic retrieved from the depths of a far off dungeon. In travelling there, the party would pass through a small human settlement, and I thought that would be the best place for them to encounter the new half elven rogue who had joined the group. I could even have the wizard tell them that they’d need to hire somebody who could to pick locks when they passed through the town.

Unfortunately, it would take about an hour of gameplay to reach the town, so that was right out. Lacking any better ideas, I simply had the wizard introduce the rogue as “an associate who also recently returned from performing a task for me.” He said the rogue would be helpful, and poof. The party was formed.

I only now find myself thinking that perhaps the game might have been improved by running two concurrent adventures. One where the party was journeying to that town, and another where the rogue player was going through a brief solo adventure in the town. I could switch back and forth between the two parties each ‘day’ of game time. That may be something I need to try in the future.

The very next session, we had another new player join the game. This one was a gnome barbarian, which was a particular challenge. The previous session had ended in a dungeon which, for unrelated reasons, had been magically warded to prevent gnomes from entering it. I wassn’t quite sure how I wanted to handle the issue, because I had gone to great lengths in the previous session to establish that even gnomes of great wealth and power had been unable to find a way to enter. It seemed ridiculous that a level 1 barbarian should be able to make it.

Fortunately, the players had already discovered a room filled with gnomish statues, and confirmed that those statues were actually real gnomes who had been turned to stone. Before the game started, I gave the new player a little background: she was a warrior who had fought beside the gnomish King Teleron against an army of Giants, Ogres, and Orcs. In the battle of Stonefist Peak, she had been magically turned to stone, and she’d spent the last 200 years as a statue.

I thought this was a really elegant solution, but again I was faced with the problem of potentially forcing her to sit the game out while the rest of the party tried to figure out how to break her curse. My original plan had been to make freeing those gnomes a potential long-term goal for the characters, but now I needed a way to do it immediately. So, when the game started, I had the players find a scrap of paper at the bottom of a treasure chest (which they had looted just before we ended the last game) which came from the diary of one of the dungeon’s prisoners. The prisoner’s diary explained that Demon’s Blood (which the players already had on hand) could be used to reverse the spell. They poured the blood on one of the statues, and the new player’s gnome did a happy little flip and shouted “ta da!”

The way I introduced that second character was somewhat more elegant than the way I introduced the first. None the less I had to fudge some stuff around to make it work: finding the diary which wasn’t there before, whichever statue they had poured the blood on would have been the correct character, etc.

How do you handle introducing new characters to your game?