Genre Police: Joining The Agency

For a while now, I’ve been undertaking articles now where I look at components of a game as a text for understanding what it wants us to do.

I looked at initiative and combat, and then, in my last article, I took a moment to look at how the game rules themselves can function as the format for understanding its expectations. 

In this article, we’re going to look at another part of those components, something that has to be handled carefully – player agency.

The Great Protected Value

One of the idioms about GMing games is about making sure your players have agency. And in basic principle this a very good idea. 

A group of players who feel that they have no impact on a story or no ability to affect its direction are really just going through the motions. And they feel it. So as GMs we should make sure that players have the ability to control the narrative through their decisions. They should be free to make choices and as long as those choices sit within the ruleset of the game, their agency of choice should be respected and allowed.

Except….well..there’s a bit of a problem. Most games have limits. Things you explicitly can’t do. Ongoing plot lines and previous choices also limit their avenues going forward having a real effect in game. 

So where do we draw a line? I’d argue that again, we have to look to the specific text of each game and where it tells us to give these lines. 

To take D&D as a measure for a minute, we know that the game is fairly wide in what it allows. It only really takes agency of control for a character away from the player as a magical effect, usually when pitched against others in a combat setting. A player of D&D can usually be assured that the DM of their game isn’t going to be making narrative decisions about what their character does outside of a very specific ‘charmed’ type situation. 

But this is not the case in all games. Some games are going to not only tell you can’t do something, but they’re going let somebody else tell you what your character does.

Loss Of Control

Usually when a game takes control of your character from you, it’s because one of the themes of the game is about control. 

In Vampire: The Masquerade whenever my players have failed a self-control role, then the true impact of loss of control is felt because I (as the Storyteller) am now in the drivers seat. All they can do is watch as they ruin their friendships by berserking into people, running away and abandoning their friends or generally making things go much worse. 

This loss of agency is critical to the heart of that game, you can sort of play Vampire with just three virtues stats and nothing else and still have a great time. Call Of Cthulhu is a similar idea – its an exploration of Lovecraftian cosmic horror requires players to occasionally break down and take actions they wouldn’t have or lose control of their ability to affect change because that feeling of powerlessness in the face of something vast and your mind working against you is an intrinsic part of cosmic horror.

You’ll notice in both of these systems, the rules for taking away agency are heavily codified. They aren’t just ‘people get to control you’. They have specific systems and rules and time limits for loss of control. This is because while the game wants to occasionally remove player agency, it wants it to feel fair that it does so. I’ve seen some examples in accounts of both of these above games where GM’s haven’t realised that this is a fundamental part of the agreement between the game and players. Instead of understanding that players have agreed to lose control occasionally in exchange for it to widen or improve a narrative, they have just made odd or terrible control decisions. 

For example, I once heard of a Call Of Cthulhu keeper who caused a player to have a fatal crash because of a temporary bout of madness without any dice rolls. All this did was dead end a narrative and remove the final moments of a character from a player. A crash might have served a dramatic purpose or upped the tension, but to simply off the character worked against what the game is trying to do. So we have to remember when we come across systems that players have agreed to use them and we need to honour that commitment in case they choose to not trust them again should be abuse them.

By limiting agency, the game is telling you about itself and where is places interest – it has removed control in order to provide a different play experience. Sometimes it is in personal horror or feeling small. Sometimes, like King Arthur Pendragon, it is about maintaining a feeling of characters acting as archetypes or being bound to their word. In The Farm, it’s about knowing the story you are telling is going to end up with one PC dead before it ends and that becoming the point of the game. It’s never about railroading player choice. It’s about generating a storyline a player wouldn’t choose and then seeing how they resolve it.

This might seem like anathema to the thinking of some but it also does what rules in games are designed to do: it generates situations. 

People talk about fail-forward mechanics all the time, where we choose to fail or use failure as a way to generate further narrative. In reality, all rules take the decisions about storytelling out of our hands. We enjoy that moment when we don’t know if what we want from the story is going to happen, and we roll a dice, and it generates a result. 

In agreeing to play a game rather than tell a story, every participant agrees that sometimes the rules will tell us ‘no’. In games with good design, we are rewarded for that agreement with a mechanic that helps us find new ways to tell stories and exciting unexpected horizons. When you think about agency, remember that sometimes, it’s nice not to be in control.

Next time, I’m going to talk about control in a completely different way, as I look at group dynamics in RPG games and the dreaded leadership role.