What is Player Agency?

[Lorsa]

I think you missed my point where the Core books have very little fluff race information. So just where are you looking for all of the information?

The Monster's Manual.

It is possible, any idea what that might be?

Maybe we can break it down to the two Cool Everyone Collective ways:

1.The Alignment Game: The game uses Alignment, as pre the rules. Good is good, evil is evil. Things are very black and white and direct.
2.The Gray Game: The game has no Alignment and does not use any such rules. Anything can be anything, or not. Things might be as they seem, or not.

(there is the #3 here, the one I use, but lets keep it simple and just talk about the above two)

What you've missed is that this alignment discussion is completely pointless and has nothing at all to do with the original arguments or their points.

It is at best a failure of understand by you how it is not important, and at worst an obfuscation attempt in order to avoid the real issue.

The argument I was making was that you should (or could), make two sides different from each other, so that working for one will provide different adventures and different a different game than the other.

You seem to be arguing from a side of "no, the two sides the players choose from should always be identical and give the exact same outcome because I really want to deny my players any chance of having an impact on their game".

Hell, even two normal equally moral grey human nobles could (or would probably) have different types of land and different types of economy. So working for one side would involve protecting valuable mines from intruders whereas the other would involve protecting farms. Or whatever difference you want. Two sides being absolutely equal except for the color of their tabards is just cartoonish.

Forget the moral stuff and focus on the discussion we are having; there is no reason at all why two sides should be identical and that working for them would result in identical adventures.

I agree, in general, about culture change. I put lots of culture in my games.

Except, apparently, that everyone has the same culture.

Yes, that would both be wrong.

Glad we established that.

Odd, I said that in a gray world, any group is just as likely to betray the characters as any other group. Then you jumped to things must go the way the players want and there must all ways be that good escape option for the players to pick.

Unless your world is just One shade of grey, even in a grey world, no group is just as likely to betray the characters as any other group. People are DIFFERENT, some are more loyal than others. That's the thing with shades of grey. Some people are more loyal than others. And if the players happen to work for a more loyal person, the outcome in the game should be different compared to if they worked for someone who is disloyal.

Do you agree with that or do you think that both all people are equally likely to do any action always?

I never said ''equally evil'' , the example was a Evil Crime Lord and a Good Baron, that would both, in Evil or Good ways cause problems for the Characters.

Except your example has a problem in that it is not, in fact, good to imprison someone whom have acted on your orders just because you intentionally didn't give them a writ only so that you could later imprison them. It's not a good act by any measure.

This is just the one example problem here.

Using one example to highlight how a game could be different depending on the choices made is perfectly valid as it invalidates the argument that "no the game is always identical no matter what the players choose". The only counter argument is "I don't care about established NPC personality or verisimilitude or anything, I would never let the players make any choices that turn out to have meaning and the whole game is solely run based on my whim".

We will use the Everyone Collective WordSpeak: Gray Game(aka no alignment).

Sure, but this Grey Game discussion is really not the point of the Agency discussion. It's an unimportant sidetrack.

The game makes an internal sense to just itself, but not to people on the outside. For the most part the example you give would never randomly just happen....but they could. It might be the biggest difference between My Game and Your Game: I let the players know anything can and might happen, your more of like ''we all agree to do things this One Way Forever Unchanging''.

Either something is very possible and does randomly just happen OR it is rather unlikely and would never randomly just happen. You can't both have your cake and eat it. Choose what you want to argue for.

Yes.

So how often has it happened in your games that a Storm Giant with Greater invisibility has cast Lightning bolt on the enemies of your players? Ten times? A hundred? Exactly how common is this? Since you say it is "very possible", it must have happened more than once and certainly along the lines of 10% of the time.

Just as anything might happen, does not say it will...or that it will in a timely fashion. A character might wait a life time for a bolt from the blue to do something...so they might want to just do an action themselves.

Yeah, but which action? How can I select which action to take if I have no possibility to judge which is most likely to lead to success? Based on your "anything might happen" argument, I could either 1) Hit with my weapon, 2) Whistle a lovely tune or 3) Do the Hokey-Pokey and regardless of which way I go, anything might happen. So my enemy might take damage or they may not.

Either actions are divorced from their consequences or there is a link. Which way do you run your games?

In my games, hitting an enemy with a weapon is more likely to kill them than whistling. Your preferences can be different, but then you really shouldn't be in a discussion about player agency because your whole premiss is "I don't allow it".

I would note that Real Life is not like that. In Real Life, anything can happen.

No it can't. I can't be the president of USA, I can't survive standing in the middle of nuclear bomb explosion, I can't upload my consciousness to a computer. There are plenty of things that can't happen. It has never been, nor ever will be, "anything can happen". That's not how Real Life works.

But my point is everywhere has Health Care, it is just the details that are different.

Except that those details are really important, and can make the difference between life or death.

My argument is most people will do ''something'' to get there stolen stuff back...and, yes, some won't. But most people will do ''something''. So rob two people, there is a very, very, very good chance that they will both ''do something''. So the players have two choices: rob person A or B, but both will ''do something'' if they are robbed.

But they will do different something.

You can debate ''what ifs'', but arresting characters that commit crimes is a common thing good people do.

As I said above, it's not a thing they do if the crimes are ones they've ordered themselves! That's not part of the idea of "good", even if it is a Grey Game without an alignment system. But this is a tangent also and we should drop this discussion as it has very little to do with the point that players making choices can affect the game in meaningful ways.

Well, as always, I would be the Lone Voice of Another Option not given by the Everyone Collective.

Does that mean that if all of us suddenly started to agree with you, you would change your opinion?