“Player Agency” in TTRPGs

I’ve been hearing this term a lot lately and thought it was time to say something.

What is “Player Agency” in a TTRPG? To put it in the simplest terms, it’s the freedom for the players to do anything they want in character. You hear a lot of DM/GM cringe whenever a player does something rude or assanine and follows it with, “It’s what my character would do.”

The opposite of this effect, this concept of player agency, is the DM/GM tells the characters exactly where they go and what their character is doing. The extreme version of this is like listening to the DM/GM read a novel they wrote that just happens to include the PCs. The players get to roll dice when the DM/GM deems it appropriate. It’s the worst version of railroaded storytelling when taken too far.

Yes, this is very much the Sandbox vs Railroad adventure argument all over again. Player agency gets thrown around whenever the GM oversteps their authority and imposes rules or environmental conditions, plays NPCs as if they were PCs, and reads a block text description of what’s happening. I also hear player agency getting abused to the extreme with the Safety Tools discussion.

So, back in my day, (Bwah Ha HA!) we cooperated with the GM.

If the GM said, “I have this module I want to run,” we would make characters and play through the thing. We had to suspend our disbelief and cooperate a little bit with the GM. We agreed to share in the adventure of the module. We had to trust the GM was still going to let us play our characters and make decisions that mostly related to the module.

While there isn’t much player agency in an old school module sometimes, it was still tons of fun. If the GM was running a homebrew adventure, we still had to trust in the GM and suspend disbelief occasionally and try to go along with the gist of the plot as much as reasonably possible. Most GMs rolled with the punches (still do) when the players pulled out something no one expected.

I hear a lot of guys (mostly cishet Caucasian guys- truth) in the OSR arguing that “Story games are terrible.” I hear a lot of newer, 5E Dungeons & Dragons players decrying how “DM’s are the devil. We should do away with them altogether.” Followed shortly by, “There’s a DM shortage. Oh noes…”

GM as a player.

I personally cringe when someone says this. I get it that yes, the GM is just as important at the table. The GM is one cog in the adventuring machine and cooperative gaming requires everyone’s consent to take part in the adventure. Cool.

But I learned early on that the GM/DM is far, far more invested in the game that most regular players. I’m not saying this from a perspective of superiority, but rather one of hard work, dedication, and lots of creative energy. The GM/DM has to create, voice, and dice for everything and everyone the characters are ever going to encounter everywhere they find it. Even with the players taking on part of the world creation load, the GM/DM is the person to pull it all together. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Someone once told me that being a DM would be the hardest challenge I’d ever love. Yes, sometimes the DM puts a lot of time, money, and energy into the game than the average player. [*One Core (Player’s)  book vs Core book, GM’s guide, Monster book, world book, adventure, and whatever other weird thing the players dredged up from the bowels of the Internet this week.] I collect RPGs, so it’s no big for me. I could see where it’s a big commitment for some people, though.

Being a GM/DM can be exhausting, even overwhelming sometimes. There’s a lot that can go into even a simple medieval fantasy RPG campaign. But, at the end of the night when everyone else has gone home; all the minis and terrain are put away; and my notes are finally caught up? There’s a crazy huge rush of endorphins and satisfaction. We created this thing together and it was fun! Totally worth all the effort.

Where’s the happy middle on this overall debate?

I’ve made it abundantly clear here on my blog that I am not big on so called “GM-less” games. So, I’m not really a fan of extreme player agency. If someone wants to play some of the NPC interactions or contribute an NPC or two, that’s great. If the player hijacks an NPC and tells me what they’re going to do? We have issues.

On the other side of the coin, I’m a writer. I know some of my adventures, especially dungeons, are a bit railroad-y. I’m leaning heavily on my players’ collective cooperation to run the adventure as planned. Or they go totally off the rails (because my wife read my notes) and I have to throw the adventure over my shoulder and ask, “Okay. What are we doing?”

As a DM in a long running campaign, it’s super important to let the players take the wheel at times. I might have a BBEG or some major villain who regularly sends lackeys to mess with the group, but the PCs and do their own thing. If they go completely in the opposite direction of the dungeon I had planned, I’ll improvise something. Why do you think I have all these random d12 tables all over the place?

On the flip side of this, in a short game, one shot, or convention game, I very appreciate it when the players kinda agree to get railroaded a bit. Maybe? I’ll let a lot go as a player in terms of agency if I have a pregen character for a one shot. That’s what I love about convention games. Everything’s cool as long as I’m making decisions for the character.

In an all-player game, who writes up the schedule for the game, provides the venue to play in, and runs the opposing forces in combat? Who arbitrates disputes between players? Who says what’s happening in the environment on any given occasion. You can’t design a good game by committee, and I think it’s tough trying to play/run one of them.

Different games, different tables: different expectations about the game.

This is usually the moot conclusion most online TTRPG debates rest upon. Your table, your players, you’re the GM, so they’re your decisions to make. That’s what we pretty much always say.

What works for my players may not work for all players. I like that warm medium ground between “story game” and open game world plus anything goes. Yes, I want my players to have that agency to explore what’s beyond the next mountain or a kingdom across the sea. I’ll be happy to create that for them if I have some inkling of where they want to go.

Otherwise, I love it when the group comes to the conclusion of the DM is hinting he wants us to go to this location. There might be a dungeon full of Jeff’s trademark sweet, sweet loot if we survive. Let’s try the dungeon for the next week or two.

Cooperation is what it’s all about. It’s vital to have those conversations amongst GM and players before players start making characters. Otherwise, someone might show up for a deep, meaningful background that will never come up in the bloody dungeon romp. The murderhobo dungeon slayer is going to stick out like a sore thumb in a dramatic romance game. We all have to agree on the setting, the world, and to some degree what kind of story we’re going to tell.

Thank you for being here. I very much appreciate it. Maybe tomorrow we’ll talk about that sweet, sweet dungeon loot.