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Dealing with agency and retcon (in semi sandbox)
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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9073199" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>I don't know that we're honestly that far apart, I'm picking out a few specific points that I think are where we continue to not align. It mostly looks to me in these examples that you're eliding the question of evaluation I pointed to earlier. It's not enough to have a state on which to make decisions, and for those decisions to produce new states; you need a point and criteria where your play will be evaluated for effectiveness in order to give the prior set of decisions meaning. To be blunt and oversimplify, "gameplay" as I'm discussing it here requires the players try to win.</p><p></p><p>It's fine to shift that up one layer, what you're talking about with advancement/resource mechanics that reward failure in a given task. I'd call them catch-up mechanisms in a more conventional game, and a lively discussion would emerge about whether or not catch-up mechanics should primarily be about rubber banding or gameable in their own right. Fundamentally, that just means you're picking a different evaluation point, which I don't see an issue with. The problem comes when you try and shift the goalposts dynamically; agency in gameplay requires a goal. If that goal is going to change, it needs to do so in a structured that's either laid out preemptively in the rules of the game being played OR in some circumstances might do so as a response to a decision by a player. The latter case is most often degenerate (think like kingmaking, I can't win, so I'll at least ensure Y loses), but it is a key design feature in some games, say like in Oath when one accepts a position with the Chancellor, or in exploration play focused sandbox type games where one adopts and discards goals as you go, basically just to see the mechanisms play out (think like Crusader Kings).</p><p></p><p>Oath is actually a prime example, considering. The game is structured to create an ongoing narrative about history of an empire that spans multiple rounds of play, and the game has specific mechanisms for allowing prior games to influence future ones; it's essentially a board game specifically trying to create a connection across multiple plays of the game. It still ends and has victor(s) from round to round and one can play it well or badly.</p><p></p><p>I feel like this discussion is mostly orthogonal to my point. I don't dispute the function of games in producing story, but I still think there is a unique, gameplay specific kind of agency. I actually quite like "player agency" as the name, because "player" marks the participant as someone engaged in a game, but it's understandably a muddled term in the TTRPG space. Part of the appeal of games as an activity is that in simplifying the complexity of the world down to a series of systems one gains a locus of control it's impossible to have otherwise. The restrictions on what is possible, combined with a specific goal give players unique agency that isn't possible elsewhere. </p><p></p><p>Harkening back to [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] 's question earlier about why I'm even interested in TTRPGs, they provide a unique and interesting structure by which that agency can be pursued in a larger and less bounded space than other kinds of game can allow. They have the potential to do so with stunning efficiency when designed with carefully applied abstraction, relative to the difficulty of offering a player even a fraction of the available space in other formats, like videogames. The story is nice too.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9073199, member: 6690965"] I don't know that we're honestly that far apart, I'm picking out a few specific points that I think are where we continue to not align. It mostly looks to me in these examples that you're eliding the question of evaluation I pointed to earlier. It's not enough to have a state on which to make decisions, and for those decisions to produce new states; you need a point and criteria where your play will be evaluated for effectiveness in order to give the prior set of decisions meaning. To be blunt and oversimplify, "gameplay" as I'm discussing it here requires the players try to win. It's fine to shift that up one layer, what you're talking about with advancement/resource mechanics that reward failure in a given task. I'd call them catch-up mechanisms in a more conventional game, and a lively discussion would emerge about whether or not catch-up mechanics should primarily be about rubber banding or gameable in their own right. Fundamentally, that just means you're picking a different evaluation point, which I don't see an issue with. The problem comes when you try and shift the goalposts dynamically; agency in gameplay requires a goal. If that goal is going to change, it needs to do so in a structured that's either laid out preemptively in the rules of the game being played OR in some circumstances might do so as a response to a decision by a player. The latter case is most often degenerate (think like kingmaking, I can't win, so I'll at least ensure Y loses), but it is a key design feature in some games, say like in Oath when one accepts a position with the Chancellor, or in exploration play focused sandbox type games where one adopts and discards goals as you go, basically just to see the mechanisms play out (think like Crusader Kings). Oath is actually a prime example, considering. The game is structured to create an ongoing narrative about history of an empire that spans multiple rounds of play, and the game has specific mechanisms for allowing prior games to influence future ones; it's essentially a board game specifically trying to create a connection across multiple plays of the game. It still ends and has victor(s) from round to round and one can play it well or badly. I feel like this discussion is mostly orthogonal to my point. I don't dispute the function of games in producing story, but I still think there is a unique, gameplay specific kind of agency. I actually quite like "player agency" as the name, because "player" marks the participant as someone engaged in a game, but it's understandably a muddled term in the TTRPG space. Part of the appeal of games as an activity is that in simplifying the complexity of the world down to a series of systems one gains a locus of control it's impossible to have otherwise. The restrictions on what is possible, combined with a specific goal give players unique agency that isn't possible elsewhere. Harkening back to [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] 's question earlier about why I'm even interested in TTRPGs, they provide a unique and interesting structure by which that agency can be pursued in a larger and less bounded space than other kinds of game can allow. They have the potential to do so with stunning efficiency when designed with carefully applied abstraction, relative to the difficulty of offering a player even a fraction of the available space in other formats, like videogames. The story is nice too. [/QUOTE]
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