What We Talk About When We Talk About Player Agency

As a relative newbie in the TTRPG blogosphere (is that still a word?), I am discovering dozens and dozens of blogs and trying fruitlessly to catch up on hundreds of blog posts. And they keep writing more!!! All joking aside, I recently stumbled across recently, a popular post from Knight at the Opera titled Princess Mononoke and DM-Prepared Plots got me thinking about player agency and what it means in a game. 

One of the central topics of discussion in the TTRPG space is player agency. It's often prized as a thing to be elevated and any situation that limits player agency is seen to be bad. 

But I think the discussion often simplifies player agency without stopping to consider what we mean when we talk about player agency. And I think generally we find that there are two types of player agency: player agency within the scene and player agency within the overall scenario. 

Player agency within the scene is the ability of players to make decisions or take actions that determine how a given scene plays out or how a problem is resolved (or complicated). This type of player agency is very important, and limits to it should either be based on the rules of the game or the fiction of the world. 

For example, a fifth level fighter in D&D cannot cast fireball because the rules of the game prevent it - they lack the mechanical class ability. Additionally, the fiction of the world restricts it as well. If the player of a fighter wants to be able to cast fireball, they have to make game decisions that allow that to fit within the game rules and, ideally, the fiction of the world. In the game rules, this would mean multiclassing. And in the fiction, you could come up with a suitable scenario where the fighter decided to change careers and went to wizarding school or perhaps learned a secret technique from elven bladesingers or somesuch. 

(Interestingly, in D&D, the rules are more restrictive than the fiction. Some play groups might just handwave the fiction away and focus on the rules. That's fine, too, if that's the kind of table you play at. But some story-focused games like Blades in the Dark or Fate, promote a "fiction first" approach. Having the ruling make sense in the fiction is critical to have it make sense within the games rules. But I digress.)

The point is that player agency within a scene should generally be limited only by the rules or the fiction of the game. When that agency is violated for other reasons - for example, the GM prevents the players from acting so that their important NPC can complete their monologue, or a monster is surreptitiously given immunity from attacks so the GM can try to make a battle last longer, or the GM presents the players with a problem that has only one possible solution and the GM invalidates other equally reasonable solutions from the players - it feels bad. 

So, generally, player agency within a scene should be respected as long as it operates within the rules of the game and the fiction of the gameworld.

But what about player agency within the overall scenario? What I'm talking about here is the ability of the players to guide the direction of the scenario or campaign. That is, players pursuing their own agendas or following leads that sound interesting to them. An open-ended sandbox campaign would be the classic example of player agency within the overall scenario. Each session, the players collectively decide what direction to go, what hex to explore, what dungeon to delve. The players decide where the campaign leads.

However, many groups are perfectly happy to limit player agency within the overall scenario or campaign. Many (perhaps most) D&D groups play published campaigns which are, if not on rails, at least limited to the locations, NPCs, and events which the campaign guide offers the DM. A group playing a published campaign like Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Out of the Abyss might never see any locations, NPCs, or events outside of what's in the campaign book. And as long as everyone at the table is having a good time and agree that's the kind of game they want, that's fine!

Giving players agency within the overall scenario is a play culture choice, and different groups will have different attitudes towards it depending on the culture of that group. Some groups will prize it above all else. Other groups will care less about it and are more interested in seeing where the planned story leads. Some groups will take a middle ground. There is not a clear cut case for this type of player agency as there is with player agency within a scene. 

It turns out that player agency isn't always a thing to be prized above all else. While it should generally be prioritized within scenes and limited only by the confines of the game rules and the fiction, the decision of how much agency the players have over the overall scenario or campaign is one that will vary from group to group.

I'm sure lots more has been written on this topic. If you have an opinion or a recommendation, share it in the comments or hit me up on Bluesky.