Scribbles and Horrors

Dear reader, I am not someone who believes the be all end all of tabletop games is player agency. I subscribe to a different idea, that games are social and material processes which are fruitful in themselves; the mere application of rules to a gamestate–even when that application is choiceless and tedious–is worthwhile to me. Monopoly is good, actually.

However, I found myself making an argument about player agency and I’d like to explore it here. For the sake of this post, then, I will take up the position that agency is King: the point of making and playing games is for players to be able to make cool moves. Say this is true.

I argue that, sometimes, character creation reduces player agency. Decision-paralysis and the pressure to make “good” character creation choices can reduce players’ abilities to make cool moves in play at the table.

The argument isn’t very complicated, just that energy and inspiration are components to agency—finite resources—and that choosing to expend them while in the adventure rather than before can be a better idea.

“How can I make this photographer that my Ref handed me useful in this fight against a bugbear?!” is a more interesting and fruitful choice (a cooler move, more agency) than “Should I put my skill points into Tact or Righteousness?”

You could say that allowing the player to choose the photographer in the first place gives them two cool moves instead of the one, and thus that character creation still increases agency. This might be so if we had unlimited time and unending energy, but I think the effort necessary to choose a photographer lessens the coolness of the photographer’s bugbear actions. It feels less efficient to me.

Besides, if that were the case, then we could increase agency infinitely by letting players choose what classes are available, what rules to use, and so on. This would be fun, but in the infinite series of increasing agency the game sort of disappears.

My basic claim is just that often “here’s the situation, make do with the pieces you have to achieve some desired outcome” can indeed enable agency in a way “here are building blocks, assemble them so that you can be prepared for some situations, and then we will have you go into some situations” does not.

Now this is a focus thing, right, like if you’re playing The Character Creation Game, where the goal is to build the best character, obviously eschewing character creation only reduces agency. In the games I generally play the focus is on what one does with the character, so prioritizing player time for doing is what will increase agency.

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Again, though, my real thoughts are that agency isn’t really the most important part of these games, that process is. From a process perspective, character creation is great.