Adventure Writing: Player Agency
Player Agency is a key topic for Adventure Writers. By default, Players are in charge of who their characters are, what they do, what they think, and how they feel. Adventure writers should be mindful not to take away this agency unless it is essential for the adventure and no other stratagem will work. This makes writing an adventure very different than writing a screenplay or written story. In those situations, a writer decides what the main characters do, think, and feel. In an RPG adventure, the main characters of the story belong to the players and the writer doesn’t know who they are, how they think, or what they will do.
Here are some of the most common ways writers erode player agency and how to avoid them.
Narrating in Read-Aloud Text
“As you burst into the room, you see a sight that shakes you to your very core, a disfigured body lies on a bloodstained altar surrounded by hooded figures chanting rhythmically. You instinctively draw your weapons and move to attack!”
The above description is pretty typical of read aloud text in that it uses second person voice to paint an image for the players. Most GMs and most Writers use this voice and style. It’s a good technique to create immersion and feels natural in most cases. The problem is that it tends to encourage the writer to narrate player actions. Since “You” is the subject of the narrative, there is an instinct to describe what “You” is doing, feeling, and thinking in the narrative. In this case, there are three elements eroding player agency.
- The characters are bursting into a room. While that might be something dramatic the writer imagines happening, the players might want to sneak into the room, or peek into the room, or teleport into the room, or any number of things other than breaking in.
- The characters are shaken to their core. Maybe one of the characters is a necromancer or mortician and this is the least horrifying thing they have seen today. Maybe they are an emotionless automaton. Maybe they are a sadist and enjoy things like this. You don’t know because you don’t know who the characters are when you write the story.
- The characters draw their weapons and attack. This is the most direct violation of the bunch, and honestly the lest common. Most role playing adventures focus on problem solving and there are usually many ways to resolve most problems. The characters may be the sort that ask questions before engaging in combat, or they may be sneaky types, or they might want to run away. Those are their decisions to make even if you intend this encounter to be a combat.
So, how do you solve these kinds of issues without violating player agency? You just need to limit yourself to what can be seen, heard, felt, etc… and use general descriptive terms in place of emotional responses.
“In this room is a disturbing scene. A disfigured body lies on a bloodstained altar surrounded by hooded figures chanting rhythmically.”
Now it is up to the Game Master to handle how the players get into the room and what the players decide to do about what they see and hear. The magic of Game Masters is that they can adapt to the wide range of possible actions the players take and adjust events so that the story keeps moving. You can help them by giving GM instructions and suggestions. In this scene, you might note that the cultists around the alter will attack the characters as soon as they are aware of them. That way you greatly increase the chances that this is indeed going to be a fight if that is important for the story or mood. You can say the scene is disturbing (to an average viewer), but you don’t have to say the players are specifically disturbed by it, they get to role play their reaction.
I don’t want to say that you must drop second person narration, it’s just that when you protect player agency, but you will find it is often superfluous if you guard player agency. It can still be a nice device for immersion, so you could write it like this.
“You look into the room and witness a disturbing scene. A disfigured body lies on a bloodstained altar surrounded by hooded figures. You can hear them chanting rhythmically to their dark god.”
Here you are only describing what their senses can discern about the environment which is a largely passive act. Of course, a blind or deaf character might not see or hear these things, but players can extrapolate an able bodied description to suit their character’s capabilities. Whether you use second person or not is your choice, but you should be consistent about it.
Overcoming Challenges
Most RPG adventures revolve around the characters encountering and overcoming a series of challenges. These can be combat, social encounters, physical obstacles, puzzles, mysteries, and so on. It is very common for writers of adventures to imagine how the heroes will overcome the challenges in the adventure. They must answer the sphynx’s puzzle, walk across the tightrope, or sneak into the Vizier’s ballroom. You can see the scene play out in your head and so you write it into the adventure detailing how the heroes do these things. This is not how RPG adventures really work. Players can do what the like and often have all manner of resources you might not have imagined. They might try to kill the sphinx, build a new bridge over the chasm, and dress up as servants to infiltrate the Vizir’s grand ball. While you can assume the players are going to face a challenge you put in front of them, you really don’t know how they will do it.
The rule of thumb I advise is this. “Plan for the heroes to overcome the challenge, but don’t plan on how.” A good adventure will have guidance for the GM for options that you anticipate, but it should not depend on the players choosing those options. So if a combat is likely, include NPC stats for the GM and describe the tactics the NPCs use. If dialogue makes good sense, then include a bit about what they want and what their attitude is. Try to imagine you as the player making choices and being clever, not what you think would be the coolest scene in a story or movie.
If you have important clues or events that must take place, try to “adventurer proof” them. If an NPC has a secret message the players need, don’t give the NPCs a lot of escape routes or put a bottomless pit in the location that they could get pushed into. Better yet, give the GM alternate places where the secret message could be so that the GM doesn’t trap themselves into a plot corner. Even if your adventure has a largely linear plot, you need to leave flexibility so the GM can maneuver the players back on track without making them feel “railroaded” into just being a narrative tool of the adventure’s plot.
The other key tool you have as an adventure writer are environmental clues and suggestions. If something is important, draw attention to it in read aloud boxes with an interesting description and tell the GM directly so they can do the same. Use curiosity and greed to pull heroes towards exciting moments and get them to naturally pursue the plot you have in mind. Players will generally pay attention to a golden rune stone, and typically ignore a mundane moss covered stone. Likewise, if you make something seem scary and dangerous, while another, safer option is available, most players will choose the safer option first. Just as important is to avoid creating unintentional red herrings, by providing in intriguing descriptions of elements that are largely irrelevant to the action.
Handling NPCs
Once you realize you have no control over they players and their actions, it is very tempting to put the clever and interesting NPCs you have created into the drivers seat of an adventure. Suddenly the NPCs are making all the choices and telling the player characters where to go and what to do. It makes things very simple as a writer, but if in heavy doses, it makes the players feel like passengers on a train or workers on an assembly line. The players should feel like the stars of the story, the most important decisionmakers. Stories featuring active Villains should have some element of those opposing forces driving the plot and story, but in the end, it should be the player characters that determine the outcome, wresting control from the antagonists.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use NPCs to help build the story and interact with the players. You can even have NPCs give orders if they are in a position of authority, but those orders should be about setting the goals for the players, not how to achieve them. The only time an NPC should be solving a problem for the players is if they have chosen to ask the NPC for help. The excitement of overcoming challenges is the main thrill of being a player, so you should do anything you can to avoid taking that glory away from them.
Minding Motivations
Motivations are very important for an adventure. For the most part, players are pretty good at understanding the overall vibe of an adventure and following along with it. If you have an adventure about getting a fabulous treasure, the heroes will mostly adopt that goal. If you have an adventure about saving a town, they will mostly think about the safety of the villagers. If you have a story about stopping a villain, they will generally hunt them down and kill them. Once you have set any kind of expectation at the start of the adventure, you write subsequent encounters with those overarching goals in mind. If you set up an expectation of a diplomatic mission, and then write nothing but combat encounters, you will have many players bending over backwards to avoid the fights you have planned and being frustrated that the adventure seems to be setting them up for failure. Its fine if you have some kind of plot twist that changes the context, but you need to signal clearly that this is what is happening so players can adjust their motivational outlook. So the key here is to check every encounter against the motivations you intrinsically set up for the players at the beginning of the adventure and rework anything that unintentionally expects players to behave in a way contrary to that motivation.
Final Thoughts
In Role Playing, there are no hard and fast rules, but there are generally good and generally bad practices. Its always a good practice to protect player agency whenever you can. You can think of it as a kind of glass wall between you as the writer and the players. You get to say what is out there in the world, but you don’t get to reach through the glass and control the player characters. The more you respect that wall, the better you will get at creating adventures that feel natural to players even when you have imagined their journey long before they set out on it. Any rough patches, the GM is there to handle while you give them all the support they need. If you do your job well, every group of players will have a unique experience playing the adventure that is driven both by your work, the GMs creativity, and the player’s imaginations.