On Player Agency, Old School vs. New School and Published Adventures

"Er, thanks, but I think I'd just rather rescue Hekaton."*

*Dungeon map by Tim Hartin at Paratime Design.

The blogger, Raging Owlbear (Marty Walser), wrote two critical comments on a post I wrote a few days ago, Why Do Players Enjoy Being Puppets? I told him I would respond to them in another post. Owlbear has a great blog that I have read with interest and enjoyment. It seems like we might disagree on a few things, which is, of course, fine. This post is simply a response to his comments and questions. It's not about having the last word, or anything like that.

The reason I will largely frame this current post around some of Owlbear's actual comments is not to be snarky or last-wordish, but because I'm too lazy to compose a structure for this post from scratch.

Keep in mind that Owlbear typed his comments (the ones I will be excerpting in this post) quickly on an iPhone, whereas I'm at a computer, sitting back with a cigar and a drink and a thesaurus and all the rest. By the way, I'm basically incapable of writing more than three sentences on an iPhone.

Owlbear ended his second comment with this question:

As I noted, this railroad adventure style has nothing to do with whether you are playing "old school" or "new school". It is an issue specific to adventure design when writing a campaign-length module, regardless of which version of D&D you are playing.

So, stated simply, do you agree or disagree with that assertion?

Let me try to answer that, as well as responding to some of the other comments.

The what-is-old-school vs. what-is-new-school debate is interesting and important to a point. Obviously, once it threatens to come down to mere arbitrary semantics, it gets silly and tedious. But I think it's obscurantist to suggest that it must always do that (I'm not alleging that Owlbear says this.)  

On old school vs. new school, one thing that OSR people often do is to draw a chronological line somewhere, say at edition 3.5 or whatever, to separate the two. But virtually everyone agrees that if the categories are meaningful, then there are "new school" elements before that line, and "old school" elements after.

Indeed, old school people such as I, often argue that the seeds, so to speak, of various new school developments were present from almost the very beginning of D&D (long before any quasi-arbitrary line) and developed gradually from there. So, for example, I would point to Greyhawk (1975) - published barely a year after the three little brown books (1974) - as the origin of such new schooly things as skills and hit point inflation. (Indeed, the thief and thief skills predate Greyhawk.) That probably makes me and those like me sound like reactionaries saying that 2017 problems really stem from the French Revolution or the Enlightenment or whatever. But there it is.

New things don't just suddenly spring up. And it's not silly or contradictory to argue that a new thing might have been present, in embryonic stage, right beside an old thing. It happens.

But note, I (and, I assume most other OSR types) are not condemning Greyhawk or, say, 1e AD&D or 2e AD&D as horrible games or horrible heresies or whatever when compared to the "pure" original edition of D&D (first printing, of course). We're just, among other things, making the, I assume, non-controversial point that historical developments in game design happen gradually and often in an unintended and unforeseen way, unnoticed at the time.

But chronology does matter to some extent, otherwise the words "old" and "new" would have no meaning.

The focus of Raging Owlbear's comments was the question of whether old school or new school adventures were railroady vs. sandboxy, etc. One of the problems with discussing this is that many of the terms seem loaded - Who wants to be railroaded or manipulated as a puppet? Let's all play in a sandbox together, yay! - so let me try to choose terms that are as neutral as possible. How about unplanned vs planned?

Here is an unplanned adventure, Palace of the Vampire Queen (1976), the first published (and not by TSR) adventure in D&D history. It consisted of five dungeon levels with a room key detailing monsters and treasure. That was pretty much it. True, there was a very short introduction and back story, but I'm not sure it was that important. The idea was: here is a dungeon, go and explore it. There was no preplanned plot or path, desired or anticipated.

Here is a planned adventure, Storm King's Thunder (2016), and here is an excerpt from A Guide to Storm King's Thunder:

8. Iymrith: The group gets the artifacts and returns to the oracle. They learn that they need a conch. On the way out, Iymrith attacks and Harshnag makes a heroic sacrifice.

9. Find the Conch: In the book, every giant lord has a conch. The heroes will need to go steal a conch from a giant lord. I liked a lot of these areas, so in my version I changed things a little so I can use Svardborg, Ironslag and the Cloud Giant castle in my campaign.

10. Use the Conch: It takes the group to Maelstrom (page 201). There, the heroes hopefully expose Iymrith and get a clue to Hekaton's whereabouts.

11. King Hekaton: The group tracks down Hekaton and saves him!

12. Final Battle: The adventurers team up with Hekaton to take down Iymrith.

If Owlbear wants to argue that one could run Storm King's Thunder in a more open or unplanned way, perhaps by changing some things around, I'm not going to try to refute that. I'm just going by how it is usually presented, and how it seems to have been originally designed and written.

Okay, now let's get into the argument. Here's Owlbear:

You are cherry picking your examples to somehow show that "old school" D&D is better, but it's a false premise.

I assume what Owlbear is partly reacting to is this:

But I think contemporary D&D would be more fun, or at least more fun for many people, if it went back to its original, yes, Gygaxian conception, where player agency was emphasized more - less Storm King's Thunder and more Keep on the Boderlands or In Search of the Unknown.

Well, sure I was cherry-picking. I was contrasting planned vs. unplanned adventures. But Keep and Search (unplanned) happen to be the first Dungeons & Dragons - as opposed to the chronologically later Advanced Dungeons & Dragons many of whose first published adventures were designed as tournament modules - adventures ever separately published by TSR, and Thunder (planned) is one of the most recent. I could have emphasized the chronological point even better by going back further and citing the first non-published, non-separately published or non-TSR adventures: Dave Arneson's Blackmoor, Gary Gygax's Greyhawk , Arneson's "Temple of the Frog" in the Blackmoor supplement (1975) and of course the first Judges Guild published adventures (which all predate the TSR efforts) - City State of the Invincible Overlord (1976), Tegel Manor, Wilderlands of High Fantasy and "Night of the Walking Wet" (1977), among others. All of these were unplanned.

One could also look at the sample dungeons in, say, The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures (1974), the "Holmes" version of D&D (1977) or even the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide (1979). All of these were unplanned.

And note, this is not about good vs. bad. Most people, even sympathetic OSR people, seem to think that Temple of the Frog is virtually unplayable. And, for better or worse, I'm sure most current players would regard Palace of the Vampire Queen as a sort of crude and childish joke compared to the long and detailed Storm King's Thunder. 

Any long running adventure module is going to have rails because one can't anticipate the actions of the players completely. This was just as true in AD&D as it is today.

I honestly have no idea what this means. Why must you have rails just because you can't anticipate the actions of players (and if you can anticipate them, who needs rails)? Why not just not have rails? Or, in other words, why not just create places for them to explore and then react to that as needed? Why can't you simply have, say, a dungeon with stuff in it?

Designers must write several pre-plotted scenarios for the players to run through because it is impossible to write an open world pre-published adventure.

Well, actually, Wilderlands and many current OSR efforts, such as Rob Conley's The Majestic Wilderlands (2009), are exactly that - "open world" pre-published campaigns, if by "open world" Owlbear means wilderness settings. But, more to the point, there's no reason why "open" (in the sense of unplanned) has any necessary connection to the outdoors. What about just a big dungeon with no preplanned plot?

Look at "Night Below" written for AD&D. It takes characters from 1st to 14th level culminating in a boss fight with aboleths. Are you claiming it somehow gave more control to players than Storm King's Thunder does?

No (or, I assume, no - I haven't actually read Night Below) But, among other things, Night Below was a 2e AD&D module written in 1995, twenty-one years after year zero. It's hardly evidence for the presence of, say, a planning element in chronologically early old school adventures.

Q: If you claim old school D&D gives more player agency, how are series modules like A1 - A4 (Slaver series) or Night Below, or any other longer campaign path written for AD&D any different from something like Storm King's Thunder or Hoard of the Dragon Queen?

In the Slave Lord series in particular, A3 "forces" the DM to capture the PCs because the A4 module starts out with the PCs as captives of the Slave Lords.

In a previous post that Owlbear commented on (and, thus, presumably read), I myself admitted that some of the earliest published adventures had railroady elements:

And some early TSR adventures or sets of adventures, did have their "railroad" elements. After all, you were sort of expected to go from G1 to G2 to G3 of those Giant Modules (though, I would argue that you still had much more freedom within the modules, and that "railroading" in general was not present to anywhere near the extent that it is now).

The last clause covers an important point. I would also say there's a difference between railroading the party into an adventure - going from  Scourge of the Slave Lords A3 to A4, where you must contrive to have the player-characters captured so that they can be thrown into a cave complex - and railroading them once they're there. But there's no question that the adventure path thing, or whatever you want to call it, started early. And, no, I'm not claiming that that, in and of itself is wrong or evil. I greatly enjoyed the Slavelords series.

It's more about a comparison between *any* pre-published scenario versus one that is home brewed... or an adventure module that is short in scope/length versus one that covers a broad swath of class levels (B2 versus Night Below, for example).

No. It's not about published versus home brew. That has nothing to do with it. Published adventures can be, and often are, unplanned. Consider the first D&D adventures previously mentioned, or the contemporary Stonehell Dungeon (2009) by Michael Curtis, Barrowmaze by Greg Gillespie (2012) or Dwimmermount (2014) by James Maliszewki, Alexander Macris, and Tavis Allison. And home brew adventures can be planned (though, they are perhaps less likely to be so because many people don't like dreaming up and writing up all that complicated plot stuff). In terms of adventures that are short/long in scope, the unplanned Stonehell can potentially "take you through" 10th level (the "you" refers to you, the player, as it's likely that many player characters will die). The unplanned vs. planned thing is not about length or scope.

Even aside from all that... Some DMs don't have time to build a large over-arching campaign arc because we have jobs, kids, and precious less free time than we did in high school or college...

Well, I would argue that if a DM has time to wade through 900 pages of 5th edition core book rules (!!!), he probably has time to draw a map and put some monsters and treasure in it. But more importantly and to the point, I'm not against buying pre-made adventures. Indeed, personally, I'm in favor it. I bought Stonehell for the equivalent of a few hours of work at minimum wage, and now I can play it for, literally, years. I think that's a great deal.

So a wide ranging adventure with some sandbox elements to customize like SKT [Storm King's Thunder] is a relatively treat. To criticize these kinds of modules as treating the players like puppets is entirely misdirected.

Fair enough, but I think my analysis was more nuanced than that. I said that a) I sometimes like such adventures, b) they have their place, and c) they still allow a fair amount of room for player agency. I used "puppets" to bluntly frame the general issue. See my original post, especially the discussion of "points" 3 & 4. And I suppose it is true that detailed planned adventures can be a "treat" in that I can't imagine anyone coming up with that sort of thing, in such detail, on their own. That's not a criticism.

No published adventure can give a player 100% agency, no matter how short. Even B2 goes with the assumption that the players will get to the "boss fight" with the cultists.

See above. But also, having a "big boss" at, say, the bottom or end of the dungeon and, thus, anticipating that the players will probably eventually fight him, is completely different from choreographing how they are going to get there. See the excerpt from the Guidebook above.

Your premise is entirely flawed because you seem to connect this to mechanics (specifically when you call out 4th edition) when it has absolutely nothing to do with mechanics or edition and everything to do with the limits of adventure design when trying to provide a long running campaign to DMs in published form.

This brings up a more complex issue that I don't want to spend a lot of time on here. But briefly, when I speak of an edition, I mean at least three things - a) the mechanics, b) the explanations, guidance or philosophy expressed in the text of the rule books and c) the associated products, such as adventures, marketed with it. Among other things, looking at b), 5th edition, which is supposedly a partial return to D&D's roots, the current Dungeon Master's Guide contains many pages of advice on how to create drama and suspense through careful plotting of your adventure etc., etc. (so here's the core book telling you how to home brew a planned scenario). There is nothing like this in the three little brown books, Holmes. Moldvay/Cook (I don't think) or AD&D.

The whole argument just falls flat when you turn it into some kind of OSR vs new school rant, when it has absolutely nothing to do with that.

Well, to summarize, at some point this arguably just becomes silly semantics. But if the terms have any meaning (which I assume Owlbear believes or else he wouldn't be using them), I think it's a commonplace in the OSR blogosphere that one of the things that "old school" means is putting a emphasis on unplanned sandbox or dungeon/megadungeon settings, as opposed to preplanned plots or stories. I just don't think one can deny that - that most OSR blogger people believe it, and partly understand the term in that manner, regardless of whether they "should." And I think if most people use a label, even if arbitrary (which most labels in a sense are), it sort of ceases to be arbitrary, if that makes sense.

But I have also tried to show that this is not simply arbitrary or a misunderstanding or whatever, but well grounded in the actual early history of D&D. Now, obviously, one can be a new school person who likes some old school elements, or an old school person who likes some new school elements, or a mix of both, or just one or the other, or whatever. And/or, if one simply doesn't like any of the labels - perhaps because of annoying associations, etc. - one can just dump them entirely. There's no law against that. But I don't think one can as easily ignore the history. Or rather, one can ignore it, but what's the point of that?.

Why Do Players Enjoy Being Puppets?

A few days ago, I critiqued an argument given by Kotaku blogger Cecilia D'Anastasio that the history of Dungeons & Dragons was partly about how players had gradually wrested autonomy and control from an all-powerful Dungeon Master. Or, as she might have put it, if D&D is about storytelling, then in early D&D, the story was largely told by the DM, whereas now it is largely told by the players.

I claimed that, if anything, this was actually the reverse of the truth.

I cited one of the most popular current Wizards of the Coast adventures, Storm King's Thunder, where almost every major event or happening is predetermined by the DM (or the authors of the adventure) beforehand. From A Guide to Storm King's Thunder:

8. Iymrith: The group gets the artifacts and returns to the oracle. They learn that they need a conch. On the way out, Iymrith attacks and Harshnag makes a heroic sacrifice.

9. Find the Conch: In the book, every giant lord has a conch. The heroes will need to go steal a conch from a giant lord. I liked a lot of these areas, so in my version I changed things a little so I can use Svardborg, Ironslag and the Cloud Giant castle in my campaign.

10. Use the Conch: It takes the group to Maelstrom (page 201). There, the heroes hopefully expose Iymrith and get a clue to Hekaton's whereabouts.

11. King Hekaton: The group tracks down Hekaton and saves him!

12. Final Battle: The adventurers team up with Hekaton to take down Iymrith.

And so on. 

There were two caveats to my claim. The first caveat is that the movement away from player autonomy is an average trend, not an all-ecompassing law. When you look at the question, at the one extreme, you have absolute player choice with no manipulation by the DM or predetermined planning by the scenario author or authors. At the other extreme, you have players as total puppets. No D&D game in history has ever been played at either of these extremes. While I think it's undeniably true that there's much less of an emphasis on player freedom and choice now (in terms of actual play, not silly rhetoric by those such as D'Anastasio), that's certainly not how everyone plays. The very existence of the OSR is proof of that. And while I think that contemporary D&D, as promoted by Wizards, allocates much less freedom to players than, say, original D&D or early AD&D, it's at least arguable that 5th edition D&D represents a small reversal of the overall trend (when compared to, say, 4th edition).

The second caveat is that while I think there's less player autonomy now, control hasn't necessarily been usurped by the DM per se. Rather much of it as been taken from the players by, as I put it, "an uncredited collective of author bureaucrats, employed by a multi-million dollar corporation." It's the scenario authors that are directing you through their story in, say, Storm King's Thunder. The DM is simply helping them to do their dirty work, so to speak.

Let me, insert a third caveat or point that I didn't bring up in the earlier post. The loss of player control is actually even worse than the above suggests. Not only are current players much more, so to speak, at the mercy of the DM and the scenario authors, they're also much more at the mercy of the dice. Randomness is not the same as player choice, and can often hamper it. Now, of course, random dice rolls have always been a central part of the D&D experience, especially for combats. What I'm referring to here is the progressive replacement of determining many outcomes based on player initiated problem solving in favor of, say, "knowledge checks" and the like. This takes real autonomy away from the players. "Choice nodes" or "problem solving nodes" are replaced with "dice nodes."

So, I would say that, in so far as players have ever been puppets, they're much more puppets now than they ever were. Indeed, I would say, again to speak very generally and roughly, they weren't puppets in early D&D, but they are now to a large extent,  - or they are now in "official" Wizards of the Coast D&D.

D&D may not be as popular as it was back in the day (and I would argue that the puppet thing is one reason why it's not as popular), but there is no question that the game is still relatively popular. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of children and adults play it, and the products are, I assume, still money makers for Wizards.

So let me ask (and then try to answer) a blunt question. Why do current players enjoy being puppets?

Let me suggest four answers:

1. They don't know they're puppets.

It's at least conceivable that someone could play through Storm King's Thunder and not know that the major happenings and events that they "experience" were all preconceived and determined beforehand. In the same way, many early published D&D adventures and current OSR offerings contain some "railroady" elements. It's perfectly fair to think that the players are often not aware of them, or if they are aware that they exist, they don't know which of them, precisely exist, if that makes sense. But it's hard for me to believe that this is the case with most current D&D players. If one reads the rulebooks, or any of the adventures at all, or even any of the blurbs on the back of the adventures, one can't fail to notice what's going on - "This will take your players from 1st to 8th level, as they progressively meet greater and greater challenges!" Of course, greater and greater challenges are precisely what they are not - in the same way that going from room 1 to room 8 on a Disney ride is not to confront greater challenges per se.

2. They like being puppets.

To some degree, actors are puppets. They (usually) didn't write their lines, and are often told (by the director) how to say them. But that fact does not detract from the enjoyment that many actors get from their craft. It's fun to dress up in a period costume and pretend you're Richard III, etc.

3. Puppets still have some freedom.

Or at least D&D puppets do. Just because the universe has already determined that you're going to fly in the cloud castle to Bryan Shander and experience the frost giant attack, and steal a conch and save Hekaton, doesn't mean that you can't goof around in the cloud castle and try out different tactics in the frost giant battle, and save Hekaton in a variety of different ways (I assume), etc. etc. And it's not like the players are sitting there with actual strings attached to their arms. A lot of playing a fantasy game is being willing to suspend your disbelief. If you can suspend your disbelief that there aren't really dragons, you can suspend your disbelief that you don't really have complete freedom in choosing how and where to proceed in a predetermined sequential adventure, such as, say, Tyranny of Dragons.

4. The puppets don't know any better.

Why do people play D&D? Not just to exercise what we have called player choice, but more generally to simply be in or experience (via pretend) a fantasy world. Even if you're playing with a bad DM or a stupid rule set or a railroady scenario or whatever, D&D still might be fun, at least for awhile. And if you don't know there's anything better...

They say that bad you-know-what is better than no you-know what. Well, I wouldn't know about that, but I get the point.

After my return to D&D, almost six years ago, and my shock and horror at 4th edition, it still took me a number of months to "discover" the OSR. And while I'm not an internet expert, by any means I'm not a total wallflower either. The existence of the OSR is taken as a given by many of us, but most D&D players are completely unaware of it. And if you don't know that something better exists, you're not necessarily going to have an easy time finding it if it does.

I love sushi. It's pretty much my favorite food. But I didn't eat it for many years, even when my friends did. I thought or assumed that it was gross. When I started eating it, it wasn't because my preferences had changed, but, rather, because I had suddenly "discovered" it, or more accurately, I discovered I had been wrong about it.

So, I don't think game preferences are completely subjective. Certain things work or work better for most people, and certain things don't. But "preferences" for most people (including me) often reflect only what we know or what we think we know.

I suspect that if they knew there were an alternative, many would prefer a less puppetish existence.

By using the term "puppet," I'm not trying to be snarky towards anyone, especially players (or players who "like" being puppets). But I think it's valuable to sometimes use blunt names for things. To some extent, even I think that games that treat people as puppets or partial puppets can be fun. I love Call of Cthulhu, but many CoC scenarios, especially the "classic" ones, are at least potentially somewhat railroady. In some of these, you're a quasi-puppet, being taken on a predetermined path from New York to the Himalayas to Timbuktu to East Oshkosh, etc. But it's still fun.

But I think contemporary D&D would be more fun, or at least more fun for many people, if it went back to its original, yes, Gygaxian conception, where player agency was emphasized more - less Storm King's Thunder and more Keep on the Boderlands or In Search of the Unknown.

And despite my often strong "power to the people" language, here and elsewhere, I don't believe it's all an evil corporate conspiracy. While I think that Wizards publishes many banal and inferior contemporary products, they also have republished many of the best original ones. They're not really trying to make you into a puppet or control you like a puppet (I hope). They don't care one way or another. They just want to make money.

But what about you? What do you want?

Do you enjoy being a puppet?