Player Agency in Tirenia

Giving players control over the story has always been a great interest of mine. Like many of us, I was raised on games like D&D which have a strict division of authority: one player creates the world, while the other players interact with it. However, over time I got to try different, more indie systems which distribute narrative control more widely. I played games like Doctor Who, which uses story points to give players limited control over what happens, and gives weaker characters far greater narrative agency than powerful ones for the sake of game play. There are games like Fiasco, which dispense of the narrator rule entirely, making all players equally responsible for what happens in the game. I decided that I wanted to try some of that in Tirenia.

In the first Tirenian campaign, The Company of the Wolf, I tried taking a page from Doctor Who. The players were part of an elite mercenary company who were routinely hired to do the impossible. I let them use Inspiration, gained from good role-playing, to create narrative details. The very first adventure involved breaking into an impregnable castle to steal some documents, and I deliberately designed no ways for the players to get into the castle. They used Inspiration to invent a minstrel friend who'd recently performed at the castle, tracked him down and then used Inspiration to invent a nearby cave system. They used Inspiration a third time to let the caves link up to a well in the castle, and with that they'd figured out how to break into the castle. It became standard practice for them to always have at least two instances of Inspiration at all times, and they'd use it regularly to pull off highly competent plans that low level characters should have been incapable of doing. It was amazing!

However, in home campaigns, I found that this rule didn't actually work as well. The next game was about a family unexpectedly thrust into a revolution, while being hunted by the agents of a conspiracy. Everyone had a secret motive, and the characters were meant to feel like they were on the back foot the whole time. I quickly found that the level of control that the Inspiration system allowed didn't work tonally for the story that we were telling, and we scrapped it. Instead, I tried to offer the players a huge web of different options to follow up on. After every session, the players got 3-5 options of what they wanted to do next time. I'm also a fan of scenarios where the players are presented with a problem and can resolve it however they want, so each of the individual sessions was very open-ended about how they wanted to go about accomplishing their goals.

When it comes to the published Tirenian books (which I'm not doing so well at working on, now that we're back in lockdown - hopefully soon, when the lockdown eases a bit, I'll get some done!) I have a different plan for narrative control. One thing that I thought was really cool in D&D 4th Edition was the Epic Destiny. This was like a subclass that you chose at level 21, which described how you would become a legend and achieve immortality, either literally or figuratively. It's something that I think 5th Edition is lacking. You have a Background, which describes where you came from; you have a Class, which describes where you are at now, but there's nothing to describe where you're going. So this is something that I'm working on. It won't be ready any time soon - I have the next four (!) books underway, and it's not in any of those - but it's coming. In the meantime, I'm going to keep experimenting with different way to give narrative agency to players, and encourage you to do the same.

Image: 'The Creation of Adam.' Michelangelo Buonarroti, c. 1512.