Campaign Diaries - Maintaining Player Agency
By Jason Campbell
As I’d mentioned in previous Campaign Diaries, I’ve been running a short campaign this summer with Andrew Kolb’s Oz TTRPG setting using Monte Cook Games’ We are All Mad Here expansion for the Cypher System. We just wrapped up the campaign arc which got me thinking about whether I’d negatively affected player agency in the way I ran the campaign.
The players had a great deal of freedom in building their characters including creating their own species. I began the first session by giving the players a choice of two plot threads to pursue (or they could come up with their own). The options were:
- A king died. The PCs are indebted to the KIng for reasons the players define. He tasked the PCs with the task of finding his appropriate successor.
- The lost kingdom of Din Pobl; a kingdom that no one remembers is described by an NPC. The place he describes is where a famous castle has stood for ages, no one has heard of Din Pobl.
The players chose the second option following a curious NPC in his search for this non-existent kingdom. After a couple of game sessions as I was preparing the next game it occurred to me that I could merge the unused plot thread with the chosen one, by having the castle be the home of this king who was about to die, and having that king task the PCs with finding his successor. This seemed to me a really cool idea, and everyone did enjoy the campaign.
I wondered later if merging these two threads was really a good idea. I’d given the players the choice of two plots to play out, but in the end they played through both plot threads. Was this railroading? Had I removed their player agency?
Over all, I think the transition from one plot to the other was fine and made a solid story. I'm pretty sure I mentioned when the A plot ended and B picked up that it seemed like we were doing the second idea and you confirmed.
Jack, one of my players
Jack did go on to discuss that there was a transition point between these two plots that felt awkward, but he seems ok with me having used both plots even though the group had favored one.
What do you think? If you were a player in this campaign, would you have felt ”railroaded”? Let us know in the comments.
