Why Player Agency Matters

Some people discover TTRPGs through friends at a table. Some through forums, or starter kits, or that one friend who always wants to try it. I discovered them through podcasts, binge-listening to comedy improv and actual-plays during a lonely stretch of having to relocate for work.

I never actually played. Not once. Here's the question that kept nagging at me: why do we play games at all, instead of just watching TV, movies, or reading books?

The One Thing That Makes a Game a Game

If you try to distill down what a game actually is, it gets tricky. You can talk about storylines, protagonists, inventory systems, combat, but for every one of those, you can find a game that doesn't have it. Take Tetris: hugely popular, has no main character, no storyline, no inventory system. Yet it's undeniably a game.

The defining property that makes a game a game is player agency: the fact that the player has an active choice to make that affects the outcome. Movies, books, and TV shows don't have that.

Player agency can be very simple: when to push a button, or selecting between a couple of dialogue choices. You take an action, and that changes the result.

The agency might even be partly illusory. A lot of visual novels have very linear storylines and the choices barely affect the outcome. Nevertheless, it's still player agency. It matters less that the choice actually changes things than the feeling of having a choice that matters (If you didn't know that your choice didn't matter, until you went and replayed, you'd never know right?)

Any Medium Can Become a Game by Adding Agency

You can take almost any passive medium and add player agency to it, and it becomes a type of game.

TV shows and movies: big narrative works with a protagonist making their way through a world. Add agency and you get video games, particularly role-playing games, or games that are story-rich

Books: historically, choose-your-own-adventure books were printed books where each page gave you a few choices, pointing to different pages where that choice played out. The story branched and you navigated it by making choices and reading the appropriate pages. Computerized versions of this became interactive fiction games and visual novels, which are typically branching stories with as mall amount of added mechanics like health, combat, or puzzles.

Stage plays are the interesting one. The cast plays out a pre-written script with a small amount of leeway in how they express their characters, but the lines are usually fixed and the outcome is the same. If you add agency and you get one of two things: improv, where the cast picks up a scene in the moment and the rest adapt, or tabletop RPGs, where a game master serves as narrator and author and players inhabit characters navigating the story, plus mechanics like combat, skills, and inventory layered on top.

In each case, the version with player agency is classified as a type of game. Players make choices and have emotional investment in the outcomes. Even improv is considered a game, one of the early books that spread the idea was titled Theatre Games.

What Sets TTRPGs Apart

One thing that sets tabletop RPGs aside from other games is the considerable flexibility in what players can do. Most computer games give players a limited set of choices and often require following pre-written storylines, which can be elaborate and extensive, but fundamentally predefined (exception being the rise of AIs in games, which I'll get into).

The game master/dungeon master of a TTRPG brings the ultimate level of flexibility. Anything the players and the game master can imagine happening could potentially happen.

But this takes a human role to make happen. TTRPGs have typically been either a group activity, or required a solo player to play both the role of player and game master themselves.

Fortunately, in the age of AI, we can let the AI handle this role, allowing the player to experience a TTRPG without the burden of finding someone else to run it.

An AI-based TTRPG is like reading a book that stars you as the main character, but with virtually unlimited freedom to act in the world and have the world respond to your actions. It gives you an opportunity to help shape the world through collaborative storytelling, without the burden of having to also run the world and NPCs, giving you the opportunity to be surprised by the outcome, discover things you didn't think of before, or tangle with mysteries that you have to uncover step by step.

When It Stopped Feeling Like a Game

I was playing a solo TTRPG with AI, in a sort of temporary setup I was using before I started working on Stage Whisper, running through a campaign, when I had a moment that surprised me.

My teammate NPC had asked me to do something. I said no, flippantly, in character. A few sessions later, the NPC sulked about it. She brought it up, held it against me, made things difficult.

And I realized: I genuinely didn't want to let her down again.

This is something I never felt playing video games. In video games, there's a very narrow set of emotions and consequences for how other characters behave toward you, unless they've been specifically scripted. You kind of feel okay behaving badly because you know the responses are just scripted and mechanical formulas.

But with an AI-driven solo TTRPG session, I was way more emotionally invested in the choices I was making and what I was saying. That made all the choices feel like they mattered far more.

The World Should Be Able to Push Back

I built Stage Whisper for players like me. People who want a hand in creating their own world, and characters that respond to your choices in ways more complex than pre-defined formulas.

With Stage Whisper, I don't just want the player to have agency and be able to affect the world. I also want to give the world agency to affect the player too. NPCs should have opinions. They should make demands, they don't need to agree with the player.

Because that's what makes it feel real. Not just you shaping the story, the story pushing back.

Ready to experience a TTRPG that actually remembers you? Get started with Stage Whisper or join our Discord