Hills I'll Die On: Give Your Characters More Agency in D&D!

Choices, Choices, Choices 

Character agency is something that I’ll bitch and moan about until the cows come home. Players deserve to impact the remainder of a campaign, oneshot, mini-series whatever it may be. Let me paint you a full picture of other role playing games. You’re playing some kind of fantasy game (think dragon age, skyrim, elden ring, idk what you’re into) and you make some decision to kill a major npc, or fail to do an optional questline and now you’re permanently locked out of a certain ending. As much as THAT sucks at least you made a choice. In today’s edition of “Hills I’ll Die On,” we’re going to talk about how as a game-master you need to let your players make choices as much and as often as possible. Choices are what really get the gears going with character creation, and more importantly collaborative storytelling! When you make a choice in character, it can dramatically alter the course of that character’s future, past and present. 

Let’s talk about what choices actually are before we jump into why you should let your players make lots of them. “Chocolate or strawberry? Life or death? We make some choices quickly and automatically, relying on mental shortcuts our brains have developed over the years to guide us in the best course of action” (Psychology Today). Choices are things we make everyday without really thinking about them. They keep us safe, they keep us moving, and sometimes they make us do dumb shit like text our partners even when we know they’re sleeping. Choices are some of the most important things that occur every day! Without them, humans find themselves operating on auto-pilot (which is arguably just relying on mental shortcuts but for my purpose it’s not making decisions, mind ya own) and potentially hurting yourself. When you make choices, impact is often made. Think about it, if you choose to drive a corolla (my kind of person!) instead of a ram 1500, you’re being impacted in SO many different ways, from gas prices to your environmental impact, and just generally being a cooler human, corollas are peak imo if you can’t tell. So why does all of this impact D&D? Choices in D&D deepen your character development. Much akin to the real world where you’re making a deeper character every choice you make, that’s the goal of EVERY interaction you have, unless you’re a weird GM who thinks that you need to TPK or fight your players (new article leak?). Through choices, things happen and that’s where we get to talk about the main point of this whole rant, character agency. When we do things like choose to murder a shopkeep for not going through a bargain deal where you offer to trade 17 rusty swords for the most impactful magic item ever created, of course that has consequences for you later in the game – looking at you Webby, stop it! 

Character Agency: What even is it? 

Notably, I’ve referenced “character agency” instead of “player agency” several times already. Yes, they are similar, but aren’t the same. Player agency is referring to the ability of that real life person having an impact on the game they’re playing where character agency is the same but about the made-up fake people we play in these lovely games. They’re both incredibly important, but I want to focus on the imaginative personas we all create. Character agency can take the form of so many different things, I’ll provide some suggestions below! 

For me, character agency is the soul of every great adventure and story that I’ve ever been a part of. I remember fondly the first character I played in a full level 2-20 campaign. He was a satyr monk who had a lot of parental issues and struggled with the concept of death being permanent – real original, I know. There was a key moment in that game where I decided to essentially give my soul away to a cajun spirit of a troll in exchange for power, magic items and losing my entire sense of self. My GM at the time definitely pushed me in a direction, but without me feeling comfortable and having the proper choices facilitated for me, I wouldn’t have accomplished as much with that character as I wanted to. 

All Good Things Come in Threes

Agency is created over time during a game, and it’s built on a few different things. The three main points that I always reference are intentionality, control, and optimism. These aren’t the end-all-be-all of creating agency, just the three that this researcher likes to use. 

Intentionality is all about how you show up when you’re put into situations. By working through things with intention, you as a player or a GM can make more important decisions! This means as a player you need to show up to the game and be proactive and prepared to make important decisions for your character. As a GM, this means doing your due diligence to prepare cool stuff for your players to do. If one of your characters is an edgy loner rogue (see here for reference) maybe you need to think of a good way for them to make a choice about becoming friends with the party. If you’ve got a monk with mommy issues, maybe it needs to be them confronting the death of their parent. This is where you get creative for your players. 

Control is something we all like to have – especially as GMs. Creating a world with a complex background and complex interwoven stories of characters that like eight people wrote is hard af!! Trust me, I’ve been there deep in google sheets staring at the stories, a video of subway surfers playing on my second monitor just confused. How the f**k do I pull all of these characters together? One of them is literally the chimpanzee from Planet of the Apes and his best friend is Thresh from League of Legends. Relax – your players are here to help. Control is how your players choose to interact and engage with all the cool lore you’re working on. A storyline that I’ve been working on is the downfall of Melora and heavily inspired by the complex narratives of the Elden Ring Empyreans (god I’m such a nerd). This can only be accomplished if my players buy-in and help me build out some cool cultures that maybe worship her, or despise her. Creating a storyline like that is simply too much for me to do on top of all the other things in my life. By giving my players control over their choices, and letting their choices create a dynamic environment, it allows them to feel like they have more agency and can express cool ideas and do cool things. 

Optimism is something that I try to preach in all facets of my life. I work in higher education, so essentially I’m a professional optimist/orientation leader. Optimism about your character’s choices and attitudes isn’t always easy. I know I can’t be the only one who gets bored and starts to question if the character you’re playing is even doing anything, providing value, or hell is even fun anymore. Every player falls victim to this at some point, even the great Matt Mercer or Brennan Lee Mulligan probably doubt some of the choices they made. Optimism is what keeps you making new choices. By feeling like everything is going to work out, you strive to create your own senses of character agency and look for new and fun ideas for arcs to go through. If you’re doubting your current choices, but know this is the character that you want to play long-term, that’s great! Give your GM some feedback and come up with a new idea for the character that gets you excited and opens the door for exciting choices. 

Landing the Plane

Character agency is something that I care deeply about and feel that it’s integral to the success of a TTRPG campaign, one shot, session whatever it may be! I think that if your characters feel that their choices matter, impact your game, and will lead to long term success or failure of the group. As a GM, your goal is to facilitate opportunities for the players of your game to make choices, create impact, have value and most importantly have FUN! I’ll absolutely die on the hill that you can make sure all of these things are happening so long as you just let them do the thing. Give your players that extra 5 feet of movement in a combat so they can get to the bad guy, let them roleplay as a pro wrestler if they want to, hell let them make a grill (for your teeth, not for food) out of the soul of a god because that’s so cool. The point is – give your characters the agency they deserve.