Is what my DM did impacting player agency in a negative way? [closed]

Question

Our party infiltrated Ravenloft in a Curse of Strahd campaign. One of the party managed to steal a beholder eye from Strahd that he was using to control a group of beholders and use them as his minions. This allowed the beholders, who we previously communicated with, to attack and kill several of his brides and assist us in destroying Strahd's heart. We made it out safely (barely) and the session ended.

During the next session Strahd used a wish spell to revive the brides that were killed because he needed them for some ritual and rolled to also banish the beholders so they were never within Barovia in the first place using the wish. Strahd succeeded but can never use wish again, along with being weakened from its use. The player who managed to steal the eye is very upset with this and feels like their character's actions were overwritten unfairly.

I can see how this might be a little frustrating, but to me, making him waste his wish spell doing this is a success in and of itself. The player who did this also has a wish scroll themselves that they could use to try and counter what Strahd did if they really wanted to.

Is this the DM unfairly removing player agency, or a reasonable counter a BBEG like Strahd could do?

I've only been playing D&D for a short time (a few months), so maybe I just don't get it.

Answer 1

It's not denying agency if opponents use their resources to counter character actions

Player agency means that the character had control over their decisions, and these decisions affect the game world. (And, they need to have some kind of information to make those decisions more meaningful than random guesses).

Both is the case here: the player could freely decide, and the result — stripping Strahd of the ability to ever use wish again — has a big, meaningful impact on the game world.

If a goblin shaman uses cure wounds to undo the fighter's sword damage, is it stripping the fighter of agency? Of course not. The goblin is just using its resources to counter what the player characters do. Not every action can be an unmitigated success in the face of active opposition.

Your fellow player may feel what the DM did is unfair, because it resets most their direct achievement, and that wish also did a lot more than what you normally can expect to ask of even an off-label wish: undoing multiple deaths, acting a longer time backwards etc, all to allow the narrative of the evil ritual happening to proceed. That indeed tastes a bit of railroading, but it still is a lot different from just raising these brides again with no good explanation and no cost to Strahd. As long as the DM is fair, and allows your fellow player's wish to undo Strahd's, I think this is acceptable.

Answer 2

I think the question here is: did Strahd always have that Wish spell? Did the DM decide in advance that Strahd has access to one Wish?

(I'm pretty sure the Curse of Strahd campaign as written does not give Strahd a Wish spell. It doesn't give him beholders, either, so clearly your DM is modifying things.)

If your party did this adventure, and then the DM decided: "okay, well, I can't have this happen, so I'm using DM power to say that Strahd has access to Wish, and then I'm using DM power to allow the Wish to be much more powerful than normal", then, yeah, that would be pretty cheap.

Answer 3

The main problem I see here is not necessarily one of denying player agency (that depends on other details, unspecified and in all honesty unspecifiable in the question).

The problem for me is that the DM has set a bad precedent of what a Wish spell can do AND gave the players an opportunity to cast one themselves.

What's to stop now the players from simply wishing Strahd out of existence? It would be very difficult for the DM to argue the impossibility of this action without contradicting their own previous interpretation of it.

Should the players choose to attempt that, the only possible outcomes are narratively deeply unsatisfying. Succeed and you no longer got a story, fail and the players will feel irrevocably cheated.

This is a very deep hole for the DM to dig themselves out of, one that is probably best resolved by speaking to the players outside of the game, admitting the mistake and deciding together on a way out that everyone would be okay with.

The good news is that this new resolution may actually lead to a more interesting continuation of the story than was previously possible.

As an example: one of my most-fun-to-play characters was a repentant necromancer type killed in combat due to a misunderstanding with the DM, we sat down after the session and cleared up that he shouldn't have died but rather than pretend it didn't happen, he was resurrected and would thereafter consider himself the "holy undead" of the god whose priests gave his life back.

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P.s.: All that being said, last I played in Ravenloft was 2e, so this might have changed, but back then the whole setting was about the odds being heavily stacked against the party. Surviving intact was considered a big win, and the jackpot, the absolute pinnacle of achievement was escaping the whole blasted plane. Beating a domain lord was never on the cards.

Maybe the problem is that the DM hadn't made this clear enough in session zero. Either way, an out-of-game discussion between DM and players should sort it.

Answer 4

Player Agency Isn't The Issue Here.

Powerful NPCs reverting player action via use of powerful magic can definitely negatively impact player feelings of agency. However, that's not really the problem with this situation.

Here you have a player who achieved an almost impossible success. They outwitted what amounts to a lesser god, defeated scores of high-CR enemies with a single action that had no inherent risk associated with it, and stacked the deck in their favour in an immense fashion. It sounds like they did this without losing anything in particular (allies, magic items, permanent capabilities), too, unless that has gone without mention.

The super powerful godlike being then permanently loses a capability to roll back some of that victory. Given that this being could achieve that rollback via other methods (resurrection scrolls, ancient rituals, subservient clerics) this is yet another win, but the player is extremely upset instead of, I don't know, overjoyed? Smug?

When I see these two things together - someone being angry when they don't get every single thing they want, and someone who appears to be bending over backwards to give them every single thing they want, what I almost automatically assume is an unhealthy social interaction. This description is of a type of problem player - the 'has to win' player. Not even to the degree that most players dislike losing (ttrpgs almost always tell the story of a group that wins and survives, even bittersweet triumphs are rare), but to the degree that even a temporary setback causes ruction, friction, conflict, and various attempts (both out of character and in character) to ensure they win (and usually in a specific way).

The victory outlined as the starting point of this issue strikes me as vastly improbable to begin with. If a player has problems with part of that turning out to be a false success, my suspicion of what the issue is squarely targets that player.

Ergo, I strongly suspect your problem here is a player who cannot lose in even minor ways without becoming extremely upset, and a DM who is catering to that, and not an issue with a DM overwriting player agency.

Answer 5

We lack information to answer this.

Some of the things that stem from your question are suspicious, but none can yield a definitive answer without knowing the whole picture.

Your DM is obviously running a modded version of Curse of Strahd

By the book, Curse of Strahd is supposed to span levels 1 through (at most) 10. This is not the levels where you fight groups of beholders, so I guess that's at least something that was changed. Strahd by-the-books is designed to be a threat for lvl 10 adventurers, not for whatever lvl you are if you are supposed to fight a group of CR13 monsters, so your DM surely also have made Strahd stronger to match the PCs.

This could be considered a bad DM move if players joined to play the "normal" Curse of Strahd campaign and haven't been made aware that there would be modifications, although so far it has little to do with railroading.

Your DM probably could have better handled what information they gave the party

How did you know brides have been brought back? If your DM simply dumped you the info at the beginning of the next session, then that's clumsy: unless the spell is cast right in front of the PCs there is no reason for them to know a wish has been used.

I can picture only a few reasons for your DM to tell you that:

• they assume you are going to whine if later on you find out brides are back in shape. Would they be right to assume that? I have no idea.

• they want you to have something to celebrate about (getting rid of Strahd's wish)

If the intent was pure railroading, it would have been easier to keep everything hidden.

Your DM seems to have trouble setting boundaries

"Players have agency" doesn't mean "PCs will always get the exact result their player expect": it means player's choice matter, and that's all. Some things may still not happen as they want, and that's most of the time what is expected in a tabletop RPG.

The impression I have reading your question is that players came up with a crazy plan and the DM made efforts to roll with it without pointing at all its issues, but later on regretted to have gone too far and roll-backed some of the consequences.

The portrayal they gave of Strahd is not what I am used to

I know there isn't a "one true correct way to roleplay Strahd", but still in my book one of his traits of personality is that he doesn't care about most people, including his brides. Using his only wish to bring them back doesn't look like something this guy would do.

Answer 6

Player Agency and Rule 0

The DM's role is not to win, it is to create an adventure for you to experience. This necessarily means creating obstacles to overcome, and will to some degree mean interventions contrary to Character goals and aspirations.

If your DM had started the next session with, "last session was fun, but the events didn't happen, I can't come up with a good continuation from what happened, so we'll do a re-do", that would have been fair - admitting limitations and working around them is a key part in being human.

What your DM did instead is to employ an in-game quasi-reasonable (magic is magic, the Wish spell is explicitly the most powerful available, and Strahd is Strahd) way to do the the above, without actually undoing the last session. He also added in the "no more Wishes", sort of like a covenant not to use that particular deus ex machina again, while still allowing your success to remove the Beholders from the picture.

It sounds to me like you think you players are playing to win against the DM, and your DM just cheated you out of a victory. That is not what roleplaying is about, you play for the adventure, to create a story, and to let your character achieve their goals. And the DM is there to help you achieve those things, not to defeat you.

Are you certain those are the total and exact effects of the Wish?

To quote the spell description:

[T]he greater the wish, the greater the likelihood that something goes wrong.

I don't know about your DM, but if it were me, I'd probably have punished Strahd further than "just" keeping him from using Wish again.

Perhaps a wording like "I wish I never got that Beholder eye in the first place, so the Beholders weren't here to kill my brides."

Presto! Time itself is reset, for everyone except Strahd and the PCs, to before Strahd got the eye. Whoops, this was also before Strahd got a couple of other artifacts/whatnot needed for the ritual, so now he has to reacquire them, with the PCs active and working against him, possibly with a weaker version of Strahd (perhaps missing some equipment or other resource).

At some point, perhaps some emissary or priest of the Morninglord could tell the PCs that they are "chosen by the Morninglord", to explain why they were exempt from the Wish spell.

Just as an example.

Answer 7

Yes, this was bad DMing

Your DM used the unlimited power of fiat to override actions taken by the players, and - worse - did so off-camera.

Probably they messed up by introducing the Beholder eye in the first place, and are trying to roll back a mistake. We've all been there as GMs, but wishing away things that happened is a very bad way of dealing with it. If the DM really feels that they need to reverse what happened, instead of abusing their fiat powers they should have talked to the players.

Although, having run Curse of Strahd myself, I don't see that what happened was disastrous enough to need your DM to pull the "reset" lever, and they would have been better to figure out how to roll with the unexpected success of the players in this encounter.

Answer 8

Yes, as wish shouldn't be able to do that.

The closest reliable effect it has is to emulate one 8th level spell, not to resurrect brides en masse and kill a bunch of beholders- that's an arbitrary success on a wish. The DM made a custom ability which deletes a bunch of party resources (the beholders) and resurrects dead NPCs. He essentially erased the content of an entire session with a made up resource and weakness.

And it is made up. Strahd doesn't have wish in the original stat block. You know how stores often pump up the price before a sale enough so that it's actually more expensive than usual in a sale despite a discount? If your DM is arbitrarily granting beyond level 9 spells to Strahd, he's already massively buffed. How can you have any real trust he's actually weaker? He could pull out a miracle and do the same again next session.

Answer 9

This is an abuse of power that does subvert player agency; by having a single Wish perform functions well beyond those within the spell description this DM has crossed a line.

Is this the DM unfairly removing player agency, or a reasonable counter a BBEG like Strahd could do?

First, let's handle whether it removed player agency. This action definitely interacts with player agency. Strahd's Wish undid two major outcomes of the previous session. Undoing/revoking the outcomes of sessions just by DM say-so is a canonical example of the DM messing with player agency; note that the wish happened off screen so the action and all impacts of it were created and adjudicated without any involvement from the players. However this does not address whether it was a fair manipulation of player agency; NPCs do things off screen that affect the PCs all the time.

If the wish was established prior to the DM deciding to use then, in a letter of the rules way, Strahd's making this wish is technically legal; wishes can do any thing the DM deems feasible. The unfairness comes in to play in that the DM and by extension the NPCs know what the limits of wish are, and what potential negative consequences might come from any particular wish. Players do not know this; if they a non-sanctioned wish they'll have to deal with unknown and unpredictable consequences. Because of this information asymmetry, DMs have a special responsibility in how they handle wishes.

By the book, one of the standard uses is to replicate the effects of a single spell. If the DM were to have an NPC use a wish for one of these standard applications, there would be no issue -- everyone has access to the same information. However in this case, the DM invoked a wish that has multiple disparate effects. There are no "mass revival" spells that could replicate the effect of reviving multiple wives; all similar resurrection spells act on a single individual. Similarly, there is not a "mass banishment" spell; Banishment acts on a single creature. Finally, this DM combined two completely independent wishes into single one ("I wish my wives were revived and the beholders are banished"). Furthermore the effects of the wish seem specifically tailored to undo exactly the main outcomes of the earlier session rather than being obviously based on Strahd's in-character motivations and approach. Although they applied the by-the-book negative side effects, having the DM decide in isolation that this mutli-faceted wish can be formulated and adjudicated with merely by the book negative side effects moves this into the realm of arbitrary DM fiat.

I wasn't at the table, and I can't read the DM's mind, but this is exactly the kind of behavior I could see a DM do in order to force a particular outcome -- in this case ensuring that Strahd can proceed with the plan laid out in the DM's prep. Therefore, player's feelings of being railroaded are completely justified. However, it may be a case of a DM looking for the best way for the NPC to recover from the setback. However, this compatibility is not proof of intentional overreach; instead this may be a case of the DM clumsily trying to recover from an unanticipated outcome.

Therefore I do believe it is warranted to have an out of character discussion with the DM about how this use of a single wish spell can produce so many disparate effects that undid the outcomes of a previous session was perceived to subvert player agency and erase the other player's monumental success without any way for the PCs to affect that outcome.

To summarize: DMs have a special responsibility with NPC wishes. Since they both construct and adjudicate the wish, DMs need to be careful with how they use non-standard NPC wishes so that the world the PCs experience is not (perceived as) completely arbitrary. This particular wish undid outcomes of a previous game session -- this clearly impacts player agency, and the wish went outside the bounds of a single formulatable wish (it's arguably 2 wishes). Together these features have led to a problem for at least one person at the table. Therefore it is worth hashing why/how this Wish came to pass and how to navigate this kind of powerful magic going forward.

Answer 10

Honestly, no-one can properly answer your question.

This is because it requires addressing 2 layers of opinion:

1. What exactly is player agency?
2. Do the DM's actions encroach upon that defined ability?

What about the Wish itself?

Any time someone uses Wish for anything beyond casting another spell of 8th level or lower, there is to be an unintended effect (often called a monkey's paw), which can be unexpected, hindering, or even harmful to the one wishing. Normally, the extent of the effect is up to the DM, but when the DM is the one using wish in this way, they can very easily adopt the mindset of "I must win", and as a result either apply no such effect, or make it unimpactful.

So, here is my advice:

Talk to your DM away from the game, and calmly remind them about the monkey's paw. Offer the following: that your table as a whole approach a social media forum where you can gather numerous opinions (such as here, Reddit, Discord, etc.), where your DM then shares the exact wording of Strahd's Wish, and asks what the monkey's paw should be in this case.

Then, your DM chooses an option from among the top answers without saying which specifically.

This way, the DM can try to avoid the "I must win" attitude, your group can know that the spell is being treated the same in your DM's hands, and your group can also avoid the "I must win" attitude, since none of you would be trying to dictate the consequences.