D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

pemerton said:

How is it a railroad? What player choice has been blocked/negated?

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Not all railroading requires player choice to be negated. If I recall, that was part of our definition of Illusionism, which is related but not identical to railroading.

pemerton said:

In that case, why is a GM preference for pedestrian events, which biases the occurrence of such events in the game, not equally a form of railroading? They are both instances of GM decisions about content introduction.

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You could say that it is a matter of degree, of how much force the GM needs to exert over the game world - how much strain to place upon the suspension of disbelief - in order to contrive that these events happen. Common events are more likely to happen, so it's less of a railroad when the GM say that they do happen.

pemerton said:

How? Can you describe how such a scene might occur in your game?

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1. At 6pm, the Big Bad grows weary of interrogating the victim, and has him killed.
2. At 6:30pm, the body is disposed of in an abandoned building.
3. At midnight, when the barrier between worlds is weakest, a hungry demon crosses over to this plane.
4. At 1:00am, the demon finds the corpse, and begins consuming it.
5. At 2:00am, the demon finishes eating, and leaves.

If the players are searching through the abandoned buildings between midnight and 2am, they are likely to hear it. If not, then they don't.

pemerton said:

Once again we return to the Spartan world. For me, a Spartan world is not remotely realistic or verisimilitudinous. Every day things occur to me that are not more than 5% likely to occur on a given day!

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Which is why I suggested the second thing, about rolling for likely disruptions to likely events. The goal is to honestly emulate the reality of the game world, while mitigating the effects of GM bias.

And given the other conceits required for the game to be playable, such as the non-complication of serious injuries, modeling only the most-likely and first-most-unlikely events should be sufficient in terms of "realism".

pemerton said:

You seem to be talking about the imaginary agency of some imaginary people (the PCs). When I talk about player agency I am talking about the actual agency of some really existing people - the players of an RPG.

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In a role-playing game where a player takes the role of a character, the player has the same agency within the game world as the character does.

Unless you're doing something funky, and trying to exert player agency beyond what the characters wield. That's nothing to do with any game I would ever want to play, though. That's Dungeon World type stuff.

Balesir said:

What do you intend to mean by "on-screen", here? The actions I am talking about are happening prior to the scene, not during it, and are thus "off-screen", as I see it. As soon as the PCs are aware of the situation caused by the NPC actions we move into the "scene", and resolution mechanics become required.

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Anything the PCs interact with is on-screen. Or at the very least, it is screen-adjacent. Regardless of strict terminology, it matters. If it's not okay to drop rocks on someone when the PCs are watching, then it's not suddenly okay to do so when the PCs turn their collective back for a minute.

TheFindus said:

I can see that some people might have a problem with the believability of the situation. But that has nothing to do with freeze-framing in itself.

<snip>

freeze-frames need to be believable, of course.

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It's a bit of a side-issue, but I don't really see what's unbelievable about an overturned wagon. I'm sure I've read city adventure modules in which wagons have collided or overturned (I think Night's Dark Terror has something like this, for instance).

A few months ago when I got to the train station near my work, a car had run off the road that runs parallel to the tracks and was being pulled by a workcrew off the railway embankment. I wasn't at the station when it happened, but I'm sure someone, as I don't think I've ever seen that station completely deserted during the daytime.

I think the classic adventures tended to have more bizarre freeze-frames - I described an example upthread, of a cult superior being in the dungeon "office" looking for information about a stolen statue, while (i) the orc guards are still at the dungeon entrance apparently having not responded to the arrival of this superior, (ii) the thieving cut member is conducting a ritual sacrifice in another freeze-frame room about 20 feet away on the map, and (iii) the statue itself is in a room maybe 100 feet away on the map and trivial accessible to anyone who has walked past the orc guards.

From the "naturalistic" point of view that strains credulity, but of course the point of those old dungeons wasn't naturalism: the point of this particular freeze-frame is to give the players an opportunity to gain advantage via negotiation (and thereby test their skill as players) and the backstory has no function other than providing the thinnest veneer of verisimilitude and NPC motivation. (The NPC is Chaotic, and the PCs in this particular adventure are expected to be Lawful or Neutral, but this is also from the era when players were expected to treat alignment as another obstacle to be expediently worked around rather than as a motivational constraint on the declaration of PC actions. Only paladins were forbidden from doing friendly deals with bad-guy NPCs!)

What does push against "naturalism" is that the PCs repeatedly find themselves at the centre of unlikely occurrences, but I don't see how any interesting RPG is going to avoid that - it's endemic in all serial adventure fiction.

pemerton said:

Can you explain why it is railroading?

Suppose I had, as GM, written up a "Garden Gate" encounter chart: on a 1 the PCs encounter a grumpy guard, on a 2 a merchant, on a 3 a beggar etc. And on (say) a 12, the chart tells me to roll on the "special events" sub-chart, which includes options like "a merchant is bribing a guard to look the other way in respect of contraband; a wagon overturns and something illegal is revealed under the hay; etc".

If, as the PCs arrive at the Garden Gate, I roll on the encounter chart, get a 12, go to the specials sub-chart, roll again, and get the "overturned wagon" result. And suppose that, in the game, rumours insurrection, or dissatisfaction with tax rates, or something similar, have already come up, so I decide that the illegal thing under the hay is a bundle of weapons. Hence I describe to the players a scene at the gate as in my scenario 3 upthread.

Would that be railroading? If so, the implication seems to be that virtually all content generation is railroading - even the random tables that are the stock-in-trade of classic D&D.

If not, why is it different if the same outcome is determined by GM decision at the point of the encounter, rather than by rolling on a table that the GM wrote up a week ago? How was player agency blocked or overridden in one case but not the other?

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It isn't about the single instance of this encounter. The assertion is that THE WHOLE PATTERN of arranging the game world to appeal to the interests of the players and present dramatic situations (or any other non-naturalistic play process) so undermines verisimilitude that the world cannot seem authentic enough to present a pleasing play experience. The player is unable to role play because the experience is of an arranged story, not of a character going about his or her routine (however dramatic that might be).

Beyond that is the bias objection, which as I stated in my last post, speaks to a more gamist aspect of process-sim, that it is ideally a process in which the DM's judgment is engaged as little as possible, thus insuring not realism, but a lack of bias. Bias in this case being measured as something like "if I ran 100 parties through this adventure their outcomes would distribute around some typical results" and no one of them would be able to say "you made it harder for us!" just perhaps "we got unlucky."

I think the two sides talk past each other at this point. The narrativist points out, quite logically, that his scenes are framed in narratively coherent terms and present elements asked for by the players, so they cannot possibly be 'biased' or 'railroading'. The naturalist points out that the sum total of the plot generated in this fashion is a long series of coincidences.

I think the whole debate has kind of reached its logical nadir. Everyone's position has been thoroughly expostulated and rejected by the other side as, essentially, not matching with their preferred agenda. There are some issues here still, primarily the question of what really can ever be said to be naturalistic, but in effect they're only answered by 'what suites you'.

Saelorn said:

Not all railroading requires player choice to be negated. If I recall, that was part of our definition of Illusionism, which is related but not identical to railroading.

You could say that it is a matter of degree, of how much force the GM needs to exert over the game world - how much strain to place upon the suspension of disbelief - in order to contrive that these events happen. Common events are more likely to happen, so it's less of a railroad when the GM say that they do happen.

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By "railroading" I have the fairly standard meaning in mind: the outcomes of player action declarations for their PCs, and of the encounters/scenes/events that they engage in, are decided by the GM without regard to the players' choices and the dictates of the action resolution mechanics.

Your definition seems to be that the game is a railroad any time the GM makes a decision about the content of the fiction. So how is writing up a timeline not a railroad, by these lights? How is the GM writing a world of pedestrian events less of a railroad? It takes just as much "force" or "effort" for the GM to write a timeline of likely events as to choose an unlikely one.

Saelorn said:

Which is why I suggested the second thing, about rolling for likely disruptions to likely events. The goal is to honestly emulate the reality of the game world, while mitigating the effects of GM bias.

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I don't see how writing up a random table and then rolling makes any difference to the amount of GM "force" or authorship.

If the GM writes a table and then rolls on it, everything was authored by the GM just as much if the GM just writes in something that s/he thinks is interesting.

I can see there are differences of aesthetic preference here, but do not see how they relate to issue of railroading or the degree of GM authorship.

AbdulAlhazred said:

It isn't about the single instance of this encounter. The assertion is that THE WHOLE PATTERN of arranging the game world to appeal to the interests of the players and present dramatic situations (or any other non-naturalistic play process) so undermines verisimilitude that the world cannot seem authentic enough to present a pleasing play experience.

<snip>

Beyond that is the bias objection, which as I stated in my last post, speaks to a more gamist aspect of process-sim, that it is ideally a process in which the DM's judgment is engaged as little as possible, thus insuring not realism, but a lack of bias. Bias in this case being measured as something like "if I ran 100 parties through this adventure their outcomes would distribute around some typical results" and no one of them would be able to say "you made it harder for us!" just perhaps "we got unlucky."

<snip>

The narrativist points out, quite logically, that his scenes are framed in narratively coherent terms and present elements asked for by the players, so they cannot possibly be 'biased' or 'railroading'. The naturalist points out that the sum total of the plot generated in this fashion is a long series of coincidences.

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My puzzle is what any of this has to do with railroading or player agency.

Which was my question to [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] and, in a subsequent post, [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]. I think it is also the question that [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] is asking.

What you describe above is an aesthetic preference - that the world be "naturalistic", that if 100 adventuring parties arrive at the Garden Gate then the scenes the GM describes occur with roughly the percentage likelihood they would in "real life", etc. As you said, it's about "the world seeming authentic enough to provide a pleasing play experience".

As Balesir asked, what do departures from this aesthetic preference - eg direct GM authorship rather than GM-authored random charts whose application is mediated via dice rolls - have to do with railroading? How do the players have more agency if the GM writes a chart and then rolls on it?

AbdulAlhazred said:

It isn't about the single instance of this encounter. The assertion is that THE WHOLE PATTERN of arranging the game world to appeal to the interests of the players and present dramatic situations (or any other non-naturalistic play process) so undermines verisimilitude that the world cannot seem authentic enough to present a pleasing play experience. The player is unable to role play because the experience is of an arranged story, not of a character going about his or her routine (however dramatic that might be).

Beyond that is the bias objection, which as I stated in my last post, speaks to a more gamist aspect of process-sim, that it is ideally a process in which the DM's judgment is engaged as little as possible, thus insuring not realism, but a lack of bias. Bias in this case being measured as something like "if I ran 100 parties through this adventure their outcomes would distribute around some typical results" and no one of them would be able to say "you made it harder for us!" just perhaps "we got unlucky."

I think the two sides talk past each other at this point. The narrativist points out, quite logically, that his scenes are framed in narratively coherent terms and present elements asked for by the players, so they cannot possibly be 'biased' or 'railroading'. The naturalist points out that the sum total of the plot generated in this fashion is a long series of coincidences.

I think the whole debate has kind of reached its logical nadir. Everyone's position has been thoroughly expostulated and rejected by the other side as, essentially, not matching with their preferred agenda. There are some issues here still, primarily the question of what really can ever be said to be naturalistic, but in effect they're only answered by 'what suites you'.

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This is a good post. I think one of the problems we're suffering from is that subjective issues around verisimilitude are being run together with disagreements on the inevitability/potency of cognitive bias with issues of player agency (which are being conflated with character agency/stance on a few occasions) with procedures for generating content into the fiction. Oh and the place of the "off screen" in the game. Oh and whether the GM should be pushing play toward thematic conflict, filling PC's lives with adventure, or just as likely (if not moreso) to introduce mundane material material into the fiction and therefore mandate n % of table time (with perhaps n being upwards of 33 - 50 %?) be spent on them (rather than transitioning right past them or not including them in the first place!).

pemerton said:

By "railroading" I have the fairly standard meaning in mind: the outcomes of player action declarations for their PCs, and of the encounters/scenes/events that they engage in, are decided by the GM without regard to the players' choices and the dictates of the action resolution mechanics.

Your definition seems to be that the game is a railroad any time the GM makes a decision about the content of the fiction. So how is writing up a timeline not a railroad, by these lights? How is the GM writing a world of pedestrian events less of a railroad? It takes just as much "force" or "effort" for the GM to write a timeline of likely events as to choose an unlikely one.

I don't see how writing up a random table and then rolling makes any difference to the amount of GM "force" or authorship.

If the GM writes a table and then rolls on it, everything was authored by the GM just as much if the GM just writes in something that s/he thinks is interesting.

I can see there are differences of aesthetic preference here, but do not see how they relate to issue of railroading or the degree of GM authorship.

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While I don't agree (at all...in any way...because there are a lot of competing priorities and a lot more nuance to it than that...including the cognitive bias issue), my suspicion is that the contention is something like one of the two:

1) If you hand a guy a gun with a single bullet in one of the six chambers, play Russian Roulette with him and he ends up blowing his head off, you may be culpable of negligent homicide.

2) If you willfully shoot a guy with a gun you're culpable of murder in the 1st (or 2nd).

Or something like the guy that plays Russian Roulette didn't commit suicide per se, while the guy who put a gun with a live bullet in the chamber and willfully pulled the trigger did.

Saelorn said:

Dungeon World makes me nauseous. It was difficult for me to read beyond the "Marking off 1 Adventuring Gear," line.

That being said, the example clearly demonstrates extra-character player agency and negotiated content generation. Whatever is out there that's "worse than a snow leopard" is out there because the character failed a check and the player decided that this potential consequence was preferable to possibly sinking in a thawed area.

Presumably, the player is fine with wielding this level of power, and that's why he or she agreed to play Dungeon World in the first place.

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But we're agreed that there is (a) no inhibition of player (the person at the table's ability to make thematic/strategic/tactical decisions and have those decisions influence/dictate outcomes in the fiction) agency and (b) there is no railroading taking place, yes?

I'm glad you answered on the other parts as well because it is illustrative of how aesthetic preference impacts your perception of system. 4e got raked over the coals for this. In fact, CaGI, martial forced movement, martial healing, and martial dailies (amongst others) were decried by detractors for precisely what you cite above.

In the fiction, the player cites that she is using using a stash of charcoal to mark trail signs for the PC who will be showing up late. Mechanically, Dungeon World elects to use an open descriptor resource Adventuring Gear and n uses (which get ticked off when used in the fiction or added when resupplying/salvaging) in order to facilitate minimal table handling time spent on managing granular equipment and to prevent table time being spent on characters oggling merchant wares while players oggle equipment lists in books. It makes genre sense to me, it speeds up play, keeps play focused on the action/fiction rather than merchant haggling and real-world book-perusing, maintains the resource mini-game inherent to D&D without unwanted overhead/book-keeping, and increases player agency all in one. But due to very different aesthetic priorities, all of these things that are absolute win for me just trigger a bile response for you (and folks with your aesthetic preference.

pemerton said:

Can you explain why it is railroading?

Suppose I had, as GM, written up a "Garden Gate" encounter chart: on a 1 the PCs encounter a grumpy guard, on a 2 a merchant, on a 3 a beggar etc. And on (say) a 12, the chart tells me to roll on the "special events" sub-chart, which includes options like "a merchant is bribing a guard to look the other way in respect of contraband; a wagon overturns and something illegal is revealed under the hay; etc".

If, as the PCs arrive at the Garden Gate, I roll on the encounter chart, get a 12, go to the specials sub-chart, roll again, and get the "overturned wagon" result. And suppose that, in the game, rumours insurrection, or dissatisfaction with tax rates, or something similar, have already come up, so I decide that the illegal thing under the hay is a bundle of weapons. Hence I describe to the players a scene at the gate as in my scenario 3 upthread.

Would that be railroading? If so, the implication seems to be that virtually all content generation is railroading - even the random tables that are the stock-in-trade of classic D&D.

If not, why is it different if the same outcome is determined by GM decision at the point of the encounter, rather than by rolling on a table that the GM wrote up a week ago? How was player agency blocked or overridden in one case but not the other?

I was hoping that you might explain your reasons.

How do the players have more agency if the GM rolls on a random table rather than making a choice?

What is the difference, from the point of view of GM influence on play, between the GM writing up a table and then rolling on it, and the GM just choosing?

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I think it may be railroading if the previous choices of the players are pointing in one direction but the DM throws this encounter out regardless of the direction of play. Ignoring the choices the players have made in order to use the encounter.

I think I have played in games like that but I can't recall any specific examples, so I could be wrong.

Random tables don't have that element of DM force - that they are going to use the encounter they drew up regardless of the direction of play. The table might have results that don't work out so well - boring, don't fit the genre, absurdly out-of-place, etc.; but what can you do, that's always a risk with any content generation.

Well, then again, maybe they do, since the DM is the one creating this table. (Or if it's a vague table.) And the DM can weight the table. Maybe it's not just random tables in isolation (or scene-framing in isolation) that leads to railroading but how they are used in the context of the entire game. A vague table + reaction rolls + a link to other setting features is what I use... but I still need to generate content on the spot.

Hmm...

pemerton said:

And to both LostSoul and JamesonCourage, who seem to think that rolling on a table makes a difference to whether or not an episode of content-introduction is railroading, would it make any difference if the GM wrote up the encounter table and sub-table on the spot and then rolled on it? Or is the important thing that the GM write up the table in comparitive ignorance of what is likely to matter to those participating in the game at the actual point of content-introduction?

If the answer to that last question is "yes", that is an interesting aesthetic preference; but what exactly does it have to do with player agency?

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I don't know... If you're going to make up a table on the spot, you might as well just ad-lib something. Would that impact player agency? I guess it would depend on the nature of the encounter. If it negates previous or future choices - an NPC coming back to life or some sort of super-powerful NPC that the PCs can't resist - then you might be removing some player agency. I guess you could come up with a future justification for why that NPC has come back to life, but because you made it up on the spot the players never had a chance to stop that event from occurring. The super-powerful NPC is usually a problem, I think.

Anyway, a lot to think about!

Saelorn said:

Not all railroading requires player choice to be negated. If I recall, that was part of our definition of Illusionism, which is related but not identical to railroading.

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Oh, yes it does! Railroading, the exertion of DM force and/or arrangement of the circumstances of narrative such that the players are disallowed any meaningful choice. That is they are unable to exert their willpower upon the game in any significant way. Illusionism is the subset of DM force techniques which are invisible to the players and take place without their knowledge or approval.

Just to be clear, we don't accept JC's definition of 'meaningful', there must be INTENT, in the same way that the law would define intent, and for the same reason, accidental action lacks meaning. It may have significant effect, but it does not convey anything. The WILL of the players is not involved.