D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Faolyn]

As I posted upthread, a module like White Plume Mountain or The Isle of Dread will basically break down if the players adopt dramatic needs for their PCs beyond "complete the adventure".

I mean, consider Aedhros the Dark Elf: that character has no reason to sail to a far island and fight whatever those brain-spiders are called (Rhagodesa?). So if I play that character, X1 doesn't even get off the ground.

That's when the GM says "please make a character who is willing to find some reason to work with the group, please."

Such as Aedhros thinking there may be information they want for their own quest available on that far island.

 

[Micah Sweet]

When I built the PC Aedhros, I had in mind JRRT's "Dark Elves" Eol and Maeglin. I also wanted to build a 4 lifepath PC who would be a Dark Elf (my friend and I had agreed to build 4LP PCs), and the Spouse lifepath seemed a good way to get that build, and it also provided an obvious reason to have become so Spiteful (both Eol and Maeglin are also spiteful for reasons connected to spouses and in-laws, albeit not because of a death as in Aedhros's case). My friend wanted to build a Weather Witch, and so I made sure to build in a connection to the human port, via Aedhros's father in law.

To save anyone having to cross-reference, here once again are some of the salient elements of this character:

Beliefs​

*I will avenge the death of my spouse!​

*I will never admit I am wrong​

*Only because Alicia [the other PC] seems poor and broken can I endure her company​

​

Instincts​

*Never use Song of Soothing unless compelled to​

*Always repay hurt with hurt​

*When my mind is elsewhere, quietly sing the Elven lays​

​

Relationships​

*Hateful relationship with my father-in-law, the Elven ambassador at the port (blames him for spouse's death)​

​

Reputations and Affiliations​

*+1D rep ill-fated for himself and others​

*+1D aff with the Elven Etharchs​

​

Traits​

*Born Under the Silver Stars (To those who look upon me with clear eyes, there is an unmistakable halo, like white light through a gossamer veil or stars shining at night)​

​

*Dark and Imposing (I once was fair and beautiful to all who look upon me, tall and slender, rounded by graceful curves)​

​

*Etharchal (My noble heritage is recognisable at a glance)​

​

*Self-deluded​

From this, we can see certain dramatic needs, and certain ways of putting the character under pressure. There is the hatred and desire for vengeance, aimed particularly at the Elven ambassador at the port. There is the spitefulness, the instinct to repay hurt with hurt and the attitude towards Alicia, as well as the refusal to sing the Elven healing song (Song of Soothing) that he knows. He is dark and imposing, whereas once he was fair and beautiful; and he has a reputation as ill-fated. But he also, when his mind wanders, sings the Elven lays to himself; he is self-deluded.

There are many ways this character might develop. In the last session, for instance, his attitude to Alicia changed. More than once she collapsed unconscious from the strain of spell casting (such that only by using the Song of Soothing could Aedhros bring her back to consciousness, which he needed to do so that she could help him in his plans), and she was humiliated in other ways too. But nevertheless, she did help with his plans. His Belief about Alicia is now Only because Alicia is not utterly without capability can I endure her company. That might change further; so might his Instinct not to use Song of Soothing, if he finds that Alicia continues to need his help. Maybe that could even change his views about hurt and vengeance! Or lead to better self-awareness.

But for any of this to happen, the play needs to be about these things. To create opportunities for their expression. Which is the whole orientation of Burning Wheel, and the focus of the system's advice both to GMs and players.

If Aedhros finds himself sailing out at sea it will almost certainly be related in some fashion to Alicia, who is a weather witch and has as one of her Beliefs that I will one day be rich enough to BUY a ship. Shipwreck could be a consequence of a failed check (it's one that I've used GMing in Burning Wheel), but it would be adjudicated and applied using the methods of the system that I have already explained. Suppose, for instance, that Alicia and Aedhros are travelling on a ship with the Ambassador, and Alicia's player fails a Weather Watching check, and hence (in the fiction) Alicia fails to anticipate the impending storm, which is to say (at the table) the GM narrates a shipwreck as a consequence: the three characters being washed up on a strange shore could be a possible way that things develop; it clearly has potential. But I've already described a situation that has almost nothing in common with the module X1.

The "storyboard" @Lanefan has sketched has nothing to do with Aedhros (or Alicia) as characters. It involves a pointless quest (go to city to get records), a fetch quest (clearing name), some pirate sub-plot, a desert island detour, more pointless info-gathering with Elves, a quest to some Elves, and then a pre-planned framing of a "final confrontation". It is a storyboard which is almost never about Aedhros and is about whatever the GM wants it to be about (family secrets, riches, pirates, etc). It shows no grasp at all of how Burning Wheel is played; and the idea that you would interrupt the sort of play I am describing via an excursion through X1 - a module which is about hexcrawling through a pulp-style tropical island, on the basis of a discovered "treasure map" - is frankly just bizarre. (Burning Wheel could probably handle it in some form, though some of its machinery might spin a bit idle; but I wouldn't be brining this character to that table. If I wanted to play that game, I would build a completely different PC with a completely different suite of attributes and build elements.)

There seems to be an implicit premise in the questions posed by @Lanefan and @Micah Sweet that there is some sort of virtue in a player being indifferent to the situation the GM frames them into, and a concomitant taking of exception to the notion that play should in some fairly robust sense be about the character that the player has established (via build and play). Of course we all have our preferences, and are under no obligation to revise or even examine them: but I don't think it can be that mysterious that someone - eg me! - would regard as railroading an approach to RPGing that very obviously requires the player to subordinate their conception of what the game is to be about to the GM's conception of the same. That's the essence of a railroad.

Fair enough. Sounds like a fun game if you can get behind all the mechanical stuff that the game is built around. Obviously it's not a game I could get behind, but I'm glad it's fun for you, and I apologize for disparaging it.

 

[pemerton]

And yet the answers to those questions were always there in the fiction, just waiting for someone to ask them.

<snip>

It's the "quantum Ogre" problem again, only with items this time rather than opponents. Hence, it's an issue.

I don't know that this means, or what you take the issue to be.

You often talk about the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. Parts of the dungeon in that module are build with stone. How many blocks of stone are in the Forgotten Temple? How much does all that stone weigh? What is it's volume?

The module doesn't answer those questions. I doubt that even a tiny fraction of 1% of the people who have played that module have invented answers to those questions. That did not seem to impede their play.

If no one yet knows whether or not spellbooks exist in Evard's tower, so what? It's no different from the infinitely many other things that, by implication, must be part of the fiction - such as the number, volume and weight of stone in the Forgotten Temple - that no one has yet authored. Calling these unauthored elements of the fiction "quantum" just seems like a misleading metaphor, that sheds no light on the actual processes used by RPG players to establish their shared fictions.

So with the spellbooks, it seems on a broader scale that failure really can't be due to in-character bad luck or incompetence - it appears the situation can't exist where the spellbooks are/were in fact right there in the tower all along and the Thurgon-Aramina team simply failed to find them; because in order to have them appear elsewhere (e.g. a library attached to a local Mystra temple) all they need to do is go and successfully search there.

I've explained how BW resolution works, multiple times. If you can't envisage a possible consequence which results in their being no spellbooks in Evard's tower, that's on you.

 

[pemerton]

That's when the GM says "please make a character who is willing to find some reason to work with the group, please."

Such as Aedhros thinking there may be information they want for their own quest available on that far island.

I made a lengthy post, not far upthread, in which (inter alia) I explained how I build Aedhros having regard to the fact that my friend was building Alicia, a Weather Witch.

What the GM actually says, in the X1 example, is "please make a character who will cheerfully travel to the Isle of Dread".

And people are puzzled that I would regard that as a railroad?

 

[Maxperson]

No I'm not arguing that. It's never occurred to me that someone might argue that an episode of RPGing was not a railroad because the players got to choose their own PC builds.

It's not a railroad because they have agency. Nothing requires the players to be able to author things the world in order to have agency. That's just your preference that they be able to do so. Agency and railroad are mutually exclusive things. If you have agency, you are not being railroaded. If you are being railroaded, you cannot have agency.

I'm talking about what happens next, in play, as a result of the players declaring actions for their PCs. And I'm saying that a game in which the totality of what happens next is either a combination of things the GM pre-authored, or the GM's extrapolations from those things, is by my lights a railroad. Because all the elements were pre-determined, or else extrapolated by the GM from their predetermined stuff.

But as I said earlier, this is false. The ONLY way this happens is if the players don't actually play. If they can play, then the resulting fictional narration that happens is a COMBINATION of DM and player input, not DM only. Even though the authority to author the fiction resides primarily or completely with the DM, the fiction is still a collaboration between the players and DM.

Inevitably? In this thread I've been told by multiple posters - @Oofta, @Micah Sweet, @Lanefan I think - that in their RPGing only the GM can establish setting elements.

Yes.

Player: "I go to the town blacksmith."
DM: "Doh! I didn't think to put one here. You go to the blacksmith."

Before the player said anything there was no blacksmith. Now, because of the player there is.

 

[Oofta]

That's when the GM says "please make a character who is willing to find some reason to work with the group, please."

Such as Aedhros thinking there may be information they want for their own quest available on that far island.

This is something I stress in a session 0. We all discuss what kind of game we want to play and if everyone else wants to play Isle of Dread and the one person who has a different preference is okay with it then we play Isle of Dread this time. The onus is on the players to make characters that will fit what the group decided to do.

If I have 6 people at my table, I can't cater 100% to every player's preference. We try to do the best we can to compromise and we can typically figure it out. Yes, we might play Isle of Dread now but next campaign let's do something a bit different. Perhaps I can tweak Isle of Dread to include a bit more of what a particular individual wants.

But like I've said before, we have to do my best to make the game fun for the group. To quote the Rolling Stones "You can't always get. But if you try sometimes, well, you might find you get what you need." Sometimes getting what you need means compromising on your vision of your character. I know I do it on a regular basis.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes, it does.

No it doesn't and I have proven that multiple times. Continuing the strawman that @EzekielRaiden began isn't helpful.

You have a weird, Manichean perception of a “bad DM”, sitting in the dark, twirling his mustache about how he’s going to screw over the players. Of course, no rule is going to stop that guy, but he’s also a comparative rarity.

Right. I've been saying for years that bad DMs are rare, and therefore should not be included in game design. There aren't enough of them to warrant rules being included to try to stop or mitigate them. Such efforts are doomed to fail anyway.

Good rules will however assist with the considerably more numerous:

• newbie DMs who think that DMing is about telling the cool story they have in their heads rather than what the characters want;
• stressed DMs that are worried that allowing players to do something cool not covered by the rules “this one time” will create a precedent that will be exploited “against them”;
• time-crunched DMs who spent too much prep time on world-building to the detriment of the stuff the party interacted with; and, of course,
• non-DMs who see a book’s worth of impenetrable and poorly-organized cruft and decide that there is no way that they will try DMing.

None of that requires any rules whatsoever. DMG advice is sufficient to cover all of that.

The first bullet point is only a problem if the players want to do something else. I've seen a number of players who want a DM with a cool story and enjoy playing in that sort of game.

The second bullet point very often does result in an exploit. I've seen it happen time and time again over the decades with many different players and DMs. The problem is that if the cool thing is weaker than what the PC can do, the player usually won't use it. If it's the same as what they can do(and it's very hard to gauge that), then it's disappointing and often not really cool at all. If it's stronger then the players will usually attempt to keep using it. Like the first bullet point, though, if you can find players who will agree not to exploit cool things, that style can work. It's all about matching DM and players to the same style of play.

The third bullet point isn't a result of time crunch or too much prep(there really isn't such a thing). It's the result of a DM being too invested in his prep and therefore loathe to change it via game play. That can happen with a DM who preps 10% and improvs 90%.

The fourth bullet point I haven't seen since 1e, since much of that edition was very confusing to a lot of people. What I typically see are non-DMs who don't understand that there really isn't as much to DMing as it appears. They are intimidated by having to run the world and interact with all the things the players want to try and feel like they can't do it. It seems overwhelming to them and once they try their hand at it, it doesn't take long for them to realize that it isn't as hard as it looks and start to swim like a fish through the rules. Even 3e was like that. The main issue with that edition is that you have to stop and look up rules too often because there were so many of them, not because it was impenetrable or poorly organized.

 

[pemerton]

It's not a railroad because they have agency. Nothing requires the players to be able to author things the world in order to have agency. That's just your preference that they be able to do so. Agency and railroad are mutually exclusive things. If you have agency, you are not being railroaded. If you are being railroaded, you cannot have agency.

By this definition of railroading, no RPG in which the players build their PCs, or in which the players declare actions for their PCs, can be a railroad. That strikes me as obviously absurd, because (i) every episode of RPGing ever involves the players declaring actions for their PCs, and (ii) most of the time the players authored those PCs, and yet (iii) some of those episodes of RPGing were railroads.

But as I said earlier, this is false. The ONLY way this happens is if the players don't actually play. If they can play, then the resulting fictional narrations that happens is a COMBINATION of DM and player input, not DM only. Even though the authority to author the fiction resides primarily or completely with the DM, the fiction is still a collaboration between the players and DM.

As I posted upthread,

the GM decision about the answer happens after I've declared my action. They have decided everything that happens next. I took the implicit "next" to be obvious.

Again, and by way of reiteration: a game doesn't cease to be a railroad because the players declared actions for their PCs. But if everything that flows from those actions is some combination of GM-authored elements and extrapolations therefrom, then I characterise it as a railroad.

Yes.

Player: "I go to the town blacksmith."
DM: "Doh! I didn't think to put one here. You go to the blacksmith."

Before the player said anything there was no blacksmith. Now, because of the player there is.

I think that this is the sort of thing that @Oofta has said he doesn't want in his RPGing because it spoils immersion.

Typically, of course, going to the blacksmith may not be all that high stakes. What about if the player declares "I go to Evard's tower"?

 

[Maxperson]

By this definition of railroading, no RPG in which the players build their PCs, or in which the players declare actions for their PCs, can be a railroad. That strikes me as obviously absurd, because (i) every episode of RPGing ever involves the players declaring actions for their PCs, and (ii) most of the time the players authored those PCs, and yet (iii) some of those episodes of RPGing were railroads.

This seems to be deliberately missing the point. A railroad necessarily invalidates player choice, so if there is railroading, there is no player choice even if the players say, "We choose to go through the left door." It's just the illusion of choice, which is no choice.

Again, agency is the key. If choosing the left door has meaning and isn't illusionism(quantum ogre), then the players had agency there. If the choice has no meaning because the ogre will appear behind whichever door they choose, then they don't have choice.

Again, and by way of reiteration: a game doesn't cease to be a railroad because the players declared actions for their PCs. But if everything that flows from those actions is some combination of GM-authored elements and extrapolations therefrom, then I characterise it as a railroad.

And I have shown that everything does not do that. Player actions are not extrapolations of DM authored elements. The DM cannot know what the players will do and MUST react to them if he isn't railroading. The traditional game is a collaboration between DM and PCs, not a pure DM extrapolation.

I think that this is the sort of thing that @Oofta has said he doesn't want in his RPGing because it spoils immersion.

It's very interesting that you say this, because @Oofta liked that post of mine.

Typically, of course, going to the blacksmith may not be all that high stakes. What about if the player declares "I go to Evard's tower"?

Stakes are irrelevant to a discussion about railroading. Stakes are a gamestyle preference thing, not a railroad/not railroad thing. High stakes, low stakes, no stakes or juicy steaks, it's all about what you prefer.

 

[pemerton]

A railroad necessarily invalidates player choice

<snip>

Stakes are irrelevant to a discussion about railroading.

No they're not.

If the decisions the players can make that affect the fiction are low stakes things like there's a blacksmith in town but not Evard's tower is near here or there are spellbooks for the taking in Evard's tower then the agency you are pointing to is trivial and more-or-less illusory.