D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Lanefan]

Now I don't know what game you're playing, but at least in 5e, by RAW as long as you're doing melee damage you can choose to deal non-lethal damage.

Indeed; and the same is true of some earlier editions as well (though I think the OP was running 5e).

There are plenty of house-rules that are feasible to strengthen or weaken that rule. That said, if PCs are purposefully killing "good" guards (more on that in a second), they aren't good.

There are a couple of ways to signpost this to your players before they actually go through the action. They're all fourth-wall breaking and I know that some people don't like that, but I recall those older Bethesda games where you could actually kill plot-critical NPCs, but you'd get a big pop-up warning you that you'd messed up the flow of destiny or whatever and you should probably reload a save. "Reloading a save" doesn't happen in TTRPGs which is why I think it's fair for GMs to provide a bit of a "are you sure about that?" warning ahead of campaign-breaking decisions.

There's a huge difference between "campaign-breaking" (where, say, the setting for some reason becomes no longer playable) and "campaign-altering" where something really big about either the setting, the PCs, or both changes but the game remains playable from that point under the new parameters.

The OP's situation is IMO in the latter group.

This, of course, brings up a number of other issues, primarily about the risks of planning a campaign arc too far out in advance, because you never know when your heroes are going to turn into notorious villains.

Yep. Plan ahead, sure, but keep those plans malleable!

There are plenty of ways to resolve this moving forward, but they really should all be done OOC in discussion with the players (and in this case, the GM).

1) You memory-hole the session. We'll call this Plan A. This is not as outrageous or as radical of a choice as it may sound. People will definitely have objections to the mere suggestion, but it is a choice and in certain situations it's a good one. I can see a DM handing their campaign off to a guest-DM for a few sessions, seeing everything come crashing and burning down around them, and saying "well that was a fun little jaunt through an AU, but let's get back to the real campaign." Not ideal, but it's there.

2) Plan B: The players decide to embrace their roles as villains. This, of course, changes the nature of the campaign, but if it's what the players seem to want, you can certainly roll with it. It might not be what the original DM wants, but there's clearly been a disconnect between the DMs and the players on the expectations on the nature of the campaign. That's something that really ought to be ironed out in a Session Zero and if you haven't got something like that set in stone then maybe you shouldn't be handing the keys to your kingdom to somebody else for a spin. I hope you've recognized that you were set up for failure here.

3) The players decide they have to find a way to redeem themselves. This is a classic trope, I'm sure I don't need to get too far into detail about it. It's also a more deeply involved affair, so we'll call this Plan C.

4) The players actions were retroactively "good". I like to call this Plan ACAB. The PCs, still trying to clear their name from the original murder, uncover rot and corruption so deep that it's infested the very city guard itself. They have, it turns out, unwittingly cleared the city of a substantial population of dirty cops, and the more evidence they uncover, the better chance they have of clearing their names for both "crimes", clearing their names, and restoring their standing in the city. As far as retcons go, it's certainly not terrible. And you can still have at least an NPC or two call them out and/or harbor continuing resentment for slaughtering them all before finding out they were corrupt. But it solves the problem without dramatically altering the course the campaign while also opening up complications in the relationships the party has with several members of the community. I think I like this one best.

For me, Plan A is so far off the table it might as well not even exist. But any of plans B, C, or (D) are certainly feasible, and allow the game to continue.

That said, from reading further updates scattered through this thread by the OP, it seems that game is kind of on life support if still going at all; the original DM bailed, as it seems did all but two of the players.

 

[pemerton]

As one of those that has very heavily tried to get @pemerton to use a different word I can say that for me it is exactly because I agree with his message. I think the concept he is pointing to as important for his enjoyment of the game is likely having wider applicability, and is valuable to talk about and have in mind. That this message is completely overshadowed by his choice of words is a loss to all of us that is interested in having a good conversation about the merits of different styles of play.

So, here is what I've described as a railroad:

A game in which the GM has overwhelming authority over setting and situation, and hence consequences, such that (i) what is staked is established by the GM, and (ii) outcomes in play consists overwhelmingly of combinations of elements that were authored by the GM as part of setting and situation, or were extrapolated "logically" from such elements by the GM.

I hereby give whatever permission is necessary, to you or anyone else, to describe the above using whatever label you think is accurate; and to explain why it has wider applicability beyond me. Nothing that I am saying in this, or any other, thread is stopping you or anyone else from starting thaa conversation right now.

If you think I might have anything useful to contribute to such a conversation by all means tag me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Talk about changing horses in midstream!

I also play with human beings who sometimes are tired or distracted or don't find the fiction I authored as interesting as I'd hoped.

But that's a point about the foibles of human endeavour and human relationships. It has ZERO relevance to the question what principle should govern my authorship decisions as GM.

I mean, upthread you outright said that there is something undesirable or ill-advised about the fact that I made a decision about the consequences of my players failure in the ritual undertaken by their PCs, because I deliberately invented something that they found interesting. And you even guessed (correctly) that they did find it interesting - you weren't worried then that my efforts might have fizzled because they were tired and distracted.

It's perfectly feasible, as GM, to set out to produce material in play that will be interesting and exciting and compelling because of how it relates to the goals and concerns that the players have staked through their play. I know, because I've been doing it, sometimes with more success than other times, for nearly 40 years of GMing. The advice that me and my players would be better off if I decided just to ignore those player-driven concerns is just about the worst possible GMing advice I could imagine.

Of course there's nothing wrong with coming with stuff your players find interesting. I just don't think my entire purpose as the GM is to do what the players want.

 

[Lanefan]

This is why I said looking at it as a binary is not useful. At what point does a game have sufficient agency to no longer resemble or be very close to a railroad? When does that begin? How do we achieve that?

I think we have a strong sense of how @pemerton might answer these questions. But it'd be good to have similarly considered responses from others.

For me, that point more or less arrives when in-character choices either cannot be made at all or, if-when they can, they turn out later to have been illusionary (as in, you're gonna meet Ogres no matter which door you pick first, even though only one door leads to Ogres).

 

[Lanefan]

The point is that, imo, the game shouldn't be all about servicing the player's needs.

Danger, Will Robinson!

Quotes like this can come back to bite you later. Believe me.

 

[pemerton]

it is a definition aimed at dismantling the sandbox

I can't comment on what Ron Edwards said in the videos you mentioned, which I've not watched. But I am not trying to "dismantle" any sandboxes. I'm not dismantling anything.

All Pemerton is really saying is in these games we are describing the GM is the one who decides what is on the map, how NPCs behave, what is going on in a particular region, and he is then saying that is railroad because it is authored by the GM. I don't see how that is a useful definition of railroad.

It's useful for me, because I see the word railroad used to describe RPGing in which the GM exercises an unreasonable degree of authority, to the detriment of the players' capacity to shape the fiction. And I am characterising where, for me, the boundary lies between the reasonable and the unreasonable.

Others are welcome to draw that boundary wherever they like. I'm not setting out to tell them what they should want from their RPGing. I'm talking about what I want from mine, using the vocabulary that I have used to so for 30+ years.

he also applies this to on the fly extrapolations, which I really don't get. The whole point of extrapolating is to expand player choice.

The reason I apply it to extrapolations is because those are still the product of the GM's imagination.

Sandbox players pride themselves on immersion and not railroading the players so if you can deconstruct those two things, you can dismantle the sandbox.

I would assume that what pleases those players is the experiences they gain from what they do, rather than the labels that they use to describe what they do.

Like, the fact that someone else labels my play "artificial" because that is how it would feel to them is neither here nor there to me. Why I enjoyed the episode in which Fea-bella and Golin's failed attempt at a binding ritual led to Megloss's house being blown apart by a bolt of lightning was not because I was confident that everyone would agree with me that it was "natural". It's because it was an exciting, compelling moment in the fiction, and my friends and I had a lot of enjoyment in the process of creating it. The fact that @Lanefan thinks it's "pandering" and that @Micah Sweet thinks it reflects too much effort to create fiction that is interesting to the players doesn't change that one bit.

 

[pemerton]

One thing I always look for is reasons to send a party back to a site <snipping the rest>

And people wonder why I might call this a railroad?

 

[Lanefan]

Look at it this way, I long ago graduated from the sort of death maze puzzle play your shilling. Like 40+ years ago. No doubt it can present a good challenge of a certain sort, but we figured out how to run games that are equally challenging but in multiple ways, and incorporate other dimensions of challenge as well.

When you reach this level of play you will see!

EDIT: never mind, a mod got to this first.

 

[pemerton]

Of course there's nothing wrong with coming with stuff your players find interesting. I just don't think my entire purpose as the GM is to do what the players want.

Well, isn't the phrase "what the players want", quite ambiguous.

Do you mean "Always narrate events in the fiction such that the players' goals and aspirations for their PCs are realised"? That has never been a principle of my GMing, and in posts in this thread in reply to you I have explained how various RPGs - Burning Wheel, AW/DW - have methods of play that ensure this doesn't happen.

There is also another active thread, started by me and called "Why do RPGs have rules?", which takes as its starting point Vincent Baker's suggestion that the purpose of resolution mechanics in a RPG is to enable the fiction to develop in ways that are unwanted by and unwelcome to all of the participants, in the sense that no one would introduce those things if the only way of creating fiction was unconstrained authorship. (Whether unilateral or consensual.)

So if you, at this point in the thread, think that I am an advocate of "Always narrate events in the fiction such that the players' goals and aspirations for their PCs are realised", then I can only conclude that you've not really read what I've posted or tried to seriously engage with it.

On the other hand, here is another meaning of the phrase "do what the players want": play the game with vigour in the way they want you to play it. And in this sense, when I play any game - a board game, a card game, a RPG - I try to play it with vigour in the way my fellow participants want me to, as established by the rules and expectations of the game. I always try to play well, within the limits of my energy and ability. So when I sit down to play a RPG, with the expectation that I will frame scenes and narrate consequences that engage the players' evinced concerns for their PCs, and put those things at stake, and make them come to life in our shared fiction, well, that's what I try and do.

Of course there are some games played with expectations that I can't engage with and still enjoy myself, either because they are just not a good fit for my taste, or because I don't have what it takes to do them in any sort of worthwhile way. The former is why I don't play computer games. The latter is why I don't play very much chess - I'm a terrible chess player and simply don't have the time or inclination to get better enough to give myself or anyone else a worthwhile game.

 

[Lanefan]

And people wonder why I might call this a railroad?

Yes.

As GM of a game that ideally will last for many years, I see one of my roles as that of long-range planner. To that end, I look for ways and means of, during the campaign, getting the most out of the setting and its various elements as I reasonably can. However, the players have to, via what their characters do or don't do, give me the openings or else I can't do much of this if any.

If they miss something noteworthy in an adventure, I make note of it as it might later provide a reason for them to return there.