D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think they intend for omniscience to be required. The problem is that their stated requirement includes the need to be omniscient. What they have said is they need to be informed so as to be able to make a meaningful decision. Well, what does informed mean? It it enough to be informed that one of the two doors is locked and the other isn't? Is it enough to hear something behind the right door(ogres are noisy), but not the left door? At what point are they informed enough?

Just saying informed without a limited means that you would need that omniscience to make a truly informed decision. Anything less and your decision is going to be flawed by lack of knowledge and therefore less meaningful. Omniscience is the logical end of their rather open and vague requirement.

Only because you insist that agency is all or nothing, we never accepted that proposition! As to what is enough? I can't answer that in some global sense.

 

[pemerton]

@Autumnal

Your post about the Declaration of Independence is spot on. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dworkin's discussion of the evolution of the use of "courtesy" as a normative standard in his book Law's Empire, but that is actually the model I've had in mind for the past day or two of posting: that is, we can use a word that has normative content or that implicates a normative standard, and on that basis apply it to controversial use cases not because we are "ignoring the received definition" but because we think ignored usage is mistaken about where the normative boundaries actually lie.

Now in the case of discussions of voluntary activities like RPGing it probably doesn't matter if people have different normative standards and hence disagree over which use cases fall on which side of the boundary.

But I fully agree that someone simply pointing to their normative standard, and hence their view of where the boundary line falls across the range of possible use cases, is hardly giving me a good reason to change my standard!

Anyway, thanks again for the thoughtful post.

 

[Gimby]

It's not that I don't understand any part of it, I just don't see it as being consistent with the concept of the controller of any character always rolls for that character, which seems so blindingly obvious as a precept it's unexpected that I have to type it out.

And yes, sometimes rolling to attack (to hit) and sometimes rolling to defend (save) isn't in itself consistent. I'm not arguing that.

I'm not sure this is really true for the way D&D is structured - for the normal case of attacks and saves in at least 3e and later the rule is Bonus + Dice versus Target number. It's fairly straightforward to rearrange this so that, say, the attacker always rolls (this is broadly what 4e did, but doable in 3 and 5e as well by changing saves to defences like 4e) or the defender always rolls (how saves work in 3/5e, and changing attack bonus + dice vs AC to attack bonus + 10 vs AC - 10 plus dice). This is sketched out in at least the 3e Unearthed Arcana and extending it to "players always roll" seems logical.

There are some quirks with this in 5e to do with things like spell resistance, advantage stacking and what counts as an attack, but putting all the dice in the player hands has been possible with official guidance in D&D for close to 20 years.

I do know that PBTA games support PvP of various sorts (Monsterhearts for example, to my understanding is largely about emotional PvP) but I'm not familiar enough to say how exactly.

 

[Maxperson]

Only because you insist that agency is all or nothing, we never accepted that proposition! As to what is enough? I can't answer that in some global sense.

I guess you missed this post.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/fighting-law-and-order.697520/post-9024016

 

[pemerton]

I simply prefer that my character inhabits a world, they don't help create it. They also don't require information the character could not possess.

In this we are largely ad idem.

 

[Faolyn]

Actually, there's a quite well respected design for a cooperative game played with a standard deck of cards called Regicide that generated a ton of buzz. It is very difficult, and there has been some professionally illustrated decks designed for play with it, but the rules were very much built with a standard deck in mind.

Fascinating!

That super specific counter example aside though I still don't think competition is the significant factor that differentiates conventional games and TTRPGs, and I'm very much not in the camp that's willing to yield "narrative" as the significant dividing factor. I do think TTRPGs have a distinct, specific ludic function that makes them different from other games, but I don't think there's actually any need to alter one's understanding of player agency in game terms. There are no/low agency card and board games, something like War being the ur-example of a no-agency game that fundamentally could be played with a random number generator as well as humans. A low agency game might be something like Klondike Solitaire, wherein the outcome can be changed by pursuing different lines of play, but will not necessarily be, and might have been lost at the initial deal.

Then let me rephrase: there's a big difference between poker and battleship, and an RPG. I think we can agree on that. Because those games are PVP, not knowing what your opponent has is not "railroading," as per the original post I responded to.

 

[pemerton]

see the main difference between linear games and being railroaded IMO is that linear games state upfront that there is an established path of events and places laid out for you to encounter that you basically agree to follow but it typically grants you as much freedom to find methods and solutions within that path that you can devise yourself.

I think of this as basically puzzle-solving play: the goal of play is to come up with methods and solutions. Whether it's good puzzle-solving play; and whether one even enjoys puzzle-solving play; are further questions.

 

[pemerton]

Exactly. Calling that style of play a railroad has done nothing but get a lot of people's back up. How is that productive?

This is a misdescription of this thread. Other things have also occurred in the thread.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I've already corrected this twice in this thread. Why do you persist in this mischaracterization?

I think you disagreed with it. I don't think you "corrected" it because I think you're wrong. This is what you said:

The two things I'm taking exception to in this thread are the mistaken ideas that 1) traditional play = railroad, and 2) choosing the doors is no agency at all when it is, even if it's low agency.

1) Okay. Why not?
2) What agency does it allow?

Honestly, I think agency is best viewed over longer terms rather than one moment of play like that. As one instance of play, it doesn't display agency. Do I think I'd label any game that included such an instance of play as a railroad? Probably not. But a game that had constant or frequent moments of play like that? Yeah, probably so.

Again, look back to the OP. The players had agency by your definition. Yet still... it's a railroad.

I don't think they intend for omniscience to be required. The problem is that their stated requirement includes the need to be omniscient. What they have said is they need to be informed so as to be able to make a meaningful decision. Well, what does informed mean? It it enough to be informed that one of the two doors is locked and the other isn't? Is it enough to hear something behind the right door(ogres are noisy), but not the left door? At what point are they informed enough?

Just saying informed without a limited means that you would need that omniscience to make a truly informed decision. Anything less and your decision is going to be flawed by lack of knowledge and therefore less meaningful. Omniscience is the logical end of their rather open and vague requirement.

This is pretty absurd. But kudos to say this and in the same breath point out how absurd others are for not expressing the absurd extreme you just came up with.

Which brings us back to the same question that's been asked since about 1975: "Which takes precedence: the roleplay, or the game?"; and for this we'll each have different answers.

I don't think that roleplaying and game need to be in contention here. Though in a case where there's a choice between the fiction of the game, and the reality of the players, yes folks may have different ideas about the best way to proceed. I honor the players above the make believe. I don't want to suspend player agency to honor the make believe of the game. Not without compelling reason.

Maybe, but IMO it's a valid argument notwithstanding; and covers off those occasions when a bit of railroading in fact does add more than it subtracts.

Again, I don't know if that's much of an argument against railroading.

By talking to the/getting a new GM? And I'm not being flippant. If you have a GM who doesn't care about your backstory or who actively ignores it, and you do care about it and want to deal with it in-game, then it's something to be addressed.

I say "a good chance," because, of course, there's always the players who insist their characters led armies into triumphant war and are actually polymorphed dragons at 1st level, or other obnoxious things.

Sure, talking it out and setting proper expectations is vital. Look at the OP... the game collapsed because the players and GM were on different pages.

Well yes, that's what I was saying.

Sorry, what were you saying? That "the quest" is a railroad? Or something else? I'm genuinely asking as I think I may be misreading your post.

 

[Faolyn]

This makes no sense: in any actual RPG play, for instance, a player can declare "I go outside, find a patch of bare earth, and dig a hole in the ground with my fingers." How an the GM "refuse" to let that choice change the fiction, even if the GM didn't want the fiction to include such a thing?

By not letting the hole have a bearing on the game. Let's say you managed to dig a deep hole in the ground, using only your fingers. If the GM doesn't want the fiction to include the hole, then nobody falls in, traffic moves around it, nothing interesting is found at the bottom, no interesting events occur because of the hole, and not having the guards/mayor/local council/whoever stop/fine/arrest you for making it. You made a hole, but it means nothing to the game. And judging by some horror stories I've read, some GMs would go so far as to say things like "you sprain your wrist and can't continue digging" or even "no, you don't want to dig." Those would be bad GMs, IMO, but it happens.

I was in a Changeling: the Dreaming game very briefly that ended because of this sort of railroading. The straw that broke the game's back was when we went into the Dreaming to a land where, if you said a naughty word, a pie would appear and hit you in the face. The party contained a redcap. If you don't know from C:tD, redcaps are literally always hungry and can eat anything (including heavy machinery). So the redcap's player was basically like, "sweet, free food!" and started cursing. The GM, who did not want this to happen, tried telling the player, "no, you're full, you don't want to eat anymore" and refused to allow the player to actually play his character the way it should be. This really angered the redcap's player and because of this and a few other incidents by the GM, the game folded in... the second session, I think.

If "railroading" is defined such that it only ever occurs if the GM literally vetoes players' action declarations for their PCs, it becomes a useless term, because it describes no actual play of a RPG.

You're misunderstanding what I mean. The GM has a story. You're not allowed to do things that go against that story. The GM fudges dice rolls or demands ludicrously high target numbers ("Nope, your nat 20 and +8 modifier isn't enough; you don't find any info" when you barely have to even roll to find out the plot of the story you're supposed to be following), has NPCs be uncooperative or actively hostile, causes you to be attacked if you go where you're not supposed to, ignores character background and motivation if it goes against the story, nerfs abilities that would mess with the plot, and things like that.

That's railroading. Coming up with the world on their own, however, and telling you what you know about it isn't.