"Railroading" is just a pejorative term for...

[Hussar]

I'd say it's more that the strategy/tactics come in *before* the dice start flying, in terms of how you set the battle up to your best advantage (assuming you've a chance to do so). Then, all the dice rolling determines whether your tactics are any good.

Now this I would agree with.

 

[Jacob Marley]

I'd say it's more that the strategy/tactics come in *before* the dice start flying, in terms of how you set the battle up to your best advantage (assuming you've a chance to do so). Then, all the dice rolling determines whether your tactics are any good.

I think that this is mostly correct -- and what I was suggesting in my earlier post -- however, there are some tactical decisions that will be made during combat as new information becomes available.

For example, lets assume that there is an adventuring party that is currently fighting goblins in a dungeon. The party has decided that their best tactic is for the two fighters and the cleric to engage the goblins while the thief watches the passage leading out of the room and the wizard watches the passage coming into the room. After the first round of combat, the thief notices an ogre coming toward the commotion. The party now has a decision to make - what do they do with this new information?

 

[Hussar]

I think that this is mostly correct -- and what I was suggesting in my earlier post -- however, there are some tactical decisions that will be made during combat as new information becomes available.

For example, lets assume that there is an adventuring party that is currently fighting goblins in a dungeon. The party has decided that their best tactic is for the two fighters and the cleric to engage the goblins while the thief watches the passage leading out of the room and the wizard watches the passage coming into the room. After the first round of combat, the thief notices an ogre coming toward the commotion. The party now has a decision to make - what do they do with this new information?

But, bringing this back around to my point, how is that edition based? What mechanical elements does your description engage? What you are describing is just good play and it could exist in any RPG or, in fact, in almost any game.

Are you going to make tactical decisions based on the in game narrative? Of course. It wouldn't be an RPG otherwise. But, I can't see how your example would engage the mechanics (in any edition) in such a way as to make the mechanics relevant.

Good play is always good play.

 

[Janx]

This "neat trick" means that if the adventurers wanted to go to Chicago, or Denver, or Kansas City, and end up in New York no matter what, then the players' decisions were ignored by the referee.

That's pretty much the exact opposite of the atmosphere I'm looking for, as a player and especially as a referee.

the problem I see is what is really meant by the players choosing Chicago over New York.

If the PCs don't have a specific reason for choosing Chicago over New York, and the thing in New York is not really tied to new york, then SOME DM's and players have a problem moving the thing to Chicago.

If the PCs are specifically choosing Chicago over New York to avoid the thing, then moving it to Chicago should be considered a bad practice.

For some DMs some content can be considered flexible.

There is some content, that should not be flexible, in that if the players make certain choices, they should successfully avoid encountering that content.

Take the Chicago vs. New York.

If you've got an encounter for a pick-pocket to attempt a grab when the players arrive in the city. It doesn't matter if you move this encounter. The PCs aren't aware of it to avoid it, and it isn't contradictory for it to be possible to happen in either city. The choice of city never really mattered, other than for local color.

If the PCs are going to Chicago, to avoid contact with somebody who is trying to take the McGuffin from them, then moving the bad guy to Chicago is Railroading because you are thwarting player decision. The choice of city was crucial in this situation.

As a DM, if you've got all these locations pre-planned on what's where, or if you've got random tables to determine what's where, and what's going to happen next, then you've no NEED to move stuff around.

If as a DM, you haven't built all these encounters ahead of time, and don't have piles of encounter tables to do all this (like Shaman's NPC encounter table thing), then moving stuff MAY be acceptable practice.

I'm obviously of the latter camp. I don't mind shuffling some stuff around, so I don't have to make a zilliion different things. Perhaps what might help to contemplate this, is that the encounters are locationless. Their location gets set when it is applicable to put it somewhere.

The dark stranger in the inn with the map to adventure is an example. Does it REALLY matter which inn he's at? If the PCs aren't specifically avoiding him, then having him be at the inn the players decide to stay at is an accepted practice by many GMs.

If somebody wants to call in the GM Police on me because I didn't make 3 different dark strangers with 3 different maps (or other hooks) to each be placed individually in the 3 inns the town has, they take their gaming way too seriously.

I consider the real problem being the GM not taking "no thanks" as an answer. When the players decline to follow-up on the map, then don't make the sherrif force the party to follow the map to the same dungeon. Move on.

 

[pemerton]

This "neat trick" means that if the adventurers wanted to go to Chicago, or Denver, or Kansas City, and end up in New York no matter what, then the players' decisions were ignored by the referee.

That's pretty much the exact opposite of the atmosphere I'm looking for, as a player and especially as a referee.

the problem I see is what is really meant by the players choosing Chicago over New York.

I agree with Janx here - and that doesn't necessarily mean I'm radically disagreeing with The Shaman - but I want to take the notion of "meaning" in another direction.

Janx gives examples where the choice of city isn't meaningful, because it isn't driven by any sort of concern that the GM is undermining by changing the location of an encounter (eg the pickpocket, or the cloaked stranger).

But another sort of meaning is this: maybe the players are choosing Chicago over New York because they want - for whatever reason is important to them or to their PCs - to learn the truth, in the gameworld, about Chicago. If this is their goal, then that goal is not undermined by the GM making up stuff about Chicago on the fly, or moving stuff to Chicago that, in his/her head, the GM had assumed would happen in New York. Because the players are still learning the gameworld truth about Chicago.

I've been thinking about this for the past week or two leading up to and subsequent to running a 4e, quasi-No Myth exploration scenario. I might start a new thread on this, but in short, I discovered that you can run a scenario in which exploration is the priority - in that the players' main goal is to find out what happened/what is going on in a particular location - without having pre-prepared the answers to their questions. You can make it up as you go along. It still serves the goal of exploration, because the players are still learning the truth about the gameworld.

Now why the players would care about the truth in the gameworld - be it the truth about Chicago, or the truth about the time-travel scenario I ran - is another question. Maybe one of the players wants her PC to become mayor of Chicago because she herself was born there. Maybe the players have a magic item which they can only use properly if they understand the truth of the gameworld's history. There are any number of reasons why the players might care about this sort of thing, which don't depend upon there being some pre-determined truth that doesn't change, in response to their own choices and exploratory priorities as actually revealed in the course of play, from what was notionally written by the GM in the campaign handbook.

I consider the real problem being the GM not taking "no thanks" as an answer. When the players decline to follow-up on the map, then don't make the sherrif force the party to follow the map to the same dungeon. Move on.

I agree with this, but think that rules in many traditional(-ish) RPGs like D&D could benefit from discussing it a bit more.

For example, they often contain GM advice along the lines of "the players may enjoy having their PCs' backstories incorporated into play from time to time" or "follow up on what seemed to interest the players, by including a connection to it in the next adventure". And I see posts on ENworld from time to time that talk about using PC backgrounds as a basis for sidequests.

But they don't tend to take the next step, which (in my experience) helps reduce the whole need to worry about "no thanks" of, saying "Combine PC backstories with those elements of prior play that interested the players and make that into the next adventure". Once these things are not peripheral but the game, then you're less likely to get players saying "no thanks".

Even under this approach, there can still be local issues of sequencing eg if there are two different things the players want to do - let's say, visit the Feywild and also redeem some slaves in a city on the world - then it is likely that the players and not the GM will determine the sequence, meaning you can have issues of unused prep or alternatively needing to improvise. But from my experience, most of your prep isn't wasted because most of it is prep for excactly the adventures the players want.

(And by way of acknowledgement: a lot of people think the Forge is a waste of time, but this approach to adventure design is something that really crystallised for me after reading an essay by Ron Edwards in which he talked about turning the usual conception of the plot hook on its head: instead of the GM offering a plot hook to the players, the players - by building and playing their PCs - establish plot hooks for the GM. Reading that and reflecting on it, and on actual play examples as well as rules from more non-traditional games, really helped me develop my GMing from the previously embryonic stage it had been in, where I was trying to break out of plot-hook driven simulationism but didn't quite know how.)

 

[Lanefan]

The module that keeps on giving! My PCs are now at 10th level, having started in at 1st, and we haven't got to Threshhold yet (admittedly I've been pretty liberal in my interpretation and expansion of the module, including detours via half of Thunderspire Labyrinth, plus the witches encounter I posted about here).

Anyway, I would describe that as a module containing many adventures/scenarios.

I think of it as a module containing many really awful moments I'd rather forget but can't. Probably the worst single module I've ever DMed was that one.

To be fair to it, one of these days I should probably haul it out and try running it again; but I'm concerned that might lead directly to poking my own eyes out with something sharp, so thus far I've held off.

Lan-"blinded by the night's dark terror"-efan

 

[Janx]

But they don't tend to take the next step, which (in my experience) helps reduce the whole need to worry about "no thanks" of, saying "Combine PC backstories with those elements of prior play that interested the players and make that into the next adventure". Once these things are not peripheral but the game, then you're less likely to get players saying "no thanks".

Even under this approach, there can still be local issues of sequencing eg if there are two different things the players want to do - let's say, visit the Feywild and also redeem some slaves in a city on the world - then it is likely that the players and not the GM will determine the sequence, meaning you can have issues of unused prep or alternatively needing to improvise. But from my experience, most of your prep isn't wasted because most of it is prep for excactly the adventures the players want.

Thank you for seeing the distinction I'm making.

And what I quoted is how I try to run my game. The early hooks are the hardest. Subsequent games write themselves as I know what the PCs want based on whats gone on before.

In the Chicago vs. NYC example, I think the guy who wrote saw the scenario I described where "moving it" was OK.

I think Shaman sees the other scenario, where the distinction between the two cities and thus the player's choice is being thwarted.

I've been trying to get folks to see there is a distinction in meaning and usage of the technique. And that assuming an extreme interpretation misrepresents the writers intent.

 

[pemerton]

Lanefan, I made that comment with memories of your experiences in mind! (Although I think poking your eyes out would be a bit extreme - just put it very carefully back on the shelf and walk slowly away . . .)

I really have done a lot of tweaking of it. I also think it has a lot of features that suit 4e well, or really lend themselves to tweaking in a 4e direction. And I've added in the whole 4e backstory material which has given the geography and history a lot more of an epic feel than it has taken just from the module.

The last time I tried to do this sort of thing with a module like that - ie one that has a lot of mini-episodes inside a fairly detailed geographic area - was OA7 Test of the Samurai, which is an Oriental Adventures module involving stopping a mad dragon from poisoning the skies of Japan in an attempt to gain immortality. I had a lot of fun with that also, but it didn't last quite as long as Night's Dark Terror has, and probably required a bit more tweaking.

 

[pemerton]

what I quoted is how I try to run my game.

What I find strange in some of these discussions is an insistence that a game must either be linear or sandbox, or at least somewhere on a spectrum between the two.

Because the sort of game I described, and - if we're understanding one another properly - the sort of game you also run, is one in which there is no sandbox in the classic sense (because you'll move the stuff from Chicago to New York, or make it up in response to what's gone before, or whatever) and yet it's not linear, because no one knows where it's going until it happens.

There also seems to be a lot of reluctance on the part of some GMs who post on ENworld to try and run this sort of non-linear, non-sandbox game. For example, I'm posting a bit on the moment on the "3.5E exalted-monk-paladin trainwreck" thread (I can't remember it's exact name). And the GM who started the thread has set up some interesting situations, by introducing a whole lot of cool stuff into a moduel s/he was running. But then s/he keeps talking about the way in which the players were supposed to respond to it - even though this sort of expectation seems to have been a major cause of the very trainwreck in respect of which his/her OP was seeking advice.

I personally think it would be good for the game if DMGs and the like gave more advice on how a GM can run this sort of game, because it's a game style that I think tends to be satisfying for players - their choices shape the game - while also being comparatively light on the load it imposes on the GM - unlike at least the classic sandbox (look at the work The Shaman does to prep his game, for instance).

 

[Lanefan]

Lanefan, I made that comment with memories of your experiences in mind! (Although I think poking your eyes out would be a bit extreme - just put it very carefully back on the shelf and walk slowly away . . .)

I really have done a lot of tweaking of it. I also think it has a lot of features that suit 4e well, or really lend themselves to tweaking in a 4e direction. And I've added in the whole 4e backstory material which has given the geography and history a lot more of an epic feel than it has taken just from the module.

Even with my limited 4e-fu I can somewhat see how that would work. And having a worthwhile backstory helps as well - when I ran it the party had just unexpectedly arrived in the area and had no local connections or backstory whatsoever.

How easy/hard are you finding the monster conversion? I've converted the other way (run a 4e module in 1e) and found 95% of it trivially easy...which usually means it's going to be hard going the other way.

Vaguely back on topic, one thing I found about NDT was that it quickly turned into a mini-sandbox once the players/PCs decided not to bother with anything like clues or investigation; they just wandered around the neighbourhood thrashing everything they met - including those who were in theory supposed to be allies! I ended up having to do some varying-degrees-of-subtle railroading to not only get them back on track but get them on track in the first place. And then they got slaughtered. Repeatedly.

The last time I tried to do this sort of thing with a module like that - ie one that has a lot of mini-episodes inside a fairly detailed geographic area - was OA7 Test of the Samurai, which is an Oriental Adventures module involving stopping a mad dragon from poisoning the skies of Japan in an attempt to gain immortality. I had a lot of fun with that also, but it didn't last quite as long as Night's Dark Terror has, and probably required a bit more tweaking.

I'm not familiar with this one at all, never did the OA thing.

Lanefan