No need to apologise, but thanks - I was just wanting to make it clear that my accounts of my gaming experiences aren't made up - they are there in those dozens of actual play posts.
My timeline and backstory (sblocked for length):
[sblock]
1982 - start playing and GMing Moldvay/Cook/Marsh B/X
1984 - start GMing AD&D.
At this time I had read Lewis Pulsipher's essays in White Dwarf, advocating the "wargaming" style of D&D. I must have read Gygax's accounts in his PHB and DMG too, but don't think I understood them at the time. I had no context outside of the game for making sense of all that advice; and my attempts to implement it failed. I wasn't good at it; my players weren't interested in it. (I've since learned that I'm not a very good wargamer/boardgamer - I lack the patience to develop my position, and so act/commit too early. I've also learned that I like teasing/provoking/prodding my players when I'm GMing, which is pretty much the opposite of dispassionate, neutral Gygaxian/Pulsipherian refereeing.)
Those early games that I GMed weren't meaningfully distinguishable from a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook experience, except that - with a referee rather than a book - there was a bit more flexibility in sequencing of exploration and fighting.
I also had a copy of Classic Traveller from around 1978/79. At first I didn't know what to make of it - it tends to assume the reader knows what a RPG is and how it works. Moldvay Basic is hugely different in this regard - it tells you how to play, and even if the "skilled play" aspect of it isn't something you pick up on (I didn't), it establishes basic procedures like drawing a dungeon map, the PCs exploring the dungeon, etc.
In the early-to-mid 80s I toyed with Traveller again a little bit, but never got beyond the odd bit of skirmishing, some trading rolls, etc. No serious play.
I would say the best part of my first AD&D campaign was when the name level PCs had set up a base, and defended it against a series of plots and attacks from NPC rivals/enemies who had been built up over the course of the campaign. This was my first experience at "scene framing" in response to player-signalled concerns/interests in respect of the shared fiction. (Of course I wouldn't have described it anything like that back then.)
1986-89 - I ran an OA AD&D campaign, and then an all-thieves campaign, starting with the Keep of B2 and then moving first to Critwall and the the City of Greyhawk (using the boxed set). This was where I developed my preferred approach to GMing - "scene-framing" in a way that respnds to player signals and the play of the game, with a character focus but not necessarily that deep or serious. (I think of Claremont X-Men as a big influence on my sense of how adventuring-group-focused serial fiction can work.)
1990 - A very bad experience as a player in a 2nd ed AD&D game with what I would regard as a super-railroading GM (but whom ENworld posters have defended on previous occasions when I've described the episode). It only lasted two or three sessions, I think. My lasting memory is that we were defending a city from kobold infiltrators, and (against the GM's expectations) we captured a kobold. We tried to interrogate it, and get it to show us on a map where the kobolds were coming from. The GM played the kobold as absolutely incapable of meaningful communication (despite kobolds defaulting to Average (but low average) intelligence in AD&D). It was transparent that the GM had a preconception of how the story was going to unfold (I assume he was running some module or other) and the players gaining intelligence about the kobolds was not part of that story.
When that GM indicated that he would be away for our next meeting time (this was a University club game), I arranged with the other players to start a Rolemaster game for them. Which I did - so in effect we sacked our GM (I think we invited him to join the RM game if he wanted; he declined, and I believe got new players). That RM game continued from early 1990 to late 1997, with a shifting cast of players and PCs (though a couple were constant from 1991 onward, and one of the originals, who had moved to the US, would drop in whenever he was back in Melbourne). A few of the players who joined over the years were refugees from standard (ie railroading) AD&D games. The campaign became fairly well-known in the club for byzantine mechanics (that's RM for you), byzantine backstory, and some interesting characters.
This same group also did some other RPGing together, in the club and at local conventions - we especially enjoyed (and sometimes won prizes for) BRP systems - RQ, CoC, Stormbringer, etc. At conventions they had two strengths compared to (eg) D&D games: first, the GMs tended to be better (more evocative in their play of NPCs, more impassioned in their framing, etc); second, the game was more likely to be focused on a single big conflict, with earlier scenes and sessions being build-ups to the payoff. (I woudln't have been able to articulate this analysis at the time, but can see it in retrospect.) The pre-gens gave everyone some starting motivations, and that would be enough to give you direction through the set-up. But then in the big finale it as your vision of your PC that came to the fore, as you had to choose (eg) between honouring alliances or betaying the group for some other commitment.
I can't really do that sort of evocative GMing, but I think I learned some lessons from the way those games were structured. In retrospect, they illustrated the difference between tight framing and railroad.
In the mid-to-late 90s (95(?)-97) I played in a 2nd ed AD&D game. This was also quite influential on my thinking. The GM's efforts were a railroad of the classic type - there was a prophecy (connected to some game this guy had run for a different group) and he would drip-feed us clues but never really signal whether we were making any progress in our interpretation.
It was quite a big group of players (six or seven), most who had no connections outside the game, and so what happened was that we (as players) made up our own game, involving a mix of our own backstories for our PCs and the connections we developed between PCs playing the game. This was especially easy because the GM spent more time with the "prophesied" PC's player than with any single other player, which gave the rest of us "free time", which we would fill in in-character rather than with out-of-game chatter, precisely because we didn't really know one another out of game. Some of this also fed back into our interpretations of the prophecy.
At a certain point it clearly got too much for the GM, because he time-shifted the whole thing 100 (? or so) years into the future, which basically invalidated all the connections, backstory, intreprations etc that we had built up as players, allowing him to reassert his authority over the fiction. I quit that game a session or two after that, and I think it broke up completley not long after.
For me, it was an abject lession in how railroading and GM control is the enemy of player engagement and creative contributions.
Anyway, my first RM campagin eventually came to an end when I started full time work, and so didn't have the time to take proper notes to manage the backstory. This, together with weaknesses in high-level RM mechanics (especially around scry-fly-die), meant that a good campaign (which I think probably peaked around 1994/95) had a slightly ignomious TPK ending. One thing I discovered running this game was that extensive campaign world notes were largely redundant, except as a tool for generating situations, and for integrating, and establishing context for, players' desires for the game.
To elaborate a bit on that last point: the game (set in Greyhawk, although in
this thread from a while ago some posters argued that the way the setting was adapted and developed made it a not-really-GH game) had a pretty extensive ancient history backstory, and that was something that the players (via their PCs) gradually learned as the game unfolded. Because of the way RM knowledge skills work, the players dont really have the capacity to
establish that sort of backstory via checks (contrast, say, Burning Wheel or Cortex+ Heroic); what a knowledge check does is oblige the GM to reveal some new bit of backstory that is salient to the players' concerns (because that's why his/her PC wants to know). But that backstory was developed by me over the course of the campaign, with initial thoughts being dropped or reworked or amplified to reflect where the players were taking the campaign and what they cared about. At the start of the campaign, neither I nor the players had any conception of the Great Kingdom except, perhaps, as the "evil, tyrannical empire to the east of Greyhawk City". By the end of the game, it was established that the Great Kingdom was a type of heir to the Suel Empire, riven by some of the same splits (political, religious, metaphysical) that had riven the Suel Empire - and the PCs were taking various stands in relation to that history, tyring to make the Great Kingdom what they wanted it to be in relation to that history. In this context, it made no sense to have big lists of events
currently taking place in the GK or other parts of the gameworld - because these had to be adapted to reflect what was going on in play, both in terms of "ingame causation" and "narrative causation". (Rolemaster emphasises the former for the local consequences of character actions, but has no ingame causation oriented mechanics for social and political developments.)
1998-2008 - We started a new (Oriental Adventures) Rolemaster game after the first RM campaign ended, which ran until the end of 2008. I used what I had learned about both campaign management and issues with RM's mechanics to help make sure this game didn't collapse under it's own weight. (At one point I toyed with trying to move the campaign to HARP - a RM-lite also published by Iron Crown - but the group didn't want to.) I say more about the ending of this game in reply to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] below.
Some time around 2000-ish I bought the HeroWars rulebooks, but at that time couldn't work out how the system was meant to work. (It's a free-descriptor system with both simple contest and complex contest resolution options, all based on "closed scene" resolution.) In early 2004 I discovered The Forge. For me, that was like a revelation. It took a lot of thinking, and required me to revisit and correct some uthinking assumptions I'd made about RPGing, but it made sense of so much of my RPGing experience - I could see RM as a "purist for system" simulation engine, but also could see that my group was using it to run a "vanilla" narrativist/"story now" game (ie one without any funky mechanics); and I could see why my attempt to use RQ for the same purpose hadn't worked (RQ doesn't give the player enough control over either PC build or the minutiae of action resolution to send signals - eg there is no such thing as "effort" in RQ action resolution - whereas RM is different in both respects). BRP can work for one-shots, but not (in my view, given what I'm looking for) for a campaign. (I used to think Classic Traveller had the same problem as BRP in this respect; my current experiences have made me look at CT in a new light, though. But I don't think RQ has the features that CT has that make it amenable to vanilla narrativist play. But it's possible I'm wrong about that, and that my past failures just showed a lack of GM mastery of the appropriate techniques.)
The Forge also let me make sense of the HeroWars rules. And then when D&D 4e was announced, and being discussed, it was clear to me that it was going to meld aspects of HeroWars (which around then was re-released and subsequently genericised as HeroQuest and HeroQuest revised) with traditional D&D mechanics, but abandoning the (in my view failed) simulationist accretions of 2nd ed AD&D and 3E while embracing the heroic and gonzoe romantic fantasy aspect of play first heralded in the Foreword to Moldvay Basic (with the tale of the overthrow of the dragon tyrant using the sword gifted by the mysterious cleric) but not delivered by earlier versions of D&D. Even as announcements about the direction of 4e seemed to cause chaos and apoplexy, the design direction seemed crystal clear to me and the published rules delivered on that 100%. (That's not to say 4e is perfect at what it does. There are active threads at the moment on the "old D&D editions" subforum that discuss ways in which 4e might have been improved. But nevertheless, it delivers what it promises on the tin.)
2009 - As more group members moved overseas, we merged two groups which had overlapping members and overlapped more generally in friendship circles. From 2009 to mid-2013 I GMed 4e exclusively, for this group. And through 2016 it remained the group's primary game. That campaign has reached 30th level, but is not resolved as the PCs have not yet recovered the seventh part of the Rod of Seven Parts, and haven't decided what to do if they do find it - they are all of the view that the Dusk War needs to be averted somehow, but have differing views on the best way to do that. We have also started a Dark Sun game, although it remains in its early stages.
But over the past few years I've also GMed Buring Wheel, Cortex+ Heroice (both Marvel and a Fantasy Hack), a session of AD&D (for nostalgia purposes when one of the emigrants returned for a holiday), and most recently Classic Traveller. None of these games is the same as the other - just to give one example, in Burning Wheel fictional positioning factors directly into resolution (a player can seek an advantage die if s/he thinks that his/her PC's ficitonal positioning would help; the system has other mechanisms, connected to character advancment, that mean players don't always want to roll the maximum number of dice they might be able to lobby for); whereas in Cortex fictional positioning only provides a basis for establishing an asset in the course of action resolution, which can then provide a bonus die to subsequent actions - so fictional positioning is mediated throught the action economy and player action declarations rather than impacting directly, which makes the game less gritty than BW, and also (I would say) a bit less visceral.
Nevertheless, I find that all can be run in my preferred style (conceived of relatively broadly): the PCs have dramatic needs, which means the players have things they want out of the game; I describe a situation that puts pressure on those needs/wants; action delcarations are therefore made; we resolve those, which helps establish elements of a new situation; and then we keep going.
And to put it in negative/contrastive terms: since 1995 or thereabouts I think I have drawn maybe half-a-dozen "dungeon" maps: I remember one for a dragon lair in the OA game; a handful in the heroic tier of the 4e game, when some dungeon exploration seemed to make sense; and randomly generating a dungeon (using DMG Appendix A) for the AD&D session. I've used some building floorplan maps in RM too, and obviously lots of them in 4e, but as situations in their own right, not as components of big bits of setting to be explored by the players.
In Cortex+ and Traveller there have been no maps at all (action resolution doesn't need them in Cortex, and Traveller doesn't really need them either - my "star map" is just a list of worlds with jump distances to other worlds that have come up in the game, and a little sketch that illustrates the same thing geometrically). And in BW we use the GM maps for "big picture" stuff, and I used the Keep map from B2 for the keep on the borderlands between Hardby and the Abor-Alz.
These are the experiences that underpin my posts about how RPGing can be, in this and other threads.[/sblock]
pemerton said:
There is no correlation between approach to RPGing and length of campaign, in my experience. It's much more about the mechanical capacity of the system to support developments in the story: Rolemaster breaks down between 20th and 30th level; 4e has a cap at 30th level (which is where our game currently is); etc.
To support developments in the story, or mechanical developments in the caracters?
A story or campaign can develop quite happily for a very long time without the characters advancing in level or mechanics at all. It's the mechanical advancement that puts an end to what really should be open-ended; to which the obvious solution is to dramatically slow down said advancement until it becomes an occasional side effect of ongoing play rather than a/the focus of it.
Your 4e game might have had another 6 years in it had you slowed down the advancement; but now you're at 30, and where can you go from there?
In D&D, developments in the story and mechanical developments in the characters are correlated. As PCs advance from being figures of local significance to important rulers or representatives of gods and empires to (in 4e) being cosmological figures in their own right, naturally the scope and stakes of the fiction grow. (4e articulates this by reference to the "tiers" of play: heroic, paragon and epic. This is set out in both the PHB and the DMG.) At a certain point, the story comes to a natural end, and/or the mechanics lack the capacity to support any further escalation (eg in RM, the PCs become "paragon"-like somewhere between 12th to 15th level; by the mid-20s the mechanics fail to support a full-fledged escalation to cosmological/epic, but the PCs have too much mechanical capacity to face meaningful "paragon"-type challenges - that's what I mean when I say the system breaks down).
Slowing down advancement doesn't necessarily help, though - in D&D the scope of the story
can't develop without commensurate mechanical development, and if the scope of the story doesn't advance then it is easy to get stuck in stale, repetitive storytelling (an example from serial fiction in another mode: how many bad marriages has Aunt May had to be rescued from by Peter/Spidey - Mysterio, Doc Ock and no doubt countless others that I'm not aware of, having stopped reading Spidey in the mid-80s).
I can see my Traveller game eventualy reaching its denouement also - in Traveller, if the players have paid off their ship or have acquired some sort of high-quality cruiser or similar; have access to all the best tech; have located the Psionics Institute; etc - then what else is left for the game? Where is it going to go? Not every story is never-ending, especially in a medium (RPGing) which tends to place such a focus on character development.
A big influence on the way I ended our OA RM game came from reading about Paul Czege's My Life With Master (I don't own a copy, and so have never read or played it, but I know it incorporates an explicit endgame mechanic), and from downloading and reading his
Nicotine Girls. I can't imagine actually playing Nicotine Girls, but it also has an explicit endgame mechanic. I framed an explicity engame situation for the OA game, the culmination of the last 10 years of play. We resolved it through a mixture of fictional positioning + saying "yes", and action resolution mechanics. It almost seemed that the PC "paladin "was going to have to sacrifice himself to save his god (who was trapped, dying/dead, in the void beyond the material world of space and time in an eternal struggle with a being of that realm who hoped to enter and destroy the material world); and the player was ready to commit his PC in this way. But then the players (I can't remember which one, or whether it was a collective thing) realised that they could use the "Soul Totem" they had been gifted by a banished god (the idea for that artefact comes from the 3E module Bastion of Broken Souls) to "split" the PC's karmic trajectory, investing his karmic "history" into a simulacrum (which another PC had the power to create) thus giving it the wherewithal to take the god's place in the battle, while the PC would be free to return to the material world and found a monastery on the island which was (in fact) the head of the giant stone body of his god where it had "died" on the material world blocking the entrance of the voidal entity.
I can't say the sentimentalist in me was disappointed by this happy outcome; but it was a result of the players engaging what the ingame situation had become, not the result of them guessing the solution to a GM-authored puzzle that I put in front of them.
With the final situation resolved, the other players also narrated the future destinies of their PCs, and it was quite interesting as (for instance) we got to see how the less assuming of the two main samurai PCs - through his courship (player-initiated) of a NPC wizard whome the PCs had encountered and rescued - had actually set himself up to establish a dynasty with an important role in sealing the barrier between the world and the void (but because it was a series of mortals over the generations, rather than a single god, would not go made from exposure to the void as had happened to the dead god); whereas the more dominant samurai had secured his own worldly position as lord of an important seaport, but did not have so much to offer to the metaphysical security of coming generations of mortals.
This sort of free narration of the campagin resolution, in collaboration between GM (as framer and provocateur) and players (as advocates for their PCs, but constrained by the established fiction), is to me the opposite of a module or AP ending, where the GM knows from the outset what the final situation will be, what the solution space is, and what the denouement is (more-or-less) going to look like.
A true railroad would not allow for failure - they'd find that adventure no matter what they did, and get run into it somehow. Allowing for failure to even find the adventure in fact speak to the game not being a railroad. Yes the DM has a story in mind and an adventure ready to run, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily going to get to run it.
And if they do find the adventure but fail to rescue the elves...well, that's just part of the game. PCs don't (or shouldn't) automatically succeed at everything they try
<snip>
the DM has storyboarded out what will ideally hapen if everything goes according to plan, and has her adventure ideas lined up ready to go.
<snip>
Player choices can - and almost certainly will, at some point - alter it; and the DM has to be able to roll with that.
If we take LotR as a game log, we've no way of knowing whether the DM in fact had them storyboarded to get through Caradhras without problem but a combination of her weather tables and player choices got in the way, after which she had to improvise. Maybe Moria wasn't even on the original storyboard!
A "true railroad" is - in my view - a game in which the GM determines the significant possible outcomes. So a game in which the only solution is
X doesn't cease to be a railroad just because the players fail to identify X. To give a simple example: it is possible for my character to die in a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook, but those books
obviously count as railroads - it's all prescripted on the page in clear black type.
As for the storyboard and going off script - what's the point of the storyboard? What's it for. If the GM is really ready to follow the leads of the players, and to introduce new story elements in response to evinced desires/inclinations/suggestions etc, then
why bother writing a story that only you will read and that is of no utility to actual play?