Judgement calls vs "railroading"

Lanefan · Apr 15, 2017

pemerton said:
By "drawbacks" do we mean "bad things"? In that case, I can't say I've encountered any.

If we're talking about weaknesses in particular systems, well that's a different topic. 4e has well-known issues about the interface between combat and non-combat resolution.

If we're talking about challenges for or demands on participants, that's a different thing too. MHRP/Cortex Heroic puts a lot of pressure on the GM to manage the Doom Pool effectively, which is often not easy to do at all. BW is demanding on players, because (i) it asks them to give so much to the game, and (ii) a lot of the time it punches them in the gut as a reward for that giving. But I wouldn't call this a "drawback" - it's the system doing exactly what it says on the tin!

So, I don't know of any general disadvantages to running a game in which the action and the focus of the shared fiction has its origin with the players' choices for their PCs. Unless one doesn't want to run such a game. But that's not really a "drawback", so much as a mismatch of methods with preferences. [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] gives an example of this with respect to B/X. I ran a session of AD&D fairly recently, using random dungeon generation, and obviously that's a very different thing - but I ended up reaching the following conclusion:

So, as I said, no drawbacks for my group.

To say your system has no drawbacks or negative aspects is I think naive at best and disingenuous at worst.

I mean, we can probably all say our various systems have no drawbacks for our own groups, if we put the rose-coloured glasses on; but the question was being asked* on a higher level than that: what are the potential downsides to your system overall.

* - I think, as I'm not the one who originally asked it.

Lanefan

Maxperson · Apr 16, 2017

pemerton said:
I don't understand your characterisation of the advsior as "Forest Gump", and I don't really follow your questions either.

Because the advisor would have to be retarded not to attempt to mitigate the damage from his outing himself.

The players won the skill challenge. The upshot of that is that the advisor is revealed: the baron knows that he is an evil traitor, and that has redounded upon him (the advisor), not upon the PCs.

And he was revealed. Challenge won. That really has no bearing on what the advisor does next, though. If he attempts to mitigate the damage, it in no way tarnishes that win.

In the fiction, the advisor can sputter and protest as much as he wants; at the table, though, that is all mere colour. The advisor is exposed, and the PCs have maintained - indeed, consolidated - their good relationship with the baron. That is the premise from which future events begin.

I don't understand eliminating the possibility of people being outed or outing themselves and being able to mitigate that damage. That seems like a perfectly reasonable and viable path for the game to go down, and one that is quite fun.

As the player pointed out, any other approach would rob the players of their success.

And he was wrong. That success is untarnished by any mitigation after the fact. They are two separate events.

As per my reply to [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] just a bit upthread, different systems have their own distinctive approaches to resolution. The 4e skill challenge has some weak spots - eg it doesn't handle PvP all that well - but it has some strengths as well. I find it tends to make the fiction quite vivid, and it really puts the players and their choices for their PCs at the centre of the action.

Our difference here isn't the system used to get to the result. It's that you seem to be taking two separate events, outing and mitigation, and turning them into one event, and I'm taking the position that they are two separate events. If the are separate, then you are not bound to have the advisor behave in a retarded manner.

hawkeyefan · Apr 16, 2017

Lanefan said:
* - I think, as I'm not the one who originally asked it.

Lanefan

That was me....but you had it right. That's what I was hoping to hear about.

Sadras · Apr 16, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
Either way - whether a table full of veterans or a veteran among new players - your anecdote is still illustrative of the challenges of trying out a new technique.

...or my anecdote is still illustrative of the snags which might be experienced within player-driven/shared narration roleplaying games.

Ilbranteloth · Apr 16, 2017

pemerton said:
But this is exactly what I'm saying would leave me feeling blind. If I don't know what the PC's motivation is, or how the player sees that relating to other concerns and declared convictions of the PC, then I don't know what is really happening in the fiction and how best to handle it as GM.

As an approach to GMing I learned this from the very good referee of a free-form Cthulhu/Dreamlands game that I played in once at a convention.

As far as I can tell, that's easy. The monsters or the world around the PCs don't know what the PCs motivation is, and they don't care. Maybe the NPC does, but the only thing the NPC knows of the character's motivation is what they discern by the PCs action and words.

As the DM I don't need to know any more at that point in time to react as the NPC or the monsters, or whatever. Just like the players don't know the motivations of the NPCs. I (usually) do, but they have to figure that out, if they care to.

pemerton · Apr 16, 2017

hawkeyefan said:
So why do you find 4E most comfortable? What is it about BW or Cortex that make them less comfortable?

I've been GMing 4e pretty steadily for 8+ years. And it's class system rests on D&D tropes that I've been working with for 30+ years.

BW, as I've said, requires kicking the players in the guts. Repeatedly. That's demanding on them, but it can be hard on the GM as well. [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] has talked about the "inner"/emotional dimension of this sort of thing upthread, better than I am able to. But using the OP as an example: it's not easy to have the brother decapitated in front of the PCs because they failed a check that brought that whole arc to a head. It's tempting always to interpose one more check, to offer them a chance to get out of jail for free. But at a certain point you have to be true to the fiction and let the guillotine fall.

4e doesn't generate this sort of pressure because its maths (not unlike 5e, to which it is the main mechanical precursor for the maths of resolution), is biased heavily in favour of player/PC success. So failures in 4e tend to be minor setbacks on the way to success. It doesn't deliver failures at the rate, and with the stakes, that BW does on a regular basis.

Cortex/MHRP I think I've already posted about. Managing the Doom Pool is hard, because it is a mixture of opposition (all checks in MHRP are opposed, and if there is no acting NPC then the Doon Pool is the opposition), "stakes" (if the Doom Pool grows big enough the GM can end the scene, which can cost the players/PCs in fictional terms) and all-purpose GM reource (spending dice to boost NPC checks, add new elements to a scene, etc). I'm getting better at it, but it's not a trivial matter. (When I first bought and started preparing to run MHRP, Doom Pool management was the main topic of conversation - other than silly (and mistaken) rants about the supposed lack of a PC build system - and once you start running the game you quickly see why.)

But I wouldn't describe any of this as "drawbacks". They're not flaws; they're differences. In a different domain of gaming, compare five hundred to bridge: lighter, easier to play for fun/with beginners, not as technically demanding (because it's generally enough to count trumps and off-suit court cards); or compare backgammon to chess (similar considerations apply). The demanding character of bridge or chess isn't a flaw though, nor is the light character of five hundred or backgammon.

As it happens, I personally enjoy the light card and board games more; turning to FRPGing, I don't know if I would want to run BW alone, but probably it's my favourite at the moment for intensity - but with a larger group I'm enjoying MHRP just as a change of pace that produces some amusing fiction.

Lanefan said:
the question was being asked* on a higher level than that: what are the potential downsides to your system overall.

Well, isn't that fairly obvious? - the "downside" is that someone won't enjoy it.

To me it seems to make more sense to talk about the sorts of demands a system puts on participants, known points of weakness or less-than-smooth handling in the mechanics, etc.

pemerton · Apr 16, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
you make a point about SCs, that only the players roll, in essence, and go on to talk about weak spots. In some scenarios, I've found the NPCs just being part of the 'framing' of the challenges a weakness, at times I wanted to have an NPC that opposed or monkeywrenched what the players were doing. In one case I actually ended up creating an NPC with specific abilities that could be triggered to mess with the challenge, exception-based design to the rescue yet again (it was almost as facile a 'solution' as DM Empowerment, that way).
The Skill Challenge framework is easy to adapt to any game with otherwise straightforward/binary skill checks, but it'd be nice if it had more was of incorporating an opposing side (or interfering 3rd parties, I suppose) into the resolution. Yet, in d20, specifically, I personally find the most obvious mechanism, opposed checks, to be problematic, ie 'too swingy.'

Under the influence of [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION], who used to post about this stuff in 2008/9, I do this via my handling of the fiction - ie I narrate NPCs doing things, the environment doing things, etc, which will be bad for the PCs unless they take steps to counteract it.

It's a sort of "active defence" approach. It doesn't interface all that smoothly with the combat mechanics, but there are workarounds (including the old standby of spending an encounter attack power for a +2 to the check).

pemerton · Apr 16, 2017

Ilbranteloth said:
As far as I can tell, that's easy. The monsters or the world around the PCs don't know what the PCs motivation is, and they don't care. Maybe the NPC does, but the only thing the NPC knows of the character's motivation is what they discern by the PCs action and words.

As the DM I don't need to know any more at that point in time to react as the NPC or the monsters, or whatever.

In my experience, this may be a reasonable approach to running a simulation, but is not all that likely to reliably produce dramatic story.

Just to pick on one, well-known example: it's fairly important to the story of Star Wars that the imperial-wanted droids end up in the house of the one person who is ready to be heir to the Jedi tradition. In terms of fictional contrivances, that involves (i) the landing on a particular side of the planet; (ii) being picked up by the Jawas (and both droids being captured by the same Jawas, despite going different ways); (iii) those Jawas coming to Luke's farm; (iv) the farm happening to need some new droids; (v) the first droid purchased being broken, so that R2D2 can replace it.

None of that can be understood simply from the perspective of the droids, the farm and the Jawas. From an RPG point of view, you can't get it (reliably) from random encounter tables, random reaction tables, random rolls to get lost, random rolls for equipment malfunction, etc.

In RPGing, the analogue is framing situations, and narrating consequencs, so that they speak to the dramatic concerns of the players as expressed via their PCs. This requires knowing what those dramatic concerns are.

pemerton · Apr 16, 2017

Maxperson said:
the advisor would have to be retarded not to attempt to mitigate the damage from his outing himself.

<snip>

Challenge won. That really has no bearing on what the advisor does next, though. If he attempts to mitigate the damage, it in no way tarnishes that win.

<snip>

I don't understand eliminating the possibility of people being outed or outing themselves and being able to mitigate that damage. That seems like a perfectly reasonable and viable path for the game to go down, and one that is quite fun.

This is like saying, "The orc was reduced to zero hp, but it seems quite reasonable, viable and fun for it in fact just to be a flesh wound, so the orc gets up and keeps on fighting" I mean, maybe some people would find that fun, and maybe in some RPG systems that is reasonable and viable, but as I prefer to play that would clearly be a violation of finality in resolution.

And to reiterate a point I made upthread (I think to [MENTION=6802765]Xetheral[/MENTION]): it is no answer to this to say that the orc can't get up because, in the fiction, it is unconscious or dead. Because the only way we know that fiction is via the mechanical state of zero hp; and we can only infer to the fiction if that mecahnical state ensures finality.

In the skill challenge, the players' success establishes that the advisor reveals himself in a way that redounds upon him and does not hurt the PCs' relationship with the baron. That's what they were angling for, and that's what they got. The matter is settled.

As I said, in the fiction the advisor can snivel and weasel - as Wormtongue does once Gandalf unmasks him - but that is not going to change the situation. As GM, I don't get a "do over". The established result stands.

pemerton · Apr 16, 2017

Sadras said:
we do not resolve every social conflict through the use of roles if there is no need for it. We follow the story organically and yes 'failure off-screen' (as well as 'success off-screen') does occur

<snip>

The player is/was rather confident of his character's abilities but was not permitted (by the party) through story-flow to act on them and so leaned towards using the Plot Point to force the issue and thus gain the reasoning required to act and get the other characters' buy-in.

So why didn't the rest of the table work with the player to try to establish some variant on what the player wanted that would force the issue without violating the fiction (eg maybe an underling comes in to see the boss, carrying the fingers of a couple more stool pigeons)?

If the answer is, the rest of the group didn't want the issue forced via Plot Point expenditure, then that suggests that that particular mechanic is a bad fit for that group and/or that game.

But that may not be the answer - as I said, I wasn't there and so don't know.

In any event, I don't regard it as a case against some mechanic that not everyone likes it or wants to use it. Not everyone likes chess, but that's not an issue for chess.