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

[Janx]

I think my read is that it is a resource inventory rather than a wish list: "This is what my character can utilize in the course of play."Yup, most definitely.I tend toward the later two, and thank you.

well, it's been my experience that it's a bit of both.

Per other advice I've long ago read, an adventure should have some skill challenges (not just all combat). The idea being, that some of those challenges be of skills the players have.

Barring a dungeon exploration or optional side trek, it would be wise to make those skill challenges based on what the PCs can do, if you have any hope of there being at least one path to succeed.

If you had a party of all rogues, and you were writing adventures (and not sandbox material), you'd also be very likely to write material to support what rogues would likely want to do (theives guild stuff, city stuff, opportunities to rob and sneak).

If you had a party of all wizards, you'd probably write adventures set around the wizarding world (and probably skip generic dungeon crawls).

Players who create oprhan PCs with no fears are the negative reaction to this kind of DMing. They build PCs on which the DM can get no leverage. I've got one friend who goes as far as making monk Forsaker vow of poverty PCs just so he has no equipment to lose either.

As a GM, if your sheet doesn't say your afraid of snakes, I may never think to put snakes in the game. If your sheet doesn't say you can swim, I may never think to put water that needs swimming across in the way.

There is some level where the char sheet does inform the GM of what kind of challenges to put in the game. At least in a game where the GM is looking at his characters, bot their stats and character and using that to build the next adventure.

I don't have a problem with that.

 

[Celebrim]

What I was trying to assert, however, is that there is a style of play which is not a paradigmatic sandbox, because it is responsive rather than exploratory...

I know your general stake in the discussion. I've been trying to pin down exactly what mix of exploratory and responsive elements you are using to see if I could say from this remote distance whether you were primarily responsive in nature or primarily exploratory. However, I conceed that there are campaigns - of which yours may be an example - which are marked primarily by a narrative which is controlled to some extent by the declared narrative goals of the players. I don't however conceed that that doesn't make them generally classifiable along the axis of - Adventure Path/Sandbox (or linear/non-linear).

I agree that such campaigns lie somewhat outside the paradigm Adventure Path or Sandbox, because in classic RPG play the players aren't given a high degree of narrative control. That is to say generally speaking, a player doesn't have the power to shape the setting on the metagame level. If the player wants to shape the setting, they must do so within the game through character actions with the assumption that prior to the character impacting the setting through some choice that all details of the setting had been controlled by the DM. Sitting down with the character and saying, "Ok, you want to play a barbarian who opposes a snake cult who has murdered your family, so I'll place a snake cult in the campaign." is outside the usual paradigm.

But, while it is unusual, it doesn't change the linearity of the campaign to do that. It simply means that depending on the implementation, you have an adventure path where the players set the goals or a sandbox where the players populated the setting. (Or of course, you might have some complex mixture of the two since midway on the linearity axis is still a point on the axis.)

Who set the preferences of play doesn't really matter IMO.

Likewise, "the GM only sets up the situations but the players resolve them" is so generic of a comment that we can't distinguish a railroad from a rowboat using that test alone.

I'm not convinced you are doing predominately linear play, but the technique of changing the scenario on the fly (regardless of the reason) is a linear technique.

I don't know how many people prefer this way of playing. Not so many ENworlders is my impression, but I don't have any reason to think high volume ENworld posters are terribly representative of RPGers in general.

On the one hand, I suspect that (quasi-)No Myth with a reasonably high degree of player input might be more common with a lot of more casual gamers than with ENworlders if only because it tends to be light on prep and makes the rewards of play very obvious very quickly. On the other hand, not many published mainstream or traditional RPG texts support this type of play, so maybe it (or approximations to it) aren't very common. Like I said, ultimately I'm not in a position to know.

In GNS theory, what you described is generally called 'Narrative' play or 'nar-play'. It is in my experience rather rare. In my experience, it's quite the opposite of casual gaming. Casual gamers are unlikely to hit upon it, and its more likely a sign of very mature roleplaying groups with alot of experience (like 10 years or more).

 

[The Shaman]

Per other advice I've long ago read, an adventure should have some skill challenges (not just all combat). The idea being, that some of those challenges be of skills the players have.

Barring a dungeon exploration or optional side trek, it would be wise to make those skill challenges based on what the PCs can do, if you have any hope of there being at least one path to succeed.

If you had a party of all rogues, and you were writing adventures (and not sandbox material), you'd also be very likely to write material to support what rogues would likely want to do (theives guild stuff, city stuff, opportunities to rob and sneak).

If you had a party of all wizards, you'd probably write adventures set around the wizarding world (and probably skip generic dungeon crawls).

But as you note, in status quo settings, the challenges are what the challenges are, and it's up to the players to make up for areas where the adventurers lack necessary resources to deal with those challenges - they are in no way tailored to the adventurers' abilities, skills, or equipment.

Players who create oprhan PCs with no fears are the negative reaction to this kind of DMing. They build PCs on which the DM can get no leverage.

I'm not sure how you get from "adventurers lack necessary skills" to "adventurers without significant backstory."

I've got one friend who goes as far as making monk Forsaker vow of poverty PCs just so he has no equipment to lose either.

As a GM, if your sheet doesn't say your afraid of snakes, I may never think to put snakes in the game. If your sheet doesn't say you can swim, I may never think to put water that needs swimming across in the way.

Seriously? Castles don't have moats if the characters can't swim? Dungeons don't have spiders unless characters are afraid of them?

There is some level where the char sheet does inform the GM of what kind of challenges to put in the game. At least in a game where the GM is looking at his characters, bot their stats and character and using that to build the next adventure.

I don't have a problem with that.

Okay.

 

[Ariosto]

I checked out "No Myth" at the Web page No Myth Roleplaying Summary. As usual with Forge talk, I think we can substitute orders of magnitude fewer words:

"Make it up as you go along."

Yes, there is a whole raft of assumptions unstated even on that Web page -- and, I'll bet, at the Forge generally.

For instance, "nothing you haven't said to the group exists" makes a campaign in the old sense practically impossible if the world that Jack and Dianne have been playing in "disappears" for Lucy and Desi until they get the lowdown on each particular part. The Monolithic Party of players is pretty well taken for granted.

"The [non-GM] players are the protagonists of the story" of course presumes the existence of "the story" in the first place. Without it, we need no more than the trivially conventional "the players are playing the game."

In this case, "the story" boils down to "genre definition". I think it unlikely that many folks -- even those enamored of very literary conceits -- would really want an RPG unconstrained by the rules of a genre to some degree. I see that problems have arisen in D&D because of decisions to market the game to people hostile to the genre rules that informed its framework.

That framework or set of initial premises has very little weight on it relative to the burden that genre bears here. In "No Myth", clichés (no surprise that RISUS was basically designed to run this way) effectively are the world unless/until someone stipulates otherwise.

It's basically what I do in my totally off the cuff D&D sessions -- except that I draw as well on a body of established facts that particular players may or may not know, and that I let the dice fall as they may rather than give PCs any more "protagonist bennies" than the game rules do.

(I don't run such sessions often, because they tend to get pretty bizarre. The "D&D genre" as I have known it encompasses all sorts of trippy stuff. That was especially true in my 1978-87 game, but it's still an "occupational hazard".)

The GM should handle all PC actions by agreeing that they succeed, or working out a conflict with the PC that they can roll dice for. This is the standard never-say-no rule, but it's good to keep in mind.

Standard at the Forge? This obviously does not apply to the vast majority of RPGs, in which things can (as in most worlds of fiction as well as in the real one) be either literally impossible or so ludicrously improbable that rolling for them at every opportunity would be a drag. "I run across the Grand Canyon on thin air." "With what magic?" "None, but we have to 'work out a conflict to roll dice for' anyway." "No dice, pal! If you step over that precipice, expect to fall."

There are in "No Myth" (at least per that Web page) also other aspects of a shift in emphasis away from the exploratory game and toward improvisational story telling.

I suspect that the precipitous decline of strategy games such as the Avalon Hill classics, along with the rise of action-adventure hybrids with very strong story lines in video games (which are much more widespread), has contributed to a shift in assumptions and expectations in the RPG-playing demographic.

 

[Ariosto]

It cracks me up that the "No Myth Related Links" on that page include guides to plotting stories such as Lester Dent's formula for Doc Savage potboilers.

 

[Celebrim]

I checked out "No Myth" at the Web page No Myth Roleplaying Summary. As usual with Forge talk, I think we can substitute orders of magnitude fewer words:

"Make it up as you go along."

Yes. We seem to have similar views on Forge talk.

And from the definition by example of 'Railroading' I provided in another thread, any campaign where you 'make it up as you go along' is linear and often a railroad.

Fortunately, I don't even much have to argue that if you accept 'No Myth' as the basis of or equivalent to how you run a game because, 'No Myth' is upfront about it:

If the PCs are trying to find a secret door, and the adventure can't proceed until they do, then failure is not interesting; this shouldn't be rolled for. If the story calls for the PCs to be made prisoners so they'll fight in the arena, then success in resisting the guards sent to capture them isn't interesting; this shouldn't be rolled for either.

That's railroading, in this case, by The Hand Wave. In fact, the discussion of technique is almost entirely a discussion of generously using The Hand Wave to railroad the game, and contains a lot of - to me at least - hilarious ironies, incongruities, and contridictions most of which probably have to do with the fact that the author admits that this is all theory with no basis in practical experience. (Let's start with "Nothing about the plot is sacred..." which gets followed by a long list of things which should be sacred and a discussion of techniques for insuring that they happen.) Meanwhile, the discussion defining the technique lays out basically 'Schrodinger's Map' or 'Schrodinger's Gun'.

It's an article on artful railroading, written from the perspective of someone who seems to think that all players want from RPG rules is to help them be cool. It's the 'validation and empowerment' school of RPG thought, never mind that most power gamers (for instance) would HATE this because they recognize how it cheapens their success.

 

[Ariosto]

Fortunately, I don't even much have to argue that if you accept 'No Myth' as the basis of or equivalent to how you run a game because, 'No Myth' is upfront about it:

That seems at first glance at odds with what I read at the Web page I cited. However, the assumption that there must be such a prior thing as "the adventure" or "the story" that requires certain outcomes seems to be very deeply ingrained in some quarters.

It's rather silly from the "grognard" perspective. That Stalingrad might or might not fall, might or might not even be a high priority when (e.g.) the Caucasus oil fields beckon, is very definitely interesting to us! It is, in fact, fundamental to the interest of a game. We play to explore worlds of "what if".

The very essentials thus are different. The traditional game involves setting up a situation, after which the players' moves -- along with whatever chance factors may be involved -- determine the course of events. That is how it goes in everything from Checkers to Chainmail.

That was the very commonplace and uncontroversial assumption in place when we started referring to "railroad" setups in FRP. The term is pejorative because the behavior so designated constituted no less than cheating except in cases such as tournaments and other convention scenarios that were regarded as less than the full game.

The basic procedures of play, as laid out in the handbooks of the original D&D game and others, are distinctly different from those in which the limited scenario is considered to be a whole "campaign". One might note that the basic unit of play in OD&D, C&S, Traveller, RuneQuest, and so on is the game week. The individual player selects activities at that scale -- a dungeon foray, wilderness expedition, research, training, etc. -- and the GM's responsibility is to adjudicate results.

This newer kind of game is like a kibbitzer butting in to insist that one must play the Lepanto Opening because "the story" calls for it!

Sure, and we've got to have mustard in a PBJ sandwich because the bologna demands it, eh?

 

[pemerton]

For instance, "nothing you haven't said to the group exists" makes a campaign in the old sense practically impossible if the world that Jack and Dianne have been playing in "disappears" for Lucy and Desi until they get the lowdown on each particular part. The Monolithic Party of players is pretty well taken for granted.

Agreed. But the sort of old-style campaign play you refer to is, as far as I can tell, an extreme minority of D&D play, and probably has been since the early-to-mid 1980s, at least as far as my evidence goes (eg Dragon magazine letters pages).

This obviously does not apply to the vast majority of RPGs, in which things can (as in most worlds of fiction as well as in the real one) be either literally impossible or so ludicrously improbable that rolling for them at every opportunity would be a drag. "I run across the Grand Canyon on thin air." "With what magic?" "None, but we have to 'work out a conflict to roll dice for' anyway." "No dice, pal! If you step over that precipice, expect to fall."

The HeroQuest rulebook has an extensive discussion of this issue, and the role of impossibility in scene-framing. The absence of a similar discussion in the 4e skill challenge rules is one of the weaknesses in the presentation of those rules in the 4e rulebooks.

There are in "No Myth" (at least per that Web page) also other aspects of a shift in emphasis away from the exploratory game and toward improvisational story telling.

Well, that's exactly the context in which I made reference to it - although I don't accept the full force of your intended contrast between game and story-telling.

 

[pemerton]

any campaign where you 'make it up as you go along' is linear and often a railroad.

Someone upthread suggested "linear" means "pre-determined". As a general rule, making it up as you go along doesn't involve pre-determination, especially if many of the constraints on what can be added (eg because elements of the gameworld have already been stipulated) are introduced by the players in the course of play.

That's railroading, in this case, by The Hand Wave. In fact, the discussion of technique is almost entirely a discussion of generously using The Hand Wave to railroad the game

<snip>

Meanwhile, the discussion defining the technique lays out basically 'Schrodinger's Map' or 'Schrodinger's Gun'.

If, as the game progresses, the GM makes things up in response to the players' choices, so as to foreground elements and themes that the players bring into play and to background elements and themes which they don't, where is the railroad (as in, where is the vitiation of player choice?) Undoubtedly exploratory choices (like in the secret door example) aren't being validated, but then we're not talking about exploratory play here, are we?

It's the 'validation and empowerment' school of RPG thought, never mind that most power gamers (for instance) would HATE this because they recognize how it cheapens their success.

Well, many power gamers wouldn't be playing a game in which a big part of the point of play is to explore thematic content or to jointly develop a game that is compelling and engaging on account of that content. Heroquest, forexample, isn't really a power gamer's game.

That said, "power gaming" can cover a range of approaches to play. A vanilla narrativist game played using a crunchy system like Rolemater or 4e still gives players who enjoy mechanical optimisation plenty of places to do their stuff. The rewards for that aren't winning in the "beat the module" sense, but include (i) the same sort of satisfaction as one gets from solitaire or a crossword (ie doing a technical passtime well) and (ii) a greater ability to have the PCs succeed at ingame challenges. This doesn't necessarily change the overall thematic orientation of the game, but does mean that (for example) fewer encounters begin with "So, having been captured by the bad guys . . ." or "So, having struggled to make your way across the desert, and arriving at the oasis utterly exhausted . . .". Your critique of the "hand wave" and "schrodinger's" approaches seems to disregard to some extent the role of action resolution mechanics in constraining the GM and shaping the content of stipulated elements of the gameworld.

4e Essentials is interesting in this respect. In the Essentials rulebooks a skill challenge gives XP whether or not the player's succeed - the consequences of failure are purely ingame disadvantages for the PCs. This sort of approach isn't necessarily going to please all power gamers, but it can please some.

 

[Ariosto]

But the sort of old-style campaign play you refer to is, as far as I can tell, an extreme minority of D&D play, and probably has been since the early-to-mid 1980s, at least as far as my evidence goes (eg Dragon magazine letters pages).

I would say it was so from the late 1980s, if TSR's product line going into and on to the Second Edition era was in fact aimed squarely at an extreme majority of D&D play.

At any rate, that stuff self-selected to be buying it those who either (A) happened to want what TSR was selling or (B) did not yet know D&D from a hole in the ground. The rest of us, whatever our proportion in the hobby of playing D&D, obviously did not figure much in the commercial aspect.

When the commercial aspect becomes definitive, it naturally defines.