Arent you usually the one talking about how important it is that players have "agency" to control what happens in the game?
Can the GM cheat?
- Thread starter airwalkrr
- Start date
Arent you usually the one talking about how important it is that players have "agency" to control what happens in the game?
I've heard about these players who love being railroaded online before but never seen one in real life. They're like bigfoot, everybody has a friend with a cousin whose seen one once...... You never do see people in gaming sites actually saying "i'm always a player and I love having my freedom of choice towards problem solving arbitrarily restricted for the DM's fun"
It would be fun to see one someday, maybe we'll actually track down one down. I should pitch it to animal planet, I'll go on right after their bigfoot show but instead of wandering around the woods claiming every animal howl is a bigfoot I'll go to organized play games, conventions and drop in on home games posted online and interview everyone. It would make a great season finale if we actually found one.
I talk about my preferred playstyle, yes. That includes GM authority over scene framing.
As I said in the post you replied to, [MENTION=5143]Majoru Oakheart[/MENTION] is talking (as best I can tell) about GM authority over scene framing - he's made it clear he wants player authority over resolution.
The house rules I use are 4e. There is no such think as "full attack" in 4e, and combats are very mobile.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
Isn't that just looking at the "railroad" at a different level? You railroad the scene and let the players decide how to resolve. But what about taking a step farther out? That's more the level timASW and I are talking about. Letting the players essentially frame the scene, not just the resolution.
I think that's really the main difference here. The level at which the GM decides the players have control.
Those are contradictory goals. You cant tell people "guys go ahead and solve this problem anyway you like, its your game and you have authority over how you do it. As long as you dont do X,Y or Z which are perfectly legal by the books but I dont like.
Thats like taking a girl to a nice restaurant and saying "dont worry you can get anything you want, as long as its an appetizer, or fish, but no salads or wine. And keep the desserts under 5$. But its all about you tonight. "
Let me put it this way - if this thread turns into browbeating about how some particular ill-defined technique or tool is wrongity wrong wrong, with wrong sauce, then perpetrators will get a vacation from the site.
State your case, if you will, in a polite and civil manner, respecting the other people and their personal likes and dislikes, and respecting that maybe, just maybe, the entire world does *not* play the game the same way you like it, but still somehow manages to have fun.
That's the last time we should see a warning here, about pretty much anything, so don't expect a warning for anything more. Thanks, all.
WhimsyTheFae
Explorer
My wife prefers railroading. She states this openly and proves it true through play. She has big feet, but is no mythical creature. She's also played in games with multiple people on ENW, including portraying Calamity Jane in a game where Umbran portrayed H. G. Wells...not that he would be able to comment on her preference for being railroaded, but he can verify her existance.
Manbearcat
Legend
Universally and contiguously? I mean, I give PC's limited scene-framing authority in my games by way of either outright authoring of the scene-opener or using me as a proxy for their authorship (where they have explicated to me the situation, its implications and much of the color). However, we don't do this contiguously by any stretch of the imagination.
Utter nullification of GM as primary scene/situation-framer is a very different game than traditional D&D (regardless of iteration) so I'm not sure * railroading is really at issue there (as it really shouldn't manifest with such techniques/systems). Unless, of course, you're referring to player-side scene/situation-framing authority as:
GM: You're in X town. What do you do?
Player: Do they have any taverns?
GM: They have N, Y, and Z taverns.
Player: Y tavern sounds like my kind of place. I go there.
Therefore, while the scene/situation that unfolds in Y tavern is the proprietary creation of the GM, and the decision to go to Y tavern was relatively arbitrary (meaning informed by little more than whim), the decision to go there was still the player flexing their autonomy. So, by-proxy of their whim of Y over N or Z taverns, they have framed the impending scene in Y tavern?
I'm with pemerton on the definition of railroad. Its what I've always perceived as orthodox/classic usage and is specifically referring to the willful short-circuiting of player resolution of a situation by a GM in order to maintain absolute creative control of the forward momentum and trajectory of the narrative.
* Railroading - A technique of scene, setting, and/or story design/preparation in which the GM has prepared a rising conflict/climax and maneuvers or otherwise determines that character activity inexorably leads to this scenario.
Well, this relates to different aspects of [MENTION=5143]Majoru Oakheart[/MENTION]'s posts from the particular ones I commented on (eg it relates to his discussion of Living Campaign scenarios).
At the "different level", the issues seem to be - who decides whether or not a particular scene is going to be framed, and when is that decision taken?
My preferred approach is that the decision about "which scenes" is driven by the whole table via more-or-less informal consensus eg I as GM will ask "OK, so you spend the rest of the day getting your stuff together and then at evening head out to XYZ?", or the players will debate what they should do and then say "OK, we're going to go to XYZ to do ABC." Some game systems are much more formal about this, of course.
In a Living Campaign scenario of the sort Majoru Oakheart describes, or in a typical event-driven module, the decision about "which scene" is taken by the GM/module author. I personally don't like that sort of play, or AP play mor generally, but if others do (and Paizo's sales suggest they do) then that's no skin off my nose!
As to when, my preference is - after the previous scene is resolved. Thus, the new scene gives expression to the consequences and upshot of the previous, resolved scene. This is the basic characteristic of Forge-style narrativist play as I understand it. It means that the plot of the campaign is not predetermined, but unfolds as a surprise to all involved.
In a typical event-based module, the "when" question is answered differently - all the important scenes have been framed in advance of play taking place. And Majoru Oakheart's description of the Living Campaing adventures fits this description too. It's not my preferred style of play, but once again the fact that others enjoy it is no skin off my nose.
If we turn from event-based to location-based modules, we can see that many are really just event-based modules in another guise - eg those with only one meaningful paths through the dungeon. This involves predetermination of the scenes by the module author, and the only way that the players can exercise authority over which scenes is by leaving the dungeon, and therefore (perhaps, depending on the broader practices and expectations of the play group) having nothing exciting for their PCs to do.
The Alexendrian, in his essays on "node-based design", argues that a multi-path adventure (whether the interlocking event nodes that he talks about, or a slightly more traditional dungeon with multiple viable pathways) means that "the players are being offered the driver's seat". In the examples he presents, however, the basic elements of all the scenes have been predetermined by the GM. The efect that the players have is (i) to change the sequence in which the scenes are framed, (ii) to determine, via the action resolution mechanics, the outcome of the scenes, and (iii) to affect, but in a micro- rather than a macro-way, the framing of later scenes by reference to the resolution of earlier scenes. What the Alexendrian doesn't discuss is the possibility that the resolution of an earlier scene might mean that some new scene hitherto unthought of by players or GM should be framed.
However railroady you think the Alexandrian's approach is (and he clearly thinks it isn't), I don't see that Majoru Oakheart is talking about anything significantly more railroady. For instance, nothing that Majoru has said precludes setting up the pre-authored events in a node style, or designing a dungeon with multiple pathways so that the players get to choose in what sequence they encounter the puzzles/traps/monsters.
In addition to the "who decides which scenes, and when do they decide that" questions, there is the question of who actually gets to frame scenes. D&D is not uniform in this respect. At low levels the answer is almost always the GM, becuase players have no metagame scene-framing authority and don't have the ingame capablities via their PCs to frame or reframe scenes. At high levels the answer is more varied, though - the players of fighters and thieves are often in much the same position as when their PCs were lower level (though clever use of thieving skills can change that); the players of spellcasters, though, while still lacking metagame scene-framing authority, often have significant ingame resources that can frame or reframe scenes. Teleport and its ilk are well known examples; divination spells too; and Majoru Oakheart, with the example of distintegrating the wizard's tower, has pointed out that disintegration (and its cousins like Transmute Rock to Mud) can also be instances of this.
My own preference is for GM authority over scene-framing. Of course the GM should take suggestions and listen to what the players want; but in the end I think the players have a conflict of interest if they get to frame their own scenes: a fun game tends to require scenes which push back hard against the PCs, but the players have an incentive to make life easy for their PCs, and so will tend to softball when framing their own scenes. Majoru noted this phenomenon himself, when he said that his players are often glad when their attempts to softball things (eg by disintegrating the tower) are thwarted, because it's more fun to actually have to engage the challenges rather than bypass them.
My own preferred solution to this issue is to remove those PC abilities that give the players scene-framing capabilities. 4e largely does this. Majoru Oakheart's solution is to ad hoc in reasons why those abilities don't work (eg via stipulating that the tower is warded against disintegration). That's a bit fudgy for my personal taste, but if you still want disintegration spells in the game for different sorts of reasons (eg in a fight in a cave, using disintegrate to blast a stalactite loose so it impales your enemy isn't softball scene-framing, it's just good old gonzo action resolution) it might be the easiest way to go. (I know from personal experience with Rolemaster that the other path, of leaving disintgrate in the game but then making disintegrate wards a standard element of the action resolution system, is a lot of work relative to the payoff.)
As I've said, though, the GM being the one who exercises authority over scene-framing has little to do with railroading, because it tells us nothing about outcomes. The issue there, as I've tried to indicate above, is whether or not the scenes that will be resolved are determined in advance, or in the course of play. And while Majoru's preferences in this respect differ from mine, they don't strike me as very radical, or - as I've indicated - even as being that different from what the Alexandrian advocates in his own much-touted, allegedly-non-railroading "node-based design".
They're not contradictory at all. If the players make it clear that they are hunting down Orcus cultists, and then I frame a sequence of scenes in which (i) they discover a cultist cave with stairs at the back and choose to descend them, and (ii) they arrive, at the bottom of the stairs, at an ancient temple of Orcus, then the players have got the scenes they want, but they haven't frramed them. I have. Hence - to give an example - I'm the one who gets to decide that, inside the temple, is an altar that will dominate PCs and turn them on their friends. (Fuller details here.)
As to whether X, Y and Z are legal by the books, and hence shouldn't be removed - as I observed above, there are magical abilities in high level (pre-4e) D&D that can be used both for action resolution and for scene-reframing. Working out how to handle them is an important part of GMing high level D&D. My preference, these days, is just to excise them. (I did this in a long-running Rolemaster campaign, which is near enough to D&D in this respect at least; 4e does it; Burning Wheel, which I hope to run once my 4e campaign finishes, does it too.) Majoru Oakheart is just using a different approach. I'm pretty confident that when it's not about scene-reframing but actin resolution within a scene, Majoru resolves disintegratioin in a completely orthodox fashion.
