Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Lanefan]

A similar issue with the adventure, yes. A single point of failure. DM should try to avoid presenting those.

Problem is, the most common place I always saw it was locked doors. The Thief fails to pick the lock, bashing on it with a hammer has little effect other than to make a world o' noise, and the MU didn't memorize Knock (or worse, the party has no MU at all). Hard to design a dungeon without any locked doors in it.

Heh, I'd consider "oops, wrong wire, you'll be playing mutants next session" to be fail-forward, in a way.

From the player side, maybe. From the DM side...well...not entirely what I might have had in mind.

In the direction of plot/fun/character-development/whatever it is you're going for as DM.

I'm looking at from the goal-oriented view: you've in character (and maybe as player also) been pushed backward away from your goal.

Lanefan

 

[Tony Vargas]

Hard to design a dungeon without any locked doors in it.

"So, this downstairs space was very close, dark and claustrophic-feeling, so what we did was, we took out all the doors, and knocked down the non-load-bearing walls, and put up mirrors, and it's really opened the space up and created a 'flow' and the light's much better, too...

... hey, put down that ax!"


And that is why orcs don't use interior decorators.

Except for lunch.

 

[pemerton]

Except the original intention (in my example) was that the war wouldn't see actual play at all, but merely serve as a part of the backstory defining the game world the characters are in. The players drag the action over to the budding war whether the DM likes it or not; I certainly don't see it as out of line that the DM has happen what was always going to happen anyway.

On a broader scale: there's actual plot, and there's red herrings. Players have every right to chase red herrings to the ends of the world if they want to, but there's no right of expectation that just because they chase a particular red herring it become any more significant than it ever was in the grand scheme of things.

What you describe here would be an example of what I have described as railroading - determing that the PCs' aspirations fail on the basis of backstory known only to the GM.

 

[hawkeyefan]

No.

From the OP:

​

It is precisely because I knew what was at stake that a DC was set. If nothing was at stake (ie if it was some bit of colour or auxiliary action that didn't bear upon some central concern of the PC and (thereby) the player) then I would simply "say 'yes'" so that the action could move on.

No, it's not. But it's not "say 'yes' or roll the dice", either.

I stated some of the reasons for not just "saying 'yes'" when something is actually at stake in my earlier reply upthread. It's primarily to do with pacing, tone, and the experience of the tension/drama/stakes of the game.

No. I view GM narration of failure by way of fiat as railroading. As per this re-quote of the OP:

​

In some more recent posts I've been elaborating on this idea and its consequences - eg "no failure by GM fiat" entails "no failure offscreen".
Which is relevant to thinking about the dynamics of a situation like the assassination of the Marquis; or the fall of the nation when threatened by the tarrasque. If those eventualities would count as "failure" - ie things that are at odds with the commitments/concerns/goals/etc of the players as expressed and realised via their PCs - then bringing them about simply as part of the backstory would, on my account of the matter, be railroading.

By "dead end" narration I meant something like "No, there's no vessel".

"Dead end" narration of failure is independent of the issue of railroading, in that it could be the result of GM fiat (ie what I have described as railroading) or the response to a failed check by a player. I prefer "fail forward"/"no whiffing" (I use inverted commas mostly because neither is an especially satisfactory term to actually describe the technique; and in addition "fail forward" has become widely identified with "success with a compication", which can often be quite a different thing).

The benefit of "fail forward" is that, by narrating the failure so as to frame the PC into a new conflict (eg there's a jar, but it's broken; the familiar is eating up all the blood), the momentum of the action is maintained - because the failure of the action declaration is used as the foundation for further framing. (Whereas "Sorry, there's no vessel" doesn't provide any new framing for the player to respond to.)

I suppose I don't see it that way...that DM Fiat must simply dead end like that, and that the failed check in your fail forward example really sets anything up at all.

In the fail by DM Fiat situation, the DM can just as easily add additional details or options, such as the broken vessel example you provided.

And the failed check doesn't determine anything from how I read your description; the fail forward options seem to be decided entirely by the DM on the spot. Unless I am missing something...which is obviously possible based on how many misconceptions I've had during this discussion.

Think of the example in the context of a whole campaign. While a 1% chance may appear as an automatic, it does not take too long before those chances add up to where you have a meaningful likelihood of failure. For example, 20 automatic "yes" answers changed to 99% chance of success means the likelihood of failure during those 20 instances is approximately 18%. That number, in my experience, is meaningful. In my experience as a player, knowing that statistic does increase the drama of any given roll. It's also important to note that just because the roll is 1% for my character, it may be higher (or lower) for another character. Moving from a 1% chance of failure to 3% chance of failure means that within those 20 instances the likelihood of failure increases to 46%.

This is true. I don't know if I'd see it as significant though, even over the course of the entire campaign. It would depend on what the specific task in question was and how important its success was to the story overall. I can't imagine that quickly spotting the presence of pottery in a bedroom is going to come up often enough for the math to get there.

 

[Quickleaf]

In the context, yes.

The tone of the game, its feel and pacing, is established by the distribution between "saying 'yes'" and rolling the dice. If something matters, even if it's easy (like spotting a vessel in a bed room for a recuperating wizard), then a difficulty is set and the dice rolled. That reminds us of the stakes; it gives the moment its suitable "heft" in the unfolding fiction, and - by creating the opportunity for failure - it creates the prospect of dramatic (potentially also blackly comedic) turnabout.

If nothing ever goes wrong when the stakes are high but the difficulty low, a different tone is created. (Eg think about the widespread sense that using magic in D&D is not dangerous, because no check is required - whereas in (to pick an example) Rolemaster, there is always a 2% chance of failure for any spell (and a much higher chance in some circumstances) which creates a different feel.)

Totally.

Hats off to you for setting up a situation where so much could hinge on such a normally minor scene detail. That takes some GM chops!

 

[pemerton]

Hats off to you for setting up a situation where so much could hinge on such a normally minor scene detail. That takes some GM chops!

Thanks - very generous! But it's actually the player of that PC who deserves the credit - as we picked up the game from where we left off last time (decapited mage in the bedroom, the bystanders standing slackjawed in horror), another player (of the decapited mage's brother) and I started discussing what his PC (Jobe) was going to do now that his brother couldn't be rescued, prospects for cooperation with the assassin (Jobe and the assassin PC-turned-NPC were comrades for a couple of years in-game, but have been more-and-more at odds over the past two or three months), etc - and then the player of Tru-leigh pipes up "There must be a lot of blood. Is there a jug, or a chamber pot, or something like that?" I looked at him quizically, and he went on "Well, if I can't take the mage with blood in him, I can take the blood!" - and just like that he'd reoriented his mission for his master into the new ingame context. So we wrote the new Belief down in the appropriate box on the PC sheet, I set the DC for the check, and off we went!

To say something less controversial than some of my other posts on this thread, I think invested players who will pick up the fiction and run with it are at the heart of the RPG experience.

(And to sink back into the mires of controversy - that's why I, personally, don't adopt GMing approaches that seem to me to get in the way of that.)

 

[pemerton]

Reading this perhaps a bit harshly, this puts the DM in the role of little more than a free-thinking processing unit which could these days be done by a computer

I think if you look at the sorts of GM judgement calls that [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and I have talked about, that's manifestly not true.

Manbearcat talked about "going where the action is". I've talked (eg posts 164, 221) about the need for the GM to distingush between what is an element of framing, and what is an outcome in which the players, via their PCs, have a stake and hence which is subject to "no failure off-screen". Campbell, in post 73, talked about the need for the GM to confront the players (via their PCs) with fiction that will prompt them to make decisions.

These are relatively subtle judgements involving a mix of aesthetic sensibility, a feel for pacing and drama, and a good ability to read the mood of the table as well as the emotions of individual participants. I don't think they would be very easily done by a computer at the typical RPG table.

 

[pemerton]

Just having the choice is often enough. While the players know they can eschew the plans at any time, that doesn't mean they want to.

After all, some players are happier with a little structure and rails. They just want to sit in the roller coaster and enjoy the ride.

<snip>

A skilled DM can hide the rails. If they can anticipate their player's actions and choices, they can plan the most likely paths. The players are on the rails the entire time and don't know it.

<snip>


Additionally, the DM is often the person most invested in the game. They're often the one interested enough to buy the rulebooks and learn the rules. They're the most likely to spend time thinking about the game between sessions.

So are you arguing that it's not railroading? Or thatit's railroading that is justified in virtue of the GM's investment and time commitment? Or that it's railroading that the players enjoy? Or, like [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], that - because the player's enjoy it - it's the same sort of GM force as railroading but not apt for the pejorative label? Or, like [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION], that it's a railroad that the players will enjoy because so long as they don't notice it's a railroad?

Because to me, you don't seem to offering any reason why I'm wrong in describing it as railroading. You just seem to be explaining how and why it might come about, and why it might be a good thing. (I'm not even sure if - as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] did - you're contesting the pejorative labelling or, like [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION], you're accepting that it's a railroad but arguing that a good GM can hide this.)

And some DMs are just poor at improv. So their players know they'll have a better experience - that they'll have more fun - if they take the hook and stick to the plot.

Again, this doesn't seem to be explaining how it's not a railroad. It seems to be explaining why the railroad might be a good thing.

The DM is a player too. They have stories they want to tell. They know what's going on in the world more than the PCs. The NPCs have character arcs and goals.

This basically antithetical to the way I GM RPGs. To me, it seems more like the mindset for writing a story than GMing a RPG. The bit about NPC arcs particularly stands out - because, once you allow that the GM can introduce material into the shared fiction unilaterally and secretly, and then can draw upon that backstory known only to him/her in the course of resolving action resolution, the stage seems to be set for the GM to let those NPC arcs really spring forth.

Things ripple outward and cause big changes. The assassination of a Duke of a small nation can caused one of the bloodiest wars in history.
Because the unexpected happens. It rains at the wrong time. Winter comes early. There's a plague. Everyone's life is full of times where the unexpected completely derailed plans.

It matters because it makes the world feel real. It's larger and more cohesive, with places and people that don't cease to exist when the players aren't watching.

If the players aren't watching, then whose sense of reality is being engendered? The GM's?

As I posted upthread, my campaigns tend to be distinguished by an emphasis on history and/or cosmology as elements of the framing. This creates the sense, in play, of "depth". But it does not exert force on resolution of declared actions. Rather, it either provides framing context for them, or is established as a result of action resolution. To give a cosmological example of the latter process: in my main 4e game, the PCs' success in defeating the tarrasque before it could rampage across the world may well be a sign of the fact that Dusk War is not imminent after all. To give a more prosaic example: the nervous collapse of a baron with whom the PCs were friendly, following the revelations (i) that his adviser was a treacherous necromancer, and (ii) that his niece, betrothed to the advisor, was not an innocent victim but herself a willing participant in the necromantic arts, were not narrated simply as consequences of these revelations (which were framing elements presented by me as GM); it only took place after the PCs killed the niece in order to stop her necromantic predations. And hence was a consequence flowing from their actions, not just an outgrowth of behind-the-scenes backstory.

It's not static. It's a living, breathing world.

I don't think anyone who has ever read my actual campaign reports would describe my 4e campaign world as static! Gods pass on; cosmolgical forces muster and clash; civilsations fall (I don't think any have yet risen during the course of the campaign). This is not just stuff that the GM reads about (like, say, the backstory of many modules). It is at the heart of the play of the game.

In the game reference in the OP, the stakes are (on the whole) more grounded in local matSlters. But in that game, a feather purchased by a PC at a bazaar, ostensibly an angel feather but also (as the PC found out) cursed, turned out to be stolen from the Bright Desert pyramid of the Suel wizard Slerotin. Slerotin's mummy, it turned out, had at some time in the past been reinterred in the catacombs of the city of Hardby - whch the PC learned some years later (both ingame and in real time) when Slerotin's mummy assaulted a dinner party in a mage's tower (the same mage in whose tower the decapitation occurred).

In my experience, the use of history and backstory to give depth and interconnection to the framing of events, and the narration of their consequences, is how you convey a living breathing world.

Players shouldn't expect to murderhobo through the world without consequences.

This seems very significant to me - because I would not use that sentence to describe any sort of campaign I've run since the first half of the 1980s. Even the 3E Castle Amber game involved PCs who weren't just "murderhoboes".

Or, to flip it around - I don't use the threat of GM-imposed consequences to keep my players "on task" or not murder-hoboing. (It sounds like a version of Gygax's much-scorned ethereal mummies or blue bolts from the heavens.) As I've mentioned more than once already upthread, the basic trajectory of play comes from the players, and the goals and aspirations they set for their PCs. The consequences in the game arise in response to those goals and aspirations - not from some sort of GM-adjudicated karmic retribution.

 

[Tony Vargas]

What's the point of murder-hobo'ing through the world if your actions have no consequences. All that wandering around and killing things should net you some gold to spend on ale and horrors.

I mean, if you like ale. And tentacles.

 

[Jester David]

So are you arguing that it's not railroading? Or thatit's railroading that is justified in virtue of the GM's investment and time commitment? Or that it's railroading that the players enjoy? Or, like [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], that - because the player's enjoy it - it's the same sort of GM force as railroading but not apt for the pejorative label? Or, like [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION], that it's a railroad that the players will enjoy because so long as they don't notice it's a railroad?

It's ONLY railroading if the players do not have a choice. If anything that looks like a choice isn't actually a choice is actually an invisible wall. Or is a false choice that leads to the same result as the alternative.

Even if 100% of the campaign is scripted by the DM, even if the players do not generate a single quest or plot hook or goal, it is not necessarily a railroad so long as they have the option of not following the plot.


At the same time, yes, I was arguing that railroads - when done well - are not necessarily bad.

Because to me, you don't seem to offering any reason why I'm wrong in describing it as railroading.

I did earlier. When I posted the actual definition of "railroading". Repeatedly.

If the players aren't watching, then whose sense of reality is being engendered? The GM's?

Where did I say that the player's aren't watching? Where did I even HINT that the players don't get to see events?
Rule number one of writing is "show, don't tell." But rule number one of being a good DM is "involve, don't show."

The players might not witness everything occurring. But when they are present to see, they can witness the current change in status quo as the result of their actions.