Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[hawkeyefan]

The primary reason why I am so down on a flexible approach comes down to expectations. The value of any social system is setting expectations and granting permissions. When I am playing in a game where GM techniques are bound to change moment to moment I have no way to meaningfully make impactful decisions. I cannot feel the ground underneath my feet. If a game does not optimally fit the experience I am looking for I can either sit this one out or take on the interests of the game and have a measure of fun. When I have tried running games like this in the past the cognitive weight of constantly reading the room and prioritizing one player's desires over another was soul crushing for me.

The pain point for me is this: we get a situation where we all sit around the table and try to play our own individual games instead of playing the same game. We do not address our very real conflicts of interest. Instead we depend on the GM to smooth them over. When things become untenable socially we look to the GM to resolve our social conflict and lack of trust in each other. We put all the responsibility on the GM for our own fun making running a game an onerous task. Because the GM takes on this extra social responsibility this can often shift the dynamics away from one where we are peers, fellow gamers, and creative collaborators.

Upthread @Lanefan bulked a bit when I suggested that any player could air a grievance about the fiction or group direction openly. This sort of thing as a common fixture of my play group. It is expected that we are all going to work together to resolve player level conflicts of interest. It is a necessary component to ensuring that all players remain engaged and motivated. Hacking the game is something that is always on the table as well as making adjustments to our characters and the fiction.

I'm all for open discussion about the game and its events, so I am with you on that. I think there's a time and place for it, and my group has established it's part of our wrap up/wind down time post game.

But your experience with flexibility is very much the opposite of mine. I thibk that flexibility and adaptation can be baked in assumptions of the game, and that players and GMs can indeed plan for them just as they can any other system. I do thibk this is best accomplished with a long-standing group of players, where they've had time to familiarize themselves with each others' judgment, but in my experience it is still achheivable with players and GMs new to each other and/or the game.

I find that such flexibility is not "soul crushing" but liberating...I don't feel constrained by the rules, but rather supported by them. Part of that comes from the ability to actually set the rules aside at times.

I agree with you about the inaptness of "flexible vs focused". Good for what I'm used to doing with it isn't a sign of flexibiility in a system.

I think a similar point applies to the idea of "player buy in". There is nothing distinctive about, say, Burning Wheel or 4e compared to AD&D 2nd ed such that the former two require "buy in" in a way that the latter doesn't.

What about player buy in when moving from one system to another? I would expect ot to be a big factor then...wouldn't you? Let's say someone is familiar with 5E and then they play Burning Wheel with you. Would you expect much of the game's success to rely on that player's ability to change his mindset so that his playstyle matches the new system?

So while I think that any game does require player buy in, I do think that such a shift in style can indeed be a factor.

Well, that is pretty different from how I run a game.

I don't run what you call "field adventures". And I frame the PCs into situations that speak to their needs and aspirations as characters.

That might be a reasonable description of your job. It's a terrible description of mine, though!

My job (as I conceive of it) is to apply pressure to the players, by presenting to them ingame situations that - in light of their PCs' concerns, aspirations, etc -drive those PCs to action. To quote Paul Czege,

Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently.

<snip>

I'm having trouble capturing in dispassionate words what it's like, so I'm going to have to dispense with dispassionate words. By god, when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out.

<snip>

I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.

<snip>

the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.​

I suspect my RPGing is pretty lowbrow by Czege's standards, but his statement of method is one that I often come back to. The gameworld is not something that I present "neutrally". I'm doing my best to turn that "firehose of adversity and situation" onto the PCs: to force the players to make choices that will push them in terms of their aspirations and motivations (both in character, and in their capacity as third-person-barrackers-for-their-PCs).

In my experience, that's how RPGing produces dramatic characters and dramatic story.

I agree with you here about neutrality. I dont thibk that's somethibg I really shoot for. Unless we look at it as a balance between rooting for the players and wanting to challenge them. I have to say that as a GM I'm very biased in some ways.

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

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

Yes, drawbacks in the general sense....a weakness or flaw. If you made a list of pros and cons about a system, something from the con list.

Perhaps we need to get more specific because your assessment of "no drawbacks for my group" seems odd to me.

Let's say you're going to start a new fantasy game; which system would you choose? Why not the others? Let's limit the choices to those games you consider more player driven.

 

[pemerton]

Let's say you're going to start a new fantasy game; which system would you choose? Why not the others? Let's limit the choices to those games you consider more player driven.

There's no need to speculate!

In the past year I've run three "first session": Cortex Plus Fantasy Hack, 4e Dark Sun, and AD&D using random dungeon generation.

As I indicated in the post you replied to, I don't think that AD&D is a very good fit for my group. So that game is unlikely to progress much further, though - on the off chance that it does - I've been making some notes for how I would run Castle Amber.

The basic issue I have with AD&D, as I self-quoted upthread, is that the exploration tends to be a bit tedious; but too much combat makes it to random and reduces the element of player choice; while increasing the "story" elements pushes the game in a direction where other systems are stronger.

4e, Cortex/MHRP and BW - the three fantasy systems I'm GMing regularly - all have their own, different feel. I've posted about that in this thread.

BW is the most grim, and most demanding on players. MHRP is generally quite light - both mechanics and story - though in our fantasy game I'm finding out whether it can be pushed in a bit more of a serious direction. In resolution, the mechanics play a role that I suspect [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] would find too dominating - fictional positioning doesn't really have a very big life of its own - but I find the game produces very colourful and vivid fiction as an output of resolution, because of the way every input into and output of resolution is directly correlated to the fiction.

4e has a very distinctive feel: the rally-narrative of combat, the D&D classes, skill challenges in which players roll all the dice and their's no mechanism for PvP except in the way the fiction is adjudicated. Dark Sun is something new for me, and I'm still developing my sense of it (we've only played a few sessions of this game).

Each system does different things. I'm probably most comfortable running 4e, simply for reasons of familiarity, but at the moment I'm probably enjoying the other two systems more, simply because they do things that 4e doesn't.

The most avid BW-enthusiast among my players may start some GMing soon, too, which will give me a chance to play BW. I think I will find that a challenge, but not necessarily a bad one. It does require being ready to see one's PC suffer in a way that isn't really going to happen in 4e or MHRP/Cortex.

 

[pemerton]

The final resolution of the skill challenge involved the 10 CHAR dwarf fighter/cleric making a social check against the advisor, calling him not by his courtly name but by the name used among the goblin and hobgoblin armies he was secretly commanding, and thereby trying to goad him into revealing himself to the baron. The check initially failed, but then another player spent a resource (an action point) to (in the fiction) add another taunt, and thereby (in the mechanics) add a bonus to the dwarf player's check that turned the failure into a success.

That was the end of that session; in the next session, we opened with the taunted advisor turning on the PCs. I declared some action for him, or said something about the situation - I can't now remember what - but then one of the players reminded me: We succeeded in the skill challenge, with the goal of having the evil advisor reveal himself. The player's point was that I, as GM, would be dishonouring that success by now allowing some action or element of framing that tended to allow the advisor to try and conceal his evil or make the PCs look like the bad guys. The success doesn't just result in the advisor doing something (in this case, being goaded into attacking the PCs); it also establishes a "meaning" or a context, within the fiction, for that "something" - namely, the advisor is revealing himself as an evil traitor to the baron.

Why would the advisor have gone Forest Gump, though, and not have tried to mitigate what happened? That doesn't make any sense to me. Perhaps you could clarify.

<snip>

How does the advisor trying to mitigate things 1) somehow embarrass the Baron, or 2) rewind time so that he didn't reveal his treachery? It seems to me that both of those goals are still accomplished regardless of his attempts to mitigate the damage.

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

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.

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.

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

EDIT: 4e non-combat resolution is determined by the players making checks, engaging the fiction as narrated by the GM. There is no such thing, in the 4e context, as the advisor making a check to persuade the baron. That part of the fiction has all been settled in the course of the skill challenge, buy the players' checks.

Contrast, say, Burning Wheel where - assuming a similar scene were resolved as a Duel of Wits - the advisor might have been making checks against the PCs, or adding helping dice to another actor's pool. In that system, the relevant principle for finality would be "Let it Ride", meaning that the outcome of the DoW would be binding on everyone who participated in it.

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.

 

[Tony Vargas]

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...
There is no such thing, ...as the advisor making a check to persuade the baron. That part of the fiction has all been settled in the course of the skill challenge, buy the players' checks.
...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.

Sorry to chop up your post like that, but 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.'

 

[Tony Vargas]

I was trying to say that some changes may be viewed by some as advances (as in, improvements) while other people may view those same changes as opposite-of-advancements (as in, they make the game worse) while still others may view them either as neutral or as just change-for-the-sake-of-change. Bad choice of words, I suppose.

Largely a matter of taste, yes. If you like the old version, refinements might be OK or not; gradual evolution might be tolerable if it's slow enough, but advancement or revolutionary or radical change of any kind is likely hard to accept.

Ok, in this post we are given "the" reasons for the reaction by a poster who knows absolutely nothing about the group....

At worst, it's a different spin on the anecdote, but it's based only on the information in the anecdote, itself. That it was the only time they tried, that the player in question was very experienced, and that something only went wrong once before it was dropped.

.. how does this type of reply do anything but make assumptions and shut down conversation?

The intent was to acknowledge the experience, not dismiss it. The point I see that example actually making, though, is that introducing a new technique or idea into an otherwise accustomed activity can be challenging.

 

[Sadras]

Not too surprising - either that a 25-year veteran of traditional TTRPGs would pull a gaff like that, nor that the table's reaction was to toss the mechanic rather than try to master it. You spring a new idea in an otherwise comfortable and familiar environment, and the most likely consequences are going to be clumsily leveraging the idea within the priorities of the existing paradigm and/or rejecting it outright.

So explain to me why the other players of 25+ years of experience at my table who did not appreciate that particular use of the Plot Point did not even enter your simplified equation and broad brush painting of an entire player base. Is my one player somehow reflective of all D&D veterans in your view?

I've tried these kinds of techniques and been in games that used them, and they can work, if the players are up for it, or if the DM does a good enough job introducing and mediating the new mechanic.

Bolded for emphasis. Sure, but that was my point which you seemed to skip over so quickly to explain away the 'clumsy' player narrative: That not all players are the same or desire the same thing, even at the same table.

I think @Imaro's point regarding the various types of players has much merit in this regard.

Neither most eds of D&D nor long-time D&Ders are exactly the ideal candidates for such an introduction, though, so I'm not sure how relevant it is in a 5e forum...

As others have explained, this thread was moved. Plot Points are very much relevant in 5e and 5e forums (refer to the DMG). I feel I must add my players have read and played other RPG's besides D&D.

Not having been at your (Sadras's) table for this event, it's hard to comment, but as you present it it looks like a pretty tightly GM-run game (eg the hurting of the PCs' allies in the organisation is similar to the assassination of the marquis that was being discussed upthread - this seems to have been narrated by the GM as a "failure off-screen" consequence for the players having their PCs deny the boss's request).

@pemerton 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 and the PCs were expecting some fall-out of some kind given their first meeting with the underworld-boss which was not to neither party's satisfaction.
They new that releasing the genie was:
a) Going to anger someone (as they did not know who at the time and neither did I, it was later weaved into the story); and
b) Repercussions would be felt by those (be it the boss's employees or the PCs) who made it possible.

Was the player being juvenile? Deliberately disruptive? Didn't have any other ideas?

A stalemate was reached between the characters and the boss. They suspected strongly he was guilty but could not prove it. 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.

Their interaction with the boss was one of many side-quests of exploration within the sandbox adventure (MiBG) I was running, so it was not like I was deliberately limiting options and that the adventure had reached a halt. In fact, with the table overturning the use of the Plot Point and not resolving the conflict via combat where one party loses, they were able to make use of their relationship with the boss to further the main storyline through some ingenuity on their part.

Couldn't conceive of anything else being feasible in the fiction?

Of course not.

I don't see this sort of example as any sort of "case against" player input into the shared fiction.

Why is that?

 

[Tony Vargas]

So explain to me why the other players of 25+ years of experience at my table who did not appreciate that particular use of the Plot Point did not even enter...

I didn't assume they were all veteran players, merely that the 'plot point' technique was new to them. 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.

 

[Lanefan]

A recurrent theme in threads that touch on what I have called "player-driven" RPGing is that the idea of player influence on play very quickly gets conflated, by at least some posters, with players authoring their own challenges, or players resolving situations by introducing novel fitional elements in a way that is somehow external to the action resolution mechanics.

What it screams out to me is that it changes the players' entire job description.

In war, a prisoner of war's first duty is to try to escape. In D&D (among many other games) a player's first duty is to more or less looking for advantages for his-her own PC or (less often) for the party as a whole. The game world (along with many of its occupants) is to some extent the enemy; a mostly wild thing that exists to be tamed, subdued, beaten up, or otherwise dealt with...and it's the DM's job to keep it real, keep it dangerous, and keep it a reasonably level playing field. The DM builds the fences, the players knock them down.

But here, at face value as it sits the player can either narrate in or roll-check in their own advantages whenever they like, and the DM is powerless to stop them. So, the player either has to consciously rein in their tendencies to seek advantage (which not all player can or will do) or the game risks becoming a farce.

For instance, when the player of a fighter in a 4e game uses CaGI, that is not an authoring by that player of his/her own challenge; and it is not solving the challenge by way of introducing some novel fictional element that circumvents action resolution. In the fiction, it can correspond to a range of possibilities, depending on context (eg most of the time in my game it represents the dwarven polearm master defeating his enemies by dint of superior footwork and weapon handling; the first time it was used, some of the forced movement was narrated as goblins, who had been fleeing down a corridor, turning around to avoid being cut down from behind); in the play of the game, it is just another status-imposition attack, like the many others found in that and other editions of D&D.

Not sure if using CaGI as an example is the best idea here, as you've just opened up the awful can o' worms that are 4e quasi-magical martial abilities.

That said, most of those forced-movement abilities seemed to me like the game trying to find ways to circumvent its own action resolution:

Paladin: "My imposing presence shall intimidate these foul beasts and send them scurrying to their holes!" (rolls great on the intimidate check)
DM: "Cowed by your confident stride and booming voice, the Goblins flee."
Dwarf: "No you don't! Come and Get It!"

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

Well, that is pretty different from how I run a game.

I don't run what you call "field adventures".

You ran Night's Dark Terror, and what is that if not either a series of small self-contained field adventures (e.g. each goblin lair is its own little mission, the yellow-robed wizard's lair is another, and so on) or one great big one, depending how you define it?

And I frame the PCs into situations that speak to their needs and aspirations as characters.

That might be a reasonable description of your job. It's a terrible description of mine, though!

My job (as I conceive of it) is to apply pressure to the players, by presenting to them ingame situations that - in light of their PCs' concerns, aspirations, etc -drive those PCs to action. To quote Paul Czege,

Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently.

<snip>

I'm having trouble capturing in dispassionate words what it's like, so I'm going to have to dispense with dispassionate words. By god, when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out.

<snip>

I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.

<snip>

the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.​

I suspect my RPGing is pretty lowbrow by Czege's standards, but his statement of method is one that I often come back to. The gameworld is not something that I present "neutrally". I'm doing my best to turn that "firehose of adversity and situation" onto the PCs: to force the players to make choices that will push them in terms of their aspirations and motivations (both in character, and in their capacity as third-person-barrackers-for-their-PCs).

In my experience, that's how RPGing produces dramatic characters and dramatic story.

You make the game world and story fit the PCs, where I expect the PCs to find their way in a game world and story that may have no knowledge of them at all until they get out and do something about it.

I'm going to drop a bit of a bomb here: from this post and various others I'm getting close to calling your style of play "Emo-gaming", as it more and more appears to be in the same vein of inward-looking emotionally-driven personal angst drama that gave us things like Twilight (the books and movies) and its ilk. Finding and-or redeeming the mage's lost brother takes precedence over answering the Queen's call to defend the southern marches against the Orc invasion (if they ever bother to acknowledge the Queen's call at all) because the personal emotional needs of the mage trump the needs of the realm. Small picture beats big picture.

And that, you can keep. I'd far rather have outward-looking characters who see what's going on in the game world and go and do something about it in whatever manner they see fit. Orcs are invading? Cool! Let's go down there and kick some ass...or see which side is winning then join up...or just loot the fallen...or go north instead; there'll be lots to do up there as all the usual defenders will be in the south... Big picture beats small picture.

Lan-"and in case it isn't clear, I avoid all things Twilight like the plague"-efan

 

[hawkeyefan]

There's no need to speculate!

In the past year I've run three "first session": Cortex Plus Fantasy Hack, 4e Dark Sun, and AD&D using random dungeon generation.

As I indicated in the post you replied to, I don't think that AD&D is a very good fit for my group. So that game is unlikely to progress much further, though - on the off chance that it does - I've been making some notes for how I would run Castle Amber.

The basic issue I have with AD&D, as I self-quoted upthread, is that the exploration tends to be a bit tedious; but too much combat makes it to random and reduces the element of player choice; while increasing the "story" elements pushes the game in a direction where other systems are stronger.

4e, Cortex/MHRP and BW - the three fantasy systems I'm GMing regularly - all have their own, different feel. I've posted about that in this thread.

BW is the most grim, and most demanding on players. MHRP is generally quite light - both mechanics and story - though in our fantasy game I'm finding out whether it can be pushed in a bit more of a serious direction. In resolution, the mechanics play a role that I suspect [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] would find too dominating - fictional positioning doesn't really have a very big life of its own - but I find the game produces very colourful and vivid fiction as an output of resolution, because of the way every input into and output of resolution is directly correlated to the fiction.

4e has a very distinctive feel: the rally-narrative of combat, the D&D classes, skill challenges in which players roll all the dice and their's no mechanism for PvP except in the way the fiction is adjudicated. Dark Sun is something new for me, and I'm still developing my sense of it (we've only played a few sessions of this game).

Each system does different things. I'm probably most comfortable running 4e, simply for reasons of familiarity, but at the moment I'm probably enjoying the other two systems more, simply because they do things that 4e doesn't.

The most avid BW-enthusiast among my players may start some GMing soon, too, which will give me a chance to play BW. I think I will find that a challenge, but not necessarily a bad one. It does require being ready to see one's PC suffer in a way that isn't really going to happen in 4e or MHRP/Cortex.

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

Every system has flaws...so I'm curious what you consider te glaws of these systems.

I love the 5E system for D&D. I feel it's an improvement over the recent editions. But I know it still has plenty of flaws. My players and I are either comfortable with those flaws or we've found ways to address them, but I had to be aware of then to do that.