Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Tony Vargas]

I don't follow. Combat encounters don't have fixed outcomes, but skill challenges do.

Combats have a few likely outcomes - everyone on one side being defeated is the obvious one. The analogue in a Skill Challenge would be gaining the requisite successes before any failures. An SC that ends in success after one or two failures can have had some consequences along the way, or have have a less desirable version of the final outcome. A failed skill challenge might also have different consequences based on the number of successes acquired before that third failure. There's a fair range of variability in the resolution for the DM to work with if he likes. Or, he could just ignore all that and have only one way to approach & resolve the challenge.

So, to predefine a combat encounter, I just have to set where it is and what it is, but I don't have to set how it ends. With a skill challenge I also need to set how it ends, and this means I must know what the challenge is about.

Sure, in that sense a combat encounter is a simpler thing to 'frame,' because the stakes are always life & death. Of course, it could be complicated by some other objective, capturing an item guarded by the enemies encountered rather than defeating them all, for instance, and the players might, likewise, decide on an alternate objective like that.

As I noted, things like environmental challenges are easy to guess -- you need to travel across this dangerous terrain -- but social challenges aren't possible to predict as they're very dependant on the immediate goals of the players.

Again, I suppose there are analogues - an officious assistant-chatelaine who's job is to keep the rif-raff from bothering the King is going to be an obstacle players seeking an audience will have to get through, and not much else.

But, sure, I see what you're getting at. I don't think it's a big/important difference, though. You can use encounter-design guidelines or skill challenge guidelines (or any workable set of guidelines for making a scene 'challenging') whether you're approaching the game in a DM-directed or players-directed way.

All skill systems in D&D that have been tied to the d20 core mechanic have been kludges, and many of them have not worked well. The swinginess of the d20 does a decent job of making combat exciting, and, since combats usually involved multiple rolls and are often a focus of D&D games, the swinginess averages out so players cans still make reasonable estimations of risk. But the skill systems don't do well with the swingyness of the d20, and so various kludges have come up to smooth out expectations and provide players with a reasonable estimation of success. 5e's incarnation is bounded accuracy and objective DCs. I'm meh on this as a resolution mechanic for skills, but then I've been meh on skill resolution for some time in D&D.

Quoted because it's worth reading (enjoy your XP), not because I have anything to say in response.

 

[Lanefan]

It's absurd for an antagonist to be protagonistic. It's a bit absurd for an NPC to 'lack agency,' too. The DM is running the whole setting, not just the one NPC.

I think we agree, other than the semantics around "antagonistic" (reactive) and "protagonistic" (proactive). I don't see all NPCs as simply reactive, and I suspect neither do you.

It shouldn't change the mechanics, if the NPC were the aggressor in a social challenge, the Skill Challenge would still be a skill challenge - the PCs would have to get n successes before 3 failures to fend off the NPC aggressor's social gambit. It might be more or less successes at lower or higher difficulty, depending upon how good the NPC is at that kind of thing relative to how good he is in the 'reactive' mode.

Would a skill challenge work the same way, though, when it's the defenders rolling instead of the aggressors? Particularly seeing as when the players are rolling they're basing their results on the PCs' skills (which probably gives them an unfair advantage as they can synergize) where in this case the rolls should be based on the skills of the NPC who initiated the challenge.

Lanefan

 

[Aenghus]

As I see it stake setting, skill challenges etc among other things allow a question to be asked and answered in a relatively short time. The referee and players have to agree what the question is and roughly what the stakes are and based on what transpires the players succeed or fail after the set number of successes or failures connected to the fiction, or whatever other methods are being used. The answer, win or lose, needs to be relatively final, no takebacks or retrys from any involved parties. This is why a genuine agreement as to stakes is the most vital step and everyone needs to accept the consequences, particularly the referee. Among other things this is a timesaving measure to try and avoid timewasting play that makes everyone frustrated.

You see, a very common failure mode I've seen in all sorts of RPGs is where the players get hugely invested in some task that the referee conscious or unconsciously believes is impossible or exceedingly difficult but is unwilling to tell them thatt. The former case is bad enough when the referee is unwilling to just come out and say they don't think something can be done, whatever it is. The latter case is worse for the game as the referee can always ask for another check and wait for someone to fail, without necessarily realising what they are doing, and wanting the players to fail is the doom of many a game. Too much of this double jeopardy makes for gunshy players who avoid risks.

Subduing a dragon in early D&D was difficult. If players accomplished it and treated the dragon reasonably, having the dragon break out and run away shortly afterwards is a dick move that will just ensure the players never interact with that game mechanic again under that referee. Similarly for interacting with an NPC and discovering that the players reasonable plan to affect that NPC can't ultimately work because of reasons unknown and unknowable to them cause the referee to claw their hard won success back, again leading to wasted time and frustration in the game.

So stake setting type mechanics put the onus on referees to own up during the stake negotiations and not agree to anything they can't live with. Once they've agreed on the terms, the terms are set. Yes, this is artificial but it keeps the game moving and forces answers to questions in a reasonable timeframe, answers that everyone has agreed to live with. The reduction in timewasting is the big potential payoff.

These methods fail if anyone negotiates in bad faith and doesn't deliver.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think we agree, other than the semantics around "antagonistic" (reactive) and "protagonistic" (proactive). I don't see all NPCs as simply reactive, and I suspect neither do you.

Hmm... that's a point, I don't see protagonists as proactive and antagonists as reactive.

Would a skill challenge work the same way, though, when it's the defenders rolling instead of the aggressors?

Mechanically, yes, it'd still be n successes before 3 failures. The number of successes, difficulties, and skills in question might all be quite different, though.

Particularly seeing as when the players are rolling they're basing their results on the PCs' skills (which probably gives them an unfair advantage as they can synergize) where in this case the rolls should be based on the skills of the NPC who initiated the challenge.

SCs typically have certain skills that can be used repeatedly, some that are restricted in use or become harder the more you use them, others that you must 'make a case for' or can't be used, and sometimes one that's an auto-fail. Which skills are which could change radically in a player-initiated vs an NPC-initiated challenge. For instance, if the party were unaware of the Vizier's evil ways in pemerton's example, they might come to the dinner, where the Vizier tries to maneuver them into committing to a quest that would take them out of his way for a long while, or insulting the Baron, or something. Instead of using bluff and the like to trick the Vizier, they might be using Insight to figure out what's up, and Diplomacy to reach a more reasonable deal with the Baron.

If I were running, they might also not know there's a Skill Challenge going on. Much as I'm open about 4e being the kind of game that works best 'above board' there can be challenges where keeping more of the mechanics behind the screen can be good. Similarly, I might run an SC where the players aren't told about the SC until they're part way into it, because part of it is figuring out what's going on.

 

[Lanefan]

As I see it stake setting, skill challenges etc among other things allow a question to be asked and answered in a relatively short time. The referee and players have to agree what the question is and roughly what the stakes are and based on what transpires the players succeed or fail after the set number of successes or failures connected to the fiction, or whatever other methods are being used. The answer, win or lose, needs to be relatively final, no takebacks or retrys from any involved parties. This is why a genuine agreement as to stakes is the most vital step and everyone needs to accept the consequences, particularly the referee. Among other things this is a timesaving measure to try and avoid timewasting play that makes everyone frustrated.

You see, a very common failure mode I've seen in all sorts of RPGs is where the players get hugely invested in some task that the referee conscious or unconsciously believes is impossible or exceedingly difficult but is unwilling to tell them thatt. The former case is bad enough when the referee is unwilling to just come out and say they don't think something can be done, whatever it is. The latter case is worse for the game as the referee can always ask for another check and wait for someone to fail, without necessarily realising what they are doing, and wanting the players to fail is the doom of many a game. Too much of this double jeopardy makes for gunshy players who avoid risks.

Subduing a dragon in early D&D was difficult. If players accomplished it and treated the dragon reasonably, having the dragon break out and run away shortly afterwards is a dick move that will just ensure the players never interact with that game mechanic again under that referee. Similarly for interacting with an NPC and discovering that the players reasonable plan to affect that NPC can't ultimately work because of reasons unknown and unknowable to them cause the referee to claw their hard won success back, again leading to wasted time and frustration in the game.

So stake setting type mechanics put the onus on referees to own up during the stake negotiations and not agree to anything they can't live with. Once they've agreed on the terms, the terms are set. Yes, this is artificial but it keeps the game moving and forces answers to questions in a reasonable timeframe, answers that everyone has agreed to live with. The reduction in timewasting is the big potential payoff.

These methods fail if anyone negotiates in bad faith and doesn't deliver.

I guess the difference between this and how I think is that I don't put nearly as much emphasis on time spent doing something. If a given thing takes all session to resolve, so be it...and if that resolution later turns out to be an illusion, so be that too. The campaign length is open-ended, nobody's on a time crunch, so let things take as long as they like to play out.

And while a DM can drop hints here and there that some given task might be impossible, if the players/characters get invested in doing it and thus insist on keeping on trying the DM has no real option but to keep on narrating failure. Been there, done that, from both sides of the screen.

I trust the DM to run a fair and internally-consistent game. Beyond that I've no good reason to trust anything in the game world to be as it seems, and nor should I: I'm well aware both as player and character that what I don't know far outweighs what I do know, or think I know, and that there might well be a twist introduced at any time. The NPC mentor we've been working for all this time could turn out to have been using us as pawns, and in fact we've been working against our own interests all along. The dragon we subdued might have merely allowed itself to be subdued (or been faking it the whole time) in order to learn more about us. The advisor might be the good guy and the Baron possessed by a demon, and capturing the Baron's niece is the only way the advisor could keep the Baron's depravities in line.

Lan-"come on baby, let's do the twist"-efan

 

[Jacob Marley]

There's people I've known who were friends once but are not now; while others who I once had little use for I've come around to. This more commonly happens over the long term but I've seen it happen during the course of one evening. Social interactions are dynamic things.

Indeed!

As I said earlier (somewhere), we can't play out the combat in real life at the table so we need a mechanical representation of it; but we can play out the social-interaction side and thus usually don't (or shouldn't) need mechanics to represent such.

In my experience, the value mechanics add to adjudicating social interactions comes from the randomness inherent in the die roll. At least, as it pertains to D&D. I cannot speak to some of the other games referenced in this thread. As an individual, I have certain tendencies on how I'd rule a particular encounter. Adding die rolls to the adjudicating process challenges those tendencies. The die roll creates moments of surprise when it runs counter to our expectations.

Early on in this thread I posted about how small percentage chances can have a significant impact on the emerging narrative. This was in response to the earlier discussion about a vessel existing to collect blood. My point earlier is just as true with regards to social encounters. In my experience, having these small chances arise from social mechanics creates a more interesting - and dynamic! - encounter than I'd narrate under a free-form model. In a free-form model I find I often default back to my basic tendencies. YMMV

Aside: This is also why I favor old school random encounter tables to [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s more deliberate framing in response to player beliefs.

 

[Tony Vargas]

(apologies if this is a double-post, I'm pretty sure it was eaten by ENWorld maintenance...)

As I said earlier (somewhere), we can't play out the combat in real life at the table so we need a mechanical representation of it; but we can play out the social-interaction side and thus usually don't (or shouldn't) need mechanics to represent such.

You certainly can play out a combat in real life. You could even, with a little SCA experience, gear, and prep, do so fairly safely - or you could play it out in a LARP style with boffers. The downside to doing that is that you're no longer resolving a combat involving the PCs, you're resolving a combat involving the players. If there's a three-time SCA King at your table, his character is going to win a lot of fights, even when he's playing a non-combatant, for instance.

The same applies to exploration and social challenges. Sure, you could have a player try to open a puzzle box or climb to a second story window instead of rolling his Thief's chance of disarming a trap or climbing a wall, or have the player of the wizard verbally spar with the DM to determine if he successfully negotiates with a devil. But you're no longer modeling the PC, so you're essentially limiting your players to characters much more like themselves than if you had workable mechanical resolution systems available to model the characters.
Of course, you could still ignore or override such mechanics in situations where you feel the PC/player and/or NPC/DM distinctions are moot, or where you want to erase those distinctions to some end, such as achieving a greater sense of immersion, maintaining a sense of mystery or discovery, or whatever.

 

[darkbard]

Lan-"sometimes the best adventures come from setting out to do one thing and - knowingly or not - in fact doing something else much more significant"

Hey! Your sig here almost sounds like the preference for a player-driven game over a DM-driven one!

Which seems to me to be a) all about the character's introspection (earlier I called this emo-gaming) and personal story rather than anything on a grander scale, and b) very closed-ended; sure the character may have resolved her own internal issues but there's still a great big world out there to go adventuring in, so why stop now?

I still don't get why you feel this way. Using an example from my own Dark Sun game scenario, two of the PCs have goals at the beginning of play as follows: The Fighter, a former arena slave, desperately seeks her combat partner, who disappeared during the insurrection and slave uprising that immediately precedes play. The Druid mechanically has a theme called "Ghost of the Past," through which we flavor the theme power as a mystic connection to Athas's past--glimmers of the distant past when the world was green, before the scorching sun turned (nearly) all to desert. Her goal is to somehow use these intuitions of the past to discover a way to bring some kind of healing to the planet.

Perhaps you might frame the Fighter's "drives" as "emo," in the sense that they are rather personal (though outwardly directed). But the Druid? How is that anything less than the grandest of scales? And note that neither of these "narratives" are DM-written. They are PC goals and the scenes that I, as DM, will frame will be interesting obstacles, etc. along the way as the PCs take actions to meet these goals.

 

[pemerton]

instead of providing clearly articulated points, you've provided play examples from your own games where there's 'always more to the story' than what you've chosen to present.

I have repeatedly stated a clear point: no secret backstory as a consideration in action resolution.

What is unclear about that?

And I've provided actual play reports: I've linked to plenty in this thread; I've given you actual play examples in the post you replied to; I can provide more links if you like - I think I have more actual play threads on these boards than any other poster.

I'm not seen any real difference in kind between your presentation of 'framing' and what Lanefan describes as his method

Well, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] clearly sees a difference, since - not very far upthread - he described me as using a "flawed system" in treating the skill challenge involving the advisor and the baron as establishing finality in respect of that matter.

the Advisor conflict is set as (and here I feel I have to delve into overly precise language to avoid a pedantic response) the DM, to support the authored goals of the Advisor NPC, is authoring fiction that establishes the entire premise of the conflict.

I described the premise of the conflict in the post you replied to: the PCs are fighting goblins. The advisor comes into the game as the leader of the goblin army.

The backstory of the advisor is built up, over the course of play, initially - as I said - as colour, but then evolving into part of the framing.

Authoring backstory in the course of play, as part of establishing the colour around conflicts, the motivations of NPC actors, etc, is pretty-much the opposite of pre-authoring secret backstory and then using it to adjudicate action resolution.

This premise isn't just framing, as you claim, because it persists through multiple conflicts

What does this have to do with whether or not it is framing? In an ongoing campaign, story elements persist from scene to scene, from session to session. That is part of what makes something a campaign.

whatever the players did in regards to the goblin attack gave them information about yellow robed wizards; whatever the players did in the tunnel under the fortress, they found more yellow wizard information; this all fed into the pinnacle scene described of trying to force the Advisor (the yellow robed wizard, I'm assuming) to out himself.

Yes, over the course of play the PCs (and thereby the players) learn new things about the yellow-robed wizard. This is how ongoing RPG play works. The players engage situations via their PCs. Backstory develops; goals are formed, pursued, altered, sometimes achieved.

In the game, other things have been learned too. The PCs have learned more about the Rod of Seven Parts. They've learned more about Torog, Orcus, Lolth and the Queen of Chaos. They've learned more about devils, duergar and their relationship. They've learned a lot more about the Raven Queen.

Most of my games involve this. In my MHRP campaign, the PCs learned things too: they learned that Clan Yashida was behind an attempt to steal Stark technology that was on display in the Smithsonian. This led them to break into a Clan Yashida office building in Tokyo. They also learned that Doctor Doom was behind a separate attempt to steal this technology, and furthermore that he had kidnapped Mariko Yashida. That led them to break into the Latverian embassy in Washington.

The PCs learning things is a failry standard part of RPGing. It's certainly not unique to my games, or the systems that I GM. Here, eg, is a standard player move from Dungeon World:

Spout Lore
When you consult your accumulated knowledge about something, roll+Int. ✴On a 10+, the GM will tell you something interesting and useful about the subject relevant to your situation. ✴On a 7–9, the GM will only tell you something interesting—it’s on you to make it useful.​

I don't understand what you think is the issue here.

If the players, via their action declarations for their PCs and their expressions of commitment/aspiration/etc for their PCs, are focused on XYZ, then it is the GM's job to focus the game around XYZ. To quote Eero Tuovinen (again),

The standard narrativistic model
[The GM's] job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. . . .

The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.​

In the case of my main 4e game, the "action" - as established by the players' creation and play of their PCs - includes the baron, because (among other things) the dwarf fighter/cleric "paladin" PC has establishd a relationship with him, as the notional leader of the PCs; the leader of the goblin army, who is clearly a wizard-type, who speaks especially to the interest of the wizard/invoker PC who has already seen his own home city destroyd by humanoid armies, just as Nerath was generations ago (and the same character is carrying an ancient Nerathi artefact, the Sceptre of Law/Rod of 7 Parts); Vecna, again because of the wizard/invoker's subtle relationship to the god of secrets. Presenting the leader of the goblin army as the baron's advisor is a natural way of interweaving these various concerns. That's part of a GM's job, in this sort of game.

The 'framing' here, the secret information you determined in advance, actually does impact the result of the challenges because it doesn't matter what the result of the challenge is, the next breadcrumb drops. This is exactly the kind of play you are decrying as railroading

What breadcrumbs are you talking about?

You seem to be assuming - and not based on anything I said - that the whole campaign was oriented towards the conflict with the advisor. That assumption is false.

As I posted in the post you replied to (and quoted), "When approaching a goblin fortress, they see a wizardly type wearing a yellow robe fly off on a flying carpet. They have heard other stories of a wizardly type in yellow robes hanging out suspiciously in the local area. . . . This begins as colour."

At a guess, the stories of the yellow-robed type hanging out suspiciously were introduced into the game in late 2009 or so, when the PCs spoke to a NPC burying dead goblins, who was able to learn the names of the dead by touching them. (This idea is from the LotFP module "Death Frost Doom".)

This "went where the action is" because many of the PCs are Raven Queen cultists. She has deliberately hidden her name to protect herself against her enemies. The ability to learn her name by touching her dead (mortal) body would therefore be very significant. The yellow-robed skulker was - as I said - a piece of colour.

Probably three or so months later - so sometime in the first hald of 2010, I would say - the PCs approached a goblin fortress (I was adapting elements of the 4e module Thunderspire Labyrinth, particularly the Chamber of Eyes). I described a yellow-robed figure flying off on a carpet as the PCs approached. I think, but am not certain after 7 years, that this was in the context of a skill challenge to approach unspotted (the only definite recollection I have of that skill challenge is that it was the first instance in our game of a successful skill check being resolved as "minionising" a NPC, so that a single hit would then take said NPC out).

This obviously drew upon the early reference to a yellow-robed skulker, and established him as the wizard leader of the goblins. (There may also have been some prior interrogation of goblin prisoners. I don't remember now.)

A year or so of play later, the PCs - having defended a village against goblin attack, with partial success - head to the city of Threshold. My presentation of the city combines three published sources: Night's Dark Terror; the Dungeon adventure Heath, with the city of Adakmi; and the 3E module Speaker in Dreams (I can't remember what name it gives to the city). I decide that the city is ruled by a baron (taken from Speaker in Dreams) in an uneasy balance of power with a patriarch (taken from Night's Dark Terror). As best I recall the players chose, at first, to ally with the patriarch. Hence, when I describe the PCs receiving an invitation to dinner with the baron, that is already applying a degree of pressure. When the players arrive at dinner and see the advisor there, and recognise him as the goblin leader, the pressure increases.

I can't remember how many hours or days before running the baron and advisor skill challenge I decided to have the baron's advisor be the PCs' yellow-robed nemesis. I just looked at a file, dated April 21st 2011, which has notes on possible background and framing elements for Threshold, and it doesn't say anthying about the evil wizard being the baron's advisor: the only comment on him is "During Baron’s funeral (or celebration), the PCs will notice Paldemar in the crowd (with Jolenta, if she survived)". So my best guess is, at that time, I hadn't thought of using the wizard as the baron's traitorous advisor.

The actual play post is dated Thursday August 11th 2011, and refers to the session taking place "on the weekend", which would by Sunday August 7th. So some time between April 21st and August 7th - a 108 day window - I got the idea of using the wizard leader of the goblins, the PCs' nemesis, as the baron's advisor, thereby increasing the pressure of the dinner invitation.

It may be that I had that idea first, and then came up with idea of the dinner invitation to bring it into play; or it may be that I first came up with the idea of the dinner invitation - which would have been somewhere in the couple of weeks preceding August 7th - and then decided that the wizard being present, as the baron's treacherous advisor, would increase the pressure even more. I don't now recall - we are talking about stuff nearly six years ago, so I've run over a 100 RPG sessions since then.

In the OP, I characterised railroading as "the GM shaping outcomes to fit a pre-conceived narrative". I have not described - either in the post you quoted, or prior posts, or this post - any shaping of outcomes to fit a pre-conceived narrative. I have described introducing elements of colour, which - in subsequent moments of play - become elements of framing. There is no shaping of outcomes and no preconception of outcomes.

Upthread, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and some other posters (maybe [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION]?) expresed doubt that running a game in the way I described - ie building up the backstory in response by following the players' leads, by narrating consequences of checks, by framing the PCs (and thereby the players) into conflict - could produce a coherent, rich world. I disagreed (as did some other posters, I think, eg [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]).

You appear to be assuming that, because the skill challenge involving the advisor and the baron incorporated established backstory as part of its framing, that all that backstory must have been authored in advance, with the purpose of pushing the players towards this event. (That is the best sense I am making of your reference to "breadcrumbs".) As I have tried to explain in this post, that (apparent) assumption is mistaken.

There is no secret backstory as an element of action resolution in any of the above. The resolution follows from the framing and the checks.

I don't know that, though

You also seem to think I'm lying about how I GM. Why? Instead of accusing me of lying, you could just ask how one establishes and manages backstory without using it to adjudicate action resolution via "behind the scenes" determinations of player success or failure.

 

[pemerton]

An example (hypothetical only) of secret backstory operating as a consdieration in action resolution: the PCs try to out the advisor in a way that will damage his relationship with the baron, but fail because - unbeknownst to the players - the GM has decided that the advisor is holding the baron's niece hostage, and is thereby exercising leverage over the baron.

See, that's the sort of thing that makes for a great game. The PCs try something that should have worked, but didn't. That gets them thinking, "What happened? There must be something going on here that we don't know about.". They then start digging for that information, find out about the niece and rescue her. At that time the baron would be exceedingly grateful to the PCs(no damage to the rep, but rather an increase) and be out for blood against the advisor(rebounded against him nicely).

You lose out on a ton by being so against hidden backstory.

As I posted upthread, I'm not that interested in RPGing as puzzle-solving. If you enjoy it, then go for it!