Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Ovinomancer]

That seems me to be less a property of a particular gaming style, rather, that's just the natural outcome of any improvisational, episodic narrative. Having random characters and plot arcs drop in and out of TV shows is a regular occurrence, for example, due to cast changes, poor reception by the audience, etc.

The more I read this the less I understand what you're driving at -- it doesn't even touch on my main theme, it just seems to say, "hey, other things do that, too, you know." Which is, okay, sure, obviously true, but what's your point?

 

[Ovinomancer]

It also syncs with how quite a few shows are written. They do not really foreshadow. They reincorporate! They take threads left dangling from previous episodes and expand upon them. Done artfully this often feels more organic and compelling than sweeping arcs. You can often see the breakpoints in shows where writers feel compelled to force a particular character or narrative thread down the audience's throats.

Well stated, but the question occurs to me... isn't this just another form of illusionism?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think this comes from a culture that expects a very specific relationship between the GM and other players, regardless of the game in question. There's this idea that there are Good Game Masters and Bad Game Masters - also that there are Good Players and Bad Players. Basically there's this idea that skills transfer between games and play groups. I do not meaningfully agree with this notion. I think there are innumerable ways to do this thing we do that provide different experiences that may or may not suit what motivates us to play games. These are different games. They can involve meaningfully different relationships between the players, Between the players and their relationship to the mechanisms. Between what is expected from a given participant and what they are permitted to do. Some skills transfer between games, but not all. That's part of the fun. Learning new skills, having different experiences, finding new ways to have fun we would not otherwise have if left to our own devices.

I mean this is like expecting because a player has developed skill in Euchre, Spades, or Bridge that they can just step in and be good poker players. It's also assuming that they do not have to develop a sense of the particular poker table they are playing at even if the rules of the game are not different.

When I say I do not care for particular techniques or expectations of play I am really saying something like I prefer poker to spades. That I prefer card games that are not about taking tricks. I am not saying spades is a bad game that no should have fun playing. I am saying I would rather not.

It's not about being the wrong way to run a game. It's about being the wrong way to run a game for me to get what I want out of it. The idea that expressing strong preferences is something that should be shamed is problematic to me. I personally value diversity of play - playing different games with different people in different ways. I personally value people speaking up about the things that interest them. I personally value poker feeling like a different game than spades.

Some fair points, but would it not be fair to say that a player that plays a trick winning game that is bad at winning tricks is a Bad Player? Can I not identify players that are bad at the game they choose to play without also prejudging them on other games? In this vein, can I not identify a trait in a particular style of DMing that is generally considered to be bad without saying such a trait is universally bad in all styles or that this particular DM is bad in all styles?

I mean, at some point overgeneralization just becomes an undifferentiated blur.

 

[TwoSix]

The more I read this the less I understand what you're driving at -- it doesn't even touch on my main theme, it just seems to say, "hey, other things do that, too, you know." Which is, okay, sure, obviously true, but what's your point?

To be fair, I have no idea what your main theme is.

 

[Ovinomancer]

To be fair, I have no idea what your main theme is.

S'okay, then.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I think the problem with using Star Wars as an analogy....or any fiction, really....is that when compared to a game, there is a key element missing from the metaphor: that of the player. So while a history may be secret from Luke, it may or may not be secret from the player who is playing Luke. Maybe that player had a concept for some kind of "child of destiny" character. Maybe he left the specifics of it up to the DM to fit into the game/story he had in mind, or maybe he came up with a detailed history for the PC himself.

But having said that, I get your point....something revealed to the character in the midst of the story became the driving force for the character thereafter. The same could happen in an RPG....if it's not something expressly forbidden by the game, at least.

Maybe it's just me....but I think the players and the DM can both be inspired by the ideas of the other. I see no reason to create walls that prevent such inspiration from occurring.

The Star Wars analogy is convenient, that's all. Like [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has said as well, the story itself doesn't really tell you anything of how it occurred, so if Star Wars was a story of what occurred in an RPG, you can't really tell how it occurred.

But my point isn't so much about whether it could occur one way or the other, using whatever system. My point is that the power of the story is more effective if the character Luke, and by the extension the player playing Luke, doesn't know the secret backstory until the key point.

Consider the impact if:
Luke knew it all along; or
Obi-Wan had told him at the outset; or
He had learned it during the battle between Obi-Wan and Vader; or
He learned it from the Rebellion

None of those have nearly the drama or impact as learning it from Vader himself, when you are in the midst of your first one-on-one battle to kill him. I'm not talking about the audience perspective watching the movies - I'm talking about the player experience in the game.

I totally agree that the players and DM can both be inspired by the ideas of each other. The players come up with far more interesting things to me. Usually things I don't even think of. So I steal from them liberally.

 

[Campbell]

Well stated, but the question occurs to me... isn't this just another form of illusionism?

I'm not sure what this really has to do with illusionism as long as we are acting as curious explorers of the fiction rather than trying to push things down a certain road. I mean we tend to do this when we are establishing fiction rather than playing in it or it happens naturally when players have their characters go back to a particular place or person to use as a resource in the course of pursuing some other goal. There is some mild contrivance involved in creating interesting fiction to play in, but we are not like meaningfully playing when we establish this stuff.

My play tends to go in a loop.

Establish interesting fiction -> Play it out by following the fiction -> Establish More Fiction -> Play It Out

I mean we all know we are doing this. We don't always bring attention to it though.

 

[pemerton]

Apologies. Re-looking at that thread, at the time you had stated that the period for which the familiar was shut down was undefined/undetermined. You really did not hint it would be as much as 3 months (refer below).

I think this would count as an example of "playing to find out".

Out of interest sake, the idea of how to reactivate the familiar was something you came up with or was it an idea by the player?

I'm the one who framed the PCs into a conflict with an Aspect of Vecna. (In accordance with the principle "go where the action is".)

The player decided to use the defeat of the Aspect of an opportunity to sever the connection between Vecna and his Eye, thereby allowing the imp to reactivate under the PC's control:

When they arrived, an Aspect of Vecna was waiting for them. It wanted to bargain to get the Eye of Vecna back from the party invoker. (Backstory to this is here.) The Eye is in the invoker's imp, placed there both to achieve a power up, and to stop Levistus (who placed the imp with the invoker) using the imp as a spy (by creating a Vecna-ish shield of secrecy). Unfortunately the party's conflict with Torog, as linked to above, had led to the invoker choosing the Raven Queen over Vecna as recipient of the souls of the Underdark's dead In retaliation, Vecna had used his control over the Eye to strike down the imp, which meant that the imp was currently lifeless (and hence the Eye inactive).

The bargaining was unsuccessful, however, as in an earlier session the invoker had already agreed to help the rest of the party try and destroy the Eye if they could find a way; and he now held to that agreement. The Aspect threatened a bit, but the PCs stood their ground and (recognising a superior force) it teleported away.

<snip>

the Aspect of Vecna reappeared bringing back up (undead cultists, lich vestiges and four demons under its control).

<snip>

In the first round the invoker dominated Vecna and made him dismiss one of his summoned demons. (I had described the demon appearing by means of gate. The player had his PC order Vecna to end the summoning. The established fictional positioning made this clearly feasible, and so it happened.) And then before Vecna's turn could come around again, the cleric-ranger stunned him with a reasonably newly acquired daily power. To add insult to injury, the chaos sorcerer rolled a 1, pushing Vecna 1 square. Vecna failed his save and went tumbling 100' to the ledges below the earthmote. Then something (I guess one of the demons?) hit the paladin and pushed him over the edge. At which point an Acrobatics roll was requested, to "do a Gandalf" (from the Two Towers film) and fall down on top of Vecna. The roll was successful, and the paladin dealt damage to Vecna with a successful basic attack, as well as taking damage himself for the fall.

While the other PCs cleaned up uptop, the paladin successfully solo-ed the now-bloodied Aspect, but (at the behest of the invoker) only knocked it unconscious (and then used his Marshal of Letherna daily utility to prevent any regeneration that might let it come back to consciousness). The invoker then came down and used an Undead Ward ritual, with the Aspect as a focus, to try and sever the connection between Vecna and his Eye. This was successful (between stats, feats and Sage of Ages the character has bonuses of around +40 to most of his ritual checks), so the imp came back to life, still powered up by the Eye but no longer subject to Vecna's influence. (But therefore once again able to send information to Levistus. When I chided the player for his PC not sticking the liberated eye in his own socket, his reply was that Malstaph (the PC) is not foolish enough to think that he's a god.)

This is an example of what I think 4e is very strong at - supporting the combination of mechanically defined story elements (like powers, rituals, items, etc) with player exploitation of fictional positioning to perform feats that are not mechanically defined, with the GM using the DC-by-level table and the skill and skill challenge frameworks to actually manage the resolution of this at the table.

The mechanically defined story elements make it less abstract than Cortex+/MHRP, where everything is about linking abstract mechanical systems to fictional positioning, without the intermediation provided by those defined elements. But the abstract resolution system makes it more friendly to improvisation than a system like BW, RQ or Rolemaster, which have more of an expectation that every PC capacity will have its own mechanical representation on the PC sheet (so if you don't have a "Sever connection between God of Undeath and his missing Eye" ritual, then you can't easily do that thing).

The player of the invoker/wizard in my game is probably the most adventurous with this sort of thing, but I can't say whether that's a feature of him as a player, or whether that's the result of playing a PC whose build (lots of skills with high bonuses, lots of spells, lots of rituals) is very well-suited to it. When the player explains (both to the table, and in character to the other PCs) that an Undead Ward, suitably powered up using the Aspect as a focus, can sever the connection between Vecna and his Eye, I am not going to contest that statement about the fiction. (Just as, in relation to the episode I quoted upthread with the sealing off of the Abyss, I didn't question the players assertion about what would be possible in the fiction.)

My job, with the fictional possibilities established, is to manage the resolution using the processes the game offers. (Which, as I've said, are very strong for this sort of stuff.)

A question that might arise here is: What stops the player(s) just making up any old nonsense to get what they want for their PCs? The answer, I think, is one that [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] has thought about harder than I have: fidelity to the fiction. 4e is good for this, too, at least in its default mode (the three tiers of play, the default cosmology, etc): the whole setting - PCs and antagonists - are infused with colour that tells you what does and doesn't make sense within the gameworld.

I'm in the early stages of a new Dark Sun 4e game. Dark Sun departs in several respects from the default 4e setting, and I'm a bit worried that it won't provide quite the same degree of seamless integration between setting colour, mechanically defined story elements, and the page 42/skill challenge resolution frameworks. If I'm lucky, though, then I'm wrong about this! (I know [MENTION=1282]darkbard[/MENTION] is also running 4e Dark Sun. Any thoughts on this particular issue?)

 

[Campbell]

Some fair points, but would it not be fair to say that a player that plays a trick winning game that is bad at winning tricks is a Bad Player? Can I not identify players that are bad at the game they choose to play without also prejudging them on other games? In this vein, can I not identify a trait in a particular style of DMing that is generally considered to be bad without saying such a trait is universally bad in all styles or that this particular DM is bad in all styles?

I mean, at some point overgeneralization just becomes an undifferentiated blur.

We can absolutely speak in terms of a particular context. We can absolutely say that someone is a poor Apocalypse World GM, or a poor B/X player, or that they are a poor fit for the way we play 5e. Saying someone is a poor GM or poor player of role playing games is very much like saying they are a bad board gamer or they suck at all video games. I mean I guess there are some universals like poor sportsmanship, having less than worthy interpersonal skills, not having much regard for the other players, refusing to buy into the social contract of the game, taking criticism too personally, and the like. Most of those apply to any game really.

There are some behaviors I consider generally toxic, but they are mostly toxic regardless of the type of game we are playing. There is some stuff based on mixing trust models I find to be somewhat socially and emotionally dangerous, but I'll get to that in another post.

Aside: My preference is to frame it in terms of a lack of skill rather than as a natural quality of the person. These are skills to be developed, nurtured, and improved upon. We all have the capacity to become meaningfully better at them. We might not have the drive or motivation, but that is another matter altogether.

Conclusion: I am calling for more specific analysis, not less.

 

[Campbell]

[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION]

I take issue with framing design trade-offs in terms of drawbacks. The framing feels overtly hostile in a way that feel leads to debate and argument about which way to play a role playing game is superior. I am far more interested in discussion, analysis, and fruitful criticism of techniques and principles. I am more than happy to speak to the specific expectations, social environment, suitability, pain points, and risks entailed in the approach I favor most of the time. I am willing to engage with that conversation. I am not really interested in having a conversation about justifying preferences.

I would also appreciate it if we could avoid bringing the popularity of various approaches into this. First, it largely ignores the particular cultural context of the greater community and geek culture in general. It also feels like an attempt to shame those who fall outside of the orthodoxy. It also does not meaningfully speak to issues of flexibility or the actual details of the experience.

I think these sorts of conversations are important. Normally our communities stay in their walled off gardens. This only serves to increase tribalism, virtue signalling, and a lack of real understanding. For instance, most of the people I know who play indie games also play mainstream games. I happen to be rather fond of The One Ring, Exalted 3e, Edge of the Empire, and Demon - The Descent. I am also rather fond of B/X, Stars Without Number, Godbound, and The Nightmares Underneath.