Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Campbell]

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]

I am speaking only to the expectation that we will all play with integrity and follow the established fiction achieved through fictional positioning and utilizing the rules of the game. I do not expect that other characters will value and build on the things my character has to say. I expect that the other players will value my contributions to the fiction and consider my fictional positioning when making decisions for their characters. This is not something I meaningfully view as different from the expectation that players will not act on knowledge their character would not have.

There is also a fundamental difference between blocking and negation for me. While fiction is being established we have every opportunity to block the contribution. This can be done at Intent, Initiation, Execution, or Effect. The game has rules that allow us to block. A saving throw is one way. Once things have been established negating the implied fictional consequences is something I am not a fan of. Another player is free to decide what their character does. It is just an expectation of mine that they will have regard for who my character is, what just happened in the shared fiction, and the rules of the game. Vicious Mockery implies that you have been hurt in someway - so much so that it could kill you. It's words that cut. Failing the saving throw implies that your character has been affected by those words in some way. I expect that to be reflected in play - not just in the marking off of hp. How that happens I do not care - not my decision to make. Similarly, Bardic Inspiration implies actual inspiration - not just a bonus die.

This idea that we can meaningfully separate the fiction from the mechanisms and can pick and choose which forms of fictional positioning to pay attention to is something I am no fan of. It completely destroys any sense of skilled play of the fiction or what I believe separates role playing games from board games - as games we play in a shared fiction. I also do not view this as a feature of 5th Edition as written despite my concerns about story advocacy.

My fiction getting all up in your fiction, and your fiction getting all up in your fiction is precisely the point. We are collaborating - not expressing our own individual creativity and precisely controlling the content of the fiction. This is my preferred form of playing a role playing game. It does not have to be anyone else's. The diversity of form we can experience in this hobby is something I value because it allows me to have radically different experiences that I could not easily get to have by only playing one game with a particular set of people. Different games. Different people. Different aims.

I would also disagree that in real life we do not place expectations on other people or that they do not place expectations on us. In social endeavors we do things on the basis of the expectations we have for other people. I would not participate in a conversation with someone who does not value my perspective or listen to what I really have to say. I would not go to work if I did not get paid for my labor. I would not open up emotionally to someone if I believed they were going to belittle my concerns. I mean everyone is always free to not meet my expectations or exceed them, and that will have an effect on my behavior going forward. There are social costs and risks involved in everything we do.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'm not ignoreing the GM involvement. I'm expressly noting it.

In the real world, a change takes place: something that was unknown (the skulker's motivation) becomes known. Something that was unauthored (the skulker's motivation) becomes authored.

But there is no change in, or to, the gameworld. Within the fiction, the skulker's motivation has not changed. It is what it always was.

I am talking about the game, not the fiction in the game. Just about anything can be justified within the fiction in some way.....but the GM and his/her techniques and how those affect the players is part of the real world.

Now, my point about your element of the fiction writing itself, the fact that the GM has not authored a motivation for an NPC he decided to introduce so that such a motivation could later be established by what happens in the fiction.....that seems much more close to the fiction writing itself than the GM writing it. Is the GM free to decide whatever he wants? I thought that was part of teh whole point of this style of play....to limit GM authorship by sharing it with players.

There are no REH Conan stories in which Conan casts a spell, but there are stories in which he finds secret doors.

And there are adventure films in which secret doors figure. It's a fairly common trope (it's not as if Gygax invented it from scracth!).

Sure....secret doors are fine as elements of story. However, you better believe that the author considers how they are introduced....not just having them show up because they would be convenient for the characters.

In any event, in BW, the failed check obliged the GM to narrate a consequence of failure. New fiction gets established, adverse to the intention with which the action was declared. The example that has already come up in this thread is the search for the nickel-silver mace in the ruined tower - the check failed, and the consequence was the discovery, instead, of black arrows made by the mage's brother prior to being possessed by a balrog.

This I can see as a strong element in your style not present in a more GM driven style; all developments seem to come from some attempt by the PCs. So things go well or poorly based on how the PCs perform at their chosen tasks.

In 5E D&D, the character who casts Passwall can just as easily find that there are further complications beyond the wall....hordes of enemies, a sheer drop, etc....but this is based on GM whim or pre-authoring such elements rather than on the results of PC actions.

 

[hawkeyefan]

As I see it, the key feature of Illusionism is not that it is GM narration.

The key feature of Illusionism is that it is GM narration that covertly nullifies the significance or consequences of player action declarations for their PCs. The illusion is that these action declarations, and their resolution, matter to the outcomes of the game.

I would think the key feature of Illusionism is the presence of an illusion.....something appearing one way, when in fact it is another.

And I would query your claim that "the GM decides what is best for the game". That is not a very precise description. The GM frames a situation. Or the GM narrates a consequence of a check. And does these things in accordance with certain principle, primarily "go where the action is" ie follow dramatic need.

The GM doesn't have any at-large power to narrate stuff on the basis that it is "best for the game". I'm not really sure that "best for the game" is even a meaningful concept in this context.

I find there to be very little distinction between deciding what's best for the game, follow dramatic lead, frame a situation.....they all seem pretty similar in the context we're talking about.

And there is another thing going on here. The idea of the left fork in a tunnel suggests that we already have a whole lot of backstory established but unknown to the players (eg the classic dungeon map). In which case we already seem to be positing an approach to play where part of what is involved is the players learning what is in the GM's notes (in this case, the map). In which case it would be something like cheating for the GM to just change things around on the fly.

But in the sort of approach I am describing, there is no map of the tunnels prepared in advance in that classic fashion. (I will sometimes use a map as an element in framing - especially in 4e - but that is something different.) So that the PCs went left rather than right is mere colour. The initial choice of a direction to go has no significance for resolution (though it may establish fictional positioning that comes to be of significance down the track).

Right.

So if a GM draws a map, and then based on the PCs' actions, decides to switch the contents of two rooms in order to force a conflict with the bad guy, that's illusionism.

But if a GM simply doesn't draw a map ahead of time, and instead decides that the dramatic need is for the PCs to face the bad guy, and so he frames such a situation....that's not.

I feel like the entire way the game is played is along the lines of illusionism. Nothing is permanent until it is made so by PC action and GM adjudication.

 

[hawkeyefan]

(1) It's not true to say that the specific decision doesn't really matter.

The players decide that their PCs travel to a city beseiged by hobgoblins, and involve themselves in the local politics. The baron becomes salient, The skulker (it turns out) is the baron's chief advisor.

Had the players made a different decision, the outcomes would almost certainly have been quite different.

But regardless of what they decide, the yellow skulker will still somehow show up and be involved. And he'll always somehow be related to their motivations and desires....

(2) If everything in the game somehow relates to choices the players make (in build and play of their PCs), then there's no illusion in that - it says it right on the tin.

So because an edition of D&D may have advocated for Illusionism, and therefore the players could expect it to be a component of the game, then that makes it not illusionism?

(3) There's no loss of agency that I can see, in either (1) or (2). The player's choice to play a Raven Queen devotee means that, as GM, I narrate an attack upon the baron by Orcus cultists. Had the player chosen to build and play a different PC, different situations would have been framed. Where is the player losing agency?

The players can do nothing to avoid the yellow skulker's later involvement in the story. If that NPC had an established motivation and/or affiliation...let's say the Scarlet Brotherhood.....and the players decide to take their characters down a path that leads away from that, and instead engage in another part of the world....perhaps against Iuz....then they could avoid the yellow skulker and his machinations.

But in your approach, there is no way for them to avoid him. He simply becomes an agent of whatever threat they are going to face....or perhaps even an ally of theirs. Things can still work out differently based on how the GM decides to take it based on dramatic need or whatever.....but that guy is going to come back into it one way or another.

 

[Lanefan]

Here are some of the details of the mystery that were established by me as part of the process of actually play:

... various notes ...

As I said, it's simply not true that this sort of thing can't be done without knowing in advance what is going on. As you can see from the above, the relevant theological motivations - burial practices, and then magical experiments that were the precursors to wizardly madness - were authored in the course of play.

Where I'd have had most if not all of that pretty much set before the adventure even started, so that the results of any pre-investigation and information gathering done by the party would either a) agree with what was actually there or b) be known at the time at least by me-as-DM to be wrong (false rumours, etc.).

Note that I'm not saying I never make things up on the fly. Sometimes I have no choice; if they've gone somewhere or done something I just didn't see coming I have to hit the curveball. But at least the major stuff (in what you reported, the mixed-up religion and practices of the cult - and evidence of such - would certainly be among such things) would be in place beforehand, such that if the PCs start casting divinations or scrying the locale I'm on a solid and consistent footing when narrating the results they get.

That said, if your system doesn't have much by way of PC-available divination or scrying you're to some extent off the hook. My system does, and I never know when they're going to pull 'em out of the toolbox.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

Sorcerer is from 2002. It is designed by Ron Edwards, the author of the Forge essay I linked to. It is one of the earliest published expositions of the "standard narrativistic model". Ron Edwards does not make a secret of why he wanted to design this sort of game - he objected to the railroad-style play that was rampant in the late 80s and 90s RPG scene, with games like Vampire as the standard bearers.

And, of course, as with so many things that are designed primarily in objecton to something he went far too far the other way.

DitV is from 2004. Its designer, Vincent Baker, also designed Apocalypse World. DitV is a fairly early and very highly regarded RPG design intended to generate story without railroading, in virtue of its combination of framing principles and resolution system.

HeroQuest is a successor game to HeroWars, which was designed by Robin Laws and first published in 2000. The latest edition I know of - HeroQuest revised - is from 2009. Both the HeroWars Narrator's Guide and the HQ revised book have excellent advice for running a game without secret backstory as an element in adjudication, and for how to manage "closed scene" resolution.

I can't speak to Vincent Baker as I've not seen any of his stuff to know it, but the other two names you give - Ron Edwards and Robin Laws - are on their own enough to send me running for the hills: their main focus seems to be to try and overlay pompous ivory-tower theorizing onto an activity best done with dice or pencil in one hand and a beer in the other.

This Eero Tuovinen - whose name I'd not heard until this thread - seems from what you and others have quoted here to just be another such.

You are also not addressing the various possibilities in action declaration. For instance, declaring "I look for a vessel!" or "I search for a secret door!" is the player playing his/her PC. How do we determine, though, whether or not that attempt succeeds? If the GM simply narrates failure on the basis of secret backstory ("Sorry, there's no vessel"; "You search, but find no secret doors") then how is that an instance of (to quote) the "process [of] choices lead[ing] to consequences which lead to further choices"?

First off, "Sorry, there's no vessel" is a poor response. Better would be "You look around and don't see any", to allow for there in fact being a vessel that the searcher has simply missed.

That said, "choices leading to consequences [leading] to further choices" sounds like a quick way down some bizarre rabbit holes, and also at face value never allows the party to in effect go the wrong way to an eventual - or immediate - dead end. Realism demands that sometimes the consequence(s) don't give any choices other than to retrace your steps and try something different.

Or of the GM "going where the action is"?

In the vessel example there's already other action going on, which the searcher can join in with; or the searcher can try to think up another way to catch some blood. In the secret door example, a flat failure means only that it's down to the players (as their characters) to go and find some action elsewhere because as far as they can tell there's none here.

How the scene resolves is not up to the GM. That's a function of the players' action declarations for their PCs, and the outcomes of those action declarations in accordance with the resolution mechanics.

None of these games includes a rule that just allows the GM to decide how things turn out!

True in all systems. A DM using a canned module, for example, is in good faith bound to use that module as the basis for narration (e.g. look at the map, see there's a secret door right where the PCs are searching, then use the relevant game mechanics to determine success or failure in the search).

For instance, in my 4e game the PCs were tricked by a group of undead spirits into coming close (the spirits were disguised as refugees huddled around a campfire), and then the undead - who had been conjured by a goblin shaman - attacked the PCs and defeated them. The PCs regained consciousness in a goblin prison cell.

That is not "taking control of the story away from the players" - rather, it is "establishing consequences as determined by the game's rules" - in this case, the rules dealing with what happens when a character is reduced to 0 hp.

And is one way of sidestepping what would otherwise have been a TPK.

As far as the owlbear moment is concerned - if that is the sort of character development you want in your game, then I don't understand why you would wait until a random encounter brings it about.

Sometimes these things just naturally arise out of the run of play, without any prompting or framing by the DM and without any forethought by the player. Seems fine to me.

So whereas you seem to think you're drawing some sort of contrast between the "standard narrativistic model" and your owlbear experience, in fact the whole point of the model is to generate that sort of experience consistently throughout play. That's why Luke Crane, in the BW books that I've quoted upthread, talks about characters changing in unexpected ways. Because things will happen that will provoke choices, including hard choices, and the way the consequences of those choices unfold will change the players' understanding of who his/her PC is.

There's a rather large gulf between:
- these changes or developments being more or less constantly quasi-forced upon the characters as a central aspect of play, and
- these changes or developments arising spontaneously and naturally out of play which is otherwise centered on something else (in this particular case, a wandering owlbear).

See the difference?

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

I'm saying that I play RPGs for the play. Which is predominantly action declaration and resolution. Which is about engaging the fiction - as framing, as fictional positioning, as consequence.

Mere colour is part of this - there's nothing wrong with mentioning the sunny sky or the stony walls from time-to-time - but it's nowhere near the heart of the game for me. Because it doesn't bear upon the play that I have described. If it did, then it wouldn't be mere colour.

Yet you've claimed marauding wolves or wandering owlbears are also just colour; even though dealing with them obviously is going to involve some actions and resolutions.

That, and knowing the environment my character is surrounded by certainly helps me imagine the scene...and that imagination/immersion kind of is the heart of the game when everything else gets stripped away.

Re: secret doors:

These are all descriptions of events in the fiction. But you seem to be also equating them with certain resolution procedures, eg that the occurrence of (4) in the fiction depends upon the GM having a note (mental, actual) that there is a secret door there, and that note is made prior to the action declaration to look for the door.

That dependence may be important to you, but it is not a general feature of RPGing.

I categorically disagree: it is a general feature of RPGing with the possible exception of a few niche gaming styles of which yours appears to be one.

Also, 4 is no different from 2: the structure is the same, except that in 2 you seem to envisage the passage of moments, but in 4 the passage of hours.

Wasn't clear enough - 2 was supposed to imply the search "failed" because it was interrupted in progress, where 4 was going after the "failed but could have succeeded due to the presence of a secret door which may or may not be noticed much later".

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

Well, I quoted this from the Codex (orignially in the Adventure Burner):

The player must offer an invocation appropriate to the moment and his idiom. If he doesn't, the GM can and should inform him that his task is inappropriate to his intent and stop the Faith dice before they hit the table.​

That requires the player to offer an invocation. Not to describe his/her PC offering one.

Stupid question, but is it possible that the Codex is here perpetuating my pet peeve by conflating "player" and "character"? Without seeing more of it I've no way of knowing how fast and loose they are when referring to players and characters...and if by player they in fact mean character in this passage then everyone's issues go away.

The idea that there is something unorthodox or even objectionable about actually requiring the player to state words in order to establish fictional positioning for action declaration is (I think) an idea that has more recent origins in the RPGing hobby.

I prefer my players to speak in character where possible but I'm also aware their characters are probably more familiar with the actual things they'd have to say in these instances than their players are; the characters live and breathe this stuff but the players don't. So, in this case if someone wants to try inventing and saying their prayer I'm all for it, but I'm not going to penalize the character if the player isn't up to it.

Lan-"I tried a mechanic like this many years ago with Bards and it went over like a lead balloon"-efan

 

[Aenghus]

In my early days in the hobby I idolised the totally prepared style of play as a goal to strive for ie. fully prewritten material that the PCs explore and the players learn about.

I can't remember the first time I encountered referees with a different style, a more improvisational style with few or no maps and limited preparation, where the referee riffs off the players actions and comments and improvises an adventure and a setting. I had my doubts about this style originally, seeing it as lazy and slapdash and potentially badwrongfun. Contributing to my poor impression of this style is that I was objectively worse at playing in that style, as it's harder for a player to prep for a improv-based game, and there's a lack of precendent to fall back on.

I've got a lot more comfortable with improvisation over the years, tho I still feel more comfortable with a moderately prepped game.

But the recent mention of the spell "Passwall" in recent thinking got me thinking. The Passwall spell as written is for an old fashioned game with detailed maps and secret rooms full of loot. It's much less useful in a improvised game where the map might be some names of buildings or encounter areas with lines drawn between them indicating possible routes, only a mental map, or even no map at all. In improvised game I've seen referees treat spells like Passwall as a plot coupon to transit from one scene or location to another, as supported by the fiction. They could even draw a new line on their network diagram if they wanted to. Referees were more amenable to such use in improvised games because they were looking for an excuse to transition the game from one scene to another and the spell use gave them that excuse, and involved expenditure of a limited resource, a fairly high level spell that the rules suggested should accomplish something concrete in the gameworld.

And when you can treat a spell as a plot coupon like that, its easier to consider using other skills and resources to accomplish equivalent things in producing scene transitions. Most narrative games have plot points, drama points or fate points etc for expending on such declarations and mechanics to adjudicate them.

Secondly, the discussion on player-driven/narrative games and illusionism may have driven onto the rocks. I've never played any of those games, but it's obvious to me that if the point of a game is the addressing the motivations of the PCs and the dramatic goals of the players, the players are primarily invested in the game constantly moving to address those dramatic goals. The scene setting and verisimilitude of the gameworld are less important considerations, and only need to be sufficiently plausible to satisfy the participants. Most social contracts would deem it bad form to poke at the setting with the intention of disrupting it, or showing the setting is "only a film set with no substance". From a different play styles perspective this is true, but from the PoV of players primarily invested in their PCs exploring dramatic goals, irrelevant.

Technically, the PCs could be floating heads suspended in a void and still conduct the game so long as they had appropriate dramatic goals and means of addressing them.

As the arbiter of whether a PCs dramatic concerns are being addressed is the player themselves, it's impossible to apply illusionism in a game like this to prevent pursuing relevant dramatic goals without that player noticing and presumably objecting. (Other sorts of illusionism might well be possible without immediate discovery, but not illusionism to frustrate the player's dramatic goals)

No style of play can survive being played in bad faith, every style of play has downsides that people downplay or ignore for the sake of the game and the other participants.

 

[pemerton]

The players can do nothing to avoid the yellow skulker's later involvement in the story.

Yes they can. They can make it clear (expressly or implicitly) that the skulker doesn't speak to any dramatic need.