What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Nagol]

Yeah, well, I think it gets a bit extreme. I mean, here we are on page 207, but if you go back to page 1 I think post 2, maybe it was post 3, was already launching an attack on the OP...

As the poster of post #3, I strongly disagree with your characterisation.

 

[pemerton]

is the DM allowed to here introduce her own thematic elements or story ideas, or is she still bound to narrating failure only within the bounds of the PCs' stories and how they are affected?

The GM is expected to establish consequences that are dramatically/thematically compelling. The theme will come from the players authorship and play of their PCs. The GM is expected to be imaginative in thinking of ways to put on pressure. But it shouldn't be a complete non-sequitur.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There's no likelihood of finding lots of secret doors in every wall, because there's no impetus to search every wall for a secret door. It's not like traditional play, where the player has to guess right at where a secret door may be (for instance, by completing a map of the dungeon and noting 'holes' where a room might be), before the character's skill at finding secret doors can come into play.

And this is exactly the nut of the whole thing, and where the 'traditionalist' analysis sinks into the swamp, falls over, and burns (before being rebuilt for the 2078th time). The idea that the players "will just find secret doors everywhere" or that things will be 'too easy', or that the players will [violate the Czege Principle], etc. is all based on a fundamentally oppositional model of play. One in which the GM has hidden the 'goodies' in the 'maze' and its the player's job to guide their characters to it.

Once the goal became to have fun playing the game and making up cool stories about the characters, etc. then all that went basically out the window. It is still possible to engage in it as a specific facet of a greater whole, but its not THE GAME anymore.

Now, some will contend that they're playing to 'explore', but the model is the same here, the GM has the 'gold' and the players are tasked with navigating the 'maze' to uncover it. The walls and traps of the dungeon maze may be replaced with other stuff, but they still remain.

Finally, you can claim to have gone entirely beyond that by saying "well, the players just come to me and tell me what their PC wants to do (in or out of character) and we work on that", but then we come back to the OP of the thread, what's the world building/details FOR?

I think the ONLY actual solid answer to that which ever came in this thread (and honestly, maybe it was the other thread, forgive me, was the one where [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] quoted one of the Story Now guys stating that you CAN have a 'built world', and it has utility in fixing genre and providing some footing for the players to leverage their character's traits into concrete action.

What doesn't seem right is that it's a Schrodinger's Secret Door - it both exists and does not exist until it's found (or conclusively established not to exist, somehow, I suppose).

There's no Schrodinger's Door if there's no concept of an ESTABLISHED fictional reality outside of what has been presented to the characters. This is something I maintain as a principle of play in games of the type I run, ONLY what has been presented in play exists, all else is vapor until you meet it. That wall didn't exist until we laid eyes on it, so who's to say it didn't 'always have a secret door in it'???

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I'm not sure if you intend this as a rhetorical question or not. I will treat it as non-rhetorical, and answer it. To the extent that you intended it rhetorically, you'll probably think my answer inadequate - sometimes that happens in discussions among human beings!

Here's the sort of thing I have in mind - it's a bit underdescribed but hopefully clear enough to get us on the same page in respect of it:

<the prior events of play, together with GM narration, establish (i) that the PCs are in a stone building facing some bare walls, (ii) thay the PCs are being pursued through the building, and (iii) leave it open what might be behind the walls in question>

Player: "There might be a secret door that we could escape through in one of those bare walls - I seach for signs of one."

GM: "Make a [Perception, Search, Architecture, as appropriate to system] check."

<player makes check>

<GM consults notes, notes that the notes describe these walls as nothing more than plain walls with no secret doors in them>

GM: "You don't find any signs of secret doors."​

Here's why I characterise this as a railroad.

We don't know exactly how it has come about that the PCs are being pursued through the buiilding - most typically, I think, that would be a consequence resulting from some recent bit of past play. But in any event, that pursuit is now the salient pressure on the PCs (and hence the players) in the game. In response to that pressue, this particular player has expressed an interest in the fiction developing in a certain direction - namely, that his/her PC finds signs of a secret door in the bare wall, so that the PCs might escape though it.

Now, because we're playing a game with "moves" and dice and stuff, rather than just round-robin storytelling, the player's desire about the fiction doesn't happen automatically. Rather, the player declares an action for his/her PC that folows from that desire. Success in that action declaration will meant that the player gets want s/he wants vis-a-vis the fiction (ie the PC finds signs of a secret door); failure means s/he won't.

(Note that this action declaration satisfies other typical constraints on player-side moves in a FRPG. For instnace, it is declared from the first-person perspective of the PC. And it's a well-establshed trope of fantasy gaming that bare stone walls can in fact have secret doors in them.)

In the example I've given, the player's action declaration does not succeed, but not because s/he rolled too low on the dice. (This contrasts with a failed attack roll.) It fails because the GM has already decicded that it can't succeed.

That is the limit on the players' choice - his/her choice to have escape occur by way of secret door has been vetoed by the GM, by application of the prior worldbuilding/setting authorship. That is why I call it a railroad.

For completeness, I've written a further comment; because it's tangential, I've sblocked it.

[sblock]There is a completley different style of play, which is not about salient pressure on the PCs but is about puzzling out the maze designed by the GM, so as to extract loot from it. The OP distinguished the two styles of play; the latter is associated with classic D&D dungeoncrawling,. I don't think the notion of railroading has any work at all to do in describing that sort of RPGing, because the game isn't about developing a ficiton at all; that's just a side effect of the players declaring moves that allow them to map out the dungeon and locate and recover the treasures. In this style of play there can be well- and poorly-desigend dungeons (eg too linear, or too many pit traps, or too little treasure relative to difficulty); and fair and unfair refereeing (eg rules that the monsters always find the PCs while resting, no matter what precautions the players take to reduce the risk of being found). But no railroading [/sblock]

You seem to have missed the way that "say 'yes' or roll the dice" actually works.

If the GM calls for a check and the check succeeds, then the player's intent is realised, and so the only work the GM did was to contribute to the framing, to call for a check in response to the action declaration, and to set the DC. It is the player's desire for the fiction that comes to pass (just the same as in combat: a successful disarm roll, for instance, isn't just a cue to the GM to make something up: it establishes a definite outcome in the fiction, namely, that the foe is disarmed).

If the check fails, the player's intent is not realised, and rather the GM narrates some consequence which, ideally (ie from the pont of view of a satisfactory aesthetic experience), was implicit in the framing of the situation In this latter case, the GM does all the work done for a successful check, plus has to establish and narrate the consequence of failure.

The role of the GM is therefore pretty clear, I think.

You are, I think, the only person I've ever met who thinks that saying "yes" to someone's request is railroading them!

But in any event, what you say is not accurate, because it ignores the narration of consequences for failure. These obviously should have thematic/dramatic significance, but will constitute obstacles to the PCs realising their goals. Likewise the framing of situations that don't follow from failure, but have the goal of provoking dramatic/thematic choices by the players for their PCs: these will be obstacles to the PCs' goals.

So I see the discussion on railroad/not has continued, but this post in particular had two points I wanted to make:

First, in terms of the Story Now approach of searching for a secret door, that the check itself is (at least partially) responsible for determining whether a secret door is found - what consideration is made, and how, that a secret door may not belong there?

While we explored this a bit with more absurd examples (the paladin declaring they find a holy sword at the market), why should the secret door be there? What if it shouldn't (logically speaking)?

A related thing is the continued (seeming) insistence that with a prepared map or notes that it is impossible for the DM to make changes. This is simply not true. There's no reason why, if a player decided to search for a secret door, that I can't decide that one might be present, and even in that moment make the decision that the dice will decide and allow them to make a check. However, if the circumstance (whether pre-designed like the map I was using, or in the moment) leads me to decide that a secret door just doesn't belong here, then so be it.

For example, one group of characters decided, for some odd reason, to leap into a shaft filled with water, the surface of which was some 40' down. The shaft was close-fitted stone blocks covered in plaster. It was in a tomb, and was designed to lead to a false tomb, which had been plundered. The water was present because of a small stream that had since compromised the tomb.

The players jumped down without any rope, or any other obvious means of getting back out of the shaft. So why, would a check of any nature, suddenly make a secret door appear to allow them to escape their stupidity? The tomb wasn't designed for an easy way to escape (although this portion wasn't necessarily designed as a trap, although the shaft did have poisoned spikes at the bottom of it).

In many cases, the secret door just doesn't make sense.

I will also point out, that I've seen a great many threads and articles suggesting that dead ends, and inescapable situations is poor design. I disagree. The world is not always a friendly place, and you can't expect that every circumstance will always have a way to succeed. To me (and us) it's in these seemingly impossible circumstances that some of the most interesting stories and adventures occur. Even if the party eventually succumbed to the elements, lack of resources, etc., and nobody outside of this group of characters ever learned their fate, the exploration of character, of the interactions of the characters, in other words, the role-play of a hopeless situation, was amazingly interesting and cool.

--

Now, connecting this to the ongoing railroad discussion. Can there be more than one type of railroad? Sure, why not? If you're a player that is as concerned (if not more) about the process of how the adventure is created by the GM, then a dungeon that's drawn ahead of time can be considered a type of railroad. And once again, that goes back to my point about what the design of the game is and agency. If the game is designed (even by consensus by those at the table) to encourage, if not require, the GM to generate the story in the moment, in reaction to the players choices and motivations, with input from the dice, then what is considered a railroad is going to be different.

To me, a railroad has nothing to do with the setting or the dungeon. A railroad (or not) has to do with the story or plot. Do the players have control of their characters decisions and actions, or the DM?

A dungeon, a map, or whatever, can be used to facilitate a railroad. But a linear map does not in and of itself make an adventure or a campaign a railroad. Just like who decides whether a secret door is present or not (and when they decide it), you can't determine what is cool, or what is a railroad by a single point in time. For example, not finding a secret door is just a thing. A point in time. Not finding a secret door when you are running from a dozen guards is different.

A railroad also doesn't need to be preplanned. If the DM is determining the outcome of all of the decisions the characters can make, and the direction the plot heads, then it's a railroad, or at least headed that way.

Note that deciding a secret door is there or not (whether before the session or during) is not a railroad. Any more than deciding there are a half-dozen orcs in this room, or the placement of any other challenge, setback, etc. It sets the framework around which the PCs make their choices.

"OK, I'm not surprised that there's not a secret door here, but it certainly would have been nice. What now?"

The group trapped at the bottom of the shaft were there because of their own decisions. Indeed, there were several fallen adventurers under the water, their corpses carrying many things that might be of value, including an old grappling hook. Unfortunately, after decades of being submerged, the rope had long since decayed. It never occurred to me that an entire party would choose to jump into a shaft without bringing a rope with them. And they were the ones that insisted that they had not, when I gave them the option to assume they had prepared better, and decided they needed to grab one of the ropes they had already used up to that point and left in place.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So there's a lot going on in this thread and I'm working my way through it because... we'll, it's interesting and I'm nosy... but I'm wondering if anyone can clear something up for me:

Is the OP advocating a form of gaming where players are able to force a specific reality on the game by simply stating an intent and using dice rolls to determine if that intent comes true?

If he is, is this a thing in 5th Edition? Because it's certainly not in any other version of the game...

Its a contentious topic here apparently...

There IS IN FACT a school of RPG technique (and games designed specifically to support it) which are often called 'Story Now' and/or 'No Myth' games.

You'll find good descriptions along the way, but the general concept is that only the most basic of facts are established at the start of play. USUALLY the players construct back stories for their characters in some fashion. This often also includes what they believe, want, what pushed them into the condition of being a character in the story, etc.

The GM then 'frames a scene' (describes where the characters are and what they see) which puts pressure on their beliefs, threatens their goals, gives them an opportunity they want, etc. The players then, in character, act on their goals/beliefs/whatever and declare actions for their PCs. The action declaration includes what they want to accomplish (what success looks like) and, possibly depending on the game system, what failure would look like.

Next the GM makes a choice:

1) The action succeeds - This is usually the case if the action doesn't really change the situation or address anything dramatically meaningful. It could also be the case where failure would not be interesting (IE if you need to pass through the secret door to find the hidden temple and that's the whole point of being where you are, then you simply find it).

2) The action requires a check - The GM can let the dice decide. In this case if the check fails, then the failure happens, otherwise the character succeeds. Some resources may be expended either way, etc. again depending on the details of the system being used.

Finally the GM will describe what happens next. This probably means further projecting the course of the fiction in light of failure/success, and advancing the fiction, either within the current scene or on to an entirely new scene if the old one has played out.

This process simply repeats. The GM might frame a whole new scene after describing how the last one finished up, or there might be some sort of 'interlude' where the players can do less dramatic things like travel to a new place, gather resources, etc.

In terms of 5e...

5e isn't described in terms of playing in this way. It is certainly possible, but the game proposes a 'classical' concept of play where the DM makes a 'dungeon' and the players make choices for their PCs, but don't have any input into the consequences of their actions, beyond informal character advocacy (I note that the 'Inspiration' rule in 5e is an exception to this, if you use it).

4e was closer to being Story Now in its architecture. 'Say yes or roll the dice' was pretty close to being a rule, 'go to the action' was a constant theme, and a lot of the mechanical structure lent itself easily to Story Now techniques.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What's really telling is that you felt the need to twist what I said......again. It's indicative of not having a valid counter argument. Not only did I not mention backstory at all with that post, backstory wasn't even backstory for it.

If the player is going to describe exactly how a success plays out, and exactly how failures play out, the DM doesn't need to be part of that game. The player through his actions and intent is going to dictate where in the world everything he needs is going to be and where his PC is, and not only IF there are enemies, but who those enemies are. The DM can literally choose nothing according to the rules you posted there. For when the player dictates that an NPC is present, the player on the right can make decisions for the NPCs and roll the dice. The DM has no necessary role in this game. He might as well not be there.

If what I just said is not correct an the DM can choose things other than what the player dictates, then the player is declaring actions to get the DM to say stuff.

So, no other activities exist in the game except checks with success or failure as the outcome!

Nobody frames scenes (everything happens in some sort of blank white haze perhaps?).

Nobody decides whether a check is required or not (I guess they just always are, can you walk down the street in this game of yours, or do you need to make a walking check?)

Nobody establishes how the fiction advances or what the wider consequences of any action are (I guess no new scenes ever appear, the players maybe just use checks to find 'stuff' at random?)

I have no idea what this game is @Maxperson, but it is nothing like what we're talking about. I mean, if you can't see your own straw man when its burning before your eyes....

The player is describing what his character does and wants to do in response to the events framed by the GM and WRT his goals/agenda/beliefs. That is what the player is doing. He's not trying to elicit fiction from the GM, except as that is incidental to and a necessity of, the play of the game. The OBJECT of the game for the player is to see what happens when he takes on the character persona and engages in situations which engage with the salient aspects of the character, which the player has designated before/during play.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I'll ask again: do you disagree that railroading is a relational property? Did you miss my post about that, or are you just dishonestly ignoring it?

Irony, thy name is [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]. Sorry, should I <snip> your post to make the irony clear?

As for your question, I find that to be a banality and so I ignored it. However, since you seem to insist:

I can see the tortuous logic you're using. You're literally claiming the right to continue to call the example railroading, and use that in future arguments, because you claim it's railroading to you. You've defined railroading as something that is unique to each individual; an aesthetic; a preference. But, right at that moment, it ceases to have any use as a diagnostic for analysis. You literally just told everyone in this thread that when you say something is railroading, it's equivalent to saying you think it's pretty. Railroading is now, thanks to your definition, utterly useless for you to use as a criticism of another playstyle that has any more weight than 'I don't like it.'

Which would normally be fine, if self-defeating to your larger stated purposes of analyzing playstyle differences (what's the use of an aesthetic for analysis?) if, and this is key, railroading wasn't already a pejorative term. So, you can't just declare that railroading is only an aesthetic consideration and thereby remove the pejorative aspects of the term, which is exactly what you're doing. You're providing the defense that others shouldn't take offense to you saying something is a railroad because you think the term should only be used as an aesthetic description and so you lack the authority to make others see something as a railroad. So, then, as long as they don't see what their doing as railroading, you should be free to use the term because it only describes your opinion of the thing and that can't be seen as you saying it's a railroad in fact.

But, railroad still a pejorative and has a general meaning that most people accept and use. Redefining a pejorative doesn't work. As Ken White of popehat fame often says, if you ironically screw a goat, you're still a goat-screwer. Since I think you're a reasonably smart person I have a hard time allowing that you've concocted this elaborate defense and yet don't recognize that you're using a pejorative term in a way guaranteed to evoke it usually understood pejorative meaning. And then claiming that it's other people's fault for taking offense because you really define that term (that you used in it's usual meaning, mind) in as a relational property. That doesn't work, man.

Sadly, there was an easy out to this, one I pointed out earlier, and that is, under Story Now, the example would be a railroad because it's the GM overriding the play procedures to abridge player agency (as allowed by the system) and enforce the GM's preferred outcome. Had you struck this argument, instead of the ones you chose instead, then you'd be standing on strong ground. However, this would require admitting that the playstyles differ enough in core assumptions that maybe you cannot use the same metrics to analyze them both, and that's a point you've not conceded and seem strongly adverse to conceding. So, instead, we get this, which halfway makes the point, but fails to frame it in terms of the actual, concrete differences between the playstyles and, instead, attempts an end-run around logic to arrive at the conclusion that you can continue to call it railroading but others should not take that to mean that they railroad because the impression of railroading is deeply personal and cannot be transferred, like the idea of beauty. It's exhausting, really.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I could quibble with some details here but we pretty much agree. The main point is that "stories" as pemerton put it, are being told by the GM in either case, not only in the GM-worldbuilding situation. The stories can be different (they don't need to be) but the real difference is the limitations on the way they are generated, not whether one game has GM's telling them or not.

Well, I said that I think GMs are pretty important in games, so clearly I don't really disagree with you TOO much, but I think that Story Now games have a lot more 'player telling the story' in general than 'classical' games do. In any case, the primary point is that the player is ordering up the story.

Its sort of like going into a pizza joint. You can buy a slice of what's at the counter, or you can order up your own pizza, with the deep crust or the thin crust, or whatever. Either way its pizza, but when you choose the style and toppings it is certainly more fair to say that you had some hand in 'making it'.

I would think not, but pemerton has written things that indicates they are at odds with this and the idea that the GM is telling stories mediated by several factors in both types of games. Then again, it isn't always clear what they are arguing. It seemed like they were arguing that using "kickers" in a game with any GM worldbuilding was impossible for instance, at one point, still not sure.

Eh, I ignore some of what people say here, its just noise

I think, I suspect, that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has really active players who 'take charge' and run with their part of the game strongly as a rule. Some games may be more the handiwork of the GM, even if they are story now.

 

[Ovinomancer]

And this is exactly the nut of the whole thing, and where the 'traditionalist' analysis sinks into the swamp, falls over, and burns (before being rebuilt for the 2078th time). The idea that the players "will just find secret doors everywhere" or that things will be 'too easy', or that the players will [violate the Czege Principle], etc. is all based on a fundamentally oppositional model of play. One in which the GM has hidden the 'goodies' in the 'maze' and its the player's job to guide their characters to it.

Once the goal became to have fun playing the game and making up cool stories about the characters, etc. then all that went basically out the window. It is still possible to engage in it as a specific facet of a greater whole, but its not THE GAME anymore.

Pretty sure I said this exact thing upthread about 30 posts. This is spot on. The playstyles are different, and cannot be judged sidebyside using the same criteria.

But, it should be noted that a lot of the animosity in this thread is from Story Now based analysis of traditional play. If the point of play isn't aligned to the Story Now principles, the resultant analysis will be badly mistaken. The OP question makes this mistake. Prep is of varying use in Story Now, and shouldn't be used/created to decide the outcome of play in any case, but that's not how traditional play works -- in traditional play, prep is done primarily to so that the GM can use it to be a neutral arbiter of outcomes by making many decisions about the fiction ahead of time. That fiction is then related to the player who use it to inform their action declarations. The point here isn't to get to the action and make that action about the character goals, but to find the character goals as an emergent property of the game. If you analyze this from the viewpoint that every action declaration is inherently about resolving a crisis for the character, then, yeah, being told there's no secret door because notes is going to be very offputting. But, in traditional play, the action to search for a secret door isn't about a crisis for the character, it often isn't made in a moment of stress at all, but as a thorough exploring of the area. Crisis will come as play progresses due to the expenditure of resources and the challenges faced. The GM doesn't frame in the crisis, it's occurs somewhere that the GM can't anticipate because it will be dictated by the play of the players.

Now, some will contend that they're playing to 'explore', but the model is the same here, the GM has the 'gold' and the players are tasked with navigating the 'maze' to uncover it. The walls and traps of the dungeon maze may be replaced with other stuff, but they still remain.

Finally, you can claim to have gone entirely beyond that by saying "well, the players just come to me and tell me what their PC wants to do (in or out of character) and we work on that", but then we come back to the OP of the thread, what's the world building/details FOR?

I think the ONLY actual solid answer to that which ever came in this thread (and honestly, maybe it was the other thread, forgive me, was the one where [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] quoted one of the Story Now guys stating that you CAN have a 'built world', and it has utility in fixing genre and providing some footing for the players to leverage their character's traits into concrete action.

That was the other thread. I'm curious how that resolves when a detail of the built world comes up against an action declaration. Like, seriously, I'm curious as that seems like a case where the GM would negate the action declaration due to the previously established fiction. Or, is it a case where the previously established fiction's truth value is being questioned and the resolution will show if it was true or what the character now claims is the real truth? Depending on the specific action declaration and the specific detail, I can see either playing out.

There's no Schrodinger's Door if there's no concept of an ESTABLISHED fictional reality outside of what has been presented to the characters. This is something I maintain as a principle of play in games of the type I run, ONLY what has been presented in play exists, all else is vapor until you meet it. That wall didn't exist until we laid eyes on it, so who's to say it didn't 'always have a secret door in it'???

Nah, it's still Schrodinger's door. Once it's observed (resolved), then it's in the state it's in, period. What it was a moment before you resolved the probability function doesn't matter and you can't answer that anyway. The cat's dead, man, the cat's just dead.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The problem is, when you put it this starkly it reads as if the DM is not allowed to insert anything of thematic interest to herself, and has to bury or deny any interests she might have.

But then you say this in the next post:
So the DM can have influence on the players' stories but not insert any story of her own? Hardly what I'd call recruitment-poster material for attracting new DMs.

Lanefan

Several years ago myself and some other people I play with often decided we wanted to create a story game about Arthurian Knights (except we didn't actually set it in England, we made up a fantasy sort of pseudo France). Anyway, we all agreed on the genre, some plot elements which could be used, selected a mechanics to use, and characters were created with back stories appropriate to the genre and referencing some of the pre-generated 'stuff'.

Now, I ended up GMing this, so I added a bunch of added 'things' in the course of scene framing. These included a child, a tower, a battle on a bridge with a black knight, a tournament, a plot to kill an important NPC, a giant, etc. A lot of stuff really.

The players also invented a lot of stuff related to their characters. They invented followers, a way to dispatch the giant, a way in and out of the tower, etc. Honestly I'm not as systematic as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] in terms of remembering who did what, but we all had a good amount of input.

I would call this typical for MY games. GM is important, but the whole game is an outgrowth of what all the participants were interested in doing.