Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay

[pemerton]

Dungeon choke points are not, IMO, railroading. Good dungeon design, especially for larger dungeons, usually requires some gating and separation of various areas. Sometimes that means there's a choke point. That says nothing about how the players should act, or how they can approach the dungeon as a whole.

This has provoked me to a reply that may connect to some of what @Campbell has been saying about the "point" or "orientation" of play (my words, not his; and I'm still catching up so I'm conjecturing this connection rather than being certai of it).

Anyway: what is the point of the dungeon? And how does it interface with the mechanics?

If you're playing Moldvay Basic or AD&D then I don't think then notion of "railroad" really has much work to do. The risk in those games is of a boring dungeon, or one that is too easy or is a killer dungeon. Too many choke points could create these sorts of problems, but that would be very contextual. And I think it's generally taken to be reasonable in dungeon design to have soe levels (or sub-levels) which have only one entry/exit point.

But that sort of skilled-play/OSR FRPGing is not the only context in which dungeons can occur. In my BW game, the PCs explored a series of caverns chasing a dark elf. And later on have used the catacombs and sewers of Hardby to travel through that city without being noticed. Those situations are resolved through checks on Catacombs-wise, Perception, Speed etc. The existence of a choke point or a blocking wall or whatever is something to be narrated as a consequence of failure, not as a premise for or constraint upon initial action declarations.

I've run underdark exploratoin and travel in 4e in a similar fashion to what I've just described for BW. Eg it was a failed skill challenge that led to the narration of a PC falling through a very thin layer of stone into the river flowing beneath it. The thin stone wasn't a pre-given "trick" to be identified as a chalenge and then resolved: that OSR-style exploration-oriented-challenge-solving play is simply not part of the point of our 4e game. (And personally I don't think 4e is well-suited to it at all.)

Things would be different again in Cortex+ Heroic fantasy. Eg its fine in that system to estabish, as a scene distinction, No Way Forward or Narrow Choke Point or something similar. So like in classic D&D these things might easily figure as an aspect of framing. But mechanically they would operate like any other scene distinction and doesn't impose any distinctively strong restriction on permissible action declarations. Eg a player could delcare actions (based on, say, an approriate field of expertise like Outdoors and an appropriate power like Dwarven Senses) to (in mechanical terms) elminiate the No Way Forward distinction, which (in the fiction) would correlate to finding a way through or around. As that took place, and if it generated failures in the process, the GM would narrate those appropriately (eg imposing mental stress to reflect that the PC doesn't know where s/he is, or appropriate complications, or whatever).

TL;DR: we can't talk about whether some particular approach to prep and resolution (eg in this case the use of maps and notes having certain features) is railroading with a bigger sense of the context and orientation of play.

Sometimes the physical reality of a place limits options. Clever PCs might find a way around, and that's also a good thing too, but the place is the place. Walls have gates, so getting into the castle means that there will be limited options. In @Lanefan 's example above, where all entries are blocked except one is maybe extreme, but it's not a railroad. It could be a railroad, but I think that has more to do with how the DM handles player actions than it does the physical space.

<snip>

Generally speaking the whole idea of railroading centers on adjudication rather than adventure or encounter design.

I don't agree with that last sentence because it posits two things as distinct which are intimately connected. "Adventure design", which in the context of dungeons and castles in a typical D&D campaign means maps and notes are tools used to frame situations and then to adjudicate action declarations. Eg the players say We walk 60' down the corridor and then the GM looks at the map and the accompanying notes to resolve that action.

If the point of play is (say) to have character-driven hijinks-ridden adventure, and if the unfolding fiction has delivered up entering a castle as the immediate focus of play, then the GM pre-determining the "physical reaity" of the place and hence pre-determining the outcomes of various feasible or even likely action declarations, that could absolutely be a railroad. And I'm not talking about this from a purely theoretical point of view. Castles and the like figure pretty prominently in a lot of my FRPGIng - especially Prince Valiant but not only that.

Eg in our Burning Wheel game when a pair of PCs wanted to enter the wizard's tower from the sewers and catacombs, I didn't refer to a pre-drawn map to determine whether or not that was possible. We resolved it via a Catacombs-wise check. When the check was failed the PCs still found their way in, but it took them much longer than they hoped which meant that their rival, whom they'd drugged, had recovered and was now racing them there: so in the end it was opposed Speed checks that counted. (The PCs lost, and so the rival got there first and murdered the NPC the PCs were hoping to rescue.)

I think a lot of discussion about D&D - especially when it comes to maps and notes - takes for granted that the skilled play/OSR-type paradgim is still operating. Which is fine, except if we look at the OP scenario that belongs to a completely different paradigm - that sort of burgomaster encounter isn't found in any of the classic dungeons that I know of - and the result is incoherence. The burgomaster encounter seems clearly to belong to some sort of "story" or "plot and drama" oriented RPGing - which of course is fine, except that maps-and-notes type adjudication is pretty ill-suited to that approach to playing the game.

 

[Fenris-77]

@pemerton - I'd disagree that maps have to equal a railroad. There are a million details that players could add to or 'discover' on a pre-drawn map. It's still more about adjudication that design. That's probably an aside though. The real difference here is in our views of what playing D&D actually means.

Your idea of what it means to play D&D really isn't the same as mine. I don't think a player in one of my games has said anything akin to 'we walk 60' down the corridor' since I was a much younger man. My dungeon maps tend to look like flow charts, not architect's drawings, and my NPCs are most often a list of character traits and maybe a link or two to what's going on. Your characterization of skilled/OSR play doesn't really do justice to the way a lot of people play, not just me. What happens to your argument when none of your comments about D&D apply to the D&D I run and play? I'm not sure. The D&D I run is perfectly well suited to run the Burgomeister encounter for example.

I think you're trying to say I can't have notes and maps and still adjudicate the game as a more play to find out what happens kind of thing. However, I can, and do, exactly that. Perhaps you were just speaking generally? Anyway, my point was that the difference between me, and another example DM, one who slides closer to a railroad-y game, tends to be far more a reflection of how they run the game at the table than how they plan it beforehand. I find it interesting that in order to contradict that statement you needed to badly mischaracterize how I run a game. I'm not accusing you of any malfeasance here btw, I just find the gap in our PoV very illuminating.

 

[pemerton]

Creating different routes to success, and placing different degrees of difficulty on those routes is not railroading....it’s creating meaningful decision points.

I know that we're mostly in agreement or at least like-minded in this thread, but I wanted to express some disagreement with this.

Whether different degrees of difficulty correlate to meaningful decisions seems, to me, and once again, to depend on details of system and orientation of play.

In "skilled"/OSR-type play I agree without hesitation. I hope the reasons are obviousl.

It's also true in BW, but for completely different reasons: PC development in BW depends upon the players being able to pit themselves against a range of obstacles of different mechanical difficulties; and BW also thrives on players being able to choose, in the fiction, how hard their PCs bang their heads against various walls. So different difficulties create a context for these choices to be made, but they're being made within very different frameworks of gameplay logic from those that operate in classic D&D or other OSR-ish games.

In 4e D&D or Cortex+ Heroic, different degrees of difficulty aren't a very important thing. In the former system, degree of difficulty (eg level of a combat encounter; degree of complexity of a skill challenge) is something that I generally control as GM, as it is an important tool for pacing and also - especially in the combat case - for forcing the players to make decisions about resource expenditure. So whether the players use the sewers or contrive hang gliders to make an aerial assault will change the fiction and hence the PCs' fictional positioning in subsequent scenes, but probably won't change the mechanical difficulty of entering the castle. Here's a post from an old thread that illustrates the idea to some degree at least:

As it turns out, the whole party encountered the bear. I didn't want to do any re-statting on the fly, so stuck with the level 13 elite. They players decided that their PCs would try to tame and befriend the bear instead of fighting it. To keep the XP and pacing about the same as I'd planned, I decided to run this as a level 13 complexity 2 skill challenge (6 successes before 3 failures).

in a "fiction-first" system, the players could attempt to avoid a combat because that offered their best chance of success. If you design the challenge of avoiding said combat "To keep the XP and pacing about the same as I'd planned", then you undo the value of that choice.

Similarly, if a diplomatic approach is just as hard as a fight, whether or not the PCs have good CHA, skill trainings, etc means something. The fact that the characters chose a non violent means of resolving the problem even if it wasn't any easier tells us something about their values.

I agree with this. The player of the paladin actually said, after the bear had been pacified, "I feel really good about not having killed that bear." (He was the player who, in the one previous bear encounter in the campaign, had also initiated non-violent means then.)

What made the choice to pacify rather than kill the bear meaningful wasn't the effect that it had on mechanical difficulty (it had none) but the effect that it had on the fiction (ie the bear is not dead and rather is a friend of at least some of the PCs).

 

[pemerton]

I don't recall your post about the giant steading, and I'm not going to dig it up. It sounds though like you had the players invent some of the details for you (akin to how DungeonWorld is meant to be played).

Nothing wrong with that. PbA games are great IMO. I actually was a Kickstarter backer for DW. I can definitely see how having your players add details to your world would help to immerse everyone through shared world building.

Cortex+ Heroic is not much like PbtA/Dungeon World. It is a bit like Fate:

Cresting a ridge and looking down into the valley below, they can see - at the base of the rise on the opposite side - a large steading. Very large indeed, as they approach it, with 15' walls, doors 10' high and 8' wide, etc. And with a terrible smell. (Scene distinctions: Large Steading, Reeks of Smoke and Worse.)

<snip>

Meanwhile (I can't quite remember the action order) the scout has climbed up onto the top of the pallisade, gaining an Overview of the Steading asset

<snip>

The next action cycle took place in the main hall of the steading, into which the PCs were led by the giant at the gate. I drew heavily on the G1 thematic here - all but one of the players was familiar with it. And I got to add in my third scene distinction - Great Wolves under the trestle tables and gnawing on bones at the sides of the hall.

I'm not going to remember all the details of this one, but highlights included: the swordthane opening up negotations with Loge, the giant chief, including - in response to a demand for tribute - offering up the steed as a gift; the scout, after successfully parlaying his Overview of the Steading asset into a Giant Ox in the Barn asset, leading the ox into the hall and trying to trade it for the return of the horse, and failing (despite the giant chief's Slow distinction counting as a d4), and subsequently avoiding being eaten (a stepped-up Put in Mouth complication, as per the Giant datafile in the Guide) only by wedging the giant's mouth open with his knife (a heavily PP-pumped reaction roll); and the swordthane successfully opening a d6 Social resource (based on his Social Expertise) in the form of a giant shaman in the hall, who agreed that the troubles plaguing the human lands were afflicting the giants too, and so they should help one another.

This fiction was established during play, not in advance of it. And as I posted, it had - at least for me - verisimilitude and depth. It made me think of the more slapstick stories of Thor and Loki dealing with giants.

My own view is that maps-and-notes style preparation and adjudicaton is less likely to produce this sort of dynamic fiction with an interweaving of PC actions and story elements (like barns, giant oxen, shamans as well as the "main" focus of the attempt to persuade the chieftain).

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm sure there have been other replies to this by now, but I'll give mine. It will consist of a few examples.

(1) There is a big literature about "trying' in the philoso;hy of action and related areas of academic inquiry. For instance, most people woud say that a human being can't try and jump to the moon, because to try means to have some sort of intention, and no one can genuinely form an intention to jump to the moon (as opposed to, say, jumping as high as s/he can) because everyone knows it literally cannot be done. (Maybe there are some people with radical cognitive problems who don't realise the moon can't be jumped to. Let's put them to one side, because in a RPG few if any people are playing PCs with such problems.)

Leaving aside the philosophies for a moment, it seems to me that in the real world it's impossible to turn lead to gold via alchemy but that didn't stop anyone from trying.

Going back to those philosophies - I would say they are wrong. I think that from our perspective Failure can never be 100% certain and so to us there is always some miniscule chance of success in whatever endeavor we try - and even moreso in an RPG featuring real magic and gods.

This is why, upthread, I've referred to "genuine" or "sincere" action intentions, because I think action declaratoins like "I talk the dragon into giving me its treasure" are freuently going to be non-genuine or insincere. (That one is also ill-formed - it doesn't actually specify an action that the PC undertakes, it only describes an intention - but that's a further issue.)

More importantly, I don't think you can judge what is actually genuine or sincere for another. I think the issue really stems from that philosophy of yours.

Also a minor quibble, "I talk the dragon into giving me its treasure" did specify an action. "talk" is an action. That said, it's a vague action in that context as "talk" can take a great many forms and that vagueness makes it difficult to fill in interesting details about the Dragon's reaction.

(2) An example of a non-genre appropriate action declaration is given by Luke Crane in the Buring Wheel rulebook, when he mentions searching for beam weaponry in the Duke's toilet as something that is impermissible. Likewise in a typical cowboy story I try and outrun the horse is not genre-appropriate (whereas in a supers game it may well be).

Yes, I'm not familiar with that game, but I believe it's one where the elements the player introduces can actually come to be in the fiction. Which is why they must limit themselves to genre appropriate statements. In 5e though where the DM is final arbiter of the fiction, and so you can say I look in the toilet for beam weaponry all you want and you will never find any. All it does in the fiction is make your character look like a crazy loon.

One of the "problems" with high level D&D - which came up in your example of angels carrying someone across a gorge - is that the genre and hence the appropriateness of action declarations is often confused or at least uncertain. Cany the player of a high-level fighter declare I swim through the lake for an hour like Beowulf did?

That definitely makes it challenging to run but the DM is still final arbiter and so it's also easier in some respects.

Under the broad label of "genre" we could also put action declarations that are contrary to the spirit of the game. Eg given the importance of treasure-acquisition in a lot of standard/traditional D&D play, action declarations like I search the village well for a holy avenger will probably be inappropriate, and obviousluy so, and the GM can safely ignore or dismiss them. They are attempts to endrun around or completely ignore a basic premise of gameplay.

Which is why the notion of auto-failure is so important in such games. In any game where the DM serves as final arbiter then being able to declare auto-failure is essential to maintaining the appropriate genre.

(3) That example leads into the idea of action declarations that follow from the fiction. Of course if the PCs have been following a series of clues and defeating a series of opponents that have led them to the village well as the most likely hiding place of the holy avenger they need to defeat the whatever-it-is, then the above action declarations would not be deviant or genre/premise-breaking. Because it would clearly follow from the fiction.

I think what you are calling "follow from the fiction" is actually "follow from the established fiction". IMO that is an important distinction.

If you read through this thread you'll see that a lot of the "counter-examples" to a flexible/non-pre-scripted approach to adjudicating NPC responses - like dragons and merchants who give away their hoards at the first request - are ones that (a) violate genre/gamepay premise or (b) do not follow from the fiction or (c) both.

I think there's a great deal of mislabeling examples because people are trying to force them to fit into one of those options. Speaking of - violate gameplay premise is a concept I think I was the first to introduce in this thread as a plausible alternative for explaining why a dragon giving away it's horde still shouldn't be an option in a no/low-prep D&D game.

To finish this post, I'll give two examples from my own play that show how I use genre/premise and the fiction to "gateeep" action declarations:

(A) In my 4e D&D game, from time to time the players would declare that their PCs search a room for treasure, even though there was nothing to suggest that there might be treasure there. They were just engaging a FRPG reflex. Normally I would just tell them they find nothing; occasionally if I had something on my treasure parcel list that didn't already have a "place" in the unfolding fiction I might tell them they find it.

I never regarded this as very singificant - 4e D&D, with its treasure pacel system and as we played it - is not primarily a game of searching for treasure (cf, say, Moldvay Basic) and essentially random or ungrounded looking-for-treasure action declarations don't have to be taken seriously.

That's a problem I've solved just by asking them to be more specific about where and how they are searching.

(B) In one of my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy games, the PCs were lost in a dungeon after having been teleported away by a Crypt Thing (mechanically they were subject to a d12 Lost in the Dungeon complication). I described a chamber with strange runes (a Strange Runes scene distinction). One of the players had his PC read the runes, with the intention of seeing if they would tell him something about where he was in the dungeon. A successful check (that, mechanically, incorporated that scene disntction) established that they did indeed provide information about the dungeon, so he was able to eliminate the complication on his PC.

That's an example of an action declaration that followed from the fiction, and was appropriate to genre and to gameplay premise. If the game was classic D&D, it would be quite different - the GM would be expected to establish in advance what the meaning of the strange runes is, and recovering from being lost after Crypt Thing teleportation would be a dungeon-crawling-and-mapping challenge.

If that PC's action can be used to establish something important about the Dungeon that wasn't previously established then I'm not sure how it followed from the fiction in any sense other than how any arbitrary action that is attempted by a PC always follows from the fiction.

I guess where I'm at is that I don't distinguish there to be any meaningful difference between a PC action inventing strange runes to tell him where in the dungeon he is and a PC action establishing that the strange runes you just found are for that purpose.

 

[pemerton]

If the PCs are never allowed to reach a wrong conclusion, it'd seem as though their choices didn't matter.

This is what action resolution is for, isn't it?

But if we're talking about "wrong conclusions" outside the context of failed action resolution, then we're back into RPGing as puzzle-solving. Which is one way but not the only way, and tends to push play towards expedience.

 

[pemerton]

I tend to lean hard into skilled play of the fiction even when running more modern versions of the game. If I'm having a conversation with @pemerton it is helpful to be mindful that he approaches the game very differently from me.

If you wanted to elaborate on those differences I'd be happy for you to do so.

My first thoughts are that (i) I rate passion/conviction very highly as a factor in resolution, and (ii) I'm very sentimental. These are probably not unrelated.

Upthread I posted the example of the PC who challenged Sir Lionheart tried to a joust, was turnd down on the basis that he was just a squire and Sir Lionheart does not joust with squires, and then tried to brush past Sir Lionheart. At that point we rolled Presence vs Presence, the player (for his PC) won, and hence he got what he wanted: Sir Lionheart knighted him so he could joust him.

I wouldn't characterise that as skilled play of the fiction. I would say it's engaged play of the tropes and the passions/convictions of the characters (both PC - his desire to be knighted - and NPC - his sense of honour and glory).

I'm guessing that that sort of thing wouldn't necessarily be a big part of your (@Campbell's) play.

When eventually (!) I get to GM Apocalypse World, which forces the GM to be unsentimentally hard, I'm going to be interested to seee how it goes.

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton - I'd disagree that maps have to equal a railroad.

You're not disagreeing. I said the same thing!

I went further and said that in paradigmatically maps-and-notes-based play (ie classic D&D, OSR-ish RPGIng) I don't even think the idea of "railroading" is really apposite. The flaws of those games are boring dungeons, killer dungeons, Monty Haul dungeons etc.

In a different sort of RPGIng maps don't have to be railroading either - in my Classic Traveller game I used floorpans of the Annic Nova when I adapted that old module to run a Alien-type scenario. That wasn't a railroad because the players' didn't have goals about what they would find in the vessel or how to make it through the vessel. So the particular geographic layout was essentially neutral vis-a-vis the players' goals.

But in examples like entering the castle or making it into the tower via the catacombs or finding one's way out of the dungeon after being teleported away by a crypt thing then the geography is fundamental to the players' goals. And at that point it absolutely can give rise to railroading.

The same thing becomes true in relation to NPCs and NPC reactions. Deciding in advance that the NPC likes donuts and doesn't drink wine seems like most of the time it will be harmless: if the players want their PCs to get on the NPC's good side by giving a gift, they're going to have to take a stab or ask a friend of the NPC what s/he likes. Provided it doesn't become too tedious that all seems like harmless, maybe even fun, colour.

But if one of the PCs is a baker, or is a vintner, then the GM's choice there takes on a whole new significance and runs a very signficiant risk of being a railroad, or a shutdown of that PC, or something similar in that neighbourhood. Because the baker PC presumably uses the provision of baked goods to make friends; likewise the vintner PC presuably likes to engage others with his/her love of fine wines.

In saying all this I thik I'm mostly just elaborating on what @hawkeyefan has been saying. But I think I'm also adding a gloss that we can't say, in the abstract, that some techncque (eg maps-and-notes) is or isn't railroading. It depends on the particular context of play. But I think we can say that some techniques are not well-suited to some fairly common approaches to play: eg NPC-as-puzzle (ie the analogue of maps-and-notes in social resolution) may not be well-suited to a game that wants vibraint, verisimilitudinous, rich and engaging social encounters. With the OP as Exhibit A as to why.

Your idea of what it means to play D&D really isn't the same as mine. I don't think a player in one of my games has said anything akin to 'we walk 60' down the corridor' since I was a much younger man. My dungeon maps tend to look like flow charts, not architect's drawings, and my NPCs are most often a list of character traits and maybe a link or two to what's going on. Your characterization of skilled/OSR play doesn't really do justice to the way a lot of people play, not just me. What happens to your argument when none of your comments about D&D apply to the D&D I run and play? I'm not sure. The D&D I run is perfectly well suited to run the Burgomeister encounter for example.

I think you're trying to say I can't have notes and maps and still adjudicate the game as a more play to find out what happens kind of thing. However, I can, and do, exactly that. Perhaps you were just speaking generally? Anyway, my point was that the difference between me, and another example DM, one who slides closer to a railroad-y game, tends to be far more a reflection of how they run the game at the table than how they plan it beforehand. I find it interesting that in order to contradict that statement you needed to badly mischaracterize how I run a game. I'm not accusing you of any malfeasance here btw, I just find the gap in our PoV very illuminating.

Well I don't know much about how you run D&D because I don't think I've seen you post much actual play.

When I think of maps-and-notes I think paradigmatically of Keep on the Borderlands, or Steading of the Hil Giant Chief, or the 4e module Thunderspire Labyrinth. All these modules invite action declarations like "We walk 60' down the corridor."

As I said in the post you quoted and have reiterated, I don't think there is any necessary tension between maps-and-notes and finding out what happens, but there can be. I've explained there and reiterated just above what the sources of tension can be. I think we see them at work in the OP.

To finish this post: if your maps and notes are not to resolve action declarations, what are they for? I can tell you what mine are fore - eg as in the example of the Annic Nova. They're to support framing. The same thing happened when we played Wuthering Heights: we needed to know how long it would take to carry a body from Soho to the Thames and so I Googled up a map of London. From that we could get a time range, which then interacted with the rule that a ghost (ie the ghost of the PC's body which was to be dumped in the Thames) manifests a certain number of minutes after death.

But I know from this and other threads that @Lanefan and @Maxperson are using maps-and-notes to resolve action declarations. This comes through absolutely clearly in the most recent discussion of the castle to be entered.

What do you use maps and notes for?

 

[Imaculata]

What do you use maps and notes for?

For me personally:

I use my maps for tactical combat, and as an extra visualisation for the lay out of locations. When you design your locations to have a rather intricate lay out, this can also make it more difficult for the players to understand the space based merely on your description. Further more, descriptions can get rather wordy, which makes it more difficult for players to process all the information. The maps serve as an extra visual and memory aid for the players. It lets them clearly see which rooms they've already been to, and which rooms are still unexplored. It also helps illustrate line of sight and positioning.

 

[Lanefan]

My take on this is that what Lanefan describes does not lead to verisimiitude or immersion.

When I think of village scenes, I think perhaps of The Prancing Pony in LotR, but even more I think of the village in Yojimbo.

Never heard of Yojimbo - what is it, and should I know it?

Lanefan is providing a tactical read out. I don't feel that it establishes verisimilitude or depth at all.

I could have gone into quick descriptions of each building or shop e.g. what the building is made of, whether it abuts directly to the next one or not, etc., and would if asked. I know for my own part that even while making that up (which I did while typing the post) I was able to get a pretty good picture in my own mind of what that street looked like; and remember what I was typing up were just the one-liners for secondary sites; I didn't bother typing up the long - as in, room-by-room - description of the Curio shop and its back area or the long write-up of the Wit and Wisdom and its usual occupants.

It depends on the imagination of the players as to how much info is needed for them to be able to form a useful picture in their minds of what's being described

The idea of shops as "quest-givers" also doesn't add depth in my view. Because it implies (i) PCs who have nothing more going on in their lives then the quest for quests,

They're adventurers - what else are they supposed to be doing?

and (ii) NPCs whose live revolves around being participants in an adventure game rather than actually living their own real lives.

The one-line notes merely give info as to their most basic basis of interaction with the PCs should such interaction arise. I've no idea what you're complaining about here.

EDIT TO ADD: by the way @pemerton , the quote attributed to me in the post of yours I quote above (post 897 for me) was not something I posted.