D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Al'Kelhar]

Why defend railroading?

Because the arrival of a technology enabling the movement of large numbers of people, and more importantly, vast amounts of cargo, overland, safely and efficiently, heralded the most dramatic increase in trade since the invention of the sail, and it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that it built the modern world?

Oh, wait...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@pemerton Given some of the things you've just said, I'm going to describe one final thing. If this fails to pass muster, I give up; the thread is already elevating my heart rate as it is, and anything further will be wasted effort.

One of my former players played a Wizard, part of the Waziri mage order (the collegiate wizards I invented during the first group's session 0, who also run many libraries, museums, and non-magic schools in the city). Said Wizard, upon returning from a particular mission, came back to his apartment (something the player invented) to pay a big fat sum for his future rent to his landlady (whom the player invented), and check back in with his grad student (who was the price negotiated by a spontaneously-invented Waziri bureaucrat meddling in the party's affairs, but ended up being a really nice person, in response to player investigation of her backstory, which I did not prepare in advance). In inventing the grad-student off the cuff, I'd said her area of focus was golemancy, which was considered reasonably close to the PC's graduate work (incantations) for him to act as her mentor. While there, I asked if there were any goals he wanted to fulfill, because he didn't really have much to do while the others were checking up with their friends/loved ones/etc. or investigating troubling information they'd learned on their last adventure (the ad-libbed result of a failed Discern Realities roll). Player thought for a moment, then said he wanted to build a golem.

I hadn't considered the first thing about golem construction or usage, so I started asking more questions. Did he want a special-purpose one, or something programmable, or perhaps modular? (He requested more time to think, focusing on getting the basics first.) What materials did he want to use? (Wood--something that could have magic woven into it to repair itself.) Based on these answers, and based on the fact that the Waziri are notorious for having fairly specialized libraries (part of my original-group Session 0 ideas), I said he knew he could find information on the subject by visiting a particular library, the name of which I apparently forgot to write down but which I'm certain I invented on the spot. (He could also consult his grad student and have her assist him with its creation.) At the library, he met with an old woman working as the receptionist and research assistant for this particular library. She directed him to a book, printed on bark-like paper and bound in wood, written by the late, eccentric Abdelmajid al-Buzidi on the creation of golems from natural materials.

After I waxed a little poetic on various woods and their applications (coincidentally something I happen to know a little about IRL), the player settled on fine acacia wood, which grows naturally in the region where they live. (The climate is heavily inspired by Morocco, and thus prior adventures had established the existence of acacia trees, wild and cultivated citrus trees, and cork forests in various places within the region.) The player then spent some money to acquire the wood from the markets, and began cooperating with his grad student to get it shaped into a golem. At other points when the party visited the city, I further delved into how the golem construction was going, either just asking questions and letting the player decide the current status of the thing, within what I hoped were reasonable limits, or requesting a Spout Lore, Defy Danger, or other roll as needed to resolve ambiguous situations one way or another.

This is far from the only time I have done things like this. This is just a relatively neat, minimal-context example that doesn't require explaining seven different adventures and multiple ways the players directly created, or by their requests directly inspired, multiple real, enduring, incredibly important parts of the game world we play in. I've invented many parts of this game, but it absolutely, positively could not exist as it does without dozens if not hundreds of ideas contributed directly by my players, with little more than a, "Ooh, I like that" or "wow, that sounds awesome!" from me.

Sadly, this particular story also never reached a solid conclusion, as the player left the game before that could happen (disengaging from all social activity online, actually--even with family members). But several other things, such as the Bard learning from the Druid how to shapeshift into small animals (sparrows, lizards, fish, etc.), the Druid collecting interesting stones or materials for his "charm bracelet," or some of the other things I've already mentioned (the Ranger and his extended family/clan, the Battlemaster and him engaging with both current and historical traditions of martial scholarship), all arose purely out of players expressing, through the words of their characters, things they thought were interesting or worth pursuing, and which I supported as much as possible.

I'd say such things make up no less than a third of all the activities we've ever done. And even with things I have prepared (like the "Bad Guy" factions, which are Fronts in DW terms, including Grim Portents which are literally described as "your way to codify the plans and machinations of your dangers"), I go out of my way to include things my players have brought into the story as part of this, and their behavior shifts and changes directly in response to the PCs' actions and effects on the world. E.g., the Raven-Shadows are having a (completely unplanned, by them or me) civil war over whether the party Bard is their prophesied messiah or a deceiver who is just in the right places at the right times, for a variety of reasons both supported by previous concepts and driven by the player's interest in religious topics in this game. (The player was raised without any religious affiliation, so this character is a way for him to safely explore religious topics with minimal risk of giving offense or bungling a relationship, and being put on the spot for a conflict of this nature is both interesting and challenging to the player, as he has personally told me when we discussed it after the conflict became known to the character.)

If you add the stuff in the preceding paragraph to the kinds of things I described above that, then no less than half, and probably more like three-quarters or more, of the things that happen in the game happen because the players make choices and the world changes around them as a result, or because the players directly describe elements of the world that had previously not been known before they did so.

But if, after hearing all that, you still think I'm just another railroad-adjacent DM merely dictating a plot to my players whose only participation is to select which prompts they wish to follow until they see the theme-park set-piece I planned for them, then there is no hope of further conversation. I'm already teetering on the brink of thinking this entire conversation, as enlightening as it was, will have been on the net much more trouble and emotional upheaval than it was worth, sadly.

 

[pemerton]

So, here's a thing that a GM of more traditional games will trip over, and that maybe will make things clear: The player setting their Beliefs in this example is part of play.

Maybe. I tend to think of it as an aspect of PC build.

In BW, a player can change their PC's Beliefs at any time, but under two constraints: (i) there are some other abilities that my be lost if a certain sort of Belief isn't held (eg a Faithful character who no longer has a Belief that express the character's Faith ceases to be Faithful); (ii) the GM is entitled to delay the process of Belief change if s/he feels it's an attempt to squib out of a conflict in the moment or that is about to emerge. That second constraint is part of why I think of it as an aspect of build.

PC Beliefs are certainly expected to be front-and-centre in play, though. The basic principle GMs are meant to abide by, in BW, is always frame scenes towards conflict that will engage one or more Beliefs. If a scene can put Beliefs at odds or under conflicting pressures, all the better!

The points where, say, someone is looking for a clue, and the player says their intent is to find evidence that Duke Badguy was behind recent events, that is what is happening in the narrative. What is often happening in the mechanics is determining if, in fact, Duke Badguy was behind it all. In "no myth" play, the mechanics resolve the PCs question by authoring the fact, rather than by testing the character's modeled technical ability to pick locks.

At least in BW, the intent you describe here is different from a PC's Belief - it is a component of action declaration. We can expect that it will typically be connected to a Belief in some fashion, though, for two reasons:

(i) Players earn fate-type points for expressing their Beliefs in play, for achieving goals expressed in their Beliefs, and for dramatically confronting and perhaps change their Beliefs. (This is comparable, in general terms, to the Marvel Heroic RP milestones, which are often expressed disjunctively in terms of playing to type or dramatically abandoning type (eg Captain America disbanding his team).)

(ii) The GM is expected simply to "say 'yes'" to any action declaration that is not addressing salient stakes, where the measure of salience is the character's Beliefs.

So because of (i) and (ii), most intents that feed into any sort of interesting or contested resolution will be Belief-connected in some fashion or other (but not necessarily Belief-affirming or Belief-reflecting).

The issue of authorship is interesting. What I think is important in BW resolution (and there are some resemblances to some instances of Asset-creation in MHRP) is that the player does not have fiat authorial power. If there is something that is stakes-laden, then the check has to be made. And only if it is successful (eg I have successfully found the incriminating letter) does the fiction take on the features the players was hoping for. If the check fails, then the GM narrates the consequences, with the major principle there being focus on the intent at least as much as on the task when determining what the failure consists in (eg in this case we could imagine that failure might be narrated as the discovery of an exonerating letter).

It is this very thing that brings many folks to consider these more "storytelling games" than "role-playing games". Because, when what you are resolving is a question of narrative direction, rather than character action, it doesn't feel to them like playing a role. Their role is, say, a thief, not a person who molds the universe by asking whodunnit.

My view on this has two components:

(1) There's no accounting for taste. People like what they like, and they dislike what they dislike, and we're talking about a leisure activity, and so that pretty much resolves the question of who should play what.

(2) When someone says that there is something in the logic of BW-type play, or inherent to this sort of RPGing, that must impede inhabitation of character, I strongly disagree. There are two reasons here, interrelated: (i) I know that I can play BW while inhabiting the character, because I do (I don't think it's the only way to play BW, but I know from experience it is a way); (ii) part of what makes that possible is the action declaration structure - in declaring I search for the incriminating letter I believe to be there, I don't have to think about anything outside of my PC's thought processes, and whether I (the player) succeed or fail on the ensuing check, what happens next is all about what my PC is experiencing (ie discovery of the incriminating letter, or a different letter or whatever else, depending on success vs failure and in the latter case how the GM chooses to narrate it).

There is no mechanism in BW, once PC build is done, for players to establish fiction outside of this process of declaring a mental state for the PC - I look for . . ., I search for . . ., I hope to meet . . ., Don't I recall that . . . ?, etc. And having those sorts of mental states is utterly compatible with being a thief. In fact I imagine thieves have these sorts of states all the time - eg I look for the way in, I search for the strongbox, I hope to meet a fence, Don't I recall that the penalty for a first offence in these parts is no worse than a day in the stocks?

To go further and explain my own tastes, I find it much more conducive to inhabitation to be able to posit these mental states and then to settle - via a check - their precise content and relationship to the (imaginary) world external to the character, then to rely on second-person narration (You see, you don't see, you recall, you know, etc) to feed me my character's mental life.

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton Given some of the things you've just said, I'm going to describe one final thing. If this fails to pass muster, I give up; the thread is already elevating my heart rate as it is, and anything further will be wasted effort.

<snip>

if, after hearing all that, you still think I'm just another railroad-adjacent DM merely dictating a plot to my players whose only participation is to select which prompts they wish to follow until they see the theme-park set-piece I planned for them, then there is no hope of further conversation. I'm already teetering on the brink of thinking this entire conversation, as enlightening as it was, will have been on the net much more trouble and emotional upheaval than it was worth, sadly.

EzekielRaiden, I haven't read your post yet beyond these bookends. But I wanted to reply to them separately because I encourage you to relax! That is sincerely meant, however feebly it may come across in the mode of messageboard text.

I'm a person in Australia, I'm guessing on the other side of the world from you (most ENworlders seem to be American) and we are unlikely ever to play in one another's games. You owe me nothing in relation to your play. I have posted in reply to you simply because I read some of what you posted in this thread, and it struck me as containing some claims I disagree with (about when it is appropriate for a GM to author content as part of the process of scene-framing) and that I thought sat oddly with the GMing of Dungeon World as I understand that system (based on my reading of it and AW, a modest amount of DW play, and a reasonable familiarity with Vincent Baker's aspirations as a RPG designer).'

As you probably know, my main reason for posting on ENworld is to engage in discussion with other RPGers about techniques of RPG play. My interest in design is because of its relationship to play (eg have I ever made a post about RPG illustrations? Not that I can recall. Maybe one or two at the height of the 4e furore? And also explaining once how an illustration inspired my framing of a beholder encounter). My interest in actual play reports is because they provide the raw material for discussions of play. When I prep for my own GMing, I am always thinking of elements in play - which is one of the things I love about 4e monsters, that as you're adapting or designing them they create this vivid image of events happening in play. And one flip-side, as you also probably know, is that I am not very interested in world-building for its own sake in the context of discussions of RPGing. Whatever the pleasures of worldbuilding (and I've done a little bit, though decades ago now when I had more time), insofar as it is interesting to discuss in the context of RPGing I think that is because we can talk about its contribution to play.

For me, part of posting to talk about play includes honest reflection on my own play. In my time on ENworld there have been two posters who I think have done the most to push me in that direction. One no longer posts much if at all, as far as I know - @LostSoul. The other is @Campbell. The latter, in particular, has done more than anyone else to hold my feet to the fire of fidelity to the fiction - as he and I have often discussed, I have a strong tendency towards sentimentality that can sometimes, even often, get in the way of following through as hard as I should when the opportunity arises and the fiction demands it. (Maybe this is part of why JRRT remains one of my favourite authors? He's also very sentimental.)

But while feeling the force of @Campbell's points, I've also stuck to my own course. @Campbell will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the PbtA design and approach to play is probably his favourite way of RPGing. Mine is BW-style scene-framing. One reason that Campbell has hesitancy about BW (and similar systems - Prince Valiant, and our indie-style 4e D&D probably both tick that "similarity" box) is that its resolution prioritises a player's goals for his/her PC (expressed via Beliefs) and his/her intention in action declaration (as I discussed just upthread with @Umbran) - it does this via its general framing principles, its intent-and-task resolution, its approach to consequence narration on a failure (which draws on both the preceding features), and its principle of "say 'yes' or roll the dice". Campbell's concern about this package is that it can elevate the conception of the character as a character over the purist fidelity to the fiction, both as established and its unfolding trajectory. And I think he's right. But I still love it, and prefer it, because of the thematic intensity I find in it. (And maybe it also fits better with my sentimentality.)

We're all ultimately free to make our own choices about how we RPG, based on our own experiences and preferences and idiosyncracies. We're here to talk to one another, and maybe to learn from one another, but we're not beholden to anyone but the other participants at our tables. I think that can be worth remembering sometimes.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I've not GMed DW, only played it a little bit. But I think it's fair game for a letter discovered via Discern Realities to be useful and yet turn out to be a forgery.

Somewhat parallel: in the BW game where I play Thurgon, while investigating Evard's Tower I (as Thurgon) discovered various letters apparently written by my mother to Evard when she was a child, and apparently addressing Evard as "Papa".

The context for this was that (i) my PC build includes a relationship with my mother (Xanthippe), (ii) my backstory notes that Xanthippe still lives on our ancestral estate (Auxol) which the family still manages but which has fallen into darkness, and (iii) one of my Beliefs at the time was Harm and infamy will befall Auxol no more! (In subsequent play, Thurgon has returned to Auxol, through prayer has lifted the weariness and resignation from Xanthippe's shoulders (think Gandalf and Theoden), and now instead has the Belief that Xanthippe and I will liberate Auxol.)

Now it's definitely true that those letters existed (they no longer exist, because I (Thurgon) threw them into the campfire). But I am hoping that they might turn out to be false - to have been forged, or perhaps have some other explanation that doesn't entail that the demon-summoner Evard is my maternal grandfather. One straightforward path to that outcome would be a successful check on Letters-wise, but that would be at a pretty high obstacle given the specificity of the knowledge, and so I can't see Thurgon achieving that any time soon. But more realistic for Thurgon, given where his talents lie, would be a revelation of the truth via a prayer to the Lord of Battle.

Now I know that DW and BW aren't the same system, but I think there is enough overlap that it should be possible, in DW play, for the letter to turn out to be false, if that's the way things play out.

Is anyone arguing differently? I don't understand your intent here. The example I started was looking for clues for the Duke's planned betrayal. A situation where the players find a clue useful for their goal and a forgery is, 9f course, possible but differs from your example where being a forgery is the useful thing.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Sure, I didn't delve into the fiction side of that, but there's no reason why the fiction must pin down the veracity of the content of the letter, is there? I mean, it will, eventually, as we PLAY TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS, right? lol.

Yes, which is what finding a clue does. We have played and we have found out. The clue impacts play here, and has fiction here. Future play may result in finding out further things, but you don't leave play vague now to accomplish this. If the players find a clue that is useful now, the ways to make it not useful later by dint of being a forgery are pretty narrow and should require staking the veracity of the clue first.

I mean, surely you aren't implying that nothing can ever be surprising to the players in a DW game? I will agree with you that DW is not a game where the GM is allowed to build some sort of clever railroad around interpreting every DR check in the way I described. OTOH things can turn out various ways.

Most surely I am not. I'm saying you cannot just set such things as GM nor can you easily reverse a useful clue into a forgery, and also that you cannot just leave a clue as a generic +1 hold in play. There's huge room for surprise in that framework.

 

[pemerton]

Is anyone arguing differently? I don't understand your intent here.

I think my intent is to close the gap between you and @AbdulAlhazred.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think my intent is to close the gap between you and @AbdulAlhazred.

The gap isn't in my failure to understand how a thing can be useful as a forgery, or in how play might, in rather uncommon ways, start with a thing being a useful clue and later revealing itself to be a forgery.

My specific issues were the general statement that a GM can just make a clue a red herring, and in the claim that Discern Realities creates non- specific results., like a generic +1 forward so that the GM has room to define it later. That's not how it is supposed to work.

 

[pemerton]

My specific issues were the general statement that a GM can just make a clue a red herring, and in the claim that Discern Realities creates non- specific results., like a generic +1 forward so that the GM has room to define it later. That's not how it is supposed to work.

I don't think @AbdulAlhazred is saying this is likely, or even possible, in every case. I read him as saying there are some cases where this might make sense.

From my point of view it's not all that a big deal. On the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time recently that @AbdulAlhazred has disagreed with another poster in making a somewhat off-the-cuff remark about what's possible in DW play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@pemerton Given some of the things you've just said, I'm going to describe one final thing. If this fails to pass muster, I give up; the thread is already elevating my heart rate as it is, and anything further will be wasted effort.

One of my former players played a Wizard, part of the Waziri mage order (the collegiate wizards I invented during the first group's session 0, who also run many libraries, museums, and non-magic schools in the city). Said Wizard, upon returning from a particular mission, came back to his apartment (something the player invented) to pay a big fat sum for his future rent to his landlady (whom the player invented), and check back in with his grad student (who was the price negotiated by a spontaneously-invented Waziri bureaucrat meddling in the party's affairs, but ended up being a really nice person, in response to player investigation of her backstory, which I did not prepare in advance). In inventing the grad-student off the cuff, I'd said her area of focus was golemancy, which was considered reasonably close to the PC's graduate work (incantations) for him to act as her mentor. While there, I asked if there were any goals he wanted to fulfill, because he didn't really have much to do while the others were checking up with their friends/loved ones/etc. or investigating troubling information they'd learned on their last adventure (the ad-libbed result of a failed Discern Realities roll). Player thought for a moment, then said he wanted to build a golem.

I hadn't considered the first thing about golem construction or usage, so I started asking more questions. Did he want a special-purpose one, or something programmable, or perhaps modular? (He requested more time to think, focusing on getting the basics first.) What materials did he want to use? (Wood--something that could have magic woven into it to repair itself.) Based on these answers, and based on the fact that the Waziri are notorious for having fairly specialized libraries (part of my original-group Session 0 ideas), I said he knew he could find information on the subject by visiting a particular library, the name of which I apparently forgot to write down but which I'm certain I invented on the spot. (He could also consult his grad student and have her assist him with its creation.) At the library, he met with an old woman working as the receptionist and research assistant for this particular library. She directed him to a book, printed on bark-like paper and bound in wood, written by the late, eccentric Abdelmajid al-Buzidi on the creation of golems from natural materials.

After I waxed a little poetic on various woods and their applications (coincidentally something I happen to know a little about IRL), the player settled on fine acacia wood, which grows naturally in the region where they live. (The climate is heavily inspired by Morocco, and thus prior adventures had established the existence of acacia trees, wild and cultivated citrus trees, and cork forests in various places within the region.) The player then spent some money to acquire the wood from the markets, and began cooperating with his grad student to get it shaped into a golem. At other points when the party visited the city, I further delved into how the golem construction was going, either just asking questions and letting the player decide the current status of the thing, within what I hoped were reasonable limits, or requesting a Spout Lore, Defy Danger, or other roll as needed to resolve ambiguous situations one way or another.

This is far from the only time I have done things like this. This is just a relatively neat, minimal-context example that doesn't require explaining seven different adventures and multiple ways the players directly created, or by their requests directly inspired, multiple real, enduring, incredibly important parts of the game world we play in. I've invented many parts of this game, but it absolutely, positively could not exist as it does without dozens if not hundreds of ideas contributed directly by my players, with little more than a, "Ooh, I like that" or "wow, that sounds awesome!" from me.

Sadly, this particular story also never reached a solid conclusion, as the player left the game before that could happen (disengaging from all social activity online, actually--even with family members). But several other things, such as the Bard learning from the Druid how to shapeshift into small animals (sparrows, lizards, fish, etc.), the Druid collecting interesting stones or materials for his "charm bracelet," or some of the other things I've already mentioned (the Ranger and his extended family/clan, the Battlemaster and him engaging with both current and historical traditions of martial scholarship), all arose purely out of players expressing, through the words of their characters, things they thought were interesting or worth pursuing, and which I supported as much as possible.

I'd say such things make up no less than a third of all the activities we've ever done. And even with things I have prepared (like the "Bad Guy" factions, which are Fronts in DW terms, including Grim Portents which are literally described as "your way to codify the plans and machinations of your dangers"), I go out of my way to include things my players have brought into the story as part of this, and their behavior shifts and changes directly in response to the PCs' actions and effects on the world. E.g., the Raven-Shadows are having a (completely unplanned, by them or me) civil war over whether the party Bard is their prophesied messiah or a deceiver who is just in the right places at the right times, for a variety of reasons both supported by previous concepts and driven by the player's interest in religious topics in this game. (The player was raised without any religious affiliation, so this character is a way for him to safely explore religious topics with minimal risk of giving offense or bungling a relationship, and being put on the spot for a conflict of this nature is both interesting and challenging to the player, as he has personally told me when we discussed it after the conflict became known to the character.)

If you add the stuff in the preceding paragraph to the kinds of things I described above that, then no less than half, and probably more like three-quarters or more, of the things that happen in the game happen because the players make choices and the world changes around them as a result, or because the players directly describe elements of the world that had previously not been known before they did so.

But if, after hearing all that, you still think I'm just another railroad-adjacent DM merely dictating a plot to my players whose only participation is to select which prompts they wish to follow until they see the theme-park set-piece I planned for them, then there is no hope of further conversation. I'm already teetering on the brink of thinking this entire conversation, as enlightening as it was, will have been on the net much more trouble and emotional upheaval than it was worth, sadly.

I think it is fair to say, based on how @Ovinomancer disagrees with some of my techniques that PbtA/DW GMing is not a perfectly specified thing, by a long shot. No doubt all of our games have shaded in one direction or another and leaned more towards GM introduced plot elements or overall direction, or less. @Manbearcat seems to object somewhat to some of the things I describe as well, and your game sounds like there's a lot of 'lounging around' by contrast to how I have typically run DW. I wouldn't venture an opinion as to how railroady or not it is, myself.

I mean, in DW, the GM is definitely supposed to put together fronts, and set up dooms to go with them. The GM is a participant in the game, and has at least the authorial power of any other participant. There's probably no avoiding the truth that GMs will color a LOT of the action with their activities. They ARE describing all the scenes! Ideally those scenes should be organic and the players should be at the levers of the game to the extent of contributing substantially to lore and world building, as well as making choices for the PCs.

In my own games of DW there is rarely much wandering around coming up with projects to do, though. It is usually much more action-oriented. The PCs may get certain down time, now and then we've even agreed that years passed between scenes of adventure and simply filled in that time briefly in narrative, introducing new NPCs, or evolving their mundane stories a bit, but we never dwelled on that kind of thing too much. In terms of table time, the vast majority is "You're in real trouble now, lets see how you get out of that!" or something.