D&D General Why defend railroading?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'll step up. I've been GMing a long time, and have done a lot of thinking about how games work, generally and specifically. My on-the-fly rulings leverage this understanding and are often immediately candidates for house-rules without further effort. Experience and foundations count for something in this.

On the other hand, I can point to a few examples of long discussed house rules on this very forum that display a lack of understanding about the game and that are essentially doomed to fail to achieve what they hope to achieve. Yet, they're very thought about.

Yeah, in fact, TBH, I'm not much of a fan of house ruling. My experience is that GMs who are really into tinkering are mostly obsessed with their opinion of how things aught to work, rather than some broad (or even narrow) conception of altering the play of the game in any logical or coherent fashion. So, if I run into a GM who's going on about how they reworked half of some game, ESPECIALLY if they habitually do this with every game they run, then that's a Red Flag moment for me. lol.

PERSONALLY, I really don't run games with house rules much. I added a couple of very minor practices into my running of 4e, and ignored a couple of things, which technically might be considered 'house rules', but well within normal table variation for that game, as an example.

There are just so many games out there these days. If I want to do something, there's a game for it. Or else I can create one based on an existing game, as really a whole new game, like my current 4e-like hack game, which is NOT 4e, so not 'house ruled'. I'd happily build a PbtA game if I felt no existing one did something I wanted too. Those situations are getting rare though!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I am convinced it creates a wildly different game. I can sit at a table where DW is being played in D&D mode, with lots of GM prep for the setting and with D&D pacing, and that game will be wildly different from a game where you lean into the game as presented because that game will be frenetic, have lots of player definitions of the setting and plot elements in play, and will not feel at all the same.

Specifically, the principles of play are rules, not suggestions, for how you are to play PbtA games. Not following through on them to the best of your ability is like ignoring AC when you want a monster to hit in D&D. The principles of play are as definitional as the 1-6, 7-9, 10+ of the checks. There's room for interpretation and execution there, yes -- your DW game will not be like mine exactly, but when we compare notes it should be about how we leveraged the principles differently -- maybe I prioritized fill their lives and you prioritized ask questions in this moment of play, and that will give different results. But, you can't just decide that "fill their lives" is an occasional thing and you want to run some slow downtime with the game -- you've now stepped outside the principles and therefor the intended game.

And this is importing how D&D works, and D&D sensibilities, into a game that isn't D&D. It's dragging culture in that doesn't align with the intended play, and then using that dragged culture to explain that it's not not playing DW to play it a different way. I don't agree, and I think that this culture of "anyway is fine" that is true inside the D&D community is not universal. I find this argument expects system to support the imported mode of play and then blames the system for failing to provide for the assumed mode of play. You see this with 5e all the time. DW will fight you if you try to play it like D&D, and then you have to spend the extra time dealing with that, or restricting what happens in play.

Couldn't say.

Yeah, I honestly haven't participated in a DW/PbtA community, per se. I have played, mostly with various people who have a lot of D&D experience, and talked with people here. So my perceptions of what DW does and how to use it may be super ideosyncratic and whatever. I do agree that my games are a bunch more 'frenetic' MOST of the time, than @EzekielRaiden's game SOUNDS, but we have little feel for the pacing of his game either. There have been times when a bunch of non-danger/adventure stuff happened in my game, but it was A) off screen and not during sessions, and B) any significant stretch of down time was largely elided from description so that the TABLE PACING was not slowed, though fictionally "several years pass" could happen.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You don't think that having more time to think will on average improve the quality of a house rule, everything else being equal? Because to me it seems blatantly obvious that it does. That's why people who write the official rules spend a lot time doing it and do not just publish the first thought that happens to pop in their head.

This of course doesn't mean that taking the time to think will guarantee that the rule is good, but it will definitely increase the likelihood of it!

That's not the position taken. And, given some of the discussion threads here at ENWorld, there's evidence to the contrary. Bad assumptions in, not questioned, lead to bad assumptions out not matter how long you think about them.

 

[Cadence]

That's not the position taken. And, given some of the discussion threads here at ENWorld, there's evidence to the contrary. Bad assumptions in, not questioned, lead to bad assumptions out not matter how long you think about them.

One advantage time gives is seeing it in actual play more (assuming I is something that happens frequently enough to worry about).

 

[Umbran]

I don't know Urban Shadows but from your reference to a "move" I'm guessing that it's PbtA?

Correct.

Burning Wheel uses "objective" difficulties (called Obstacles) rather than "subjective" difficulties (as in 4e D&D, MHRP, HeroQuest revised, etc) or fixed spreads (as in Apocalpyse World and other games that adopt its move structure). This means that, for a Circles or Wise check, a difficult has to be set, and this is based (respectively) on the improbability of an encounter with this sort of person here-and-now, and on the obscurity of the information being recalled. So in BW there has to be specification of the hope or the conjectured belief as an input into the resolution process.

In this example, though, the PC can (and must) state at least the topic and kind of information they are seeking. How probable the results are is based on the information requested. The person narrated is, at this stage, merely color, as you can't use the invoked person for anything else without further moves, and the difficulty of those would be set independently.

 

[pemerton]

In this example, though, the PC can (and must) state at least the topic and kind of information they are seeking. How probable the results are is based on the information requested. The person narrated is, at this stage, merely color, as you can't use the invoked person for anything else without further moves, and the difficulty of those would be set independently.

Sorry, I haven't quite followed this. Which system are you referring to?

Just to tell you where I'm coming from: I think your suggestion about leaving some of the specification abstract at the input stage, and precisifying it at the output stage, is workable for a PbtA resolution framework (because of the "fixed" spread for all checks) but is not workable for BW (because of the need to set a difficulty that depends on that specificity).

Are you agreeing? Or disagreeing? About one or both approaches? Or have I got even more confused than I think I am?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So why are people arguing about PbtA games on the D&D general thread?

 

[Cadence]

So why are people arguing about PbtA games on the D&D general thread?

And now I'm curious if all PbtA's combined are less played than Halflings in D&D games/spinoffs...

 

[Dausuul]

So why are people arguing about PbtA games on the D&D general thread?

The alternative is to discuss the actual topic of the thread, which is doomed to an endless loop of "Railroading is any time X!" "No, that's not railroading, railroading is only when Y." "You're both wrong, railroading means Z, and that's why railroading is a good thing."

I'd rather read debates about PbtA than take another ride on the quantum ogre train.

 

[pemerton]

And now I'm curious if all PbtA's combined are less played than Halflings in D&D games/spinoffs...

Dungeon World typically has a couple of race options for each class. There are Halfling Druids, Fighters and Thieves.

Burning Wheel doesn't have Halflings in any official publication - I think for good reason. But I have read an account of a playtest in which one player was playing a Halfling called Biggie Smials.