D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm only describing using your definitions what others mean by 'linear adventure'. I think @Scott Christian nailed it with his story board picture he posted a few pages back.

I'd suggest that linear adventures don't actually exist (as in no one plays one) with your very narrow definition here. I'm not sure why you've defining 'linear adventure' so narrowly that no one can be said to actually play one.

I mean, most canned adventure paths are either linear or very close to it, and I can absolutely say that I have experienced (and been told of such that others have experienced) adventures that either were straight-up linear, or were so close as to not meaningfully matter.

Illusionism is often used to disguise linearity, for example. The players are presented with something that seems to be a choice or an open-ended question, but in reality there is only one outcome. The fictitious selection (in the trivial example, "road forks, but DM knows that the haunted mansion will be on whichever path the players take") gives the appearance of nonlinearity, without having to do any of the work involved in actually making a nonlinear adventure. Dragonlance was somewhat notorious for being particularly linear as I recall. Similarly, many computer games have truly, completely linear stories. Some of them are quite good stories, but they are linear nonetheless.

In a thread about illusionism from several months back, a poster very explicitly said that becoming a DM means losing the ability to pretend that your choices actually matter. You've seen behind the illusion and can no longer go back to unquestioning belief in your freedom to direct the game, because the DM is (they seemed to be arguing) inherently an illusionist. Pulling the players along through their pre-written story, merely using stagecraft and theatrics to make players believe they're actually making choices. Obviously I don't share their views, but you couldn't have such a poster if no adventures were ever linear.

 

[FrogReaver]

Force is about the outcome. It’s about steering things toward an outcome regardless of what the players do.

Outcome of what? Outcome of having an exciting scene framed? Fictional Outcome of fictional PC actions? Outcome of anything related to the game?

It seems to me that your definition of Force is the one that’s far too broad. You’ve basically included everything a GM does as part of running a game. But I don’t think that’s how most others are using it.

They say they aren't until it comes to talking about linear D&D adventures and then how the DM goes about framing the scene matters.

Not necessarily. They may at times. But look at the published adventures. How do you think those work? GM Force. Players participating in “the story”. They’re buying in….okay, we’re playing Princes of the Apocalypse, so we’ll keep looking for the elemental cults. Oh we’re playing Curse of Strahd….we’ll make sure to hunt down the objects of power and then confront him. I mean, maybe we’d leave except OOPS THE MAGIC FOG MAKES US STAY.

GM frames the scene that he wants (for a linear adventure the scene the DM wants is the 'next' scene in the adventure). This establishes a point of conflict. How it will play out is uncertain (players succeed or fail and where precisely this leads them). Where it will lead is uncertain in that there's usually there's more than 1 thing that can happen in almost any module. And everything in a linear adventure is carefully crafted so that whatever happened previously in play forms the building blocks for what is going to happen next. That's extremely similar to what you said below.

No, I don’t think that framing is the same as Force, nor do I think that the GM is free to frame anything he wants. Framing a scene is establishing some point of conflict. How it will play out is uncertain. Where it will lead is uncertain. What it involves will be at the very least influenced if not outright determined by the events of previous play.

Things are going to largely go the same way for everyone who plays these games. Will there always be subtle differences? Yes. Will there be some severe exceptions? Sure, of course. Are some of the published adventures worse (in this regard) than others? Yes.

Generally speaking 2 groups going through a module will not have things go exactly the same way. While I'm with you that things will typically be close, those differences are a matter of degree and not type when compared to less linear play.

Does any of that mean that the D&D adventures are bad? Hell no. Some are quite good. I’ve run several and played in a couple. They’re perfectly good at what they do…which is to deliver a story that’s largely already been written, with some decision points or areas of input left to the players.

I hear this refrain alot - as if the only reason others disagree is because they believe you are calling that style bad. That's not the primary source of the disagreement though. And while it helps the conversation to acknowledge a style isn't bad, saying it's not bad and then using language about that style that implies it is bad undermines your stating that it's not bad. Examples: 'it's a railroad', 'it's mother may i' - that's some very mixed messaging.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I don't understand this bit. I mean, I understand that there might be a social contract or expectations of play at the table, and that a gm (in any kind of game) can break that. But are you saying that there is something about the gm advice in, say, blades that makes it more binding? How?

Well, the game tells you how to play it, and that would be ignoring how it tells you to play it. I really don't see how this is a point of confusion.

Here's the very first GM goal of play:

Play to find out what happens. Don’t steer the game toward certain outcomes
or events. Be curious!

Emphasis in original.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I’m guessing it would count as Force if after a successful climb check the angry bird showed up anyway. But couldn’t the gm just frame the next scene as angry bird attack, but with the PCs on top of the successfully-climbed cliff? In dnd the climb check and the wandering angry bird would be completely separate checks, since the two are not related logically (maybe the bird gets advantage on perception or something).

Maybe, if the goal of climbing the cliff was to meet an angry bird. If it was something else, then, no, not really. It doesn't work like that. This is thinking it's playing like a D&D game with some funny bits. It's not. The GM isn't free to just frame whatever whenever. They are following the player's lead.

In this way, I’ve never understood why you can’t speak the name of your move. I don’t think it harms the fiction for the gm to say that this is the result of an unsuccessful roll; if anything it helps make clear what the point of rolling is. The blades advice about keeping the meta channel open and talking about what you are doing and why makes more sense to me for that kind of game

Speaking the name of the move would be like saying, "Okay, I'm announcing future badness as the result." This is dull and boring. Instead, you just announce the badness! Everyone knows the roll failed, that's not what's being kept secret. This is just a statement that you should focus on the presenting the fiction, not the move made.

Blades doesn't have this principle. DW/AW and Blades in the Dark have many similarities, but are not the same game. There are no GM moves in Blades, although it can be helpful to talk about consequences in terms of soft and hard moves as an easy conceptual device. In reality, you don't even need to do this. In Blades, it's quite normal to "state the move" for a consequence -- stuff like, "okay, that's reduced effect as your blah blah made blah blah not work as well as you hoped." This is because Blades has a different mechanical structure than PbtA. It leverages different tech, so to speak.

 

[Ovinomancer]

My like was because this is not far off from my aforementioned "there's been a murder but you have a quantum murderer until the party declares who the murderer was" issue. That is, I don't at all mind (nor consider it "easy mode") that the player can declare elements of the setting in general. But certain kinds of them break any semblance of groundedness or verisimilitude for me, and those things can't just be "player declares whatever makes sense."

I just can't wrap my head around the idea of "solve a mystery" where the "solution" is invented by the players. That rings as so obviously, inherently hollow that I literally cannot imagine enjoying an experience where that's how a mystery got resolved. How can you collect clues and draw valid inferences when not just the clues but the inferences themselves are causing the truth? It would be like if an absolutely omnipotent deity (that is, one not bound by the rules of logic) tried to do science. How can you perform an experiment and record the results in order to learn something when you, personally, are directly making the results happen, and you, personally, are creating the true state of affairs that the experiment is attempting to ascertain? Indeed, you personally are deciding what logic itself is permitted to relate? That's just...not solving a mystery. It's re-writing history so that whatever you believe to be true not only is true, but always was.

It might be easier to grasp an intermediate form of the Story Now mystery -- the system used by Brindlewood Bay. I'm familiar with this through The Between, which uses the same approach but may have some differences. Here, during play, players earn "clues" towards the mystery. Each of these clues is a concrete bit of fiction, but none of them are conclusive. In fact, in prepared clue lists for The Betweeen's threats, the clues could all have multiple different meanings depending on how you take them. So, during play, you earn these clues through play (usually via successful actions to investigate/engage something). Associated with the mystery are various questions, like "where does this thing hunt prey?" Or, "where is their lair?" Or, "why do they hunt prey?" The questions are really somewhat generic but are meant to provide leverage for addressing the problem. These questions have a complexity rating, a simple number. Once you have at least half of the complexity rating in clues, you can pose the Question move and try to answer one of these questions. To do so, you roll an appropriate attribute with a modifier of clues - complexity. You then form a theory using the clues as to what the answer to the question is. On a hit (10+) that's what's up and you now have a clear path to engage the threat. On a 7-9, it's right, but there's something else that makes things worse added -- either the opportunity to address the threat is far more dangerous, or the threat attacks you beforehand, or something, but you still have your path. On a 6-, well, you're probably wrong in a disasterous way, or you're right but it's still disasterous.

The point being that solving the mystery is really only the first part -- its what you do with it afterwards that's really going to be the focus of play. And this is true of Story Now mysteries in general -- the usual point isn't solving the mystery, it's what you do next now that you know. Usually in Trad games, solving the mystery comes with the win button attached. In Story Now, it's just the step before really engaging the problem.

 

[pemerton]

Sorry, but I have to disagree. You do not get to change the definition of "playing." People play D&D. This word connection (of which connects it to a term that is many times negative) is poor taste at best, and elitism at worst.

But if playing D&D means (inter alia) experiencing the exercise of GM force, then how do I describe what is going on when I <verb> Tomb of Horrors or White Plume Mountain?

And this is not just a theoretical question - there is a whole clash of schools over this difference.

 

[pemerton]

I'd disagree with that assessment. The fiction was honored - the main adversary was killed and he's not coming back. That his lieutenant steps in to his now vacant role seems rather realistic and fitting for any kind of adventure genre.

I strongly disagree. The practical effect of making up "second stringers" to keep the "plot" alive - and this could go on ad infinitum, lieutenants all the way down - is that the players never succeed until the GM lets them do so.

 

[pemerton]

I’m guessing it would count as Force if after a successful climb check the angry bird showed up anyway. But couldn’t the gm just frame the next scene as angry bird attack, but with the PCs on top of the successfully-climbed cliff?

You mean if the GM made a hard move without first making a soft move? Yes, that might count as Force. It's also contrary to the general principles of GMing AW, DW and similar games.

How is making a giant freaking bird appear that was hitherto non-existent in the fiction not GM force.

Well, here you seem to be using force as a synonym for making a decision about the content of the fiction. That's not how @Ovinomancer is using it, though.

In AW and DW, the rule for a missed check (ie 6 or down) is that the GM can make as hard and direct a move as they like, that follows from the established fiction. So if we assume there has already been an appropriate soft move - eg the GM has narrated the giant nests that sit on the high peaks of the mountains the PCs are climbing - then the hard move (A giant angry bird of prey grabs you off the mountainside is fully justified and not a use of force in any of the senses I set out above: there's no manipulation of mechanics, or of behind-the-scenes fiction, or of scene-framing. There's just the GM doing their job as the rules tell them to.

The earliest RPG I know of that expressly uses this soft-move hard-move structure is Classic Traveller (1977) in its vacc suit rules: if a character attempts a non-ordinary manoeuvre in a vacc suit (eg jumping, running, etc) then a check is called for; if it fails the GM has to describe what threatening situation has come about. (This is the soft move.) The character can then make a follow-up check to get out of the difficult situation; if it fails the GM follows through on the threat. (This is the hard move.) One time when I adjudicated this in my current campaign, the PC was trying to crawl through a firing slit into a pill-box. The first check failed: I narrated that the PC was getting stuck. The second check failed: I narrated that the PC ended up wriggling through into the pillbox with only his helmet, the rest of his body exposed to (and hence him taking damage from) the corrosive atmosphere.

I've never heard anyone suggest that adjudicating Traveller in this sort of way is force. The AW/DW process is no different. (Also: it's a red herring to get caught up on the degree of causal connection between mountain climbing and avian attacks vs pill-box slithering and damaged vacc suits. Both are just the GM establishing an immediately threatening fictional situation that builds on the established fiction in accordance with the rules for failed checks.)

 

[pemerton]

I just can't wrap my head around the idea of "solve a mystery" where the "solution" is invented by the players.

Did you read my post upthread where I identified two ways of RPGing a mystery, both of which are different from your "backstory-first" approach and neither of which fits the description I've quoted.

Do you have an example of a published RPG that advocates resolving mysteries the way you describe in what I've quoted? It's not something I'm familiar with.

 

[pemerton]

I have run across the idea in discussions not in this thread, that backstory--as y'all use the term--is stuff that isn't known (knowable?) by the players when the situation is engaged in play. So anything the GM might have used as framework to hang the situation on, y'all would (I think) be inclined to call "backstory" and I'd probably think of it as "part of the situation." I think I'd probably think that, even if that framework was GM-created, and even if not all of it was player-facing. I'd probably think of those as the "defining borders."

Roughly.

I think your "defining borders" are pretty central to "backstory first" play where the GM treats prep as binding: because a scene will only be framed where the players' declared actions for their PCs "activate" a scene latent in the prepped backstory - eg the PCs open a door and look to see what is in the room behind it; and at least some adjudication will take place by reference to the prepped backstory - eg the GM telling the PCs what they see.

I think your "defining borders" will be absent in "backstory first" play where the GM liberally changes or adds to the backstory in the course of adjudicating actions within a scene. An example, already mentioned upthread, would be the NPC ally who "helpfully turns up" to assist the NPC the PCs have on the ropes - where the arrival of that helpful NPC is not the GM working from or even extrapolating from prepped backstory, but is making up new backstory as part of the process of adjudicating the scene.

I think your "defining borders" will also be absent in "situation first" play, whether that is "living novel"-type play (and the example in the previous paragraph could easily drift into "living novel" if the GM starts giving up on prep altogether and just makes up the scenes and their unfoldings and outcomes as they go along) or "story now"-type play. I don't think "living novel" has any borders beyond the GM's imagination.

And in "story now" play the borders are provided by processes that determine who gets to say what when, and the principles that guide those exercises of authority, but there are not content-based borders of the sort I take you to mean by "defining borders of a situation".