D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[AbdulAlhazred]

OK, so the GM gets to say where the bird goes. Glad we got that nailed down.

Next question: what if anything is wrong with the GM using the bird's destination* (which she gets to determine, as noted above) as a means of introducing new content she wants to introduce e.g. a new realm, a potential adventure site, a different type of landscape?

For example, say the party's been doing lots of inland adventuring and she'd like to see a bit more maritime content, so she has the bird go to an island offshore. Or she's come up with a neat idea for a culture and sees this as a glorious opportunity to at least get the PCs into the right neighbourhood, so she has the bird go to a craggy mountain in the middle of said culture's realm. That sort of thing.

* - assuming the remaining PCs come to rescue their captured buddy at some point, of course.

OK, if it is a DW game, then the question is whether or not the players have any interest in this 'maritime content' or not. The GM is certainly not doing something wrong by offering it as an option, but the players are going to decide if it suites them. Maybe they like the idea of becoming pirates and jump on that bandwagon. Maybe they head back to whatever they were doing before and have no interest in pirate ships, pirate town, or whatever it is that appears to be on offer there. In that case, the GM really should probably just ASK, or maybe just go back and make some moves that go along with what the players seem to be interested in developing. Now, maybe the end result of that is that the Pirate King becomes a threat later, because that's a front that the PCs have not engaged with and his faction racks up some dooms. That's OK, maybe they never will deal with that potential plot line, or maybe some aspect of it will come up again later.

There's undoubtedly an art to both formulating potential plot lines in the form of things like factions and maps, but not just doing all the work yourself as GM, as more traditional games would tend to dictate usually happens. So, maybe the GM should ask a character if they know of an ocean in this region, or of the existence of pirates, or something like that. Or maybe a player will mention something like that and then the GM elaborates on it and riffs it into a front.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think this is exactly the point. Going from @Ovinomancer ’s definition of GM Force, I don’t see how these examples qualify.

They meet the first criterion: the GM has a preferred choice, but they don’t meet the second: they are not not overriding player action declarations, input or system mechanics.

I see @pemerton's point, and that is he's looking at this as Force because players are expected to fall in line and declare for the goals despite what they might do otherwise. It's really participationism, though, which is willingly engaging with the content that otherwise would require Force to enact.

Isn’t that always the case? If the players or the GM fight against the principles of PbtA, they also break down (such as with the hawk example).

The difference here being that in PbtA games this is how the game works -- it's the rules, so if you're fighting that it's not on the order of what fiction is being presented by rather whether or not you should be playing the game. With the AP, following it or not is just fine with the game -- it doesn't have anything to say here.

Incidentally, this is why I tend to prefer principles over rules (which is an element I like about PbtA). You cannot use rules to enforce good play or the social contract. Using principles is generally easier to understand which means that the social contract is less likely to breakdown by accident.

Principles are rules, just usually at a higher level of abstraction.

I would simply call it traditional RPGing or non-sandbox play. I’m sure other people have different terms for it.

Well, B/X dungeon crawls are also traditional in a sense, so some form of distinction from natural language is needed. Using the capital, or just Trad games to reference the Six Cultures breakdown, is sufficient. There's no Trad game that @pemerton would preferably enjoy. Sandbox is a largely useless term, though, as it's used to depict Trad games with more open station schedules and the ability to switch tracks at stations, or it's a Classic hexcrawl with no Force at all, or it's a NeoTrad thing. It's kinda a super blurry term that people seem to value because it's seen positively as the antithesis of railroading. It's not, really, the antithesis. It can be used that way, but can also be used to run something pretty railroady.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I didn't see any reason from what @hawkeyefan wrote to think that having the group make the save was inappropriate, or that the escape was DM force rather than just the fey woman being ready to escape when the PCs arrived. It could have been force, but I'm not going to assume it when there is a reasonable explanation that doesn't involve force. Unless they show otherwise through gameplay, I feel that DMs should be given the benefit of the doubt in situations like these.

I definitely read it as Force. I just would have been more willing to accept it for that without the kind of halfassed use of mechanics that mattered in no way at all.

It is difficult for me to read an example like that without thinking what I would have done in the same situation as DM. So the party has met the villain and they have some sort of beguilement ability. The party rolls and rather unexpectedly, some of the party succeeds.

Cool! Roll initiative. I already know that the villain is going to Polymorph into a raven and fly away. I tell the players that failed their roll that they view the villain as their friend, and it looks like some of the PCs are about to attack her.

The unaffected PCs are unlikely to be able to defeat the villain before she escapes, the beguiled PCs interfering with their friends convincingly showcases the villain’s power, and gives the party that they should neitralize the power before next confronting the villain. All without having the party make unnecessary rolls or restricting the players’s agency.

If the outcome of the encounter is a foregone conclusion, then why bother with it? Just tell me what happens.

Now, the only way I could see this kind of going in my DM's favor in this instance is if he wanted to see if we all failed the saving throw, and if so, then we'd be captured or killed or facing some other significant shift in the unfolding events. Once that saving throw was failed, there was no way she'd have stayed to face the party.

But even that doesn't really hold up because of the way saving throws work in 5e....they're made every round against ongoing effects, so there's no way to expect that we'd all continue to fail long enough for those purposes.

To @Crimson Longinus and @Maxperson :

What about the players who had succeeded the save not being able to do anything? To me, that is the real restriction of player agency.

If the PCs who had succeeded
were allowed to act, attack (even knowing that they would be unlikely to one-shot the opponent), I don’t think @hawkeyefan would have had a problem with the scene.

The entire scene removed player agency entirely. That's not really my issue with it. There are always limits to agency, and I get what the purpose of it was. To me, if that's the purpose, then just do that thing.

If instead, we're going to follow the mechanics and see what actually happens here, then cool, let's go. The ranger and the monk both made their saves.....let the ranger hit her with a couple of shots for a good amount of damage, followed by a flurry from the monk with some stunnin fists in there specifically to stop her from getting away. Then see how the rest of the party does with the lingering charm effect.

I actually spoke to the GM about it today because "auto-escape" seems to be a theme lately. He actually said that he thinks the game is too skewed to the PCs for a scene like this to ever actually work per the mechanics, and that's why he chose to narrate it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

There are always going to be people who are better at managing this than others, and of course people who's operating procedure can look vaguely like they might be doing it when they aren't. But, well, when it comes to their understanding of what is and isn't working in games, the Dunning-Kruger effect is in full force in the GMing part of the hobby.

I would not disagree with you there.

It depends. Sometimes its a roundabout way of information management that ends up exceeding its need. This is notoriously so in perception/stealth type situations, but there are other kinds of rolls where simply revealing the rolls provides more immediate information to the players than it may be desirable that they have. Even under the best of circumstances, not everyone is good at firewalling these things away from their play decisions.

Oh it always depends. I think your comment about "exceeding its need" is really relevant, and that's what I find to be the big sticking point.

Eh, as you can see, I have to repeat my big ole "It depends" on this one. I don't see the point about hiding how hard a roll to climb a wall is, but I can absolutely see the reason to hide how hard it is to tell someone is lying.

I mean, I don't know if I see a meaningful difference there. I can describe a wall that's difficult to climb, I can describe a person who is difficult to read. But really I wouldn't say there can never be a justifiable reason, for me it's about what that decision adds, and what it takes away.

 

[Malmuria]

You've had one reply to this, from @Campbell:

Here's another reply, from me.

I'll start with something @FrozenNorth posted not far upthread:

See how, in @FrozenNorth's examples, whatever actions the players declare for their PCs, the GM-established fiction - either directly established by the GM, if they wrote the AP; or deemed to be part of the game by them, if they bought someone else's AP and declared this is what we're playing - pulls the action back in the GM's pre-conceived direction.

If the players try to "fight" that pull, and really keep fighting it, the GMing technique that @FrozenNorth describes will break down: either the GM has to relent, and abandon the AP, or the game busts up.

Now think about the dynamic and expectations of AW or DW. The GM narrates that the bird/dragon carries the PC from the mountain cliff to the maritime shore. And we're supposing this is because the GM has a thing for oceans - it's not the GM responding to any suggestion or goal the player has signalled.

The expectation is that the player will now declare an action for their PC, aiming at whatever it is the player has in mind for their PC. And let's suppose that that doesn't include the coast - eg suppose (as per my post upthread) that the reason the player had their PC climbing the cliff was to find the supposed paradise beyond the mountains. So the player has the PC take actions to get back to the cliff and the possibility of paradise - maybe the PC tries to persuade the bird/dragon to carry them back; or builds a gyrocopter; or whatever else makes sense given the genre, established fiction, PC capabilities, etc.

No one has provided an actual play example, involving birds and mountains, that illustrates this - but I've provided one in the neighbourhood, in BW rather than AW or DW: the GM used his authority to make Elves vs Orcs a part of the fiction; I wasn't interested in that - it was a thing the GM was into, not me - and I used my authority over action declarations for my PC to turn the focus of play back onto the things I was interested in, namely, liberating my ancestral estate.

Just as @FrozenNorth's posited game will break down if the battle of power can't be resolved, so will AW/DW or BW. If the GM keeps pushing the fiction back to the Elves, or back to the coast, every time the player tries and push the focus onto something else, either the GM will have to relent or the game will bust up.

Now here is my question: for you, for @Malmuria, for @FrozenNorth, for @Crimson Longinus:

There is a difference between the following two approaches to RPGing:

One where the player is expected to exercise the sort of authority over what play is about that I did in my BW game, and the @Campbell has described for AW/DW by reference to "dramatic needs". And where the principles of the game tell the GM to exercise their authority over scene-framing and backstory having regard to that player authority.

And one where the GM is expected to exercise the sort of authority over backstory and situation that @FrozenNorth has described as approaches to AP play, and where the player is expected to bring their action declarations into conformity with what the GM has in mind. And where, perhaps, the GM even exercises authority over backstory - eg by introducing a "second string" as per my example of Bastion of Broken Souls, or introducing material to the Rainbow Rocks that will prompt the players to declare that their PCs go to the Dark Clouds as per FrozenNorth's example - to help bring this about. And where, perhaps, the GM even exercise authority over action resolution - as per @hawkeyefan's examples of actual play, or as per the "obscure death" rule in the original DL modules - to help ensure that the scenes the GM has in mind actually come to pass at the table.

Those two approaches to RPGing are not the only possible two. But they are both actual approaches: I know, because I'm a player in a BW game that uses a version of the first approach; and hawkeyefan is a player in a 5e D&D game that uses a version of the second approach.

What label am I allowed to use to describe the second approach, and to contrast it with the first approach, so that I can pithily communicate what I do and don't prefer in RPGing?

The terminology you use and the way you employ it makes sense, and does the work of distinguishing story-now type games. When I was trying to explain to my Dnd/CoC players how to play blades in the dark, I drew a similar contrast to emphasize how blades would require a somewhat different focus from both me as gm and from the players (using the language in the book, which is more colloquial). So I can say first hand, if you are trying to play a story-now derived game, making this sort of bright contrast can be extraordinarily helpful in getting everyone on the same page.

So it does a good job at separating story-now from not-story-now. My concern with this vocabulary is that this primary distinction is somewhat at a loss to describe the variety of play available in not-story-now. To use @Campbell geographic analogy, from the perspective of someone outside the United States, Los Angeles and Mobile, Alabama are both in the US, and thus have a lot of things in common.

For example, someone mentioned the 5e AP, Descent into Avernus. I've read/listened to many reviews and criticisms of this product, and to be honest it sounds awful. There are seemingly several points, including at the very beginning and in the titular descent into hell, where the PCs will have no reason to follow along aside from "do you want to play dnd tonight, or not." That is, from the perspective from these reviews, an adventure path can be more or less railroady-y. Similarly, there is a lot of DM advice geared towards best practices in hooking the PCs into the story in an organic way; thus, one can DM an adventure path in a way that is more or less railroad-y. From the perspective of story-now, maybe all adventure paths are ultimately railroads and/or require heavy use of force. But taking the perspective a) causes confusion because now we are using the term "railroad" to describe two different things and b) makes that term functionally unavailable for anyone trying to identify best practices in writing or running adventure modules.

Finally, this dynamic speaks to my ambivalence around a term like "participationism" not being an autonym. Ostensibly, the term is an attempt describe what appeals to players about the adventure-path style of play. But I think it's more useful in its use for players like you to point to a style of play and say "not that. Whatever that is I don't want it."

 

[Malmuria]

Sandbox is a largely useless term, though, as it's used to depict Trad games with more open station schedules and the ability to switch tracks at stations, or it's a Classic hexcrawl with no Force at all, or it's a NeoTrad thing. It's kinda a super blurry term that people seem to value because it's seen positively as the antithesis of railroading. It's not, really, the antithesis. It can be used that way, but can also be used to run something pretty railroady.

So this is what I mean by making terms unavailable. If someone is using the terms "sandbox," "linear," and "railroad" to describe different approaches to DMing and playing games, why collapse those terms back into "railroad"?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I definitely read it as Force. I just would have been more willing to accept it for that without the kind of halfassed use of mechanics that mattered in no way at all.



If the outcome of the encounter is a foregone conclusion, then why bother with it? Just tell me what happens.

Now, the only way I could see this kind of going in my DM's favor in this instance is if he wanted to see if we all failed the saving throw, and if so, then we'd be captured or killed or facing some other significant shift in the unfolding events. Once that saving throw was failed, there was no way she'd have stayed to face the party.

But even that doesn't really hold up because of the way saving throws work in 5e....they're made every round against ongoing effects, so there's no way to expect that we'd all continue to fail long enough for those purposes.



The entire scene removed player agency entirely. That's not really my issue with it. There are always limits to agency, and I get what the purpose of it was. To me, if that's the purpose, then just do that thing.

If instead, we're going to follow the mechanics and see what actually happens here, then cool, let's go. The ranger and the monk both made their saves.....let the ranger hit her with a couple of shots for a good amount of damage, followed by a flurry from the monk with some stunnin fists in there specifically to stop her from getting away. Then see how the rest of the party does with the lingering charm effect.

I actually spoke to the GM about it today because "auto-escape" seems to be a theme lately. He actually said that he thinks the game is too skewed to the PCs for a scene like this to ever actually work per the mechanics, and that's why he chose to narrate it.

It's not. I had a recurring 5e villain who wasn't supposed to get away the first time but did. He continued to be a thorn in the side of the PCs and escaped at least 3 other times that I can easily recall. The trick here wasn't to use Force, but to play a bad guy that would cut and run quickly. A few times, he used his escape plan right off the bat because the situation had already tilted against him.

Thing is, if he got killed or captured he got killed or captured. I never Forced his escape because I didn't care to. The fun way really having a bad guy the player hated and wanted dead but who's primary motivation was to get away.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The entire scene removed player agency entirely. That's not really my issue with it. There are always limits to agency, and I get what the purpose of it was. To me, if that's the purpose, then just do that thing.

If instead, we're going to follow the mechanics and see what actually happens here, then cool, let's go. The ranger and the monk both made their saves.....let the ranger hit her with a couple of shots for a good amount of damage, followed by a flurry from the monk with some stunnin fists in there specifically to stop her from getting away. Then see how the rest of the party does with the lingering charm effect.

First of, I think this is more how I would have ran it. If we roll saves and some people succeed, they get a round of actions before the enemy escapes. However, I don't think it actually would have affected the outcome. This is presumably some boss level foe with legendary resistances, so it seems unlikely the PCs would have had anything they could have used to stop her from leaving in such a short time. (Now if this is not the case, then it is another matter.)

This sort of thing I think is a blemish. It is a tad awkward moment, but I don't think it in itself says that much about the overall level of agency in the campaign. The actions the PCs were denied wouldn't have altered the trajectory of events anyway. But how constrained are the paths the PCs can take overall? Will there be several possible way to deal with this fae queen? Can you eventually trick her, make a deal with her, learn her weaknesses, or defeat her in many different ways? Or is there just one preplanner outcome and the GM blocks other paths?

I actually spoke to the GM about it today because "auto-escape" seems to be a theme lately. He actually said that he thinks the game is too skewed to the PCs for a scene like this to ever actually work per the mechanics, and that's why he chose to narrate it.

Yeah, it's just that rolling saving throws first is kinda sensing mixed messages. Is this a combat or a cut scene?

 

[Ovinomancer]

So this is what I mean by making terms unavailable. If someone is using the terms "sandbox," "linear," and "railroad" to describe different approaches to DMing and playing games, why collapse those terms back into "railroad"?

Those terms lack even more descriptive power about what's going on during play? But, you've mistaken me for collapsing these. I was pointing out a side point that "sandbox" is a nearly useless descriptive term because it encompasses both what would be railroady game approaches and non-railroad game approaches (usually in the Classic or OSR style as sandbox doesn't really make sense from a Story Now or Nordic LARP perspective). I was pointing out that it's not an actual antithesis to railroad because it doesn't actually mean eschewing the same techniques but is rather an non-descriptive term of art. This doesn't mean it doesn't have a different value from railroad, or that railroad is the only term in play, it's pointing out that the traditional arm of the hobby -- the largest and most prolific arm -- uses terms to describe their play that are not at all useful terms for play but actually fit your taxonomy of words used to say "I don't like that." Sandbox, railroad, powergaming, munchkinism, needy players, etc. These are common terms to describe play inside D&D, but they don't do much work because they are usually used as virtue signals or derogatory terms. I'm more interested in what's happening during play, which is why I have a clear definition of Force, and only a vague on for railroading because I recognize railroading is really a matter of tolerance for how Force is being used.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's not. I had a recurring 5e villain who wasn't supposed to get away the first time but did. He continued to be a thorn in the side of the PCs and escaped at least 3 other times that I can easily recall. The trick here wasn't to use Force, but to play a bad guy that cut and run quickly. A few times, he used his escape plan right off the bat because the situation had already tilted against him.

Thing is, if he got killed or captured he got killed or captured. I never Forced his escape because I didn't care to. The fun way really having a bad guy the player hated and wanted dead but who's primary motivation was to get away.

Right, that's what I'd try to do....cut and run, and if he makes it and continues to do so, then you have your recurring villain. I think that's the best way to actually establish a recurring villain. Like it shouldn't really be a case of deciding when you create the NPC "this guy's gonna be a recurring villain right here".

And don't get me wrong....I used to do this kind of thing all the time back in the day. And this play group has consisted of the same core group who has been playing since those days....so I think those old campaigns and the fondness with which we hold them may also be at fault here.