D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Campbell]

Also, I think we could say that the GM is taking account the dramatic needs of the character when placing the halfling-eater ogre. It might be an interesting and engaging situation for the player if they cannot rely too on their usual sweet talking tricks or if they can it takes some unusual effort and creativity.

That's not a dramatic need though. Dramatic needs are about what the character wants.

Framing a scene according to dramatic need means putting character desires front and center. Making the stakes of the situation centered on whether characters achieve those desires or not.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Passive is in reference to the driving of the game. It's not suggesting they do nothing.

And I think that's not the way everyone is going to read passive here, and it implies more than its saying. As such, its a bad choice of wording.

Play in 5e is about taking actions to get the GM to reveal more about the world or story. Play is focused on getting the GM to tell you things. Of course you're doing things, that's not what's passive. You're passive in the sense of creation versus consumption. You aren't creating story in normal Trad play, you're receiving it from the GM. You still have to do things to get the GM to do this.

Still don't buy it. It might be true of the zoomed out story, but story also includes what individual characters do and how they interact with each other and the NPCs, not just the thrust of overall events.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm looking through a Quick Start for an Italian TTRPG - Fabula Ultima: a TTJRPG - but this game actually gives the Villain a limited number of "Ultima points" that operate similarly to Fate points, which the DM can use so that the Villain can make their escape (among other things), but a Villain's Ultima points never recharge. The game - which also lists 4e D&D, Ryuutama, Fate, Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel, and more as key influences - is meant to simulate JRPGs, where the villain escaping is a trope.

That's a useful tool for a lot of superhero games too, and avoids problems like the open-ended GM Fiat in Mutants and Masterminds, which I've summarized as "so when does the GM let us win?" It was why, when we were running that, we limited the number of those in use in any given session.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I mostly agree. I just don't see any of this as a problem. The GM decides these sort of things, that's why they're there.

Well, truth be told, I have done a good bit more DMing than playing, or at least it was more wide ranging and exploratory in its character than my play in most games. So, when I'm a player, I have the urge to be an authorial figure, it is just what I'm about. I don't get so much out of watching the story unfold and just deciding which orc I kill. Like in the first big 5e campaign we ran, my character had a grand plan to create his own little empire. I didn't care for the idea that this apparently didn't fit that well into the GM's conception of what we were 'supposed' to be doing. I mean, in point of fact I got to mostly do what I was wanting to do. It wasn't easy for the character to accomplish, which is fair enough. Still, 5e wasn't exactly helpful! I'd have thought that story was easier told using something like 4e. Certainly defining the "dwarf who wants to build an empire" character would be easier in some other games, and I'd think something like BW which demands you explicate the character's core motivating beliefs would have made him a more 3-dimensional figure (because basically I don't have a clue WHY he wanted to build that empire or what he was willing to do to get it done, aside from typical D&D PC type stuff).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Do you want language that allows you to identify styles of play that you personally do not prefer? Or do you want language that is merely descriptive? My sense is that a term like "participationism" claims to be the latter while more accurately being the former. Similarly the strength of the situation/backstory distinction is that it enables to you to identify what you like and what you don't like about games; the weakness is that it does not have a lot to say about a style of gaming that you generally don't prefer.

You realize that the modern academic response to this is "So what you are saying is that your preferred terminology is ideologically dominant and thus seen as objective, and mine is therefor relegated to a lesser category of being 'subjective'." lol. I mean, there is nothing LOGICALLY about your position which makes it necessarily true. It MIGHT be that @pemerton's terminology is less descriptive of 'traditional' gaming and less useful in characterizing it, perhaps. It is certainly demonstrated to be a fact in anything argued here. At the very least, reading much of the thread, though not all by a good bit, I would say I didn't come out with a sense that I understood a logical argument establishing the inferiority of Pemertonian terminology. I'll assert the reverse as well, it isn't established as objectively superior in all respects either. Honestly, its hard for me to fully wrap my head around all the arguments in a thread. I think we'd need someone on each 'side' of that terminological divide to argue their case in a more discursive fashion to get there.

My point is, I don't think you can make this albatross fly

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Well, truth be told, I have done a good bit more DMing than playing, or at least it was more wide ranging and exploratory in its character than my play in most games. So, when I'm a player, I have the urge to be an authorial figure, it is just what I'm about. I don't get so much out of watching the story unfold and just deciding which orc I kill. Like in the first big 5e campaign we ran, my character had a grand plan to create his own little empire. I didn't care for the idea that this apparently didn't fit that well into the GM's conception of what we were 'supposed' to be doing. I mean, in point of fact I got to mostly do what I was wanting to do. It wasn't easy for the character to accomplish, which is fair enough. Still, 5e wasn't exactly helpful! I'd have thought that story was easier told using something like 4e. Certainly defining the "dwarf who wants to build an empire" character would be easier in some other games, and I'd think something like BW which demands you explicate the character's core motivating beliefs would have made him a more 3-dimensional figure (because basically I don't have a clue WHY he wanted to build that empire or what he was willing to do to get it done, aside from typical D&D PC type stuff).

Perhaps, but I feel what matters most is if the GM and players are on the same page on what the campaign is about. Either empire building is within the scope of the campaign premise or it isn’t.

 

[Thomas Shey]

See, my experience of play is that those other things don't happen--that once a table sits down to "go through" a given AP, the point of play at that table becomes getting through that AP. Obviously experiences differ, but I find that the goal of finishing the AP warps play--not just in the sense of needing to stay on the rails, but in the sense that character goals don't matter to the AP (frankly, IME, characters don't matter to APs).

This is the sort of thing that's going to color your view of this.

When we started playing Age of Ashes, we understood in rough the kind of campaign it was going to be about and choose characters who, generally were going to want to interact with the sort of problems that would pull you through the campaign. As such you could argue that the goal warped character choice (but that only makes sense if your basic premise is that developing characters with the idea of the campaign is "warping" them) but it doesn't distort play in any particular way (for the most part, the general choices of the PCs as to what to follow-up on were the things they'd follow up on if no AP was involved).

(There's an exception for one of the four players, but, honestly, what she wants is a single player campaign focused entirely on her character personal goals so she can just suck it up. She'd have problems in any game the rest of us likely would want anything to do with, and since no one is interested in running a single-player campaign for her, if she wants to play she just gets to adapt).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well... I certainly would not argue with people's assertions about the character of their own play. I would point out that, as a general concept, its hard to give that a huge consideration. That is, this sort of unrevealed backstory is pretty tenuous. One can always reason some way to get to X. Or if X really is very explicitly ruled out (IE this bad guy has an absolute aversion to lying, so he won't deceive the PCs) then there's always Y, which can be functionally equivalent to X, but avoids the restriction. I agree that such things can add flavor to the game, they're good, but I'm vastly less certain they constitute a substantive barrier to GM story telling. Anyway, beyond that, if they are derived entirely from the mind of the GM in the first place, its more a matter of temporal sequence of when backstory was invented, yesterday or today. I am not sure that's a big distinction.

And, in general, contingencies are rarely going to hinge on a specific trait or resource constraint, etc. of one person or group. The world is complex, contains many factions and operatives, and whatever. With total backstory authority, setting authority, etc. you can generally bring about whatever eventuality you desire, assuming the players don't outright dig in and fight you to the death on it! Even then, the GM in some sense prevails, though obviously we're getting into degenerate cases at that point.

Again, this is why dungeons WORKED in the simple GM-directed paradigm of Gygaxian play, walls and such don't have loopholes or ambiguity. You either can or cannot proceed west, it isn't really a matter of interpretation, even if it was decided at some point by the GM; he's now just as constrained as the PCs.

But again, this is working process backwards. You don't come up with the result completely in a vacuum and then fit your villain into it; you either come up with the villain then look at the result you can see coming from their aims, abilities and limitations, or work them both out as a gestalt. Either of those mostly avoids just finding an excuse to get to X even though everything you know about the villain, his abilities and personal limitations tells you he can't get to there from here.

I'm not going to tell you everyone does this, but to exclude it as a legitimate approach using unrevealed backstory is, at best, super cynical.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Sure. Games have premises and things work best if characters are compatible with the premise.

Right. But then what does this say about the game in question? The premise is what the game is about, right? Where the premise comes from is, I think, a significant factor in all this.

So if the GM says "hey guys, I'm going to run Tomb of Annihilation" then you should make a character compatible with the premise. Which pretty much renders characters interchangeable. I don't mean that as a criticism so much as an observation. Here's a book with a story already prepared, and you can plug your characters in and off you go. If you instead made this other character, plug him in and off you still go.

If the player says "hey, I had an idea for a character who wants to restore the legacy of his family, who fell from grace and he's like the last of his line and I'd like to see how that would go" that's something different. That's a premise connected specifically to that character. Taking that character and sticking him in Tomb of Annihilation does nothing for the premise the player was interested in.

A lot of GMs (and this is largely what I've done in the past, and part of what I do when I run 5e now) will take that character concept and make it fit into Tomb of Annihilation in some way. Maybe the character's family is one of the prominent families of Chult, and one way the character could restore their name is by finding the Tomb of Annihilation. Seems like both premises are merging, right? No, not really. It's more that one is consumed by the other. All character goals lead to the premise of the pre-written adventure.

So then I would say that a better approach for that character and its premise is to have the GM run a game that's not a published adventure. Then the GM can tailor the game to fit the premise of the character, rather than the player tailoring the character to fit the premise of the game. This leads to a more character-centric game.

And then one step further, I'd say that there are games that are better suited for this kind of play than 5e. Not that it cannot be done in 5e, because it can, but there are games that are designed with this in mind and enable the GM and players to do what they need to in order to realize this premise through play, and to challenge it. Such a game will do things differently than 5e, and those differences are simply more suited to this character focused premise rather than plot-focused premise.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Right. But then what does this say about the game in question? The premise is what the game is about, right? Where the premise comes from is, I think, a significant factor in all this.

So if the GM says "hey guys, I'm going to run Tomb of Annihilation" then you should make a character compatible with the premise. Which pretty much renders characters interchangeable. I don't mean that as a criticism so much as an observation. Here's a book with a story already prepared, and you can plug your characters in and off you go. If you instead made this other character, plug him in and off you still go.

Can you enlarge on what you mean by "interchangeable" here? Because that seems--off. Even if you end up at the same final destination, the trip is going to feel pretty different depending on the characters in play to me, and that doesn't seem to make them "interchangeable" in any sense other than "they can all fit in this game" which, frankly, describes a lot of game characters.