D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Cadence]

It's nice to have these brief words of guidance but we should judge a game by what it does, not what it says it does.

That's what the rule book says about responding to your players storytelling wants, using published adventures, structuring your own adventures, and using villains. And it seems like a number of posters on here claim to follow what the rule book says to do just fine

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And as I said before, that's only true if the overall plotline and steps are what's important to you. That is not a given.

I think the lens is too narrow here...

Imagine a DW game. There is a Barbarian, and a Paladin. The Paladin imagines the barbarian as a servant of chaos, so he has a bond for himself of "The Barbarian's misguided behavior endangers their very soul!" and an alignment of 'Good' (Endanger yourself to protect someone weaker than you). He's concluded he must save the Barbarian from himself! The Barbarian is Neutral (Teach someone the ways of your people) and creates a bond "The paladin shares my hunger for glory, the earth shall tremble at our passing!" Clearly there's going to be some head-butting here...

Now, what is GOING TO HAPPEN in this game? Regardless of the specific fiction (IE if they are in a town, on a ship, whatever is happening) the Barbarian is going to "show the paladin his ways" and the Paladin is going to try to redeem him from his evil ways! LOL. As the GM this will be pretty amusing! They spy some goblins, and the barbarian decides to hunt them, he's going to show that paladin how it is done too! But the Paladin leaps from cover and charges the prey, sniping at them with bows is unmanly, doesn't that barbarian have any honor? Well, this is kind of generic, but at some point they will face an actual dilemma, a point where say, the Paladin cannot protect someone without sneaking. This will never due, the barbarian will learn bad ways! The game is ABOUT their dynamic, the situations the GM will come up with are literally going to test that dynamic, again and again. As bonds are resolved and rewritten the dynamic will evolve, but it will always be there.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I think the lens is too narrow here...

Imagine a DW game. There is a Barbarian, and a Paladin. The Paladin imagines the barbarian as a servant of chaos, so he has a bond for himself of "The Barbarian's misguided behavior endangers their very soul!" and an alignment of 'Good' (Endanger yourself to protect someone weaker than you). He's concluded he must save the Barbarian from himself! The Barbarian is Neutral (Teach someone the ways of your people) and creates a bond "The paladin shares my hunger for glory, the earth shall tremble at our passing!" Clearly there's going to be some head-butting here...

Now, what is GOING TO HAPPEN in this game? Regardless of the specific fiction (IE if they are in a town, on a ship, whatever is happening) the Barbarian is going to "show the paladin his ways" and the Paladin is going to try to redeem him from his evil ways! LOL. As the GM this will be pretty amusing! They spy some goblins, and the barbarian decides to hunt them, he's going to show that paladin how it is done too! But the Paladin leaps from cover and charges the prey, sniping at them with bows is unmanly, doesn't that barbarian have any honor? Well, this is kind of generic, but at some point they will face an actual dilemma, a point where say, the Paladin cannot protect someone without sneaking. This will never due, the barbarian will learn bad ways! The game is ABOUT their dynamic, the situations the GM will come up with are literally going to test that dynamic, again and again. As bonds are resolved and rewritten the dynamic will evolve, but it will always be there.

This seems like a decently interesting character dynamic, but I really don't see why you need specific system for this. The things that make this interesting are not any specific rules, it is their personal beliefs and attitudes.

 

[Malmuria]

I have to say, I see some ultra lightweight 'games' here, and some discussion of certain elements which are used in indie games, but aside from Anti-canon, which is pretty much about SETTING exclusively, I am not sure what makes these specifically about mixing between traditional and story now styles. Certainly there are a few indicates in a couple of them that you COULD perhaps use a front in D&D, or play a Zero Myth game of 5e. Also I don't at all doubt you when you say that there are people actively mixing elements of such games together. TBH I would call DW itself a mix up of D&D traditional themes with PbtA.

Yeah it's not necessarily systematized, and those were just some things that I thought of off the top of my head. And I don't think there is any stated aim of playing dnd in a more story-now sort of way. That is, they aren't examples of games that meet a "story-now" threshold. Rather, it's just what happens when people play a variety of games and mash up their experiences and preferences. There's also a lot of conversations happening on discord, but those are basically impossible to capture because of the way discord works. Some of the games I linked to were from posters (chatters?) in the FKR Collective discord.

I guess what I'm saying is, I would see Indie/Story Now type games as an OUTGROWTH of traditional games to start with. I think it is an error to emphasize rejection of traditional themes and processes as key to new style games vs them more building on what came before. I mean, I started out in 1975 playing D&D, I sure have built on that myself! In fact I LIKE a lot of D&D's paradigm and am probably overly comfortable with it in a lot of ways.

That makes a lot of sense. For me, the arguments around "story-before" makes most sense when I consider some of the games I grew up playing in the 90s (2e dnd and WOD). That is, you can pick up a 90s 2e adventure module like "Dead Gods" and see very clearly all the ways the backstory constrains play. If you try to run it as is it is very railroady.

 

[hawkeyefan]

And as I said before, that's only true if the overall plotline and steps are what's important to you. That is not a given.



What I'm arguing is that often that level of decision is not what someone cares about.



But again, so? If that all doesn't matter to them? That the whole point in the game is to be able to engage with the combat system and interact with other characters, both PCs and NPCs?



My only argument is that at least some of the participants are considering some things mattering more a given, and to a given player that doesn't always follow. As I said, your argument and some others is based on the assumption that the view from on high is the more important one, and its just that--an assumption. It may well be for you, but it does not follow that it does for everyone.

Yeah, I’m not really disagreeing with anything you’re saying here. It’s always about preference.

 

[Ovinomancer]

One has somewhat broader scope, yes. This is what I said ages ago. It is a difference of degree, not of kind.

No, it's a clear difference in kind. One has a premise that's a goal of play "defeat Strahd," the other has a premise that amounts to a genre "play criminals in a haunted city." This aren't differences of degree -- one is about doing a specific thing, the other is about a genre.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The overall arc might have been the same but I bet the details weren't - the in-party interactions, the route(s) taken*, the choices made, the tactics and strategies, the overall approach (e.g. degrees of stealth vs face-charge vs divination vs caution etc.) almost had to have been different.

It's like taking two hockey games, where one was a slow defensive stalemate with lots of grind-'em'down play while the other was an end-to-end up-tempo game with chances galore and great goaltending, and complaining they were the same because the final score in each was 3-2.

* - unless the adventure is very linear; I'm not familiar with RtToEE but I've read (all of) and run (part of) the original, and while it has chokepoints there's lots of room for different approaches and exploration choices between said chokepoints.

No, it's like taking ANY hockey game and saying that the end score is GOING to be 3-2, and then talking about how it matters which teams actually played because of the details of how they managed to get to the ordained end result of 3-2.

 

[pemerton]

Yes. It's just that the games in former category do not exist in practice. Every game has a scope and premise. If in your Prince Valiant game the characters decide that hereditary rights of aristocracy are unjust and fighting and having knigtly quests is dangerous and dumb and harassing non-christians is morally wrong and decide to become pacifist cabbage farmers what then?

Well, there seem to be two possibilities.

(1) The game is over - the PCs no longer have dramatic needs. (Or to put it another way: the players are no longer interested in establishing and exploring dramatic needs for these characters.)

(2) The game takes on a change of focus - Farming and Crafting checks start to loom larger than Riding and Arms checks! My thinking here is influenced both by a certain sort of western (in which farmers are often protagonists) and the late scenes with Lancelot among the peasantry in the film Excalibur.

the fact that the GM often chose or made up those mechanical details in the first place muddies things, as then the question becomes when the GM decides them.

I don't know what you mean here:. Are you saying that there is no difference between the GM writing in their dungeon notes that the Ogre has 20 hp, and the GM deciding to manipulate the hp total of the Ogre on the fly so as to keep it alive despite the damage dealt by the players being sufficient to drop it to zero hp?

GM makes up stuff anyway, and the made up stuff always directs the players to some direction. And as a human being the GM will always have some ideas what would be cool or interesting.

This claim, which I strongly disagree with, reinforces my conjecture as to what you are saying in the previous paragraph.

You seem to be saying that there is no difference between the GM establishing an "arena" for the players to engage with via their PCs (the dungeon/sandbox model) and the GM making stuff up as they go along to conform to their sense of what would make for a good "story" (the DL model; the "guidance" and "manipulation" advocated in The Traveller Book that I quoted upthread). That claim - that there is no difference here - is not plausible. There's a whole conflict-of-schools ("Old School" vs Hickman-esque "New School") that is predicated on it, even before we consider approaches to RPGing that don't conform to either of those schools.

EDIT:

Pretty much none of the things here are stark binaries like you imply, they're muddy spectrums at the best.

The colours blue and red sit on the same spectrum. That's not a reason to deny that they're different.

Maybe that's not a "muddy spectrum"? But if the claim is that everything is really a shade of brown, what's the spectrum?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, it's a clear difference in kind. One has a premise that's a goal of play "defeat Strahd," the other has a premise that amounts to a genre "play criminals in a haunted city." This aren't differences of degree -- one is about doing a specific thing, the other is about a genre.

Still nope. We can easily imagine premises in between these in specificity. "The land is ruled by a horrible Vampire tyrant, what you're gonna do about it?" Or "Play adventurers in a land ruled by a tyrannical Vampire." Those are still the overall concept of Curse of Strahd, though probably more somewhat broader in scope that the AP, if slavishly followed, permits. But now they're far closer to how you described the Blades. It's a spectrum, not a binary.

 

[Ovinomancer]

That's what the rule book says about responding to your players storytelling wants, using published adventures, structuring your own adventures, and using villains. And it seems like a number of posters on here claim to follow what the rule book says to do just fine

Not really, it's what the rulebook throws out as nice soundbite. Is there any advice on how to do this? Tools to use? Structures that aid? No. It's just some pretty words that you're left to figure out on your own while the rest of the book keeps beating the drum about how it's the GM's game, and how to prep (and gives tools for this) things that aren't character focused, and how all of the play examples that are published very much do not do any of this, or even have spaces and options included for areas it might happen. And none of that changes the fact that most play is about solving the GM's plot, which rarely has anything at all to do with the players.