D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Ovinomancer]

I don't think you're lying, but I think I'll hear it from Campbell before I believe you've got it right.

Sure, he liked my post, though.

 

[Ovinomancer]

When you make it a line of discussion with you is useless--and you've done it more than once now--you shouldn't be surprised if I consider it useless.

You mean the line where you suggested I was trivializing play people like, and where I made that useless by pointing out that I do, in fact, like and engage in that exact play? Yes, I can see how that might be frustrating for you when I didn't conform to the box you wanted to put me in.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

And it seems some pay more attention to the final score while others are more interested in how it gets there.

The former are probably supporters of one of the teams involved, while the latter are simply hockey fans with no real vested interest in the outcome of this particular game - they just want to see good hockey.

It's the same with a D&D adventure. Which matters more - the end-result outcome or the intricacies of play involved in getting there?

And the answer may well depend on which side of the screen you're on: the DM is naturally going to pay more attention to the end-result outcome (as this can/will affect the ongoing campaign) while the players are more likely to pay attention to the run of play at the time and let the ongoing campaign take care of itself.

 

[Lanefan]

I'd note that DW play sheets (classes) are heavily centered on the characterization provided too. For example the Paladin starts with these moves:

4. Lay On Hands - Heals wounds, but its risky, they could transfer to you instead! Nice way to easily take a risk for another, which is a pretty common theme here.

Apropos of nothing else, this is a really cool variant on what is otherwise a pretty bland ability in D&D. I like it!

 

[pemerton]

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.

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.

I get exactly what @hawkeyefan and @Ovinomacer are saying.

Drawing comparisons to other media is always fraught, but I'll try.

In a Roger Moore James Bond film, nothing turns on who James Bond is as a person. Any tough "secret" agent would be equally substitutable. But this isn't true for (say) the Bourne Identity; nor, at least at their best, for the Daniel Craig Bond films.

The point is even easier to make if we move out of adventure films - you can't replace Rick in Casablanca with some other arbitrary bar-tender (eg Tom Cruise's character in Cocktail) and get anything like the same story.

Of course replacing the wild and flamboyant chaos sorcerer with the gruff mercenary fighter with a heart of gold will change the colour of play - the characterisation will change, certain action declarations will be different - but the overall content and trajectory of the story remains the same. As far as I can see that's inherent in playing through an AP.

If the GM is bending everything to create a path to Dark Clouds, then they are asserting story authority, authorial control over the direction of the plot and content of the game. It is a moot point if the players have 'autonomy over character action' if the only situations they are presented with are designed to inevitably give them no real option except Dark Clouds! And make no mistake, this is exactly what happens, and its exactly why the whole 'AP' type of setup is almost inevitably going to lead to some measure of GM assertion of authority, because you have only certain finite material in your AP and it needs to be engaged.

So, given that we are hardly going to give up on the idea of pre-written adventures, at least for most people engaging in RPG play, there would seem to be a need for a way to avoid this pitfall!

<snip>

Honestly, I think it is REALLY not that easy to generate adventures in a Story Now paradigm. At least not complex or extensive ones.

I agree. When I look at successful scenarios deliberately intended for "story now" play - I'm thinking of some for Prince Valiant, especially but not only Greg Stafford's, and also some Robin Laws ones for HeroWars - they present a single situation. Everything else is part of framing. The framing may be extended - for instance, it may involve action declarations which affect how certain NPCs engage with the PCs at the climax - but it is framing, not a thematically determinative climax.

This is not trivial to pull off, as a design specification. As I've posted before, in the Prince Valiant Episode Book Jerry Grayson pulls it off (in The Crimson Bull) whereas Mark Rein-Hagen's contribution to the same volume is a railroad as written.

There is always the risk that something happens in the framing parts of the situation that trigger a "premature" climax. That's just a risk that has to be taken, I think.

 

[FrogReaver]

The things I find interesting or like about the Story Now approach:

1. There's actually quite a bit of backstory involved. There's the setting, many PC-NPC relationships, the genre, player goals, etc.
2. However, there are many backstory elements left blank to be filled in later during the course of play.
3. I really like the notion of being able to jump to the action via the GM advice coupled with the mechanics seems to provide as this provides a nice pacing ( pacing is important to me).
4. The ability to generate content on the fly is a big win (less prep required).
5. Potential for simple resolutions to generate a large amount of fiction (helps with pacing)

The things I find indifference about with the Story Now approach:

1. Transparent Mechanics and resolution processes (could care less about this).

The things I dislike about the Story Now approach:

1. Limited tactical and strategic considerations on the fiction level. In a traditional RPG your tactical choices can make an encounter much easier or harder. In a Story Now RPG your success or failure is decided without respect to your specific in fiction tactical choices. (at least as I understand the games).
2. The ability to author fiction outside my immediate character (possibly not present in all story now games, but certainly in many).

That's probably not an exhaustive list but it seems like a good springboard.

 

[pemerton]

Why does any particular feature of RPG's exist? It is just a way of structuring a game. There is a function, deciding the fiction content of the next scene, which is going to be accomplished in SOME way. One way is to have a designated 'scene content generating person'. There are obvious implications to that, as there would be to say rotating that position on some sort of basis (say after each scene ends). One issue with players taking the role usually assigned to a GM is the Czege Principle. That is, its hard to make a scene that has any tension in it where the author of the scene is also directly involved as one of the participants resolving whatever conflict it represents. Reserving that position for a specially designated participant, and having that participant forego playing a PC, obviates that issue. It brings a different perspective to the table. This is not to say that collective story telling games cannot work, and they could be Story Now (probably would tend to be). That is just clearly a bit different category of game, and one that, so far, has not proven to be popular with game designers, though I guess there have been a few experiments here and there.

Related to this: a friend and I have started a BW game together where we each have a PC, and each is in charge of framing and consequence generation for the other. So far we're only one session in, but it seemed to work at least for that session.

 

[pemerton]

I would say this, if you were to build a Middle Earth Story Now game, I don't think you would center it on the War of the Ring, or at least on the Fellowship of sketched in areas.

I did build a story-now MERP/LotR game, using MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. The details are here.

The only fellowship character was Gandalf - who perhaps turns out to be a bit over-powered, or at least dominant in play, when played without regard for the consequences of using magic (which mechanically consist in building up the Doom Pool, leading in turn to GM opportunities to spend 2d12 to end the scene).

The way we started was by me asking each player to tell us all why their PC had come to Rivendell. That gave us some starting ideas - Orcs in the North, from where rumours of a recovered Palantir (presumably the one that was lost at Forochel) were also coming.

The main thing I discovered - fairly early on, and building on experience in another Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy game plus thinking through some of the published MHRP examples - is that to get a LotR feel you need to use Scene Distinctions as "opposition" - for instance, if the PCs are pursuing the Orcs then there is a In Pursuit of Orcs scene distinction, and to catch the Orcs the players have to wear down that distinction - by declaring actions that target it (eg running fast, or in Gandalf's case using his magic to slow the Orcs, by reaching out through the Palantir they were carrying and sowing dissension) - before the scene is closed off by me (as GM) spending 2d12 from the Doom Pool.

The prep I did for this game consisted in (i) rereading bits of LotR and my Complete Guide to Middle Earth, (ii) writing up the PCs, (iii) writing up some NPCs (Orcs, Trolls, Nazgul, Saruman, etc), (iv) preparing some ideas for Scene Distinctions in places like Ost-in-Edhel (they didn't go their originally, but passed through there when pursuing Saruman's Orcs south), and (v) writing up some artefacts (a Palantir, a Lesser RIng) which seemed like they would be relevant to play.

Of course the game has a tremendous amount of setting backstory, but it is not backstory-first in its play: it's situation-first, with the backstory providing genre and colour that can be leveraged as part of the process of declaring actions, establishing Assets and Resources, etc.

Despite the Gandalf issue I've enjoyed it, and would happily come back to it if others in my group were happy to. (It's one of about half-a-dozen of our more-or-less active games.)

 

[pemerton]

I am not quite sure what I'm supposed to do with this ground-breaking observation that a writer of an adventure path who has never met me or even heard of me, who wrote the module years before I made my character, might not have perfectly incorporated the unique backstory of my character into the adventure.

One thing you're being invited to do, I think, is to observe how - given the fact you've pointed out - playing an AP might be different, in certain reasonably specifiable ways, from other well-known approaches to RPGing. And perhaps also that it might be useful to have some terminology to talk about the differences of method, the differences of experience, etc that flow from this.

 

[Aldarc]

It's an argument, but since I'm in a AP at the moment where what the poster described is not happening, the question comes down to "Is this a necessity of that style and we're somehow special snowflakes that avoid it, or is it an artifact of that style interacting badly with some people who simply shouldn't be playing in it because they're not motivated enough by themselves to avoid that?" The latter can come across as kind of critical, but I'm really seriously having trouble believing we're such focused roleplayers that we can somehow maintain that sort of thing where others can't (especially since I'm old and frankly off my game a fair bit and I manage).

And you haven't considered that other viable alternative explanations could exist apart from the one explanation that require you to condescendingly cast aspersions at other people's roleplaying or GMing?

Basically, the question I have to ask is "Is it necessary for for the actions of the PCs to really change the results of a campaign for someone to be able to stay in character while participating in it and not just treat it as an extended wargame?" And the answer I have to give in terms of watching a rather lot of people play in games over the years that did not have any longterm thrust at all is "No." At that point I have to conclude that these are a mix of general failure states (people who don't focus on their characterization at all consistently--token play has existed since the start of the hobby) and people who need more engagement with what's going on to be able to do so. But I have no reason to believe the latter is particularly a common case, and to the degree the first is, it doesn't care what kind of game is going on.

I think that you are adding some needless leading assumptions in your questions that are skewing your conclusions.