D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[prabe]

I'm sorry. But this is wrong on sooooooo many levels. If that is how you think an adventure path works... well, let's just say that makes your previous arguments much clearer.

So, @Ovinomancer and I disagree about much, but we agree on this.

This:

The point is that the same challenge exists the same regardless of the characters, and however it's overcome, the next one in line does as well. The challenges the game presents care nothing for what characters are present in the scene or what motivations those characters have.

exactly matches my experience of AP play--and at least one of the two GMs I've played APs with was trying to adapt them to fit the players at the table. It seems to me as though a published adventure would by necessity be unable to care which characters (or players) were involved, because the author/s would have to write to include more or less every possible character.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Agreed. I asked it many pages ago, phrased as 'what are the implications?'

At this point, I'm not sure trying to define these terms universally really has good effort to reward value.

The only practical use I have seen is to easily talk about play style so that you can decide if you want to join a certain game or not.

This is a so-called “golden opening”, so I am going to jump in here.

A consistent and limited definition of GM Force is useful to me as a GM if it either acts as a spur to my own GMing efforts or to articulate my experiences with other GMs.

So, taking a definition where GM Force is strictly overruling a player’s action declaration or backstory, or actively disregarding a system rule after its been applied.

I can then say to myself as a DM: “Hmm, this action I am contemplating may be construed as GM Force. In this instance, is that the best approach? Is there another approach that is better here?”

That is also why a definition of GM Force that makes virtually every act in an AP to be GM Force is useless to me. There is no opportunity to improve your game, just black and white.

 

[Scott Christian]

So, @Ovinomancer and I disagree about much, but we agree on this.

This:

exactly matches my experience of AP play--and at least one of the two GMs I've played APs with was trying to adapt them to fit the players at the table. It seems to me as though a published adventure would by necessity be unable to care which characters (or players) were involved, because the author/s would have to write to include more or less every possible character.

I guess this goes back to a discussion on these boards a long time ago. It discussed how much prep DMs do, and for some running an AP, they said 5-10 minutes. When I stated most I know did hours, they were flabbergasted. They questioned how it was possible. This makes things a little clearer now.

 

[pemerton]

And you're not deciding whether he dodged, either. The die decided that. But there's still a direct cause-and-effect from what you did to the result.

Likewise in Spout Lore: the direct cause-and-effect is from trying to remember to remembering.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I'm sorry. But this is wrong on sooooooo many levels. If that is how you think an adventure path works... well, let's just say that makes your previous arguments much clearer.

Sure. Let me ask, though, what changes are made to the adventure of, say, Storm King's Thunder, if you have a paladin in the party vice a barbarian? Does the plot change? Which scenes change? Does a motivation change for an NPC? Or are all of these the same?

I've run Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil three times for three very different sets of players, much less their characters. Nothing in the adventure changed -- not a single Fane, not a single NPC. Same thing, from the book. Nothing changed. Didn't matter a whit which characters showed up, the adventure was the same. The details of what was in the adventure were the same. I mean, one group had a character that said "yeet!" to the naga in the water(?) fane and died a hilarious death that stuck with me. When that player brought in a completely different replacement character, nothing in the adventure book changed.

 

[prabe]

I guess this goes back to a discussion on these boards a long time ago. It discussed how much prep DMs do, and for some running an AP, they said 5-10 minutes. When I stated most I know did hours, they were flabbergasted. They questioned how it was possible. This makes things a little clearer now.

The GM I'm thinking of who was trying to adjust the APs he was running to suit the table, took longer to prep a session than I do, and I run entirely homebrew adventures. So ... A) maybe you were jumping to conclusions not consistent with reality, and B) maybe, between not caring for the experience as a player and finding them harder to prep as a GM, it's clear why I don't run AP-style adventures.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I guess this goes back to a discussion on these boards a long time ago. It discussed how much prep DMs do, and for some running an AP, they said 5-10 minutes. When I stated most I know did hours, they were flabbergasted. They questioned how it was possible. This makes things a little clearer now.

I usually spend many hours of prep for each session of an AP, because they generally suck and I prefer to rewrite the parts that use huge Force or outright railroading to make them more palatable. I'm running the starter set adventure for Aliens RPG this Sunday, and I've already put in two hours reading the module and have started my rewrites for the parts that are just Force to make them work better with my style. Your suppositions are incorrect.

 

[pemerton]

There isn't anything sacrosanct about structuring the authorship. But a lot of people apparently think there's a big difference between swinging a sword vs. a secret door or forge appearing on a map. If a lot of people see a difference between things... it kind of feels like there might be one. Even if it's one you don't care about.

Sure. The difference is that most people are playing a game in which learning the secrets of the map is important but there is no game of learning the secrets of the Orc's ability to dodge.

I have a set of choose-your-own-adventure/FFG-style books called (I think) Assassin. As the reader/player, your PC knows various martial arts techniques chosen from a list. And there is a rocks-paper-scissors aspect to combat resolution: you have to choose the right technique to avoid or circumvent your foe's techniques. It's very comparable to discerning the secrets of the map.

If the D&D combat system looked like that, rather than was dice-roll based, then someone who introduced a roll-to-hit combat system would be just as "radical" as the Spout Lore approach to recollection is for those who are familiar with D&D's map-and-key approach to establishing geography and architecture.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So White Plume Mountain, Against the Giants, Tomb of Horrors, Sinister Secrets of Saltmarsh, Temple of Elemental Evil... all those were not railroading under this definition?

The majority of play back then was through modules. That is how people learned, especially because there were no videos and a limited number of game stores.

Uh, no. There was an enormous amount of nonmodule play in the early days. A lot of it was simple home-grown dungeons, but there was still plenty of it. I never actually saw a module in use during my entire time in early D&D, and that wasn't just in local groups.

It may not have been true wherever you started playing, but an awful lot of people on the West Coast learned from game clubs, conventions or other methods that were not entirely dependent on teach yourself. There were large game populaces pretty early at least in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco.

 

[pemerton]

And you're not deciding whether he dodged, either. The die decided that.

So why are you, @Crimson Longinus and others denying this in relation to the Dwarven Forge example?