D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Lanefan]

Every D&D character has this power: they use it to determine whether or not Orcs dodge or parry; whether or not they sneeze or trip while casting their spells; whether or not flies and mosquitoes sting them while they are climbing walls, etc.

EDIT, for clarity: or alternatively, no one supposes the fact that no D&D caster ever sneezes while casting a spell, and hence fails entails that in the world of D&D sneezing is voluntary, and the no one supposes that the fact that no thief ever fell from a wall because, in spite of all their skills, a bee stung them just as they were reaching for a vital handhold entails that thieves have magical control over bees.

Can't speak for anyone else here but in my game both those things are eminently possible as explanations for a caster fumbling a spell and a thief failing to climb a wall, respectively.

So why would anyone suppose that I recall that X coupled with a process for determining that that recollection is accurate entails that the character was causally responsible for X?

If it's recollection of past knowledge (e.g. the relevance of Count Augustus to the place the PCs are now in), no problem. The character isn't suddenly creating Count Augustus to become part of the fiction; rather she's taking two pieces of established fiction (1 - there once was a guy called Count Augustus who they've heard of before, and 2 - the place the PCs are now in) and trying to tie them together.

If it's recollection of a setting element (e.g. the location of a Dwarven forge) that's more controversial due to different systems putting control of setting elements in the hands of the GM, the players, or nobody in particular; because if successful this adds something to the setting that wasn't there (or wasn't known of) before.

There's also the question of whether the player is trying to gain an advantage of some sort. With the Count Augustus piece this is fairly unlikely as this info is probably neutral to the players' interests and they're simply trying to connect some dots, while with the Dwarven forge piece it's guaranteed as it's already known the players need a forge to fix their Pally's armour and it's very much in their interest to have one somewhere nearby.

 

[Lanefan]

There's not plot in these, and the GMs aren't directly to make specific events happen to serve a plot, so that line of being a railroad is out. Instead, these are straight up map and key dungeons for the most part.

In and of themselves yes, but most DMs IME would wrap at least some backstory around them to give the PCs a reason to go there. That backstory may or may not sever some bigger plot the DM has in mind.

I actually can't speak to Saltmarsh as I'm not familiar with it, but the first three and ToEE are all map and key dungeoncrawls. Can they be railroads? Sure, a GM could turn them into one, but the nature of the these modules do not require it. In fact, Classic play, which is an approach where you can avoid Force, is based on this kind of map and key dungeon. The dungeon is fixed, nothing in it is changed to force an outcome, and the GM is adjudicating what's keyed with what the players do with their PCs. Player input, action declarations, and system say do not have to be overruled at all, and, in fact, are expected to be strongly honored and enforced.

Saltmarsh is quite different, in that while it has a brief dungeoncrawling element the overall theme much more revolves around stumbling into and then solving a mystery.

 

[Lanefan]

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?

Ideally they are 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.

I've played through L1 Secret of Bone Hill twice and also DMed it twice, and those four runs each played out very differently based on several factors:
--- the degree of 'gonzo' vs caution among the players and-or PCs
--- the exploratory approach taken in-character (there's numerous ways into that thing, some much safer than others)
--- the routes taken once inside
--- what was found and-or missed both in terms of areas and items

Yes the same rooms held the same things etc. each time but so what - the general run of play was different, and that's what matters to me.

 

[Lanefan]

The character isn't determining whether or not the Forge exists. The character is wracking their memory. The die roll determines whether they remember something interesting and/or useful.

Except in the original example given by @Manbearcat every possible roll result did confirm the existence of the forge, meaning that it was in fact written in by the player through simply declaring the action of trying to remember/look for it.

Had one of the bad-roll options been that the PC was mistaken and that, in the setting, there is no forge in this area then this isn't nearly as much of an issue.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes, and also a bit no. I can take a completely pawn stance character through an AP and it doesn't change versus a deep backstory, carefully considered character. The play at the table will be different, yes, in tone and execution of characterizations, but the arc of the play will have the same beats in roughly the same places and timings.

And why does anything except the bolded bit matter?

The play at the table is the point of the exercise, isn't it?

 

[FrozenNorth]

It feels like these two different ways of running it would result in two very different games (and the disagreement between some of those posting on each side seems to back that up) and would give the players very different levels of authorial/narrative control.

Very good points, and they prompt some reflections.

First, while overall, I prefer and recommend principle-based design over rule-based design, this does abut upon one of the challenges of principle-based design: it is more open to being interpreted in very different ways even by good-faith individuals.

Second, the more “interesting and useful” is interpreted to limit player narrative control and to allow the GM to interpret the result creatively, the more it resembles a more improv-heavy D&D game.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Which things change. This shouldn't be hard, just look in the AP and see where it says "if paladin then A, if barbarian then B." You seem to be pointing out that the characters are different. I'm talking about the adventure. It doesn't care if a barbarian or a paladin shows up.

Only if you are interpreting an AP game as effectively tying the GMs hands on how to run it. That isn’t what APs do, and another poster has quoted the relevant sections of the GMG to that effect.

An AP without a GM is just a book.

To directly answer your query (which is difficult, as saying “a paladin” isn’t particularly specific), take a LG Oath of Devotion paladin. A bog standard archetype.

Storm King’s Thunder is all about the upending of the traditional order due to the disappearance of the Storm King. Lots of potential resonance for a character built around the ideal of feudalism. Earlier in the AP, the idea of the ordning is introduced. What does the paladin think of this as a concept? Is he OK with the lower orders having no opportunity to rise at all? When they meet the lower order giants in chapter 4, maybe have one of the hill giants rail about how unfair the whole system is (while still being villainous). How does the paladin feel about that? In a later chapter, the adventurers face off against stone giants. Although their leader is evil, the stone giants believe that she has received the voice of their god and they are bound to follow their leader. Seems like a paladin could relate with that reasoning. They may view a particular stone giant as an Honourable Foe.

But that is a bit of an obvious choice. How about an Oath of the Ancients paladin, a Green Knight? The hill giants are consuming everything in their path. The knight will see an enormous area of environmental despoilation around the hill giant stead. How will they react to this? Will this affect their willingness to show mercy to the hill giants that were “just following orders”? The theme can be revisited with the fire giants, which are the most technologically advanced giants. Think Saruman’s tower, but on a grand scale. Now the duel between the fire giant king and the paladin is nature v. technology.

Obviously, details will vary depending on the actual characters in the campaign.

 

[FrogReaver]

Second, the more “interesting and useful” is interpreted to limit player narrative control and to allow the GM to interpret the result creatively, the more it resembles a more improv-heavy D&D game.

Which seems to explain why I see so many similarities between story now and non-AP styles of D&D play.

 

[Aldarc]

As Dungeon World seems to be a central point of discussion, would it be helpful to link to the Dungeon World SRD? Here are the pages on Moves and Gamemastering, which people may find useful to read through.

• Moves
• Gamemastering

This is quite a reductive view of fiction! Take any story--A Tale of Two Cities, Star Wars, Parable of the Sower--keep the setting and the minor characters, but change the protagonists. Give them different personalities, motivations, and skill sets. Would the story change in a pretty fundamental way? Probably!

In an RPG, and adventure path provides some of the elements of a story, but it is incomplete. To make it complete, it requires characters. Who those characters are, the choices they make, and who they become can significantly alter the end story. How and the degree to which the adventure changes will depend on the style and temperament of the group.

It would be like describing Lord of the Rings by saying "Well there was this evil ring and yada yada yada some people (doesn't matter who, could've been anybody) threw it in a fire and the world was saved." The journey is the whole story!

A critical difference, IMHO, is that the characters' dramatic needs drive the stories in the works of fiction you listed. Literary stories are written with these characters and their drama in mind. Their lives and desires are often a central point to the unfolding of these stories, and they propel the story forward in ways that create further drama. We can talk, for example, of the dramatic needs of Doctor Manette in Two Cities, Luke and Han in Star Wars, or Lauren in Parable. In Episodes IV-VI, the story takes time to establish and remind us of two personal dramatic beats: Luke's quest to "become a jedi like his father" and Han's unpaid debts to Jabba. These are their dramatic needs, and serious story complications arise from these needs, especially in Episode V (i.e., Luke's true heritage and Jabba's bounty hunters have come to collect) that are finally addressed in Episode VI.

As the protagonist and deuterotagonist respectively to the story, the dramatic needs of characters like Frodo and Aragorn are also important factors that propels LotR forward: e.g., Frodo's quest to destroy the One Ring and Aragorn as the one true heir to the united throne of Gondor and Arnor. Not everyone in LotR is that central or has much of an arc. Tolkien flat out admits, for example, that Legolas grew the absolute least as a character as a result of their journey, and one could feasibly replace Legolas with some other elf, and the story would mostly play out the same.

However, the idea of characters' personal dramatic needs driving the plot forward is a far more questionable claim in the case of adventure path play. I have played no small amount of APs in Pathfinder, 3e, and 5e. Even when roleplaying my characters with integrity, I can't say that my characters' dramatic needs were ever significant to how these APs unfolded. Rise of the Runelords doesn't care about my Ulfen storm druid's conversion at sea or the decisions that led them to Sandpoint. My character's dramatic needs are irrelevant to the AP. It cares that I stop the goblins that are terrorizing Sandpoint and the follow-up plot threads, but it doesn't particularly care why or how about my character. If I played a Keleshite Inquisitor of Sarenrae instead, the aforementioned would still be the AP driving the plot forward moreso than my character's dramatic needs or their personal drives.

My character is a cog in an adventure path machine that doesn't particularly care how I as a player have painted my cog. Put a penny, a dime, a nickle, or a quarter in the device below. Why stop there? Use Euro coins, Japanese yen coins, or fake currencies like Canadian Loonies and Toonies. Will it roll differently and be in different sizes, patterns, or colors? Could one coin end up entering tails side up instead of heads side up? Sure to all these things. But it will still roll, spin, and/or slide towards the hole at the bottom.

Spoiler

Thanks for playing. We're glad you enjoyed the journey. Would you like to play again? Maybe with a different coin this time?

My play experience in a video game like Guild Wars 2 will be different if I pick an Asura Necromancer rather than a Charr Engineer, but it's still a linear story where my characters' motivations and drives are basically ignored and subsummed in favor of the meta-plot: i.e., unite the three orders and defeat the Elder Dragon Zhaitan. At a certain point, my character's arc becomes the same no matter which character I picked at the start. I was running my partner through the Titansgrave: Ashes of Valkana AP for Green Ronin's Fantasy AGE system. I had played T:AoV before, and I have run it twice now. Though the details change here and there with the different parties over the years, the overall story, plot, and arcs are essentially the same. There are ways to hook characters into the AP, but that basically involves hooking players to pre-authored backstory, which is not the same as play propelled by a character's dramatic needs. I will also point out that my partner liked the playing the AP, in part, essentially because of its Story Before nature. They are enamored with playing video games like KOTOR/SWTOR, so an AP feels like second nature.

All that said, that the play experience of an AP would differ with another set of characters is a banal assertion that misses the actual issue at stake. Did you also know if that I had rolled differently throughout the game with that same character that the play experience could also have unfolded differently? Or that if we played a game with different players - even with the same characters! - that the play experience would also be different too? Or that one player's psychological state from one session to a next may impact play? Or that if I as a GM had roleplayed the same NPC differently that the PCs would have done something differently? Or that the game could have been different if the party took a right turn rather than a left turn in the hallway?

What does pointing out any of this stuff meant to prove or establish? In general, I feel like pointing out that changing out the characters has an effect on the play experience has the same profundity as asserting the myriad ways that causality exists in a technical sense while either ignoring or failing to address the actual issue that is at stake: i.e., a play experienced propelled by the dramatic needs of the characters is different from one where the dramatic needs of characters is marginalized or orthogonal to that play. What purpose is served by trying to obfuscate that point with the banalities about different characters resulting in differences of color?

APs present themselves as an Adventure Path, and this is also a self-coined endonym. (The Wikipedia article claims that it was first used by the adventures starting with The Sunless Citadel.) This is fine IMO. I'm not trashing APs here. APs can be great fun. But let's not pretend that the focus of their play experience is even remotely concerned with the dramatic needs of the characters or that this is what propels these games forward. If I want my character's dramatic needs to be a part of play and I know the GM wants to run an AP, then I will probably shelf that character concept for a later game and either create a new character concept or dust-off a previously shelved one for that works for play in that AP and whose enjoyment thereof will not necessarily be impinged by the nature of AP play.

---------

I apologize if this all feels unfairly framed around your post. The conversation as of the past decade of pages have felt, to me at least, as some people trying to paint with broad strokes that these games are virtually the same or similar enough that we should ignore some key differences between them. If that's not what you, yes you, dear Reader!, feel as if you are doing, then feel free to dismiss my rambling with a wave of your hands. I'm only conveying my own jaded sentiment as I have slogged through this thread trying to play catch-up while juggling the myriad of tangents and sub-tangents. But I also don't think that this broad-stroke painting does justice to either the respective games discussed or even to particular games, such as D&D 5e, which entertains a divergent set of potential campaign styles under its umbrella.

If we were to ignore Story Now, Dungeon World, or this nonsense discussion about quantum forges and look exclusively at D&D 5e, then there would likely be minimal contention that the play experience of a sandbox game would be different than an adventure path, including in terms of the role and expectations of the Player Characters as well as those of the GM. The dramatic needs of my character is far likelier to propel play forward in a 5e Sandbox game than a 5e Adventure Path game. One reason for this is obviously because PCs in sandbox games are expected to be more proactive and drive play with their own goals. But simply establishing the rote point that the play experiences for either of these 5e games would also differ with a different set of characters does nothing, IMHO, to enrich that conversation about the playstyle differences between APs and Sandbox games or why/when I should consider running/playing one campaign style versus another. It's just utterly baffling to me that if we were talking about Sandbox vs. AP play, then these key points of difference between the two playstyles would be mostly accepted as a given - with a large amount of users in these forums and in our hobby having talked about those differences - but now that we are talking about Story Now or [insert other game here] that suddenly everyone is now supposed to pretend that those same character issues surrounding AP play are somehow non-existent.

This is entire conversation is becoming a real mind-blowing WTF moment of topsy-turvydom for me.

But the darkness has pass'd
And it's daylight at last
And the night has been long
Ditto ditto my song!
And thank goodness they're both of them over!

 

[FrogReaver]

Yes. A LARP is not all about fiction and authorship. Nor is a football game. Or actually climbing a wall. Or me typing this message.

But I'm talking about (table top, D&D-style) RPGs in which all the content is imagined.

IMO Most D&D players want nothing to do with authorship. At least not on any level beyond, I swing my sword at that orc. I try to look intimidating to that goblin. I search for a secret door. I move to block the door.

That's the limits of the authorship powers they want and that's very similar to the limits of authorship powers in LARPing.