D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Aldarc]

IMO. The initial context 2 posts before (and the direct reply to someone quoting that post) should have been enough to clue you anyone in that I was still referring to the same set of players I was before.

It's not like I went from saying most D&D players to saying all D&D players.

Regardless of what you may believe was obvious from context, I felt that your post was beginning to enroach on my own play preferences in D&D, and it did make me feel uncomfortable. Either way, I don't see how the bold was meant to help matters any at all, but I can most definitely see how that would escalate tension or begin to make things far more personal than need be. And I suspect that there were many ways you could have addressed the point without the part in bold.

 

[Scott Christian]

Do you think railroading is a useful term for a degenerate case of sandbox play? I kind of do.

This gave me pause. But, in the end, I don't. That is a DM saying they are going to play one way and changing their mind. It's a jerk move if the players are not on board with it, but that's all. It's a DM that promoted sandbox play and then shifted to an adventure path. The terms to define this are already there. @pemerton stated them, and defined them.

 

[Campbell]

I just do not see what use normative language brings to a discussion of technique. It does not actually say anything useful about the impact of those techniques.

Most D&D players are irrelevant in conversation between individual players and GMs on these boards.

 

[Ovinomancer]

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.

You're arguing about the color of the scenery, saying maybe some of the colors could be changed, but still acknowledging that the scenery is otherwise the same. I mean, you just asked how the characters would feel about the same wickets that they have to go through if they were completely different characters! This is the point I was making, and you've helped make it -- you've imagined different characters, but they're doing and encountering the same exact things! They were interchangeable from the point of the game -- nothing changes to suit them. You're imagining some different colors on parts of the scenery and not even noticing that it doesn't change regardless of the characters on stage!

 

[FrogReaver]

Regardless of what you may believe was obvious from context, I felt that your post was beginning to enroach on my own play preferences in D&D, and it did make me feel uncomfortable.

It should be clear by now that wasn't my intent. We can go back and forth all day about whether I should have added some clarification into the post or whether you should have picked up on the immediate context. I don't think that's going to go anywhere.

 

[Ovinomancer]

This is where DM prep comes in. It does not say it in the AP - because the AP is an outline.

I sincerely did not mean it as a value judgement. I meant it as, perhaps the DMs I know and myself run APs quite differently than many other DMs I have seen. I have watched DMs run the APs by the book. It's fun for most players. I have also watched DMs run an AP based off decisions, actions, backstory, and even spoken thoughts of other players. I apologize, but I have not read Storm King's Thunder. (I have always wanted to be a player, so avoided the temptation. ) But, running Icewind Dale, we had a Duergar in our group. We were plotting how to scout/attack the Keep at Caer-Dineval. The player player playing the duergar mentioned a few things about what should be there. No rolls. No asking the DM. Just: I am a player who is from this region and of that culture - this is what I know. And voila, the DM took the time to add it in. That is why I asked about prep. It took time to do that.

And regarding your hit or miss stuff, my guess is you are your own worst critic. Seeing how much knowledge you have, I doubt anything you build is an actual miss.

No, APs are not meant as outlines. That's not how they sell themselves. They sell themselves as complete adventures. You can run them straight out from the book, or at least that's the claim. There's nothing in the APs that tell you that you have to fill in all the blanks. What you're doing is smuggling in your own expectations and assumptions. I tend to tear published adventures apart and put them back together, but I don't pretend that this is the assumed mode of interaction. The idea that characters are interchangeable in APs is not solved by suggesting that the GM can add whatever, though, because, again, the outline of the adventure still doesn't care about who the characters are. You are not going to change this fact by adding a bit of character color here and there. The "outline" of CoS doesn't change if you have a barbarian vs a paladin playing, even if you add a few bits of color unique to each. Strahd is still the bad guy, his motivations do not change, and the fact that you have to go through him to escape doesn't change.

 

[FrogReaver]

I just do not see what use normative language brings to a discussion of technique. It does not actually say anything useful about the impact of those techniques.

Most D&D players are irrelevant in conversation between individual players and GMs on these boards.

It highlights that many people are looking for a different experience than you are. That they value different things. That the things they value aren't even registering for some posters because those posters value different things.

 

[Campbell]

It highlights that many people are looking for a different experience than you are. That they value different things. That the things they value aren't even registering for some posters because those posters value different things.

Then say that instead of the other thing please. You can do this just as well by speaking to your own preferences. If I'm trying to have a conversation with you the only people whose preferences matter are mine and yours. No one is discussing what all D&D play should look like. Those of us on the periphery certainly do not need to be constantly reminded that we are in fact on the periphery unless the intent is to show us that our experiences, perspectives, and insights do not matter.

Why can't we all just speak for ourselves without appealing to the undefined masses?

 

[hawkeyefan]

So in your view are DW and Dnd radically different games or quite similar, such that you could run a dnd game with dw principles very easily?

I don’t think it’s a simple yes or no answer, really.

The D&D 5e rules are presented in such an uncertain way. So much is left up to interpretation and/or preference. So there are several ways to approach play and the books don’t offer any kind of unified vision. In fact, they actively support this; offering multiple ways and even presenting what I would say is at times contradictory advice.

Dungeon World doesn’t do that. It presents a specific way to play. All the advice presented in the form of bast practices and principles is in service of that one way to play.

So if we look at D&D given its lack if focus, we can say yes, a given GM/group can incorporate practices/techniques that are more like Dungeon World. But does that make D&D the same as Dungeon World? Definitely not. There’s still too much about the structure of play in D&D that prevents that.

So although I think a GM can run D&D with some DW principles or techniques, it can’t get all the way there. There are some differences that I don’t think can be bridged.

 

[Blue]

My point is that for something as big as this - an Elvish realm - the player(s) could and should have known of it via the existence of a setting map long before things got to this point.

Which merely raises the question that if it's not to be disclosed then why would Throndor a) know of it and-or b) disclose it? You're replacing one disconnect with another.

Many's the time I've encountered situations both as player and DM where had something been known of sooner it would have changed prior actions. A very small-scale example might be forgetting to narrate the existence of a table in the middle of a room where a combat takes place, then on mentioning it afterwards being told how that knowledge would have changed actions x, y and z during the combat. In my view there's no such thing as retcons; instead a mistake like this invalidates that entire scenario and thus should simply never happen.

Contradicting established fiction isn't good no matter what the situation, I think we agree there.

What I'm talking about is a bit fuzzier, where the "new" fiction doesn't directly contradict anything established but is still something that really should have been established much sooner in the campaign, or before it even started, so that players both in and out of character could plan around it.

The argument here is whether something's been established or not, which is again tangential at best to what I'm after; that being whether something new (and not secret in the fiction) being established would have caused different things to happen in play had it been known about sooner.

These are not universal truths. They fit great in how many play a game like D&D. In a PbtA game, where everyone (including the GM) "plays to find out", defining that much ahead of time is counter to some of the concepts of the game.

Looking at the Gamemastering Principles of DW, the very first one is: "Draw Maps, Leave Blanks". Here's what the SRD says:

Draw maps, leave blanks
Dungeon World exists mostly in the imaginations of the people playing it; maps help everyone stay on the same page. You won’t always be drawing them yourself, but any time there’s a new location described make sure it gets added to a map.

When you draw a map don’t try to make it complete. Leave room for the unknown. As you play you’ll get more ideas and the players will give you inspiration to work with. Let the maps expand and change.

Gamemastering – Dungeon World SRD

In that type of game, what you are describing is against how it is supposed to be run. The Principles are much stronger than DMing advice from the DMG, they are basically rules for GMs where breaking them is akin to cheating just as much as a player fudging their dice in D&D is.

None of this a critique of D&D. Just exposure to the fact that other styles of games explicitly do not follow some of the assumptions D&D does.