D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Ovinomancer]

Not at all. You run the AP with different characters and different players, you are going to get meaningful differences.

The fact that these differences aren’t meaningful to you explains why you believe what you do, but it doesn’t make the differences any less meaningful.

You may feel like i’m just changing the colour of the drapes, but I feel like I’m going to Paris twice and you’re responding”Why go a second time? You’ve already been to that destination!”

You get differences, but the AP doesn't care. The differences come out of the random number generators and how the players choose to engage the rather fixed challenges of the AP. The AP doesn't change, though. This is actually a major selling point for AP -- you can bring whatever characters you want to! If this isn't evidence enough that characters are interchangeable, I don't know what is. But, instead of acknowledging this, we get the argument wanting to talk about how a different character couldn't have created the exact play of a completed AP with this other character in it. This is moving the goalposts to insisting that interchangeable characters is about creating the exact same play report. It's not. It's that I can bring any character I want (they are interchangeable) and the AP runs the same way. The details of the outcomes may be the same, but the arcs of play and the story beats are the same regardless of what character is actually present in a given game.

I mean, here, I'll put if very simply: The party I played CoS with was a dwaven fighter/rogue, a firbolg druid, a human cleric, an elven wizard, and a human barbarian. We recovered the Raven token, found and recruited the ally, and got the sunsword. We faced and defeated Strahd! Now, your turn (or anyone else) -- provide your party that completed CoS and say if you also did these things.

 

[soviet]

Not at all. You run the AP with different characters and different players, you are going to get meaningful differences.

The fact that these differences aren’t meaningful to you explains why you believe what you do, but it doesn’t make the differences any less meaningful.

You may feel like i’m just changing the colour of the drapes, but I feel like I’m going to Paris twice and you’re responding”Why go a second time? You’ve already been to that destination!”

Let's accept meaningful. What about 'shockingly different'?

I suggest that a Story Now version of LotR with different characters would be 'shockingly different'. Let's say we begin with the Council of Elrond as the stated-upfront premise and backstory of the game.

No Frodo PC? No Bilbo and Gollum as former ringbearers. No Gandalf? No Saruman or Eagles. No Aragorn or Boromir? No Denethor, succession drama, or last stand of Minas Tirith. No Legolas and Gimli? No Moria, no Lothlorien, no theme of division between the races. No Merry and Pippin? Uhh...

If we swap in Bob the Lizardman and Jane the angel summoner for two of these characters in adventure path LotR, sure maybe we have a social etiquette faux pas in Rivendell but also sneak through Moria successfully. Maybe the quest fails, or succeeds more easily.

In Story Now LotR, having Bob the Lizardman in the game might introduce a trip to the East where we witness the oppression of his people and try to recruit them into the war. Having Jane the angel summoner in the game might bring in lots of detail about the Maia and efforts to get them to provide a backdoor into the Undying Lands where we can learn about Sauron's secret fatal allergy to wheat from the Numenorean chef who cooked for him in the Second Age.

Maybe this campaign isn't as good. Maybe noone here would like it. But it would certainly be different because it would be driven by the story needs of wholly different characters. Maybe we end up with Sauron's negotiated surrender, maybe we end up with Dark Queen Galadriel, maybe we team up with the baddies to wipe out the real enemy, the Sackville-Bagginses.

Can an adventure path accommodate all these things?

 

[soviet]

I say 'maybe it won't be as good' in all seriousness. I don't dispute that adventure paths have their own strengths including (hopefully) a well-paced structure and lots of ready-made setting detail to explore. I'm not knocking them, they're just different. The long-running campaign I'm a player in is almost entirely adventure paths and modules.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Doesn’t that mean the problem is you?
“I refuse to consider APs as outlines or as anything other than complete adventures”.

This is how their sold, this is their marketing, I'm pointing that out. I just re-read the introduction to Curse of Strahd. It lays out the adventure structure, provides some advice for running gothic horror, and discusses some of the ideas in the adventure. At no point does it ever, not even once, refer to itself as an outline or even describe places where the GM is expected to flesh out the adventure. Go read it for yourself if you doubt me. I also looked at Storm King's Thunder and it, likewise, doesn't refer to itself as an adventure outline nor does it point out areas where the GM is expected to flesh the adventure out. Claiming that this is my problem rather than exactly how the APs present themselves is terribly misplaced -- you're going to need to do some work to show that they are indeed outlines rather than just claiming it.

“I also strongly dislike the fact that APs don’t change based upon the character I play.”

I don't, though, I think it's a strong selling point. It's what lets them be useful to many tables rather, increasing their appeal. And, as I've said, it has a nice social bonding mechanism built in of shared experiences which helps build the customer base.

 

[Nephis]

I think some perspective from the horses' mouths might help here.

@darkbard and @Nephis , I summon you Pikachoo!

When this scene happened in our Dungeon World game as a result of Maraqli's Spout Lore, would you describe it as "a scene edit?"

If you would/could, answer that question from two different perspectives:

1) Would you describe it as a "scene edit" mechanically? I'm referring to the nature of the generation of content itself. Did it feel like you were taking the shared imagined space and editing it. Did it feel more organic than that? Less organic than that?

2) What was your actual cognitive orientation toward that moment of play? Were you inhabiting Maraqli and Alastor up in that inhospitable mountain range at camp 2, dealing with the desperation and serious fallout from the events that had just transpired to put you in the spot you were in? A thought about your past and an exchange about a possible answer to one of your many worries? Or did that move reorient you cognitively to (I won't say your names but your actual names) a framework of "I am x and y persons in real life and we need a forge to repair armor so lets press this 'maybe get a forge?' button"?

3) When you trekked out to try to find it and discover its nature...how did that feel? Downstream product of a scene edit? Did it feel like cheating? Did it feel jarring? None of those things? Why or why not? What were you focusing on when all of this was happening?

Okay. So my response will not be as organized as @darkbard, but here goes.

I would not describe the dwarves forge as a “scene edit” at all. One of the things I love about ancient maps and DW are those empty spaces that need to be filled in. This was simply one of those empty spaces, particularly in our particular game, filled with archaeological dig sites and glaciers, covering numerous possibilities. As @darkbard mentioned already, this idea came up in discussion during the week between session, but it felt organic to me as a player and made sense for Maraqli as a character, having devoured books growing up and her brain already established as being filled with information, both useful and not. If I remember correctly I not only rolled well but I also made use of Maraqli’s “bag of books,” which gives a bonus similar to having skill points in any particular “knowledge” in D&D (4e, at least). So, the move was completely in character, felt organic, and I think it may have followed one of those “interesting rumors” along our journey (not the forge necessarily, but that dwarves once lived here .... I think).

I imagined that a poor roll would have resulted in Maraqli’s misremembering the forge or, if our GM didn’t want the forge on my good roll, he would have given us equally useful information (such as serendipitously finding armor for Sir Alastor, but this fit into the fiction and landscape we were collaboratively creating so neatly. For a player less interested or less confident in such a collaboration, the GM could come up with their own idea for a “useful and interesting” result - and indeed there were times that @Manbearcat did just that.

An earlier poor roll resulted directly in our very need to find a forge: Maraqli’s magic exploded an existing workspace we were hoping to use to repair the armor. Hence the needed for Maraqli’s to wrack her memory via Spout Lore. That earlier failure also resulted in this additional arduous and treacherous trek to find the forge.

@Manbearcat, if I’m understanding your second question correctly, my actual cognitive orientation (after the success SL roll) was inhabiting the young woman with an immense amount of curiosity about her world and its history and little actual practical experience of it: I felt Maraqli’s giddiness and determination. There was an urgency to find the forge and figure out how to utilize: put her knowledge into practice.

In answer to question number 3, well, falling down the crevice was certainly jarring (and definitely not as fun as a well!), but the journey was definitely curated by your narrative ( as I’ve never hiked on a glacier before!). No, not jarring (except Maraqli’s landing), not cheating, definitely organic. Both me as a player and Maraqli as a character were terrified about outcome ( poor roll/misstep): Maraqli was focused on being brave in the face of adversity (certainly more than I would have been!).

I also think these moments - the Spout Lore move and subsequent actions - are where Maraqli became more confident, by literally stepping out of her comfort zone and where Sir Alator’s bond with her changed from “Maraqli is reckless and I need to reign in her impulses” to “Maraqli is impulsive and intuitive and I will trust her instincts.”

Does this answer your questions ... perhaps too much?

 

[Cadence]

I know they don’t and I know those are the factors (among others) being claimed.

What I’m asking is “why are all other areas of the huge amount of D&D procedurally generated or GM’s Choice content NOT binned here as well?

Thank you for the restating the question and prompting me think about it more.

When I'm playing, it's not that I'm spending tons of time acting out the characters role by crafting the exact phrase they'd say, or that I'm not also kibitzing about other things with the other players out of character, but the mental overhead being spent on the game is primarily focused on what/how the character is interacting with the world just then and what they would be thinking or experiencing. (Trying to imagine what the character would do to investigate something. Imagining the character in that situation and trying to feel how scared they are. Trying to feel how angry they were and what spiteful thing they'd do to the NPC. Trying to visualize what they'd perceive on the battlefield and the different worries they'd have.) And for many parts having to do that and have the character react pretty quickly.

Even after 20+ sessions of playing 13th age with two (or three?) different characters - the switching to control the entire scene in the montage sequences still seemed more of an unnatural diversion than part of play, and I didn't enjoy it. And the day structure for recharging powers not being days but being encounters - regardless of how much actual rest occurred between them made me hate that part of the system - in part because I found myself inevitably unable to get the character to do anything except be frustrated that, say, the weekend stay in the nice city after two fights wouldn't bring back the powers - but whatever encounter came next would. It's been a while longer since I played FATE, but there were some things in there that jarred with focusing on the character being in the now too, but I'm not recalling the details. And I think there was a system with inspiration like points gained for doing certain things that I had trouble trying not going out of my way to earn in artificial ways. Leveling in D&D mid-session or mid-dungeon still does that somewhat to me too, but I've done it enough I can get by it -- although a recent short story I read that had it happen to a character in a story annoyed the F out of me.

Doing things outside of the actual play session - constructing character background, or managing downtime with the DM - don't take away from that focus on the character and what they would do in play because it's outside the play session. I'm guessing that being assigned to come up with a 13th Age montage sequence to e-mail everyone between sessions would feel a lot different than the ones in the game. Similarly suggesting to the DM out of character between sessions that a famous forge that fit my backstory could be up ahead and would fit with what the party was doing wouldn't take away from the anything in the next session.

For something like Lore Spouting, I don't think it would hurt my "half-arsely getting in character" much if both (1) it didn't necessarily require the character to try to be remembering and (2) it was just fine if the DM had it find something interesting/helpful instead of what I was trying to remember/find/whatnot. It seems a pretty common thing in D&D to have a character do something like asking around or looking around to see if there's a smith in the village they just came to, or - if it's a village the characters had experience with - the player saying that the character goes to the village smith they would know of assuming there is one. And it also seems pretty common that villages have a smith and/or some other interesting/useful things. And finally, also common for DMs to sometimes adjudicate things they don't already have in place with a die roll (sure, 80% of villages have smithies, and making a roll).

[EDIT: This paragraph got lost somehow, so apologies to anyone reading this between it's deletion and retyping]
But removing (1) and (2) feel like they would result in me trying to have my character remembering things (even if they'd be doing some other action) that I as a player thought would be optimal but that the character might actually doubt would be there - and treat it like having a semi-reliable Djinn at my beck and call. And take me out of trying to be in character much like the way the day mechanic in 13th age, too repeatable inspiration point system, and edge-cases of leveling do.

So, I don't think it is true for all combinations of players and ways their DM might generally adjudicate Spout Lore that:

@pemerton's post below this one

Whereas a player in DW can Spout Lore without ever leaving the inhabitation of their PC.

 

[pemerton]

Yes, this is obvious. The forge is not created in fiction, but fiction of the forge is created. No one is confused about this.

<snip>

It is impossible to for remembering things causing those things to become true.

Are you sure no one is confused? If no one is confused, what is the point of the second sentence?

What makes everyone agree that the PC remembers a Dwarven forge is not a memory of anything: it is a dice roll (10+ after adds) followed by the GM's exercise of backstory authority, undertaken in accordance with the rules of Spout Lore (on a result of 10+ say something interesting and relevantly useful) and the broader principles of the game.

What makes it true in the fiction that the PC remembers a Dwarven forge is that they have turned their mind to the matter and successfully recollected what they once heard.

What makes it true in the fiction that there is a Dwarven forge is that some dwarves once built it.

The only difference from how this might work in 3E or 5e D&D is that the GM is never obliged by the rules of the game to say something interesting and relevantly useful in response to a player's successful knowledge check.

the player is using the system to force GMs hand.

Well, the player is declaring an action which then triggers a roll which, on a success, imposes an obligation on the GM to say something interesting and relevantly useful. I take it that that is what you mean by "forcing the GM's hand".

But the player is not authoring any backstory. You seem to think this is a small point, but I agree with @Campbell that it is a huge point. It's a wild difference from, for instance, OGL d20 Conan, which permits a player to spend a Fate point to directly author some element of backstory. You can't do that, in the Conan RPG, and remain in Actor stance. Whereas a player in DW can Spout Lore without ever leaving the inhabitation of their PC.

I don't strive for inhabitation of character as the be all of RPGing and, in fact, consider it a bit of an impossibility.

I do strive for inhabitation of character as central to the player role in RPGing, and I don't think it is impossible. But some things are more consistent with it than others. In my view, part of the technical cleverness of a system like DW is that it contains moves like Spout Lore which permit the player to send cues to the GM without having to cease inhabitation of their PC.

That technical cleverness is not an accident, in my view. Vincent Baker (and Luke Crane with somewhat similar though by no means identical mechanics in Burning Wheel) deliberately set out to solve a problem which arises when the setting is not foreign to the PCs but backstory authority rests primarily with the GM.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In @Manbearcat's example of Spout Lore, all the player inserts into the scene is an attempt by their PC to remember stuff about Dwarven forges. Then they make a roll. Based on the outcome of that roll, the GM tells them something about the setting. All that changes in the scene at hand is that the PC's attempt to remember crystallises into an actual memory.

Except because of other dynamics in PbtA that's not all that's going on; in other kinds of games, the GM is perfectly able to just go "there's nothing like that here" and move along. But the requirements there are going to steer the GM toward putting in a forge or something of similar interest, and if you don't see the difference between that and simple knowledge checks, I don't know quite what to tell you. By the simple nature of asking the question, they've at least put their thumb on the scale.
But a difference of topic is not a difference of process. Whether the history of the world contains Dwarves and their forges is regarded, by many D&D players, as something about which the players have low ownership and the GM has high ownership.

Writing that the Orc dodged the warrior's sword blow is not a different process from writing that the wizard remembered the secrets of the Dwarven forges. Both describe a character performing an action (one physical, one mental). Both implicate objects and persons that lie beyond the control of the character (the Orc did not create or control the warrior or their word; the wizard did not control or create the Dwarves or their forges).

And this shows you still don't get it. The action of "I swing at the orc" predicates a number of things, and usually has a semi-binary (and repeatable) result; you hit or you don't, and try next time. It is not producing any trend toward anything in the fiction that the PC does not already have influence over. I stand by my opinion that is not the case with Spout Lore; the precise result of Spout Lore is not deterministic, but it is almost certainly going to produce a result the PC had no intrinsic way of producing. It might fail, but the success cases are well along something as simple as making a hole in a fellow living thing and far different in terms of cause and effect.

 

[pemerton]

You're either ignoring or unaware of something that I see as a fundamental difference between these two things.

The Orc is already present in the fiction; it's an established element with which your character is interacting. That said interaction happens to be combat doesn't matter, it could just as easily be a conversation over lunch or a simple wave as you pass each other by; what's relevant is that it is occurring at all.

The dawrven forge is an attempt to establish an entirely new element that's not already present in the fiction, in hopes of being able to interact with that element at a later time.

Well, you're either ignoring or unaware of my points, which - to repeat it - are these:

(1) Perhaps the metaphysics of objects (a Dwarven forge exists) and the metaphysics of events (an Orc dodged a sword) are different.

But the metaphysics of authoring an object and of authoring an event are identical.

(2) A scratch on an Orc is a new thing that becomes part of the fiction because the player authors it. And a PC recollecting something is an event, no different in that respect from scratching an Orc.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ovinomancer and hawkeyefan have answered the question.

@Cadence and @Crimson Longinus asserted that the effect of a Spout Lore-type move is "quantum collapse". They don't believe that to be the case when the GM performs such authoring prompted by players but under no stronger constraints than being prompted. My point is that introducing stronger constraints (eg make it interesting and relevantly useful) doesn't change the authorship into "quantum collapse".

I'd argue its absolutely quantum collapse with a GM too. My argument is that sort of thing is not expected as in in-game action, and some people don't want to be doing out of game things as an aspect of their play outside of trivial cases.

@Thomas Shey used phrases such as "disrupt", "rearrange", "scene edit", etc, all of which imply that there is some established fiction that gets changed. My point is that that's not the case.

@Thomas Shey, @FrogReaver and @Crimson Longinus seem to be asserting that authoring a moment of recollection of a past event or a long-existing thing is different as an act of authorship from authoring a moment of swinging a sword and an Orc dodging or failing to dodge. As Ovinomancer in particular has pointed out, this is not true. I made the same point with reference to Immanuel Kant's mistaken theory of geometry.

And I still maintain it is, on simple issues of scope.