D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Ovinomancer]

I think the easy mode comments are regarding the changed decision space that the reality editing brings (Pemerton, don't argue semantics, I don't care.) I'm not sure it necessarily makes things easier, but it definitely changes how problems are approached. If the problem is how the characters get across the river, the decision space becomes rather different if intentionally 'remembering' that there is a bridge nearby is an available option, rather than having to solve the issue solely with the actual capabilities the PCs might posses.

Do this is an option, but it's risky and you do not have the ability to buff rolls in DW that you do in 5e, so that risk is fairly static. You can try to recall a bridge -- we don't know if one is there or not so it won't be edited in, we'll just find out -- but that's a fraught conjecture. This is another point that gets missed in these discussions: that the things discussed are more likely to cause problems than be straight solutions. If you take the play from the Spout Lore example, that wasn't just go to forge fix armor problem solved. There was quite a lot of problem to deal with there. So, the idea that players just get to fix their own problems is badly framed because they have a chance to open a pathway, yes, but it doesn't just solve things.

As for editing things, I'm on board with this. Editing in the wound on the orc is at least the same framework as editing in the forge, and so long as these alike processes are being treated the same, I'm not going to get hung up on a phrase used to describe what's happening in play.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think most of my games, going back to B/X have had some/many zero prep zones. When the party gets to the hexes that have the keep on the borderlands and caves of chaos then there are certainly a lot of things fixed in there. But I'll often have not much of anything set for the hexes between the last mapped dungeon or the next and come up with everything on the fly.

In a D&D game for my son's group, when one player had their character storm away from the party to go find a ring of invisibility (because another character wouldn't give them theirs) I had to come up on the fly with a set of rumors about such a thing and the history and characteristics of a guy who had one and might be a reasonable target for pilfering it from, the part of town he was in, the inn he stayed in, the personality of the inn keeper and what the hoard of guests would react like when certain failed attempts to get the cloak occurred, etc... (Since they were near a major metropolis it seemed reasonable that there would be rings/cloaks of invisibility around, and that one might be owned by someone who blabbed about it but have it be reasonably possible to get it away from). At another point I had set up rumors of a vampire and had some connections set with the other bad guys they'd run into. When the same player said they wanted to know if they could use the vampire to become immortal I came up with a priestess of Hecate and her temple and personality and motivations and how that might even work on the fly.

But there were other places where I had a mental if not drawn out map prepared.

I think I would want a lot more zero-prep practice to be comfortable having nothing set out in advance at all all the time!

That echoes my D&D experiences as well, both playing and DMing. Actual D&D play (often) has quite a bit of primarily improv driven scenarios. Good GM's are usually open to player suggestions much like you detail above.

 

[FrogReaver]

Im sure you and your GM didn’t see them and you played the game differently than I ran it.

That is a a “you biography”, not a “4e biography.”

Ive covered all the Story Now tech and principles and GMing advice dozens of times so I’m not going to recap it here (along with all the inspiration Story Now game designers have credited to 4e in subsequent games.)

Who is the authority on 4e biographies? You?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Well, that's not how I use it, how @Manbearcat uses it, how @Ovinomancer uses it, or how Ron Edwards uses it.

If Force just meant the GM deciding something then it would not be a very useful analytical tool, because nearly every moment of RPGing involves the GM deciding something (eg if a player has their PC approach a NPC to talk to them, the GM has to decide what the NPC says; that is not, per se, Force as any of those I just mentioned use the term).

I still don't know how you would reconcile this with your stated preference for backstory-based mysteries. I mean, if you decide this at a particular moment of play, it was not something written in your notes that the players might have learned, by provoking you to reveal it via their action declarations, at some earlier moment of play.

I don't see how this is to be reconciled with what you said just above, about going with something like such-and-such a NPC was secretly one of them.

I don't see how you can avoid this.

Suppose a player declares that their PC goes to the market to buy an X. I don't particularly care what X is, other than that (i) it's a thing that is obviously conceivable as being for sale at the market, and (ii) it's not a thing that you, the GM, have made any notes about. Let's say that it's a swede or some other generic and undocument-by-the-GM foodstuff.

If you as GM narrate that the PC does indeed find a swede-vendor at the market, you have now retroactively fixed a specific event that was the direct cause of other things - that someone gave birth to this swede-vendor, that someone grew the swede, that someone harvested it, and brought it to the market, etc. RPGing is rife with this sort of thing.

I'm still curious as to what RPG you have in mind here.

Well, I make quite a good living as a scholar, but am only an amateur author of fictions. If I could write fictions as compelling as the Star Wars trilogy I don't think I'd be earning my living writing articles that will probably have fewer readers over my lifetime than the number of attendees at a Star Wars opening night!

For reference to non-British or Commonwealth speakers, a swede is a rutabaga. I didn't know this, but do now.

 

[Cadence]

This is how Hunting is resolved in Classic Traveller (Supplement 4, 1979): it increases the chance of the character encountering the desired creature.

That feels like how it would happen in D&D to me. A player who said they were going hunting for deer hopefully (in an area that had deer) would be much more likely to have what they brought back to camp for dinner be a deer than a player who just said they were going hunting for dinner and would take the first thing they got. If the player had knowledge of that area it might not even take them much longer to get a deer than it would to just get the easiest thing. .

The monster they hear down the hall being an orc because the player wants it to be an orc feels different.

Instead of roaming being like the hunter going through the deer inhabited area looking for deer, that feels akin to the party coming across a pit-trap on the road that they heard something in, a party member inserting it sounds like a deer, and so it's a deer.

Or similarly, it feels different to me to have the player be able to say "I know this area, the glade just next to our campsite is full of deer" and the player saying "I go to the closest area that I think will have a lot of deer". Making the nearest clearing or the pit have a deer in it makes me feel like I have a summon deer spell. (Having the player go, I know there's a great white stag in the area that lives just down the road feels even moreso).

Is streetwise in the city fairly analogous to hunting in the countryside?

 

[Cadence]

For reference to non-British or Commonwealth speakers, a swede is a rutabaga. I didn't know this, but do now.

I was just getting ready to ask

 

[Ovinomancer]

I want to say that the way D&D is played in practice might have this to an extent. A player saying "crap, doesn't anyone in the party have an extra wick for a lantern?" might result in the DM going "I'm sure at least someone in the party does." in a game where the resource management wasn't too strict.

I'm trying to think about

• Toon's Back Pockets (access to hammerspace where just about anything could be pulled out up to the size of an anvil; akin to Mary Poppins' carpet bag that might have something of arbitrary height as long as the length and width fit the opening)
• Leo's magical toolbelt in Percy Jackson (a pouch on it grants access to anything that might reasonably be found in a toolshop and be of a size someone might put it on a toolbelt - screw driver, sledge hammer, breath mints, safety goggles, wire of a needed size, etc... lots of simple things have no recharge, something mechanically complex would)
• Batman's toolbelt as you describe it above
• DM flexibility in the party having to record every reasonable small item are all related.

Are players' thought processes about their character and how they fit in the world encouraged by the genre, restrictions on what can be pulled, reliability of what can be pulled, and the mechanical game cost of doing so?

I'm imagining an experiment where we get a bunch of RPGers to play Batman where the way the utility belt is run is randomly assigned from those four choices. It feels like in the back pockets implementation that some of the players would start focusing more on the optimal pull than following their imagination and reaching down and pulling something genre appropriate and reasonable. Would the tool belt one lead to some cases where the player tried to pull out a few hundred batarangs? (Certainly some players would have the self control or genre immersion to not have it be a problem). Would the a bit of DM flexibility one lead to the player to rely on it less and use the belt less than would be expected for the genre?

If the game is structured like 5e, where there are optimal choices because of the combat engine (there aren't these choices too much outside combat), then, yes, I would expect the players to do this because there's an incentive for doing so. If the game isn't structured like this, and the pull only grants fictional positioning to try something rather than a bonus towards success, then no, it doesn't work out this way. I think this is another part where understanding the whole of play is important so that a known structure isn't smuggled in to evaluate a tool in only one context when comparing more than one context.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think most of my games, going back to B/X have had some/many zero prep zones. When the party gets to the hexes that have the keep on the borderlands and caves of chaos then there are certainly a lot of things fixed in there. But I'll often have not much of anything set for the hexes between the last mapped dungeon or the next and come up with everything on the fly.

In a D&D game for my son's group, when one player had their character storm away from the party to go find a ring of invisibility (because another character wouldn't give them theirs) I had to come up on the fly with a set of rumors about such a thing and the history and characteristics of a guy who had one and might be a reasonable target for pilfering it from, the part of town he was in, the inn he stayed in, the personality of the inn keeper and what the hoard of guests would react like when certain failed attempts to get the cloak occurred, etc... (Since they were near a major metropolis it seemed reasonable that there would be rings/cloaks of invisibility around, and that one might be owned by someone who blabbed about it but have it be reasonably possible to get it away from). At another point I had set up rumors of a vampire and had some connections set with the other bad guys they'd run into. When the same player said they wanted to know if they could use the vampire to become immortal I came up with a priestess of Hecate and her temple and personality and motivations and how that might even work on the fly.

But there were other places where I had a mental if not drawn out map prepared.

I think I would want a lot more zero-prep practice to be comfortable having nothing set out in advance at all all the time!

Again, there's a huge difference between having to improv the contents of a hex to the necessary detail level in D&D, especially when there are no constraints on that generation. The field is huge, the task large, and the time short. This is hard. I find it extremely hard and work to avoid it at all costs, either through prep or deployment of Force in D&D.

I don't find the necessary GM work in Blades in the Dark to be any harder, and in some ways easier, than running prepped material in 5e.

Let that sink in a second. I agree and actively avoid large scale ad hoc play in 5e -- at best I'm comfortable dropping in a few details or an NPC reaction. But I'm not the least bit concerned about running Blades, which is no to very little prep and almost entirely reactionary. Hell, often leading up to a 5e game (or my Aliens game this afternoon), I'm buried in my prep getting ready and feeling a tad nervous. Blades? I might read some notes from prior sessions sometime during the week and have no problems sitting down right at playtime and starting. This isn't saying Blades is better -- it's different -- but rather that the process of play really helps with the necessary invention.

 

[FrogReaver]

As a thought experiment let's suppose there was a game that let you attack enemies but anytime you did so you had to roll a dice and on a failure you missed AND the GM must author fiction that some cute innocent young animal somewhere dies (his choice of kitten or puppy or etc). Do posters like @Manbearcat and @pemerton have any issues with the structure of such a mechanic? Afterall, the mechanical structure is the same as the Spout Lore forge example as far as I can tell, it's just the fictional subject matter has changed.

 

[Scott Christian]

Agreed.

My concern is when someone fills in a blank on the map* with something that really should have been obvious to all since day one.

* - I do my maps this way as well - leave lots of blank space for later use - but when filling in those blanks later I try hard not to let anything in there that should have been more obvious sooner.

Can I ask what scale we are talking about when filling in blank maps?

I mean, if the world has a northern mountainous forest, and the player says I am a barbarian from the north mountains. And then they go on to describe how it is full of geysers and hot springs and a magic cave; couldn't that easily get plugged in?

But if they said I am a barbarian from a tropical rainforest, and just from an ecosystem standpoint, there is no place to put it, wouldn't they just be creating a new continent?