D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Aldarc]

This, right here. I can teach high schoolers who have never read the PHB D&D. They could never have seen the game before, and within ten minutes have an understanding of how the game is played. In an hour, they will know and understand how the game is run, in almost all aspects. They may not have the rules and powers and mechanics memorized, but they understand the process of the game.

It seems to me, that some of this discussion should try to be more in line with that type of concision.

You could teach them Dungeon World just as quickly. Or any number of other games.

These games aren’t more difficult to learn or teach than D&D.

They generally only seem so to folks who are familiar with only D&D.

I have taught my partner a handful of TTRPGs. They love playing board games, especially Eurogames (e.g., Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, Settlers of Catan, etc.), as well as video games. I ran them through some solo games during the pandemic lockdowns last year. I found it far easier to teach them and for them to learn Dungeon World than D&D 5e. (Since I mentioned the campaign earlier, my partner also found Green Ronin's AGE easier than 5e D&D.) On the whole, they found 5e a bit overwhelming. There's more crunch than some vets realize.

In contrast, it was´easy for them to work through a DW playbook. It's pretty easy to teach the idea behind "to do it, do it." I frame fiction and then ask them what they do. They tell me. It may produce a roll. It may not. I'll let them know. They mostly just need to focus on the fiction and a small handful of abilities. Even then, I told them that they could just focus on telling me what their ranger character would do in the fiction, and then I could remind them of pertinent abilities, if they were relevant. But there's not really many rules to know, and they found it pretty intuitive. They had not trouble what so ever with getting in-character or the issues that people have been discussing in this thread.

IME, the problem is generally not newcomers to the hobby or those who have experience playing a wide range of games. I have taught and played games like Fate, Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, etc. with ease to my groups. Again IME, it's far more difficult teaching games like these to long-time gamers who are fixed in their assumptions about TTRPGs and how they should work, especially if they are mostly familiar with D&D, CoC, etc.* I think it's telling that I don't have to wade through pages upon pages of discussion about quantum forges elsewhere I participate online. I mostly encounter resistance to learning/understanding these tabletop games online, and here moreso than a number of other notable tabletop forums. For example, I know one person on this forum put me on ignore for the audacity of saying that Fate was a roleplaying game.

I will also add, that there are complex issues and concepts that you can explain fairly easily to kids and they will accept it pretty readily with zero fuss. But when you try explaining that same concept to adults with fixed ideas about how the world is/should be and how that aligns with the values they formed - whether as a result of religion, political identity, culture, shallow and outdated knowledge/science/etc., family upbringing, etc. - then you can potentially face a whole lot of pushback, resistance, and lots of "fuss."

* This includes myself, who had ~15 years of D&D/d20 System before encountering Fate. When I tried learning Fate, it confused the living bejeezus out of me at first. I couldn't quite figure out how on earth these Aspects worked, Create an Advantage, or Fate points. There was just a lot that required me to readjust my thinking about the game, particularly about how mechanics model fiction. I put the game back on the shelf for half a year, picking it back up again when I heard more people talk about it. It was only then that the game finally "clicked." It was a watershed moment for me. I had considered myself willing to try new tabletop games, but almost all of those were in the D&D/d20 System family of games. And understanding how this game approached gaming differently helped me greatly expand my horizons and suss-out my own gaming preferences.

There's a third option, which you don't hit here and I think is what the original example was referring to: that the dramatic need to get the ring only just now came up out of nowhere due to something else encountered in the fiction (to wit, another such ring owned by someone else), well after play started and maybe or maybe not related to anything else going on in the campaign.

In other words, it's an unexpected sidebar to the main campaign, or a random interrupt.

So like Bilbo encountering Gollum?

 

[Aldarc]

RE: APs

I would much rather have a bunch of separate dungeons and set-pieces I could put in my own world where they could be made to fit nicely without much work (kind of like Yawning Portal or some old modules like B2) instead of a huge chain adventure (like the 1e GDQ combined book or some of the modern APs). The Goodman Borderland book has B1 and B2, but is set to let you run them separately with places explicitly to plug in things in the map or modify things you don't want. And the world doesn't end if the party doesn't decide to clean out the caves.

This is generally how I approach Nentir Vale in 5e. It's a region with rumors and breadcrumbs about various ruins, but they are mostly modules dropped into the area. I did use and heavily modify an AP to start. The first self-described AP adventure even: Sunless Citadel. I dropped the Sunless Citadel in the area around Kobold Hall with the twist that the god Torog may have pulled the old keep underground. It's not that I planned to run this as an AP followed by Forge of Fury, but I thought Sunless Citadel was more interesting than Kobold Hall.

I also seeded breadcrumbs about the disappearance of another patrol squad, actually my partner's previous patrol squad they had served in before their promotion to squad commander. The first adventure was meant to be a bit more linear to help set things up. Afterwards, it was a sandbox game with modules interspersed throughout the Vale.

With my partner, I devised upon the idea of having them having been recently promoted to the leader of a small patrol squad based in Fallcrest. The baron of Fallcrest devised these patrol squads as a way to work with short-handed resources. The barracks would have rotating squad of characters that my partner could choose to accompany them on missions. As they work for the baron, the baron gets first cut and the lion's share of whatever loot the squad hauls, which the baron uses to maintain the town, pay troops, etc. (How do you make gold more valuable in 5e? Make it more scarce.) But the squad gets a cut too, which can add up to a nice commission of prize money. This was the reason why partner's character joined. They wanted to earn enough gold to support their parents, who were reputable inn-keepers now living in the slums, and possibly win/buy back their inn, which was possibly lost through underhanded means.

 

[pemerton]

Unless the item was already in place, it absolutely is. The character can remember things, but only things that exist. If something has not been established yet, fundamentally it doesn't exist.

That last sentence is fundamentally false.

What colour were Sherlock Holmes's undies when he encountered the Hound of the Baskervilles? Conan Doyle doesn't tell us. That doesn't mean they were colourless.

I don't believe that REH ever told us anything about the hair in Conan's armpits. But it seems likely that he had some there.

Gygax tells new AD&D GMs to first build a dungeon and perhaps a village, and then gradually build the campaign world around that. The fact that stuff is authored later doesn't entail that it didn't exist in the fiction. It's utterly standard to author backstory after introducing elements into the fiction. (Eg the backstory of the bartender with the mysterious past.)

It is literally impossible to detail, in advance of play, everything that a RPG protagonist might know or remember. One way of handling this fact, which tries to reconcile it with unfettered GM authority over backstory, and players depending on the GM to tell them their PCs' mental states, is to have the PCs be strangers in a foreign land. But if you want to play a different sort of character, one who is deeply embedded in the world in which they act, then alternative approaches to backstory authority naturally suggest themselves.

if you don't see the difference between "I do an action that produces a result based on already established situations in the game" and "I do an action that produces a result that there's no particular reason to assume is true in the game" then I'm not going around about the difference again.

There's every reason to think that a scholar will know interesting and even relevant things about the subject-matters of their study.

Now that previous sentence is trading on the wording you stated. And I don't think you're really all that wedded to your wording. But the bigger issue is that there is no way, at least so far, of stating your point that doesn't beg the question. Because ultimately, as per the earlier part of your post that I quoted above, what is really going on is that you are making an assumption about the nature of backstory authority. And it is only with that assumption in play that you can then make your point.

this has nothing to do with who does it, a player or the GM, and everything to do with what is being done. If the GM makes this forge exist when it didn't previously its metagame, if a player does it its metagame.

I don't even know what you mean now, by metagame. When the players open a door, and the GM tells them what they see, are you really saying that is "metagame"? In what sense?

When a player asks, as their character, "What do I know about X?" are you really saying that's metagame? It happens all the time in RPGing. Or are you saying that exactly the same action declaration somehow becomes metagame because there is a mechanical procedure for determining the answer that is different from the GM just makes something up? As you can see, I think your notion of "metagame" here is quite unstable and ultimately not tenable.

To me, it seems that you are treating Spout Lore as if it were no different from the player having an ability to simply declare There are Dwarven forges in the mountain. Undoubtedly that would be a metagame ability that required the player to adopt Director Stance (unless it rested on very peculiar fictional positioning, like a Wish effect in D&D). But Spout Lore is not like that. It is triggered by something that happens all the time in RPGing: What do I know about such-and-such? When such a question is asked, there has to be a resolution of the declared action: the attempt to recall. Just as in D&D, DW has the GM provide the answer. But the GM's answer is constrained by the results of the roll: and using a roll to constrain authorship of the consequence of a declared action is a bog-standard RPG resolution technique.

Spout Lore only becomes "radical" or "different" if one puts authorship of backstory into a special category of authority: ie that unlike (say) authorship of fisticuffs, it ought to come unilateral and unfettered from the GM. Your attempt to formulate an alternative premise that will support the same conclusion - ie that nothing exists in the gameworld that has not been established - I think is so obviously untenable, and not part of any RPGing practice I've ever heard of, that I'm simply discounting it at this stage.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Strahd would still be a major focus and threat in the AP, and a different solution doesn't seem to be keyed to be different if different characters are present. This seems more like "We have option A, defeat Strahd; and option B, negotiate with the Dark Powers; and option C, something else." None of these seems to be particularly dependent on what character is present. I think the argument here is that the characters are taking actions so they must be important, and, sure, that's down the line in execution where the players are using the PCs to select and implement an option. How that happens can be different, but that it happens, or what the gist of the happening is, really doesn't care who the characters actually are. We're looking at "in instantiation 1142, with character array FF3, events a-g unfurled in this manner. In instantianion 1143, with character array FF3, events a-g unfurled in this manner. In...." It's like flipping a coin and seeing how many heads come up in a row over a 1000 trials. It doesn't really matter who the flipper is.

Strahd is part of the premise. Like if we had a Star Wars game about the Rebels, the Empire is part of the premise.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yes. My immersion is badly hurt by "setting editing" mechanics which mean that the GM has unconstrained authority over the backstory, with the result that the only way for me playing my PC to have access to my PC's knowledge and memories is to ask the GM to tell me what I think and know and remember.

I don't really understand why you adamantly want to muddy terminology so that communicating ideas clearly is not possible.

 

[pemerton]

I don't really understand why you adamantly want to muddy terminology so that communicating ideas clearly is not possible.

I don't know what you mean by "scene editing" other than establishing new setting elements. And as I posted, there are definitely ways of doing that that wreck my immersion/inhabitation of character.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't know what you mean by "scene editing" other than establishing new setting elements. And as I posted, there are definitely ways of doing that that wreck my immersion/inhabitation of character.

Put your hand on your heart, you genuinely do not know what subset of mechanics me, @Thomas Shey and some others mean? Regardless of whether you agree the nomenclature is accurate? (As I said, I really don't care what it is called.) Could you drop the debate club attitude for a moment?

And I am not questioning whether your immersion works differently than mine. I am sure it does, that is very subjective.

 

[Aldarc]

I don't really understand why you adamantly want to muddy terminology so that communicating ideas clearly is not possible.

People have been talking about "quantum forges" breaking in-character roleplay immersion, but it doesn't necessarily consider how "quantum knowledge" can also break in-character roleplay immersion. Some find the latter acceptable, but not the former. Some find the former acceptable, but not the latter.

Intentionally misunderstanding others is not constructive.

Neither are statements like this that insist that any misunderstandings in conversation over this matter must be intentional on the part of @pemerton. This seems to make the discussion far more personal than need be.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

People have been talking about "quantum forges" breaking in-character roleplay immersion, but it doesn't necessarily consider how "quantum knowledge" can also break in-character roleplay immersion. Some find the latter acceptable, but not the former. Some find the former acceptable, but not the latter.

I am really not claiming that immersion must work in certain way. Merely that certain mechanics affect immersion of different people differently and thus it is useful to have terminology for such mechanics. It could be also be for purpose of one liking such mechanics, thus seeking games that have them. What I find bizarre is the insistence that the distinction doesn't even exist.

 

[Ovinomancer]

How did you get the idea that I'm coming from a completed play point?

I'm doing almost the opposite, and saying that if you or I or any other neutral observer were to sit in on a game for half an hour where a darkside thief was going through any given adventure the run of play we'd see during that half hour would be considerably different from what we'd see if the character was a stereotypical tank of a paladin, even if the characters happened to be dealing with the same encounter when we happened to be watching.

Um, you just described the completed play that was watched. That's how? And, sure, we'd see different details of play, different tactical choices, but the obstacles to be overcome would have been the same. That's what interchangeable characters means -- rogue or paladin, the dungeon is the dungeon, Strahd is Strahd, the Burgomaster is the Burgomaster. The challenges are the same, the context is the same. What's different is that, after play, we can look back and note the different tactical choices made by the characters because of class features and the RNG.