D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Aldarc]

Is the most important part of LotR the destruction of the ring? Or is it the cleansing of the Shire and what happened in the appendices?

I'm fairly certain that it's elf poetry about the First Age and Tom Bombadil.

 

[Campbell]

That's a good point @pemerton

I think different sorts of fictional situations are more amenable to different sorts of processes. I think that in the context of being a stranger in a strange land or exploring unknown ruins mostly having the GM be a purveyor of all knowledge works fairly well to model that process of discovery. Even in something like Blades having a measure of uncertainty makes some sense because the landscape is constantly shifting, but as we approach characters who live in more and more familiar territory you really don't want that sense of insecurity about what you know. You want to have a sense of confidence about it.

Sure, the GM might be able to author a whole host of information for the player to study so they can feel confident about their base of knowledge, but as that level of knowledge becomes substantial it creates a massive cognitive load on both the GM (to create and manage it) and the player to study and internalize it all. It also requires either a massive amount of time away from the table or even worse at the table to enable it all.

Now imagine you are playing someone substantially more intelligent than you are with a vast knowledge base and quite a large social network. The amount of material the GM must prepare and the player must learn become a huge drain on the entire table. Furthermore this experience of two people performing vast amounts of work does what I feel is a pretty poor job at making the player feel like someone who has already done the work, to who this stuff is easy.

I get that a player authoring material can also not feel quite right to some people, but sometimes I think it's the best solution we have available. It means that material is more likely to be top of mind to the player, something they will probably have some investment in, etc. Some people would say the solution is not to play the sort of characters that are beyond our mental capacity to bring to life. That would be a sad day for me because my favorite fiction are about these larger than life figures that live tangled and messy lives. Ancient vampires, demigods, wuxia heroes, etc.

This sub-thread is actually pretty relevant to my own play. In the Exalted game we are about to start playing I'm playing an emissary from an important city state who is also among the most learned men in all of Creation. The game actually uses a system that is almost exactly like what some people initially thought Spout Lore was. You can Establish A Fact that you have the fictional positioning to (consistent with your Lore Background and/or relevant Specialties). It does include a GM veto, but that's fully transparent. That system does lean more into collaborative storytelling than I am usually comfortable with, but I am not sure how else you would enable the sort of wuxia scholars that have disruptive knowledge on a regular basis otherwise or enable that sort of back footing the GM's NPCs through superior knowledge otherwise. The GM needs help getting into NPC headspace just as much as players need help getting into the mind space of their characters.

Here's the basics of the system in question:

Introducing a Fact

One of the basic functions of Lore in Exalted is to allow the player to spice up narrative drama, forward the plot, or become the object of positive Intimacies by demonstrating valuable knowledge. Once per scene, a character with Lore 3+ and a relevant specialty or backstory can attempt to “know” something useful about Creation’s history, geography, cultures, etc.

The player states a fact they would like to introduce. If it is a fact the Storyteller deems admissible, roll the character’s (Intelligence + Lore) against a difficulty set by the Storyteller. Note that the context of this roll is important. A character with Lore 5 may have a background in the subject being discussed, or their Lore 5 may apply little or not at all. (See the description of the Lore skill on p. 153). The Storyteller should increase the difficulty and levy penalties as they see fit; conversely, if a character specializes in a certain subject, the Storyteller may declare success without a roll. In any case, if the roll succeeds, the character may introduce her fact as knowledge she knows or uncovers in the scene, allowing the plot to progress, and perhaps leaving those around her in awe of her acumen.

Storytellers be warned! Facts introduced in this manner must remain internally consistent. Once a character has successfully introduced a fact, that information should not be contradicted; another player cannot then choose to introduce a completely contradictory fact by rolling an even better result. Once a fact about the setting has been introduced, it becomes concrete. Therefore, Storytellers, it is up to you to decide what facts to allow into the game, and to what degree. You might deem a Solar’s “Sidereal Exalted” hypothesis to be more than the character should know, while being more comfortable with a theory that tends toward something more vague, such as speculation about “Exalted conspirators behind the world’s events.” In this case, you should clarify which facts you will allow before the roll is made.

To be clear, no matter how many dice your player is able to roll, and no matter what Charms their character wields, you can always veto knowledge of certain events or the introduction of facts that would ruin your story. If an introduced fact contradicts a canonical fact you’d prefer to keep canonical in your game, contradicts a fact from your personal setting history or a future plot developmentyou’ve yet to reveal to the players, or is something you are undecided or uncertain about, you can veto it. In the former cases, you are upholding the integrity of your story. In the latter, you are allowing yourself time to decide if you want to incorporate an idea that might change your view of that story. You should also veto knowledge of any canonical information you think it would be impossible for the character to know. That said, remember that people take Lore because this is the kind of character they want to play. You don’t have to treat the setting like a piñata, and Lore like a bat that will split its colorful shell and spill all the delicious secrets within, but you should always treat a character’s Lore rating as a chance to make the character look good, and as a chance to make the player feel good.

I'm personally not a fan of the ruin the story or veto for story reason stuff. I mentally edit that stuff out when I run it.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Pessimist!

Some people look at a glass half-filled with water and say, "That's half-empty."

Others look at the same glass and say, "That's half-full."

Me? I dump it out and fill it with scotch.

 

[Cadence]

I'm fairly certain that it's elf poetry about the First Age and Tom Bombadil.

I was thinking the parts about Aragorn and Arwen, and Legalos and Gimli, and Eowyn and Faramir.

[Edit: and more on the non-Frodo Hobbits, <insert something from a different thread a while back>.]

But don't forget the language essays and genealogies!

 

[Aldarc]

I was thinking the parts about Aragorn and Arwen, and Legalos and Gimli, and Eowyn and Faramir.

[Edit: and more on the non-Frodo Hobbits, <insert something from a different thread a while back>.]

But don't forget the language essays and genealogies!

Look carefully or you may miss the only female dwarf named in Middle Earth!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I tend to be okay with using meta mechanics for something like 'luck' because being lucky is viewed as a trait of the character and because there's not a feasibly good non-meta method of modeling luck (at least not one i've ever seen). This also ties into part of why battlemaster maneuvers don't bother me despite being meta.

More hit points I suppose, coupled with some sort of cue to the GM to narrate "that orc taking a mighty swing at you and doing 8 damage didn't actually hurt that much" as luck, but that only covers a pretty narrow bit of ground, and I would argue that it is still meta-game (though at least the player doesn't have to directly engage with it). So, yeah, this is TBH one of the reasons I've never been that taken with the more extreme forms of the "but I'm taken out of character!" objections. I mean, sure, I can see how constantly being tasked with managing lots of 'currency' that isn't directly related to anything specific in the game, and spending it, could get more problematic (or other equivalent mechanics, whatever it is). But we all do SOME of that when we play, its simply inevitable, so its hard to hold it against a game designer when they can get a big win for a small amount of 'make the player track this/decide this.'

 

[prabe]

In what RPG does a PC's knowledge cause things to happen outside the character's direct influence?

From the point of view of some people who object to such mechanics, any TRPG with mechanics that allow the players to define things about the setting based on the results of a roll on a know-whats type of check. You roll, and geography changes (or is defined).

Note: That's not my objection to such mechanics. I would prefer not to engage in an argument defending someone else's position (or my understanding of someone else's position).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To me, and I would think that to the great majority of people who play RPGs, those are meaningful differences. Another team might trick the baron and Wachter into taking each other out. Or take the side of the Baron’s young son against the other factions. Or, just skip Vallaki altogether.

And that is just one aspect of the AP. Multiply that by any amount of encounters and you get a constellation of different choices, actions and outcomes based on what the party did.


The implication of this is that in any adventure with fixed encounters, the characters are interchangeable and their decisions are meaningless.

Obviously, I disagree. I think most RPG players would also disagree with this interpretation. It goes without saying that “meaningless” and “interchangeable” are subjective terms.

Well, I cannot speak to the referenced AP, I know nothing about it. However, this sort of thing is VERY tough for adventure writers to pull off, at best! For example, in the 4e era there was a Dungeon adventure, Dark Heart of Mithrendain. For some reason I got bored or lazy or something and decided to actually RUN A MODULE! This never happens, lol. I learned why, which is that it was as much work as making it all up myself. The adventure is actually pretty flexible in that it revolves around a bunch of intrigue. Mithrendain is a fortress city that guards the main entrance to the Feydark, where the Fomorians lurk, and there's a 'gate' which the city defenders protect. Some of these defenders have been corrupted, and there's a faction who knows this, but nobody knows who is trustworthy. So, you'd think this would be a very flexible sort of setup where the PCs are brought in by the 'good guys' and set to try to uncover the bad guys. The problem is, in the end you WILL end up in a final confrontation where the party has to venture into the base area of the Fomorians and kick butt. So, NO MATTER WHAT happens in the "James Bond Phase" of the adventure doesn't REALLY matter in the end. Yeah, maybe slightly different assassination attempts will happen and some of the intermediary fights and whatnot might or might not happen as laid out, or you would have different ones, in the end, like almost all adventures, there's a denouement, the big bads come on stage and get their moment.

I subverted this by adding a lot of very character-specific elements. The Eladrin Wizard's family is one of the clans, are they being subverted, are they dupes, can she trust them, and if so who are the enemy, and will they even survive this? The warlock was getting major bad vibes from 'the stars' wanting him to do their bidding, why are they interested in this? He decided to break free of their influence, and what do you know, a covey of hags showed up to offer him a way to defeat the Fomorians, all he had to do was accept this one little gift.... (he ended up with a secondary Fey Pact, which was pretty cool). The swordmage found out that her mentor opposed the city defenders, why? What were HIS motives? So, that part of the adventure got a lot more interesting than the rather shallow and meaningless stuff that was written into the adventure (it has some decent useful NPCs and factions, there's just not much to make the PCs care about them besides die rolls). EVEN SO the finale was still fairly much of a set piece. The option existed for the PCs to try a 'third way' where they would change the system that governed the city, but SOMEONE has to kick Fomorian arse, unless you just wanted them to win (which I couldn't really come up with a reason why even stupid crazy people would want that, Fomorians are nobody's friend).

Anyway, my point is, adventures are pretty strongly constrained to have a rather narrow fixed set of contemplated outcomes. Going 'off the rails' or heavily customizing is cool. I think they can provide some material, but honestly its hard to see very many successful adventures in any classical sense being written for most Story Now play. Something like @pemerton's favorite Arthurian Romance game, Prince Valiant, is probably about as ideal as it gets, the sorts of action that happens in that milieu is pretty strongly stereotyped, and a lot of what matters is more HOW you did something and what its effects on the character were, vs lots of doubts about the basic plot and who will fight who, when, and where. Of course that also means there are only a very few classic 'patterns' for adventures to follow, unless you start pushing the boundaries of the genre pretty far (maybe by incorporating adjacent types of material from a wider region/time periods).

 

[Campbell]

I'm personally not a very big fan of currencies that don't have a corresponding fictional existence. Stuff like Willpower in World of Darkness is fine. So are strings in Monsterhearts. Mostly I think we rely too much on currency to mediate authority when directed judgement generally works better in my experience. Generally roleplaying game design seems overly afraid of its players. That we cannot let characters do amazing things without somehow limiting it. Pathfinder Second Edition and Exalted Third Edition have kind of changed my mind on that point. Nothing breaks if characters can just kind of be good at the things they are good at pretty much all the time.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Regarding constraint on the GM; I think that's something I’ve found very engaging about GMing Blades and similar games. As a GM, I’m forced to react and think on my feet, and to honor input to the game other than my own.

In that sense, it’s kind of like being a player. Which I think speaks to “Play to find out” as a principle.

But thinking a little further on it, we typically think of a player who is able to navigate the many constraints placed on him by the fiction in order to overcome a challenge as being skilled.

Doesn’t it stand to reason then that a GM navigating the constraints set upon him during play is likewise skilled? That this mode of GMing is a challenge that requires skill?

Taken a step further, doesn’t less constraint mean less skill is needed?

It’s probably more a different set of skills being tested, but I think there’s something to that.