D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[pemerton]

I don't think that can be true. The room with stuff in it sure, but the character looking for spellbooks and not doing handstands, or brewing potions or whatever else they opt to do is entirely down to the player. We can probably map out the time searching a room takes, and point to the 5 minutes of time in that room and clearly point out which things were down to one player's choices, and which were down to the GM.

You could have (an admittedly very boring) game session that was nothing but a massive library keep, devoid of anything but romance novels, that a character wanders through looking for spell books, evaluating room by room. I'm pretty sure that could be handled much more easily/efficiently by noting the time that would take and moving on, but it certainly would still happen, and be different than if the player had decided to stop after the first room. If for no other reason than after that's done, I'd start describing the scene outside with a different time of day.

You're adding some kind of relevance criteria here to "things happening" that I don't entirely understand enough to define yet.

So what you describe in your hypothetical is a type of play in which the players main function is to declare actions that oblige the GM to reveal bits of their notes (or, if their notes run out, to make up stuff based on "logical" extrapolation from what's in their notes).

In your example, the notes and the extrapolation all concern the contents of the library. (The notes might tell us, say, how many volumes are in each room and what their topics are. The extrapolation is likely to be required if the players declares that they pull a volume from the middle of the third row from the door and start reading it.)

In the real world, this sort of play is very common but doesn't normally involve library books. Normally it involves the players speaking to NPCs and searching the occasional room for a <bit of paper, book, magic item, whatever>.

If we put to one side the complications introduced by the need for extrapolation due to the incompleteness of the notes, then we could say that the entire play space is defined: it is some path or other through the GM's pre-authored material. (My maths isn't strong enough to know whether there is literally a function that can define all these paths, or whether I am confined to describing it more metaphorically: still, I believe my point is clear enough.)

That is why I call it a railroad, and say that everything that happens is decided by the GM.

EDIT: I mean, suppose that I decide to have my PC do handstands or brew a potion or whatever. There seem to me to be three possibilities:

(1) That stuff has no meaningful affect on play, and after a few minutes of me describing my PC's hijinks we return to the real focus of play.

(2) The GM incorporates that action into their established fiction and logically extrapolates: my handstands knock some books from the shelf, or the fire from brewing potions sets fire to some books. We're still within the play space defined by the GM's pre-authored fiction.

(3) The GM introduces some new fiction that speaks to the concerns I have evinced via my action declarations, and play starts to be about that. Now we no longer have a railroad: we have broken out of the play space defined by the GM's notes + extrapolation therefrom, and have the sort of play that I am interested in.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You keep talking about characters. Characters are imaginary things. They don't make any decisions about the fiction. Real, flesh-and-blood people who are playing the game make decisions about the fiction.

In the post you replied to, I posted an example of play from AW world and an example from D&D. In the example from AW, the player decided that their PC was looking for Isle, to visit grief upon her and decided that, when she turned up, the situation became charged. Neither of these is decisions about anything beyond her PC. It was the GM who decided that, having looked for Isle, the PC met Isle. But the PC did that by having regard to what the player wanted for their PC (ie the GM provided an opportunity, given the player's expressed desire to have their PC visit grief on Isle).

So you are wrong when I read your post literally, and you are wrong when I read it substituting player for character. The basic difference between a railroad, and a game I enjoy (as player or GM) is about who decides what the focus of play is, what the stakes are, what the dramatic needs and themes are that will be addressed in play.

What do "to visit grief upon her" and "the situation became charged" mean? Because both those seem like game-specific terms in your example.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think that's an excellent observation. It's entirely fair to note that narrative games are much less "gamist" and challenge-oriented than D&D-type games. Narrative games are more extended improv sessions with rules for deciding who's turn it is to make stuff up. Now, that kind of play is definitely its own challenge in and of itself, but it's a different challenge than using your limited resources to win a combat.

I think that can be the case, certainly. But I don't think that the drive for many in this thread is about maintaining gamism. It seems more about setting integrity or verisimilitude. That the setting is somehow more important than the characters.

Long experience has taught me that the moment I cue danger in any way - say, by having them make a perception roll - the players often metagame their characters into acting or behaving differently than they normally would, even if-when the characters don't yet themselves have any sense of danger (as determined, say, by that perception roll failing miserably).

And so I fight against this by various means including false rolls, outright surprises, and other means to try and stop the metagaming; and in this way at least I'll happily label myself as adversarial before anyone else bothers.

So if you're their adversary, and you as GM hold nearly all the authority in the game, where's the fairness you were asking about?

This is my point. Traditional RPGs skew authority so heavily toward the GM that it makes sense to have certain checks in place. We should remember that in addition to crafting fiction, it's also a game.

Obviously, if they succeed on such a roll then they become aware of approaching danger. I'm talkng about when the roll fails.

If the die roll fails, then they don't get the info? Let them act as suspicious as they like... people get hunches all the time. Fake rolls and all that just throws logs on the metagame fire.

Yeah, that's not for me. Sometimes the dice decide that you ain't getting through that door no matter what.

That's fine. When I play D&D, I don't typically bother with that kind of stuff because I don't want there to be nothing happening. I want players to be engaged and for meaningful choices to be made, and for things to progress.

Perhaps, but I still don't think there's any substitute for good ol' trial and error.

Trial and error involves recording prior results in order to learn in the future. Why shouldn't people benefit from those who went before them?

I don't know, that sure sounds like, "if you really understood MY way, you'd realize it's better than yours" to me.

Maybe you're hearing what you want to hear instead of what's being said?

 

[Micah Sweet]

There are dozens if not hundreds of threads on these very boards where D&D players talk about foreshadowing, signalling and signposting, etc. (Eg is it fair to use a medusa as an encounter without placing some very realistic statuary first, for the PCs to notice?)

That is all about a soft move/hard move structure, even if the precise terminology is not being used.

True. At this point, I have to say that the terminology and the structure of PbtA and similar games just  really turns me off, to the point where my knee-jerk reaction is just to dismiss them.

 

[pemerton]

The problem I think I'm having here is that you're using your, very specific to your experience definition of railroad so casually, as if it's shared by everybody and you're just telling it like it is. That simply isn't the case. Can you at least say you prefer the ones that don't feel like railroads to you? Because that's a lot more accurate.

If you're allowed to call certain structures of play "artificial", "forced" and "unnatural", why am I not allowed to call certain structure of play "railroads"?

I mean, I make the effort to understand your posts even though the feelings you evince are foreign to me - there is nothing unnatural or artificial to me about running non-railroad games.

Are you not able to do the same in return?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Maybe is the key word, and those maybes tend to be about forcing them to make hard choices:

It's like saying that "the pass of Caradhras is blocked by Saruman's magic. It looks like the only paths left are to go past the Gap of Rohan or through the Mines of Moria. What do you do?"

That isn't really advice out of character though. The PC is familiar enough with the terrain of Middle-Earth to know what their options are.

 

[pemerton]

I'm going to say this one last time. Railroading is a derogatory term. A game that doesn't have player generated fiction for things outside of the control of the PC is not railroading under anyone's definition but yours. It's becoming a dog whistle and it's insulting to everyone who doesn't happen to enjoy that style of game.

So you are allowed to say that you find PbtA constraining, artificial etc, but I'm not allowed to say that I find typical GM-driven approaches to D&D (and similar RPGs) to be railroading?

And is this because you're allowed to insult me, but not vice versa? Or is there some other rule at work that I've missed?

That's before we get to the fact that you keep falsely imputing a view to me - I've bolded it in your post - that I don't hold and have repeatedly told you, in replies to your posts, that I don't hold. Do you think it's OK just to casually impute to people opinions they don't hold?

 

[TwoSix]

I think that can be the case, certainly. But I don't think that the drive for many in this thread is about maintaining gamism. It seems more about setting integrity or verisimilitude.

Oh, for sure. But noting that most narrative games might be less appealing to gamers who prioritize challenge play is certainly a worthwhile observation. (With the possible exception of 4e and its descendants, like Lancer.)

And yea, whether to prioritize setting and worldbuilding over characters is the single biggest dividing line in these discussions.

 

[pemerton]

your backstory is a plothook that [should] exist in the world that you created with your backstory, it is possible for you to seek it out to resolve that narrative and drama, BUT IT IS NOT THE GM'S DUTY TO PUT IT IN FRONT OF YOU IF YOU ARE NOT DOING ANYTHING TO FIND IT, if you just EXPECT your plot to come to you without any efforts on your end that's what i mean by it being given to you it on a silver platter.

This is the railroad. The player has to jump through hoops established by the GM (they have to "do things to find it") in order to get to the play that speaks to their concerns.

In non-railroading play, as I understand it, it is the GM's job to frame scenes that speak directly to those player-authored concerns. This is what be a fan of the characters (a slogan from AW/DW) means. The rulebook for Burning Wheel (my favourite RPG) doesn't use the slogan but similarly has instructions to the GM which explain that it is the GM's job to frame scenes in this fashion.

The 4e DMG also has similar advice, when it tells the GM that it is best to "say 'yes'" to player-authored quests for their PCs.

I appreciate that the sort of RPGing I prefer, that is spelled out in these various rulebooks, is a minority taste on these boards and, as far as I can tell, in the RPGing hobby more generally. But it's not confused or impossible. And nor - despite what @Oofta keeps saying - does it require the players to have a power to author fiction beyond their PCs' actions and mental states.

 

[Oofta]

So you are allowed to say that you find PbtA constraining, artificial etc, but I'm not allowed to say that I find typical GM-driven approaches to D&D (and similar RPGs) to be railroading?

And is this because you're allowed to insult me, but not vice versa? Or is there some other rule at work that I've missed?

That's before we get to the fact that you keep falsely imputing a view to me - I've bolded it in your post - that I don't hold and have repeatedly told you, in replies to your posts, that I don't hold. Do you think it's OK just to casually impute to people opinions they don't hold?

If I were to call you a boogaloo* not knowing that boogaloo was a slang for a very derogatory term and you told me that it was the equivalent of the n word I would stop using that term. I'm telling you that calling a style of game that does not include ongoing creation of fiction by a player a "railroad" is derogatory. One is an opinion, I don't like a style of game. The other is continuing to knowingly using a word in a fashion that people find derogatory.

I don't care if you don't like D&D, or at least the default assumptions. I object to you using the term "railroad" that is not used in the fashion you are using it by anyone anywhere else that I know of.

*If it actually is some kind of derogatory term, I apologize.