D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[pemerton]

That's not how it works. If call you the "n" word and say "Hey, I don't mean anything by it" that doesn't make it okay.

WTF?

You keep misdescribing my opinion. I have not said that any game in which the players do not have control over fiction beyond their PCs' actions and mental states is a railroad. Yet you keep saying that I have done that.

It is perfectly possible to have a non-railroad RPG in which the players control nothing but their PC's mental states and actions. Apocalypse World is an example; so is my preferred approach to Burning Wheel.

 

[Gradine]

I didn't realize this before I posted this, but apparently there is a fairly new connotation surrounding the term "boogaloo" that could actually be fairly offensive to some folks, but to go into it would be highly political.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That is, the players pick from what the GM offers. That's the railroad.

This is contradictory. Consider my PC I posted about upthread, who wishes to get vengeance for the death of his spouse, who hates the Elven Ambassador to the port, the father of his spouse whom he blames for his spouse's death, and who when his mind is elsewhere quietly sings the Elven lays.

If the only options I as a player have to choose from are whatever the GM has come up with, then I can't play out the themes and dramatic needs of that PC. Unless the GM is shaping situations and stakes so as to ensure that I can. In which case it's no longer a railroad, it's exactly the sort of RPGing that I enjoy!

EDIT to add:
Right. This is the railroad. And the players cannot create their own drama and theme. They're stuck with the ones the GM has written, none of which speak to a Dark Elf become embittered and spiteful because of the death of his spouse.

Where is it written that a character can't decide to pursue their own personal interests in a game with GM-created adventure choices? If a PC decides they'd rather confront Captain Foswell over in hex 03.12, who is having an affair with his wife, then investigate the missing settlers in hex 06.09, more power to them! The options are still there.

 

[Faolyn]

Most D&D games have stuff like that happen from time to time, where you fail a check and nothing happens. Is your experience that different, or do you often feel incredibly bored and frustrated when playing D&D?

Why yes, it does get boring and frustrating when nothing happens, regardless of the game.

Now you explain how having nothing happen makes the game better and more interesting. Why not give an example from a game you've been in, either as player or GM?

I don't recall anything about insisting on failing forward in Level Up, for example.

Funny, it has a sidebar on page 402 of the AG (and I found that page because "fail fowards" has an entry in the index):

Failing Forwards
Where possible, use failed ability checks to present interesting outcomes and to keep the adventure moving forward. If a thief attempts to pick a lock using thieves’ tools, rolls poorly, and fails to meet the DC, the Narrator has a choice: “you can’t pick the lock,” and stalled progress, or limited success and a setback. For example, the Narrator might instead say, “if you continue you’ll pick the lock, but it will take several minutes. There are guards patrolling this building, do you want to risk it? What do you want to do?

 

[Pedantic]

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.

The things are, in that the GM authored the castle, but the events certainly aren't. The character has agency to do things, and the described objects will presumably interact as appropriate. Setting aside for a moment, along with the point about extrapolation, how incredibly dull this would be, let's assume that our castle full of books is all there is, and the game will never have anything else. You can still imagine distinct different states that will emerge. A player could build a book fort, could read the whole collection, could light certain rooms on fire and so on (arguable this is most of the gameplay, in video game form, of certain kinds of immersive sim).

I don't think you can meaningfully derive "everything that happens is decided by the GM" from even that limited scenario. Everything that can be interacted with for sure, and if we're going real old school possibly "all the means of interaction" though I think that's a hoary old school of design I'm pretty done with too. But the events that occur, the things you would recount in a retelling of "stuff the wanderer in the book castle did" were not determined by the GM. Depending on the system, some of them may not even have been determined by the player, you can imagine some kind of test for how many books can be stacked atop each other or how long they'd take to die if they walked into the fire they'd created.

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.

Here again, you're hitting on an unstated premise about relevance that I'm not able to specify. I think we're talking about goals, like I said earlier, but you're doing a transformation of some kind to get to that third point. I think maybe it's responsibility? The player, instead of trying to declare actions that achieve the outcome they want, is through action declaration, specifying that outcome. Not, "I want a glass of water" so I walk to the kitchen, retrieve a glass and turn the tap, but a generalized summary action 1 step up, like "I travel to the nearest water source" and the GM is doing...something with that. I break down a little there, because the GM is pointedly not trying to achieve the outcome the player is. Presumably that's where all the principles and moves come in to stand in for normal gameplay incentives.

 

[Gradine]

Really? You think so?

I mean, "railroad" means a specific thing to me when I use it: it means play where all the fictional outcomes have been decided by the GM (see my reply to @Pedantic not far upthread for a slightly more technical setting out of this point).

Okay, but this definition does not necessarily include pre-defined settings/locations/NPCs, including several examples you have expressly declared a railroad earlier in this thread.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If my declared action is "I search for spellbooks" and the GM decides the answer to that unilaterally ("alone"), whether by consulting their notes or making up what they think is "logical" on the spur of the moment, then that absolutely is a railroad. The GM has decided everything that happens.

The GM should decide what the world is like in my view, including whether or not there are spellbooks on that bookshelf a PC randomly decided to search. Why the heck would the player have anything to do with authoring that bit of fiction, and how would them not authoring suddenly be a railroad?

 

[Oofta]

Why yes, it does get boring and frustrating when nothing happens, regardless of the game.

Now you explain how having nothing happen makes the game better and more interesting. Why not give an example from a game you've been in, either as player or GM?

Because achieving a goal the hard way, after failures and nothing happening can be rewarding. Because it doesn't feel as artificial; when the logical outcome of not succeeding on a lockpick check is that the lock isn't opened but nothing else it feels more natural.

Funny, it has a sidebar on page 402 of the AG (and I found that page because "fail fowards" has an entry in the index):

It's not like the campaign comes to a screeching halt (if it could I have different advice for that). The players just didn't accomplish a goal as easily as they thought they would.

Have you never felt an extra surge of excitement when you find a different way of accomplishing a goal?

 

[Faolyn]

Not necessarily. There is no drama or theme in the play of White Plume Mountain, but solving the puzzles and beating up the monsters can be fun. Similarly for X2 Castle Amber.

<shrug> My group decided to try the old GDQ series games--the adventures remained the same but the mechanics were updated to 5e. We all found it incredibly boring because there was next to no RP involved. I think we ended up negotiating with a sphinx and promising to get her a deck of cards to help alleviate the boredom of doing nothing but guarding an area. I don't remember exactly; it's been a while.

CoS was better, although I didn't think it was horrific enough--I had to do a lot of rewriting and introduce a lot of side adventures to make it palatable for me.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Really? You think so?

I mean, "railroad" means a specific thing to me when I use it: it means play where all the fictional outcomes have been decided by the GM (see my reply to @Pedantic not far upthread for a slightly more technical setting out of this point).

And so does "artificial": in this context it is OBVIOUSLY a criticism, intended to convey that the game feels unpleasant or alien or not a thing to be done naturally.

If I'm expected to accept, I have done throughout this thread, that it is OK for other posters to call the sort of game I enjoy artificial, why am I obliged to refrain from saying that the sort of game they enjoy is, for me, a railroad?

No, but the point is if you’re not using the same agreed upon definition that everyone else is using you don’t get to be upset when people disagree and tell you that what you’re calling railroading is not actually railroading