D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Maxperson]

I see one problem with this claim in the larger context. You speculate that long winded combat is the reason D&D feel combat focused. However really long winded combat was introduced by WotC, while I would say TSR era D&D had an even stronger reputation for being combat focused back in the day, than I experience 5ed's reputation.

I think you really need to look at the larger culture. When I am running home made campaigns in D&D there are usually many sessions between each combat (and these campaigns are mostly formed and driven by player input). If I am running a prewritten adventure, I can expect at least 1 combat per session. That include enworlds excelent War of the burning sky, that is the least combat focused adventure path I have seen if run mostly as written.

There are multiple issues that result in D&D being misperceived as combat focused.

1) As you note, back in the day 1e was much more combat focused. Even exploration was usually just to find treasure which was generally guarded by monsters.
2) This is one that I see most. RULES!!! There are many more combat rules(the combat section is by far the largest) in the game than the other pillars have. What they are ignoring is that combat by necessity needs many more rules in order to function well. I don't need all of the initiative, combat facing, OA, movement, etc. rules for the other pillars.
3) XP. Most(and often all) XP is awarded via combat. The game has moved away from that somewhat in recent editions, but the lion's share still comes from combat.

There may be other reasons, but those are the ones I can recall now. What the people arguing combat focus are missing is that in the vast majority of games, most of the playtime is spent in the exploration and social pillars. If combat is a minority of the time, the game is not focused on combat.

The change in focus from combat oriented 1e to the modern outlook on D&D means that those who still play 1e generally also spend more time roleplaying and exploring than they used to.

 

[Oofta]

But the decision is uninformed. At the time of the decision, there is no meaningful difference. There's no skill involved.

This is why signals are important. Or at least, the chance for signals. If the players are able to deploy skills or inventory to try and make the choice an informed one, then that may change the situation. This gives them agency.



Rule zero is just as unnecessary for a GM who wants to change the game in some way as it is for the viking hat GM who wants to ignore the rules. No rules can stop people who are determined to break the rules, nor can they stop people from changing the rules. But they can help folks from going too far. They can serve as a guide for those who aren't yet sure how they want to play.



I think it's more about signaling things to the players. This lets them know it's not a quantum ogre situation. This is what makes it a game, and that is where PLAYER agency comes in. The choices that players make need to be meaningful not just in their outcome, but in the choices themselves. They have to have some idea of what they are choosing, or some way to learn what they are choosing prior to the choice.

I think that part of the reason for this disconnect is that as D&D has moved along, there have been shifts in how focused the game is meant to be. How specific the experience is meant to be. In the early days of dungeon crawling, agency (such as it was) was about the player mitigating risks through clever use of spells, inventory, and other resources. So the whole of play was a test of player skill. Information was hidden, with the expectation that the players would have a means of learning the hidden information.

As the game has evolved, the scope of play has broadened. But the processes of play haven't always adapted accordingly. Combined with some odd ideas that have developed about playing the game being bad in some way... or labeling it as metagaming... leads to some strange ideas.

Why give the players a choice that at the time of making it, is totally arbitrary? That there could conceivably be significant consequences for this decision makes its uninformed nature even worse. Where is the game in this? It's just as much the illusion of choice as is the quantum ogre.

In real life do you know all the consequences of your decisions? Does that make your decisions uninformed? Or do you have a decent idea about some while others are just a best guess?

If some of your choices are best guess does that mean you have no choice, that your life is a railroad you have no control over? If some decisions are done blind in real life, why should it be any different in a game?

 

[pemerton]

Railroad is established as one of the extremes in the railroad-sandbox axis debate.

By whom?

The way I am using the word "railroad" is a way that I have been using to meaningfully communicate about RPGing for multiple decades.

Louvre is huge with a lot of different ways to go about watching the suff there, but you are unlikely to actually get your own work displayed there by just visiting. This seem more like the experience you are describing. And I havent heard about any railroad tracks trough that place.

The Louvre is an actual place. People can move through it using their own limbs, their own motive power. In doing so, if they are sighted than they can see many things in virtue of physical and neural processes that take place, involving the surfaces of the displayed objects, the retina, as well as the properties of light.

The equivalent to doing that, when playing a RPG, is the fact that I can see, talk to, interact with, shake my fist at, etc my fellow participants in the game.

The experience I am describing as a railroad is not the experience of moving around, seeing many things, talking to many people. It is the experience of having one person - the GM - establish the shared fiction, in virtue of (i) specifying all the elements, and thereby (ii) specifying all the consequences of actions I declare for my PC, either directly or by extrapolation from what they have specified.

That has nothing in common with visiting the Louvre, where I get to see the products of many imaginations all on display to enjoy, compare, etc. In fact it's virtually the opposite of such a visit - I get the content of exactly one imagination, told to me by the GM.

 

[pemerton]

Let's say that in reality I find myself in a strange building in a hallway with six unlabelled doors*. I'm there looking for a small business, which I know is behind one of these doors but I've forgotten which one. I also know that one of the other doors is alarmed; I don't want to open that one! So, how do I decide which door to open? You guessed it - after what little observation I can bring to bear, it's good old trial and error; and if I set off the alarm well so be it.

Both the store and the alarmed door were in place ahead of time, and nothing I do now is going to change their locations. I've no idea which door is which, and yet I still have the personal agency to choose which one I'm going to try first regardless of how I make that choice.

And the same is true for a character in a D&D setting. It doesn't know what's behind any of these doors (and thus neither should its player); the player just has to trust the DM to honour her own prep and leave things in their assigned locations instead of changing that prep in response to the player's choice. And a good DM doesn't break that trust.

* - a situation that more or less existed many years ago when a friend had a store in the upstairs of an old building - there was a sign for the store on the outside wall above the street but for the longest time there wasn't a sign on the door, meaning unless you already knew how to get there it really could become an exercise in trying random doors once you got to that floor.

In real life do you know all the consequences of your decisions? Does that make your decisions uninformed? Or do you have a decent idea about some while others are just a best guess?

If some of your choices are best guess does that mean you have no choice, that your life is a railroad you have no control over? If some decisions are done blind in real life, why should it be any different in a game?

In real life, if I am in a situation and exercise my powers (eg cognitive, muscular etc) to make choices and affect physical objects, the outcome is not authored by anyone (setting any possible divinity to one side for present purposes) - it just is what it is.

In real life, if I ask someone else "What would you imagine would happen if I did such-and-such", then I am learning the content of their imagination. The only power of mine that I exercised was to ask the question.

In real life, if I say to someone else "Suppose that I had such-and-such abilities, what do you imagine would happen if I did such-and-such", then I am still earning the content of their imagination, and the only power of mine that I exercised was to ask the question.

When my RPGing looks like the paragraph just above, it is a railroad. The fact that the GM is extremely sincere in their report of what they imagined would happen if I, having certain abilities, did such-and-such a thing, doesn't change the fact that it is their imagining.

 

[Oofta]

In real life, if I am in a situation and exercise my powers (eg cognitive, muscular etc) to make choices and affect physical objects, the outcome is not authored by anyone (setting any possible divinity to one side for present purposes) - it just is what it is.

In real life, if I ask someone else "What would you imagine would happen if I did such-and-such", then I am learning the content of their imagination. The only power of mine that I exercised was to ask the question.

In real life, if I say to someone else "Suppose that I had such-and-such abilities, what do you imagine would happen if I did such-and-such", then I am still earning the content of their imagination, and the only power of mine that I exercised was to ask the question.

When my RPGing looks like the paragraph just above, it is a railroad. The fact that the GM is extremely sincere in their report of what they imagined would happen if I, having certain abilities, did such-and-such a thing, doesn't change the fact that it is their imagining.

In real life you don't have control outside of what you physically do. You don't have perfect knowledge of the result of every action, you don't get to change the world just because you want to make it so. The effect of much of what you do is controlled and influenced by other people. In D&D that extends to the physical world because someone has to handle that part of the game.

But that isn't what my post was responding to. I was responding to the concept was that people have no agency unless they know exactly what they're getting into and know the possible outcomes every time. By that logic, people in the real world have no agency.

 

[Enrahim2]

By whom?

By the RPG community. Please make a google search of railroading, and show me any source not written by you describing a sandbox as a railroad. I can find numerous examples of people explicitely contrasting a sandbox with a railroad, even pointing to sandbox as the only obvious counterexample to railroad. The massive feedback you have gotten in this thread should also be a hint that you might not have tuned properly in on the common use of the term.

The way I am using the word "railroad" is a way that I have been using to meaningfully communicate about RPGing for multiple decades.

How do you know it has been meaningful for the recipient? Have you ever used the term and clearly been understood the way you intended it to be understood, without providing suplementary information about your use of the word like you have in this tread? Mind you, there is a huge overlap beetwen what you coin "railroading" and what I and others in this thread have claimed is the common understanding of the word, so only cases where the sandbox case of contention is clearly implied can be taken into account.

That has nothing in common with visiting the Louvre, where I get to see the products of many imaginations all on display to enjoy, compare, etc. In fact it's virtually the opposite of such a visit - I get the content of exactly one imagination, told to me by the GM.

How weird. Are you transported from one physical place to a physical place miles away when you play D&D? Because that is the main quality I associate with sitting on a railroad. The physical sensorary experience was obviously not what I suggested would be analogous. Try again.

Also as a minor side note, you are playing in a sad game indeed if you only experience your GMs imagination. In all games I have played in there has clearly been elements drawn from hundreds of creative minds providing myths, stories, illustratons, designs, philosophies and all kinds of other creative products. The GM acting mostly as a currator, sometimes as a guide, and in a few cases they even might come up with something truely original themselves.

 

[TwoSix]

I disagree.

Let's say that in reality I find myself in a strange building in a hallway with six unlabelled doors*. I'm there looking for a small business, which I know is behind one of these doors but I've forgotten which one. I also know that one of the other doors is alarmed; I don't want to open that one! So, how do I decide which door to open? You guessed it - after what little observation I can bring to bear, it's good old trial and error; and if I set off the alarm well so be it.

Both the store and the alarmed door were in place ahead of time, and nothing I do now is going to change their locations. I've no idea which door is which, and yet I still have the personal agency to choose which one I'm going to try first regardless of how I make that choice.

Disagree with that. Making an uninformed guess isn't agency. Choosing to guess, as opposed to just walking away or just sitting there waiting to see if someone opens a door, is agency. But the actual guessing part isn't.

If I roll up a character, and get 6 18s, I'm very lucky, but I didn't exhibit any agency in getting that result, even if I was the person physically rolling the dice. Now, if I chose to roll instead of using point buy, then I did exhibit agency, because I made an informed choice between two distinct options.

Or, let's see as a hypothetical that the DM designed to base their next setting on the results of 4 random tables, which are filled with descriptive game terms that will be used as the base elements of the campaign world, and each table has 100 options. The DM kindly lets you pick the 4 numbers for the tables, although you cannot see the values on the table.

Despite picking the actual numbers to decide between 100,000,000 combinations, you still exhibited no agency. If you complain that you don't like the setting that's been created, the DM does not have the right to say "But you picked it!"

 

[Oofta]

By the RPG community. Please make a google search of railroading, and show me any source not written by you describing a sandbox as a railroad. I can find numerous examples of people explicitely contrasting a sandbox with a railroad, even pointing to sandbox as the only obvious counterexample to railroad. The massive feedback you have gotten in this thread should also be a hint that you might not have tuned properly in on the common use of the term.



How do you know it has been meaningful for the recipient? Have you ever used the term and clearly been understood the way you intended it to be understood, without providing suplementary information about your use of the word like you have in this tread? Mind you, there is a huge overlap beetwen what you coin "railroading" and what I and others in this thread have claimed is the common understanding of the word, so only cases where the sandbox case of contention is clearly implied can be taken into account.



How weird. Are you transported from one physical place to a physical place miles away when you play D&D? Because that is the main quality I associate with sitting on a railroad. The physical sensorary experience was obviously not what I suggested would be analogous. Try again.

Also as a minor side note, you are playing in a sad game indeed if you only experience your GMs imagination. In all games I have played in thee has clearly been elements drawn from hundreds of creative minds providing myths, stories, illustratons, designs, philosophies and all kinds of other creative products. The GM acting mostly currator, sometimes as a guide, and in a few cases they even might come up with something truely original themselves.

This is a losing battle. You know, I know, the vast, vast majority of people who play RPGs and know what the term railroad will disagree with pemerton. But as far as I can tell they'll never accept that their personal definition is not the accepted definition.

 

[Oofta]

Disagree with that. Making an uninformed guess isn't agency. Choosing to guess, as opposed to just walking away or just sitting there waiting to see if someone opens a door, is agency. But the actual guessing part isn't.

If I roll up a character, and get 6 18s, I'm very lucky, but I didn't exhibit any agency in getting that result, even if I was the person physically rolling the dice. Now, if I chose to roll instead of using point buy, then I did exhibit agency, because I made an informed choice between two distinct options.

Or, let's see as a hypothetical that the DM designed to base their next setting on the results of 4 random tables, which are filled with descriptive game terms that will be used as the base elements of the campaign world, and each table has 100 options. The DM kindly lets you pick the 4 numbers for the tables, although you cannot see the values on the table.

Despite picking the actual numbers to decide between 10,000,000 combinations, you still exhibited no agency. If you complain that you don't like the setting that's been created, the DM does not have the right to say "But you picked it!"

Do you always have agency as your describing it in real life? If the answer is no, why is it required for a game? Because if I always have agency in a game I would personally call that "artificial".

 

[hawkeyefan]

Sure. No skill involved. Skill isn't important to this discussion, though. That's a different topic.

It absolutely does. We're talking about the agency of a player playing a game. Their ability to play the game well or not is fundamental to that.

No. It gives them information. Agency is just the ability to decide what your PC says and tries to do.

If information = agency, then you would have to prep every adventure to an incredible degree and then inform the players of everything from beginning to end before the first session. That way they will have agency. Less information than all of it means that their decisions will be lacking and therefore, by your argument there, lacking agency.

If you're viewing agency as binary, I suppose. But I think that's a foolish way to view it. Certainly there are situations where we have more agency than others.

Agency is my ability as a player to alter the game state to a way I prefer. To evaluate and improve my situation. Blind choices are not an example of agency.

You're stuck on this idea that a GM only robs the player of agency if they make the choices for the players, but that's not really what it is. It's about removing the player's ability to make meaningful choices. A choice between door A and door B absent any other information is not a meaningful choice.

And it doesn't require complete and total information to make allow for some agency. You can just say that "behind door B, you hear the growling of two creatures, uttering in a gutteral tongue that it's been a while since they've gotten to eat adventurers". Now the choice of dor A with no noise, or door B with the hungry monsters is a more meaningful choice.

So can a few paragraphs of advice in the DMG. The problem with your idea is that a lot of people won't alter rules if they don't have game permission to do so, but would change them and make the game better with such permission. I suspect that a hell of a lot more people would fail to make the game better with the lack of rule 0 than the number who make the game worse with it included. Your way harms the game.

Well what's Rule Zero? Is it permission to change rules, or is it that the GM has absolute authority? I can never tell, and those things are not the same. There are plenty of games that grant the first without the second.

They don't need to know that it isn't a quantum ogre situation. If they are worried about it, then they don't trust the DM and have no business playing that game. That's why railroading is such a sin. It betrays that trust.

No business playing in a game? What are you talking about? What if it's their first game with the GM and part of the goal is to build trust? Not everyone plays with the same group they've been playing with for decades. Some people play online or at game stores or conventions; why would they just automatically trust the GM? Why

Trust is earned.

I disagree with this just a little bit. The scope of play HAS broadened, but it still includes skilled play. The broad nature of today's game means that you can play your way and I can play mine. The difference is that I'm not arguing to hurt your way of play.

Nothing I can do will hurt the way you play. That seems disingenuous. If you're saying that Rule Zero is somehow fundamental to RPGs then I'd say you're wrong, and would point to the many RPGs that don't have Rule Zero as evidence.