D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, it seems glaringly obvious to me that @pemerton is being deliberately provocative in order to challenge the normative language usually associated with trad/simulation play and the usual "othering" of narrative play.

Plus, it's just kind of fun to rile people up, I imagine.

I don't. While I'm sure many of my posts have riled people up, that is never my purpose. It's always about how I feel at the time.

 

[Maxperson]

All language is subjective, but I definitely agree with @hawkeyefan's interpretation of agency. Choosing to take a blind guess shows agency, the actual value of the guess itself has none.

Value is not what it takes to have agency or not. That's a personal preference about the agency in question. It's fine to prefer agency of certain values, but it's not fine to tell other people that they don't have agency when they don't like what you like.

 

[TwoSix]

Value is not what it takes to have agency or not. That's a personal preference about the agency in question. It's fine to prefer agency of certain values, but it's not fine to tell other people that they don't have agency when they don't like what you like.

Blind guessing isn't agency. Opinions on "liking" or "not liking" are immaterial.

It's also immaterial in play, anyway. You wouldn't be blind guessing in a dungeon, you'd always have some kind of information guiding your choice.

 

[pemerton]

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.

This completely misses my point.

Railroading is not something that happens to a character in a fiction. It is a thing that happens to a person in the real world who wants to play a RPG. It's about who has what sort of ability to contribute to the shared fiction. Talking about physical capacities of both real and imagined people is absolutely irrelevant to it.

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.

This is silly too.

@AbdulAlhazred already gave the example, upthread, of consent to medical procedures, which is generally understood to require being informed. In the law of sexual assault, the issue of rape by deception is a complicated one, but no one I know who works in that field regards knowledge as obviously irrelevant.

And some of the most paradigm examples of lacking agency are gambles, like tossing coins or making a lucky dip.

In the context of the play of a game, the agency of the player is manifested through making choices with the purpose of changing the game in some or other way. Making choices that are, functionally, coin tosses is like choosing whether which of two dice to roll to make my move in snakes and ladders - I mean, someone can make that choice, and even be passionate about it ("I only ever roll my lucky red die!"), but that doesn't mean that they actually have any agency in the game.

The contention you and others really seem to be making is that, if the PC is ignorant in the fiction, then it is fine for the player to be ignorant at the table. In other words, that it doesn't matter if it is the GM who is deciding all the consequences. Now of course anyone who wants to is free to play that way, but it can hardly be surprising that there might be others who regard that sort of play as a railroad: everything in the fiction is coming from the GM, with the players making essentially random suggestions as to which bit of their stuff the GM should bring into play.

 

[pemerton]

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.

This is what I am calling a railroad. When I play a RPG, I want the fiction to be a joint creation of all the participants.

 

[pemerton]

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.

I cheerfully accept that you, @Enrahim2 and others don't find things to be railroading that I do.

That's not very different from how I don't find things to be artificial that you do.

It's almost as if people have different preferences in relation to RPGing!

 

[pemerton]

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".

So if the GM always has agency, is that artificial?

For my part, when I am sitting down at the table to play a game, I want all the participants to be participating, not just one. If the game is principally about establishing a shared fiction and seeing how it unfolds, then I want everyone's imagination to contribute. And if the game is going to involve the distinctive, asymmetric roles that typify RPGing, then I want the allocation of powers and responsibilities to those roles to be well-designed to ensure that everyone gets to contribute.

To me that's not artificial, it's just common sense game design. The idea that RPGs should be distinctive, in that the so-called "players" don't get to do much playing, isn't one I can get on board with.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This completely misses my point.

Railroading is not something that happens to a character in a fiction. It is a thing that happens to a person in the real world who wants to play a RPG. It's about who has what sort of ability to contribute to the shared fiction. Talking about physical capacities of both real and imagined people is absolutely irrelevant to it.

This is silly too.

@AbdulAlhazred already gave the example, upthread, of consent to medical procedures, which is generally understood to require being informed. In the law of sexual assault, the issue of rape by deception is a complicated one, but no one I know who works in that field regards knowledge as obviously irrelevant.

And some of the most paradigm examples of lacking agency are gambles, like tossing coins or making a lucky dip.

In the context of the play of a game, the agency of the player is manifested through making choices with the purpose of changing the game in some or other way. Making choices that are, functionally, coin tosses is like choosing whether which of two dice to roll to make my move in snakes and ladders - I mean, someone can make that choice, and even be passionate about it ("I only ever roll my lucky red die!"), but that doesn't mean that they actually have any agency in the game.

The contention you and others really seem to be making is that, if the PC is ignorant in the fiction, then it is fine for the player to be ignorant at the table. In other words, that it doesn't matter if it is the GM who is deciding all the consequences. Now of course anyone who wants to is free to play that way, but it can hardly be surprising that there might be others who regard that sort of play as a railroad: everything in the fiction is coming from the GM, with the players making essentially random suggestions as to which bit of their stuff the GM should bring into play.

Let me ask you this: most versions of D&D talk about railroading as a concept and GMing technique to be avoided, true? Accepting your exceptions (4e and AD&D OA), do you think those games are using the term the way you are using it, where it's a railroad if the GM authors the fiction? If so, what's going on? Are all these designers being hypocrites about their game, which is a railroad even as they warn against them? Or is it possible that their definition of the term differs from yours?

 

[Oofta]

This completely misses my point.

Railroading is not something that happens to a character in a fiction. It is a thing that happens to a person in the real world who wants to play a RPG. It's about who has what sort of ability to contribute to the shared fiction. Talking about physical capacities of both real and imagined people is absolutely irrelevant to it.

This is silly too.

@AbdulAlhazred already gave the example, upthread, of consent to medical procedures, which is generally understood to require being informed. In the law of sexual assault, the issue of rape by deception is a complicated one, but no one I know who works in that field regards knowledge as obviously irrelevant.

And some of the most paradigm examples of lacking agency are gambles, like tossing coins or making a lucky dip.

In the context of the play of a game, the agency of the player is manifested through making choices with the purpose of changing the game in some or other way. Making choices that are, functionally, coin tosses is like choosing whether which of two dice to roll to make my move in snakes and ladders - I mean, someone can make that choice, and even be passionate about it ("I only ever roll my lucky red die!"), but that doesn't mean that they actually have any agency in the game.

The contention you and others really seem to be making is that, if the PC is ignorant in the fiction, then it is fine for the player to be ignorant at the table. In other words, that it doesn't matter if it is the GM who is deciding all the consequences. Now of course anyone who wants to is free to play that way, but it can hardly be surprising that there might be others who regard that sort of play as a railroad: everything in the fiction is coming from the GM, with the players making essentially random suggestions as to which bit of their stuff the GM should bring into play.

About the only thing we're going to agree on is that I believe "if the PC is ignorant in the fiction, then it is fine for the player to be ignorant at the table." is a perfectly rational and enjoyable way of playing. It also happens to be my personal preference. I even go out of the way to not have my character act on knowledge that I have as a player. I don't regard that as a railroad, other than you I don't know anyone that would. Railroading is a completely different topic and one I'm not going to bother arguing with you about any more.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is what I am calling a railroad. When I play a RPG, I want the fiction to be a joint creation of all the participants.

I don't actually see much that the GM is doing in your ideal game, other than making sure the rules are followed.