D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Oofta]

Yes, of course. My choices in real life are made with varying degrees of information. With varying understanding of the risks.



Because we’re talking about a game. Someone playing a game. This idea gets lost a bit because players are also playing roles. But if we look at other games, it becomes clearer.

Imagine chess without being able to see your opponent’s pieces.


If you don’t think it’s accurate, then refute it with an actual argument. Present evidence that supports your claim. All you’re doing is saying “you’re wrong”. Explain why he’s wrong.

So far, no one has done that. And as someone who used to think as you do, but who stopped and considered it, I say his argument has merit.

If you don’t think it does, then say why.



First, I don’t know if the argument you want to make is “sometimes you get railroaded in life, so why not in a game as well?” It’s kind of the opposite of a counterargument.

Second, an RPG is largely artificial. If the point is to play the game, then there’s a certain amount of ability to affect the game state that’s expected. If that’s absent, then what do we have?

What I'm saying as artificial and unrealistic is the concept that you always know what the choices are and the consequences. You admit in your first sentence that it's not how reality works, that choices in life with varying degrees of information and understanding of risk. I've never said other aspect of the game are not artificial, just that this one in particular doesn't work for me and y'all are trying to turn this into some kind of broad insult. It's not. It's a preference.

I've quoted sources on what railroad means, I can't help it if you don't accept the standard definition. I posted the first one that came up when I google "rpg railroading".

 

[pemerton]

How does the PC have no knowledge about the world? That's not true, at all. They just don’t have  complete knowledge of the world. They have what their character would logically know, and make decisions based on that.

Really? I live in a densely packed suburb with many little streets and lanes. (It is perhaps the closet one can get to Greenwich Village in Australia.) I know the names of dozens of streets, the locations of shops and cafes and restaurants and pubs. There are different paths I can take to get from one place to another depending on my mood, my sense of how much traffic might be about at a given time of day, whether I want to check out a particular piece of street art or remind myself of a particular interesting or beautiful building.

I see people on the streets and in the shops whom I recognise, some of whom I know.

Playing a game in the way that you are advocating does not give me, in playing my PC, all that knowledge. I have to ask the GM at every moment of play what I can see, what I remember, who I recognise, etc. That 's not immersive, unless I am playing an artificial space alien.

And when I see a person, I can see their build and their manner and their dress. I can see where they are coming from and where they might be heading. If I interact with them, I have a sense - built on years of experience as a human with these other sorts of humans - of what they want from me (if anything), what their immediate purpose is, etc.

Playing a game in the way that you are advocating makes every interaction feel like it is with a cypher, as if I were trying to make sense of the motives and purposes and manner of a telemarketer on the phone.

Now for all I know, when you actually play the game you don't use all the methods you're advocating for in this thread. Maybe players get to deploy an intuitive knowledge of their friends, family, home, neighbours, neighbourhood, etc. Or maybe - like most D&D adventures ever - your play assumes that the PCs are strangers in the worlds they move through. I don't know.

What I do know is that playing a game in the way that you are advocating is, in my experience, not at all immersive. The knowledge on which I make decisions is some austere, stripped-down version of the world, shorn of its value and meaning and presented typically in the terms of compass directions and Gygaxian architecture (in which, say, ceiling height is crucial but the beauty of the architraves never matters - unless a secret door stud is hidden there.)

 

[hawkeyefan]

Really? So whenever I suck at a game I have no agency? I need to use that excuse when I lose!

Nope! Just because you have agency doesn’t mean you’ll automatically succeed. It means you have the chance of success.

Let’s look at some card games? Can you suck at poker? Absolutely. Can you suck at war? Nope… all you do is flip cards. There’s no skill involved. You have no say in the outcome.

It is a binary. Either you have agency or you don't. If you want to talk more or less agency, then it gets very subjective. What you view is more agency others will view as less and vice versa. Because of that subjectivity, I focus on whether you have it or not.

So it’s binary because people’s opinions on agency levels will vary?

This doesn’t make any sense.

To you. That's your subjective opinion, except for the part where blind choices are not an example of agency. You are just wrong about that one. You still have agency, it's just not enough subjective agency for you and you want more of the kind of agency that you like. There's nothing wrong with wanting more of the kind of agency you like, but telling others that they don't have agency at all in those situations is wrong. Your dislike of the amount of agency you have in those situations doesn't translate into it not being there for either you or others.

I don’t see how it’s all that subjective. I mean, who’s going to say that a blind choice between two doors represents more agency than an informed choice between two doors? No one.

The bolded is the problem here. Meaningful is nothing BUT subjective. I find there to be meaning in the blind choice between A and B. You don't. That's fine. The issue is that you are incorrectly trying to say that there is no agency in the latter situation just because you don't find subjective meaning there.

What’s the meaning to a player making a blind choice? The choice needs to involve something for it to be meaningful. Not just the outcome, but the choice itself.

It doesn't take ANY information to allow for some agency. It's just less meaningful to you than you like. To take agency away from someone to the point where they have none, they need to have no ability to make choices other than those the DM wants them to make.

But then we’re back to the question @pemerton has raised about the base level of what’s expected in an RPG. That a player says what his character does. No game would be a railroad according to your logic unless the GM usurps the players’ characters.

I think there are far more subtle ways to railroad players. Blind choices are among those.

They are the same, though, when the DM can unilaterally make any change he wants at any time he wants. If the DM doesn't have total authority and/or cannot make any change he wants to the rules, then it's not Rule 0. It's whatever rule the game gives the DM or table to change a rule under limited circumstances.

They’re not the same. Plenty of games allow for rules changes without granting absolute authority to the GM.

Because if you don't trust the DM, you should not be playing in that game. You will very often be disruptive to the game, interrupting to ask why something was done or arguing over something. Lack of trust destroys games. When I go into a new game I give the DM trust and it stays there until he shows me that he is not deserving of that trust, upon which time I walk out of the game.

I don’t think that understanding why the game works the way it does should be considered problematic. People aren’t perfect. I’ve questioned people I trust many times.

Expecting people to just shut up and do what I say without having to offer any insight? That seems really odd.

Trust is also granted. If my house is on fire and firemen show up, I'm going to trust that they know what they are doing. I'm not going start questioning them for why they are doing certain things because I don't trust them. They are the experts in fighting fires.

The DM is presumably the expert in running the game, unless I KNOW that he is new. Even if I know the DM is new, I'm not going to distrust him, but I will be on the lookout for possible mistakes and be ready to offer quick friendly advice if it's a major mistake, or friendly advice after the game about what I saw if it wasn't major.

Presumably is telling. Also, “expert”? I’m not sure if that’s really the right way to view the GM.

Do we view players as experts?

Rule 0 is a cornerstone of traditional play. Rules changes to make the game better has been a large part of the game since its inception.

Sure… it just doesn’t need to go hand in hand with absolute GM authority.

 

[pemerton]

That whole paragraph is total BS and not at all the way the game works.

So please explain, then: how do the players know what their PCs are seeing and experiencing, other than the GM telling them? I mean, you've told me, repeatedly, that they can't imagine it for themselves.

Where do the PCs' friends come from? How do they know who bakes the best bread in the village, other than by asking the GM?

How is the experience of playing the character any different from having to look up a Lonely Planet every few minutes to work out the lie of the land?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Really? I live in a densely packed suburb with many little streets and lanes. (It is perhaps the closet one can get to Greenwich Village in Australia.) I know the names of dozens of streets, the locations of shops and cafes and restaurants and pubs. There are different paths I can take to get from one place to another depending on my mood, my sense of how much traffic might be about at a given time of day, whether I want to check out a particular piece of street art or remind myself of a particular interesting or beautiful building.

I see people on the streets and in the shops whom I recognise, some of whom I know.

Playing a game in the way that you are advocating does not give me, in playing my PC, all that knowledge. I have to ask the GM at every moment of play what I can see, what I remember, who I recognise, etc. That 's not immersive, unless I am playing an artificial space alien.

And when I see a person, I can see their build and their manner and their dress. I can see where they are coming from and where they might be heading. If I interact with them, I have a sense - built on years of experience as a human with these other sorts of humans - of what they want from me (if anything), what their immediate purpose is, etc.

Playing a game in the way that you are advocating makes every interaction feel like it is with a cypher, as if I were trying to make sense of the motives and purposes and manner of a telemarketer on the phone.

Now for all I know, when you actually play the game you don't use all the methods you're advocating for in this thread. Maybe players get to deploy an intuitive knowledge of their friends, family, home, neighbours, neighbourhood, etc. Or maybe - like most D&D adventures ever - your play assumes that the PCs are strangers in the worlds they move through. I don't know.

What I do know is that playing a game in the way that you are advocating is, in my experience, not at all immersive. The knowledge on which I make decisions is some austere, stripped-down version of the world, shorn of its value and meaning and presented typically in the terms of compass directions and Gygaxian architecture (in which, say, ceiling height is crucial but the beauty of the architraves never matters - unless a secret door stud is hidden there.)

Obviously there has to be some way to let the players know what their characters know. This is generally done in most RPG play via conversation with whomever has that knowledge, often the GM. The GM is not in-game necessarily providing them with knowledge new in the moment to the character, they are instead informing the player of information that their PC knows. The only other option I can see to convey this information is for the player to functionally invent all the information the character knows themselves, if which case the conversation goes the other way, with the player telling the GM what they know. Since I would prefer in my gaming for the setting to exist as independently as possible (ie, I as a PC do not want to invent the setting myself, which feels lacking in verisimilitude to me), I prefer the first option.

In short, our preferences are simply too divergent to ever reach common ground.

 

[pemerton]

This is just my point: just because you're playing Aedhros doesn't mean everything in the entire game has to revolve around him*.

* - and to suggest that it should really comes across as more than a bit self-centered, even though you probably don't mean it that way.

Why not? I mean, it involves Alicia too. But why wouldn't everything be about them. They're the characters my friend and I have sat down to play. The game is about them.

For one thing, what are the other players supposed to think? If each of them takes this same attitude, hoo boy - I'd not want to referee that argument!

You have a habit of asserting, or implying, that things are impossible which in fact many of us have been doing without trouble for years or even decades.

In this thread I linked to the actual play report: it's not hard to find my dozens of actual play reports on these boards, for Burning Wheel and other systems.

The way you described him and his goals etc., the story you seem to want to tell with him very much looks like a quest; that being to avenge his spouse. If I'm the GM I just take that and run with it.

To me, this seems an incredibly shallow way of thinking about a character - as if every aspiration, every passion, every goal is a quest; and hence, in the context of RPGing, an opportunity for the GM to trot out dungeon number 8 and put the McGuffin in the final room.

The way that I make a game about (say) the bitter, self-deluded Dark Elf Aedhros is by framing him into situations which will reveal, through their resolution, how bitter, self-deluded, and willing to hurt the world he really is. Quests have nothing to do with that.

it puts the GM in a very subservient position in that the role becomes merely one of catering to (or pandering to, whichever) the players' story arcs and-or whims, rather than being able to put her own idea for a story arc in there as well.

This is both bizarre and comical. You advocate a play style in which the GM's conception of the fiction utterly dominates - to the extent that you think that character-driven play means whipping out generic storyboard number 23 and writing the name of the PC in place of the X in the adventure schema - and then when someone mentions a type of play in which the GM is not the dominant contributor and you use words like "subservient" and "pandering".

Your whole conception of RPGing seems to me one giant pandering to a GM who cannot handle any sort of creative collaboration.

 

[pemerton]

Obviously there has to be some way to let the players know what their characters know.

Sure.

This is generally done in most RPG play via conversation with whomever has that knowledge, often the GM. The GM is not in-game necessarily providing them with knowledge new in the moment to the character, they are instead informing the player of information that their PC knows

I'm aware of this. It's not remotely immersive. As an experience, it has ZERO resemblance to actually moving through a place and among people that one knows.

I mean, I've once or twice travelled through places that were, to me, very foreign, relying on a Lonely Planet. And the technique of GM narration is not super-immersive even for that sort of experience.

The only other option I can see to convey this information is for the player to functionally invent all the information the character knows themselves, if which case the conversation goes the other way, with the player telling the GM what they know.

That's one option, sure. There are others too. Just sticking to games mentioned in this thread, consider how AW and DW handle this ("ask questions and build on the answers") or how BW and Classic Traveller handle it (Wises and Circes in the first system, Streetwise in the second).

Since I would prefer in my gaming for the setting to exist as independently as possible (ie, I as a PC do not want to invent the setting myself, which feels lacking in verisimilitude to me), I prefer the first option.

Sure. I'm not confused about your preferences. All I'm saying is that for me it is only immersive if my goal is to play a space alien.

 

[Gradine]

 

[hawkeyefan]

What I'm saying as artificial and unrealistic is the concept that you always know what the choices are and the consequences. You admit in your first sentence that it's not how reality works, that choices in life with varying degrees of information and understanding of risk.

So what? I’m a player playing a game. Player agency seems to matter to that. Players can know things that the character doesn’t.

I've never said other aspect of the game are not artificial, just that this one in particular doesn't work for me and y'all are trying to turn this into some kind of broad insult. It's not. It's a preference.

I’m not insulted. It’s really unlikely for me to get insulted by discussions of RPGs. I just thought it was worth pointing out that people who viewed one descriptor as insulting were perfectly comfortable using other descriptors that others claimed were insulting.

I've quoted sources on what railroad means, I can't help it if you don't accept the standard definition. I posted the first one that came up when I google "rpg railroading".

I don’t think they do any work to counter @pemerton ’s claim.

 

[Autumnal]

This is what a rule book that says "be a fan of the characters" is really saying: Be like Fictional Cinematic Media.

Hmm. Now, I’ve actually gotten paid to write about running and playing doomed campaigns - that is, where everybody playing knows up front that the PCs will die, and what matters is how, when and where, and what comes of it. It’s part of the Fate Horror Toolkit. I’ve run and played characters in narrative games where I/we set out with inspirations like All Quiet On The Western Front, Thomas Ligotti’s stories, and Zdzisław Beksiński’s art. In every case I was very much a fan of the characters, all the way to their dooms.

Or least that’s what I thought I was doing. You seem pretty sure, though. Could you explain the fictional cinematic media I was actually using?

Unlike all the other mentioned games that put strict limits on the role playing to make the game exactly what the author(s) want to to exactly be, D&D can be anything you want to make it be.

I thought I’ve played and run Fate as cosmic horror, personal tragedy, caper comedy, quietly contemplative hard science fiction, melodramatic quest fantasy in a sophisticated low-metal society inspired by the Inca and Maya, and heavily didactic near-future espionage and art theft. I thought it was a pretty diverse spread. But you say other games, presumably including Fate as a narrative game with shared power of works and story creation/development. So the folks at Evil Hat who appreciated my messages with game play stories must have also been building up strict limits that constrain all of the above beyond the declared aim to support competent characters dealing proactively with their environment. Um…what are those strict limits? ‘Cause, no fooling, I don’t see ‘em, and I’m curious about what I’ve been missing all this time.