D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[TwoSix]

But there's is no illusion of choice there. There simply is no choice (mostly) and the players accept it.

That's why I prefer the narrower definition. If the players recognize they do not have a choice and go with it anyway, there is no illusion so I don't label that the generally derogatory term Railroading.

I'm sure if we just describe adventure path games as "no choice, but you all accepted it"-style games no one will have any issues with that at all.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

So by this you would exonerate all killers because they can't be perfectly sure of the consequences of their actions?

 

[Mort]

I'm sure if we just describe adventure path games as "no choice, but you all accepted it"-style games no one will have any issues with that at all.

I prefer the term linear myself.

Everyone at the table has to accept that they will follow along the adventure, or it falls apart fast.

 

[TwoSix]

That's both true to my knowledge and unfortunate. But published adventures don't encapsulate how to play the game. They just represent what the publisher thinks they can sell, and  possibly what they consider the core gameplay to be.

And you have admit a traditional railroady adventure path is a lot easier to write than any other sort of adventure. That probably has a lot to do with why people keep publishing them.

I'd say that modules are probably the most idealized version of trad play priorities, which are to tell a story that features the characters but isn't really ABOUT them, it's about displaying the setting and ideas of the adventure. (There's a reason Paizo adventure paths jump from country to country, after all, the Pathfinder line is just as much about Golarian as it is about gameplay.)

But absolutely, you can do more of a trad-sandbox with no module. Kind of a hybrid of trad and OSR/classic sensibilities.

I'm not really the person to ask about adventures and modules anyway, I'm on the record as pretty much hating them, even when I do play trad-style games.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

Like Micah said, your character has incomplete knowledge. However, you are not your character. Even if you're the type of gamer who completely immerses yourself in your character, you don't have your character's memories or experiences. You don't. The only way you could is if you were playing yourself in the actual, real world, in which case... that's kind of unusual.

So if you want your character to go to their favorite pub, you either have to make it up (potentially as part of their background, potentially on the spot) or let the GM make it up. This doesn't mean you're being railroaded! It just means that you are not your character.

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.

Most D&D adventures that I've seen assume that the PCs are strangers to that area, not to the world; the adventures very rarely take place in the PCs' home town.

Or more to the point, most D&D adventures that I've seen do not assume that the players have encyclopedic knowledge of the setting. And why should they? You don't have encyclopedic knowledge of your own real-world suburb (since there are people you don't recognize), let alone the entire world!

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.)

This is dependent on two things: how good the GM is on describing the scenary (maybe you haven't had many GMs who are good at that), and on how much the players are willing to sit there and listen to scenery porn (not every player has the patience for such a thing).

 

[CreamCloud0]

I prefer the term linear myself.

Everyone at the table has to accept that they will follow along the adventure, or it falls apart fast.

eh, i feel a linear game and being railroaded can be two different things, conflating the terms just confuses things. all bloodhounds are dogs, not all dogs are bloodhounds, ect, ect...

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'd say that modules are probably the most idealized version of trad play priorities, which are to tell a story that features the characters but isn't really ABOUT them, it's about displaying the setting and ideas of the adventure. (There's a reason Paizo adventure paths jump from country to country, after all, the Pathfinder line is just as much about Golarian as it is about gameplay.)

But absolutely, you can do more of a trad-sandbox with no module. Kind of a hybrid of trad and OSR/classic sensibilities.

I'm not really the person to ask about adventures and modules anyway, I'm on the record as pretty much hating them, even when I do play trad-style games.

Agreed. Again, this why I prefer classic over trad.

 

[TwoSix]

I prefer the term linear myself.

Everyone at the table has to accept that they will follow along the adventure, or it falls apart fast.

I do agree that if you do agree to play in an adventure path, you then can't complain that your character's backstory isn't the focus of play. That's a violation of social contract.

 

[Mort]

eh, i feel a linear game and being railroaded can be two different things, conflating the terms just confuses things. all bloodhounds are dogs, not all dogs are bloodhounds, ect, ect...

Yes, that's what I was referring too. Linear isn't necessarily railroad - especially when the table knows it's linear.

My point was that Linear and Railroad should NOT be conflated.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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".

You're confounding player agency with character agency here. @pemerton is talking about HIS agency, not Aedhros' agency, which is at best imaginary.