D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Maxperson]

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.

Right. Linear =/= railroad. There are generally multiple ways to get to the end of a linear adventure. You aren't forced down the path. Further, you COULD just leave it and go do something else. You aren't forced to stay on that linear adventure. Generally the players agree to stay on it as you note.

 

[CreamCloud0]

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.

ah, i had misread what you were trying to say with that

 

[Faolyn]

Imagine Battleship without being able to see your opponent's pieces.

Oops... I mean, imagine poker without being able to see your opponent's cards.

Uh... dangit, I'm having a hard time thinking of any game involving cards that doesn't limit player knowledge.

I guess it means that all such games are railroads lacking any player agency? Imagine the reaction of all those professional poker players, and fans, when they find that out.

In Battleship and poker (and in other card games and probably most board games), there are winners and losers. RPGs don't have winners and losers.

 

[Faolyn]

I've always understood Railroading to be narrower than that. Railroading is the ILLUSION of choice.

If an adventure goes from A-B-C-D with no deviation allowed by the PCs, but the players know the path and just choose to follow it - it is a linear adventure.

If the GM tells the players, ok you can pick A-B-C or D. But , B,C and D are actually ALSO A - that's railroading.

I think that's where the big conflict is being generated here.

(@Oofta @Micah Sweet) go with the fact that as long as the players have REAL choices to make it's not railroading.

@pemerton is saying that in games where the content is SOLELY GM generated (ALL the content and ALL of the consequences) ALL the choices made from there are actually an illusion. And thus a Railroad.

Pemerton's definition is too broad for my liking. I prefer the narrower definition. But I can certainly see where Pemerton is coming from and have struggled a bit with it in 5e.

Railroading is a bit of an umbrella term. A linear adventure is a form of railroading (railroads travel in a straight line!), and adventures where you can't pick anything but A, or where your attempts to pick B, C, or D are prevented or punished, are also railroads.

If the players have real choices, as Micah said, and not just the illusion of choice, then it's probably not a railroad--it's just a sandbox. It can be a railroad, if the GM has made the sandbox so that specific events occur when triggered by the players. Like, the PCs go into town (that the GM made) and no matter what they did before hand or how they entered, or even when they entered, a certain event occurs, like a cutscene in a video game. That (IMO) is a very minimal railroad; minimal enough that it probably doesn't matter.

Permerton seems to think the options are "everything is created solely by the GM" or "everything is created by the players" with no middle ground. That having the GM describe anything to your PC is railroady because your PC should know it already.

Maybe they've had crappy GMs who haven't let them include any details in their backgrounds, to the point they wouldn't even be allowed to say what their character's favorite pub was. I dunno. I don't think I've had any GMs like that, at least not in recent years--except for, yes, the GMs who relied on railroading. But I'd wager that most of the GMs I've had were fine with players making up details.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why are you so desperate to enforce this weird nonstandard definition of agency?

 

[Oofta]

The point is this. If we're playing a game where my character is in the town they grew up, what is the benefit of asking the GM where the blacksmith versus the player just saying where the blacksmith is?

Some people are saying that being able to say that information as a player ruins their immersion, because they can only be immersed when the fictional situation is described to them by an outside narrator. Some other people are saying the opposite, that not being able to roleplay knowing the layout of the character's home town takes them right out of the fiction.

A player filling in details can certainly happen in D&D games I've played. But that's far, far away from having perfect knowledge of all choices, all consequences along with players declaring that they're spouting lore in a location they've never been before. The DW stream I was listening to had one of the players do that - describe the tower that they had recently discovered and what threats were there. The gulf between a typical D&D game where a player adds a bit of flavor text and the way PbtA games work is pretty massive in this regard. It's the difference between a player regularly declaring what the narrative of the world and what is happening versus someone helping the DM fill in the blanks on fluff now and then.

Even then, there's nothing wrong with more collaborative world building. It's just that PbtA games takes it much further and makes it part of the structure of the game instead of an option. But it bugs me if I have to shift gears during play from being a player to filling in [searching for the right words here...] active fiction of the world outside of my PC. For example, one of my old PCs has become a fairly important NPC, something that has also happened to other player's PCs when I DM. My wife and I share a campaign world when she DMs. There were a few times when she would have me take over that NPC during play because I knew him and how he thought better. I hated doing that, and I politely let her know after the game that it bugged me. I don't want to get out of the mindset of my character when I'm playing, adding something other than what they would know to the game, whether that's what an NPC thinks or world building just doesn't appeal.

 

[Campbell]

At the very least if we are not allowed to use agency to refer to a player's ability to meaningfully impact the setting/scenario based on the informed decisions they make for their characters then we need jargon for that so we can meaningfully talk about it and not have to deal with arguments by definition meant to shut down discourse.

 

[Oofta]

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

And the hyperbole of the day award goes to .... DING DING DING ... AbdulAlhazred!!!!

 

[Mort]

Railroading is a bit of an umbrella term. A linear adventure is a form of railroading (railroads travel in a straight line!), and adventures where you can't pick anything but A, or where your attempts to pick B, C, or D are prevented or punished, are also railroads.

That's my point though. When something is linear there is no illusion of choice - there is simply no choice (other than to go down the path or to not play). So linear does not equal railroad (unless the DM hides the fact that the adventure is actually linear - but that's illusionism, which is usually a form of railroading).

I prefer to keep the term to the narrow usage - that of the DM presenting an illusion of choice.

To put it another way. The players are generally aware that they are playing a linear adventure. They have accepted that that's the adventure and move along with it. They KNOW that their options are constrained or non-existent.

The players are generally NOT aware that they are being railroaded and many would react poorly if they found out. Because they THOUGHT they had true options but actually did not.

 

[Enrahim2]

I can understand a group with a desire to do this, but it does make me curious as to why you're playing a game like D&D for it, as it is not designed to promote the kind of play you seem to want. Are there concerns we don't know about that makes D&D still the best choice for your group?

This is a question I have had a lot of introspection around, so I could have given a really long answer. But to try to keep things in what I gather to be the overall spirit of this thread I will try to be brief.

I have not found any game that appear designed specifically to promote the kind of game I want. As such D&D is one of many similarily suitable candidates for me running a groupbrewed campaign. D&D has hence generally been the go to game by default, the wide familiarity, and a community that is used to their game being played in a wide variety of ways.

To explain why it is a decent candidate I can mention it provide some critical properties I want for a campaign game: (i) A long term progression system that changes the feel of the game over a span of many sessions, making it less likely to grow stale. (ii) Ability to adapt third party adventures, making it easy us to bring in an outside voice, if we start getting a bit tired of the syle in the bouble we create as a group. (iii) A easy to use, fast and low intrusion resolution mechanism for most issues that come into play.

When it come to combat system, I am not very fond of D&Ds offering, but that hold true for almost all systems I have found providing all the 3 properties mentioned above. The only exception I can think of is D&D 4ed. However as combat is rare, and when they happen the stakes and narrative weight is usually high enough that spending time resolving feels worth it, the mild clunkiness of the D&D system isn't a big enough problem to exclude it from consideration. Indeed 4ed might be my prefered system from a pure system perspective, as those times the heat go up to the point volience breaks out, having a cool deep tactical combat session might be exactly what is called for. Unfortunately the 4ed is also the D&D version where I experience most rigidity in the community's thinking about how it should be played, and hence harder to get players for playing my prefered style.