D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[soviet]

I believe the relevant terminology there is participationism - yes it's a linear adventure but we have signed up willingly. As opposed to illusionism where we are unaware that's what we're playing.

 

[Autumnal]

If I may, I’d like to offer some alternative words beyond Is Not/Is Too about what @pemerton ia doing with “railroading”.

Let’s take US constitutional law. (On my shelf, several textbooks shout “Please!”) the US’s founding documents refer at various points to the rights of “all men”. Laws and court rulings made it clear that this meant “all white men of sufficient property”. Gradually, courts and legislatures and executives decided that, no, it really meant more than that, and “all white men” became its practical meaning. In the wake of our Civil War, a bunch people said, no, seriously, it means “all men”. So it did. Half a century later, authorities said, seriously, the intent here is clear, and in practice it came to mean “all adults”. And so on.

Finding that a piece of law has implications its creators didn’t think of is part of the rich cycle of life. Rights and responsibilities can change in practice even when the language doesn’t.

And that’s what Pemerton is doing. He’s arguing that by the criteria a lot of us accept, some things we don’t think of as railroading actually are, because how they work in practice and what they implies about the participant’s situations with regard to play and each other.

I’m not sure I agree with his effort. But I’m not sure I don’t. I’m thinking about it, because I have changed since the last time I thought about it. If I were making the argument, I’d have led off with “should be considered” rather than “is”, but:

• I’m very wordy (one reason I’m in awe of some indie RPGs’ concision)
• I’m kind of an anti-realist in writing about ideas (this is complex and mostly irrelevant; I just like to write about ideas as if they didn’t exist in the same way my cats and my diabetes do)
• I’m often too wimpy in asserting things I actually think very strongly, and I think @pemerton has an often-more-appropriate level of confidence in presentation.

 

[Aldarc]

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.

That's crazy talk. If the jargon doesn't exist in the D&D community, it doesn't exist at all.

 

[Oofta]

Right.

And here is the thing. There are multiple sorts of agency that a game can give effect to (or not).

If the game is about overcoming rules-constrained opposition within a participant-facing structure (basketball or multiple TTRPGs), then (a) understanding the way the opposition is constrained by the rules and (b) understanding the structure of the play is absolutely imperative. What happens when either the opposition deviates from the rules-constraints or the structure fails? Rightful protests. Why do those rightful protests occur? Its because the integrity of the game is marred by the fouling up of the agency that is supposed to be afforded to both sides. The participants know when the trajectory of play has suddenly been perturbed by a miscall or a dubious action by a participant.

If the game is about having the biggest say (or total say) on what my character's dramatic needs are, what they pursue, and how they pursue it (which gives expression to those dramatic needs), and someone with the power to rug-pull subverts that say (via various means, some subtle and some not-so-subtle, of rug-pullery), what happens? Rightful protests. Why do those rightful protests occur? Its because the integrity of the game is marred by the fouling up of the agency that is supposed to be afforded to the individual (or individuals) to make the nexus of play be the dramatic needs of their character(s). The participants know when the trajectory of play has suddenly been perturbed by one form of dubious rug-pullery or another.

So its not about real life agency (and do we have the means here, which includes time and commitment, to have an intense discussion on Theory of Mind?). We don't need to try to grasp at (and fail to hold) the obscene slipperiness of real life agency in order to have a functional conversation about the nature of agency within a specified agenda of play and a specified ruleset and codified refereeing and participant roles within those games that are both meant to facilitate that agenda (or fails to do so). I mean, @Oofta , with respect, you bringing in your incredibly unique and niche (just like everyone else's) autobiographical sense of real life agency as a litmus test...and how any games that don't hew to those slippery particulars (of which I very much doubt even you can sufficiently articulate those particulars such that we can even engage with them) to conversation here as a central point of contention about games? Its really tantamount to saying "this conversation is over...it cannot be functionally talked about...so stop talking about it." I can see absolutely no way forward to have a conversation on these subjects given those parameters. Its like the event horizon of human communication.

I simply prefer that my character inhabits a world, they don't help create it. They also don't require information the character could not possess.

What I object to is the statements of "You only have agency if you have information to make decisions that your character could not possibly have." I don't care if that's what you want in a game but it redefines the word "agency".

 

[Faolyn]

If the players are aware they are playing a linear adventure - where is the illusion of choice?

I would imagine the illusion of choice is in the order things go in. For example, the 5e official adventures I've bought or played in provide side quests or have an "open world" where the PCs can choose to go to village A or town B, or if they want to deal with the dangers in the woods before or after they visit the tomb, or if they want to skip town B and the tomb entirely, but ultimately, they have to face the BBEG and its minions. If they choose to ignore the BBEG or leave the area completely, they have abandoned the adventure--and there's no real option for them to side with the BBEG either, and only barely an option for them to get someone else to deal with it. The characters might be able to hire some henchmen to help fight the BBEG, but they wouldn't be able to convince someone else to fight for them.

It's still pretty linear, in my mind. Town B and the tomb have higher CR threats than village A or the woods do, but there's technically nothing stopping the players from going there and being clever about how they approach those threats.

At least, that's how I view a linear adventure.

Pure railroading would be this, but where the order is laid out. You have to go village A and clear out the dangers in the woods before you go to town B and the tomb. If you try to go off the rails, your attempts are thwarted in some manner. (There are also character railroads, where backstory or even your own racial/class/etc. traits are ignored or twisted to fit the plot--I had to deal with one of those, briefly.)

 

[occam]

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.

I don't see how this is relevant to the issue of railroading and agency; can you explain? Adding the following for context, to which this is in response:

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?

 

[Gradine]

 

[Micah Sweet]

Many times I have heard proponents of traditional play process describe how only the process of a single author inventing and describing the world provides verisimilitude. I would simply argue that @pemerton's PoV illustrates the flip side of that, the highly stilted and unnatural experience of being fed everything your character knows. Imagining it yourself may also be imperfect, but it certainly COULD seem far more natural!

They clearly feel that way, yes.

 

[Manbearcat]

I simply prefer that my character inhabits a world, they don't help create it. They also don't require information the character could not possess.

What I object to is the statements of "You only have agency if you have information to make decisions that your character could not possibly have." I don't care if that's what you want in a game but it redefines the word "agency".

It doesn't redefine it, it puts parameters on it for a particular game or a particular type of game.

What your prior espoused agenda preference ("doesn't feel artificial to Oofta") does is that it does one of two things (take your pick), both of which make conversation impossible:

* It tightens the parameters to such an extreme degree that it will be impossible to build an inclusive coalition around sufficient to meaningfully discuss games ("feels artificial to Oofta").

* It broadens parameters to such a degree that it becomes impossible to distinguish and dissect any particular thing because everything is so slippery and so malleable that any attempt to capture a given concept for discussion becomes impossible (conversation becomes an endless haggling over "premise-disagreeing" and "language-policing" and "concept-deconstructing" such that you_never_build_anything).


And here is the other thing. If we pivot to something a little more concrete like "working off of information to make decisions that your character could not have," then we're going to get into a few powderkegs:

1) "Does the imagined space that you're working under/within actually include a User Interface for players that is even remotely real (contra "artificial") or is it basically artificial (eg why do characters feel like space aliens teleported from another dimension into the setting, a setting that they should have sufficient familiarity of people/places/things to mentally model the world and act upon their model such that the actual experience of play meets the very low threshold of "not a space alien"?)? "Artificial" here meaning you (the "not space alien") see places and don't reflexively know them (you have to ask an authority figure if you do), see passersby and don't recognize them nor do they recognize you (you have to ask an authority figure if you do or they do), and you experience and engage with phenomena that you should have built out a robust model for (rather than pawing at it to determine its parameters with the aid of an authority figure telling you how your pawing manifests)."

2) Most of the people I've interacted with on here with respect to the subjects of martial expertise and high-resolution, powerfully predictive mental modeling of related physical collisions/interactions (of which the characters in a D&D game would necessarily be)...are not only not experts...they're not even remotely proficient...many times not even experienced in hand-fighting, or trekking, or track-and-field athletics, or climbing, or weapon-fighting, or what its like to suffer from exposure, etc. Which is totally fine. They sub their genre expectations for these things.

But "feels artificial because it doesn't match my genre expectations which I've subbed for real-life experience and expertise" is a very different beast from "is artificial." And calling that obvious fact out yields offense. Offense that either accidentally or willfully shuts down the drilling down of these issues that is necessary to have a human conversation about them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The exploration of that point was apparently lost in their need to shift the goal posts to whether the GM rolls for NPCs.

Yeah I don't understand the objection to that either. As you pointed out, there are plenty of fairly standard RPGs that never have GMs roll dice, or whatnot. I think it does serve a significant design role in PbtA, but less so in some other games. It's almost as if anything that isn't D&D is obviously doing it wrong...