D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Micah Sweet]

Be slow to offend or resist taking offense at all costs. If you find that you're taking offense routinely and/or conversation is consistently orbiting around your offense, then something is going on and we need to figure it out (preferably not in the middle of threads...but in DMs).

Post play excerpts for discussion of the ideas and concepts you're referring to.

Speak specifically, concretely, and discuss games at the level of "what is this particular game trying to do" and "how does it go about that" and "does it do the things."

If you must speak autobiographically and about "my feelings/preferences," try as hard as you can to drill down intensively and communicate how those feelings/preferences intersect with the concrete aspects of games. Be open to the prospect that your feelings/preferences, while legitimate as feelings/preferences, are up for scrutiny around things like application generally, applicability specifically (in this game or that game), or scalability.

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I'll take those as good starting points to actually "build" interesting conversations and a vital repository of shared knowledge if not consensus (which is never going to be reached...and good for it).

That all sounds good, but I think it's unrealistic on a discussion forum to ask all participants to avoid emotion of any kind as much as possible. For example, I understand what @pemerton thinks is good gaming for them, and what isn't, but I strongly disagree with their preferences, and believe that the fundamental core of their preferred playstyle is simply too incompatible to produce anything of value to me. Because of how I feel about what I value, I don't think it can be discussed emotionlessly.

 

[Micah Sweet]

By talking to the/getting a new GM? And I'm not being flippant. If you have a GM who doesn't care about your backstory or who actively ignores it, and you do care about it and want to deal with it in-game, then it's something to be addressed.

I say "a good chance," because, of course, there's always the players who insist their characters led armies into triumphant war and are actually polymorphed dragons at 1st level, or other obnoxious things.


Well yes, that's what I was saying.

Exactly. Calling that style of play a railroad has done nothing but get a lot of people's back up. How is that productive?

 

[Lanefan]

What part of “the GM doesn’t roll in PbtA games” do you not understand?

It's not that I don't understand any part of it, I just don't see it as being consistent with the concept of the controller of any character always rolls for that character, which seems so blindingly obvious as a precept it's unexpected that I have to type it out.

Combine that with the idea of no mechanical in-play difference between a PC and an NPC, (a.k.a. what's good for the goose is good for the gander) and yes, this is the type of rule I'll fight against.

Nope. The players make attack rolls to hit the NPCs, and players make defense rolls to avoid being hit by NPCs.

Inconsistent all the way. If the players make attack rolls to hit NPCs then consistency demands and insists that the GM makes attack rolls to hit PCs. (side question: what happens when two PCs fight each other?)

There is nothing more consistent than players being the only ones who role. Inconsistency is when rolls switch between players and GMs for a variety of arbitrary reasons: attack rolls, saving throws, etc.

As long as each roll type is done the same e.g. a saving throw for a PC and a saving throw for an NPC are handled the same, then no problem.

And yes, sometimes rolling to attack (to hit) and sometimes rolling to defend (save) isn't in itself consistent. I'm not arguing that.

 

[Faolyn]

I don't think that's quite the right diagnosis. There are, for example, completely cooperative board games,

That's why I said "probably most board games" instead of "all board games."

If there are cooperative card games--and I do mean the standard deck of 52 cards you can buy at any store--I'm not aware of them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's why I said "probably most board games" instead of "all board games."

If there are cooperative card games--and I do mean the standard deck of 52 cards you can buy at any store--I'm not aware of them.

That makes sense, but I think it's fair not to assume that the term, "cardgame" on this forum doesn't necessarily mean, "played with a standard poker deck".

 

[Faolyn]

That makes sense, but I think it's fair not to assume that the term, "cardgame" on this forum doesn't necessarily mean, "played with a standard poker deck".

The person I was responding to mentioned poker, so...

Unless someone has figured out the rules for playing poker with MtG cards!

 

[Lanefan]

By whom?

The way I am using the word "railroad" is a way that I have been using to meaningfully communicate about RPGing for multiple decades.

The Louvre is an actual place. People can move through it using their own limbs, their own motive power. In doing so, if they are sighted than they can see many things in virtue of physical and neural processes that take place, involving the surfaces of the displayed objects, the retina, as well as the properties of light.

The equivalent to doing that, when playing a RPG, is the fact that I can see, talk to, interact with, shake my fist at, etc my fellow participants in the game.

The experience I am describing as a railroad is not the experience of moving around, seeing many things, talking to many people. It is the experience of having one person - the GM - establish the shared fiction, in virtue of (i) specifying all the elements, and thereby (ii) specifying all the consequences of actions I declare for my PC, either directly or by extrapolation from what they have specified.

That has nothing in common with visiting the Louvre, where I get to see the products of many imaginations all on display to enjoy, compare, etc. In fact it's virtually the opposite of such a visit - I get the content of exactly one imagination, told to me by the GM.

In the Louvre you get to see only what the curator(s) have decided you get to see on the day you're there.

The art collection of most galleries is often ten times or more than what they have on display at any given moment; and the job of the curator(s) is to slowly turn those displays over such that while a few key things are always on display, everything else eventually gets displayed for a while. So while you might go there in hopes of seeing painting X by artist Y, unless it's a permanent-display piece like the Mona Lisa there's a very real chance that painting won't be hung that day, or week, or even year.

And in a place like the Louvre you're also very restricted in where you can actually go as a visitor, in comparison with the size of the whole complex. So while you've got some agency as to where you go and in what sequence within that restricted area, that agency is still limited by lots of "Staff Only" and "No Entry" signs, in some cases with guards to back those instructions up.

 

[Maxperson]

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

There's nothing non-standard about it. This isn't about healthcare.

 

[Maxperson]

My point is that @Maxperson 's idea of "none" is virtually non-existent. I don't think it's enough to avoid a railroad that the GM simply allow me to declare actions for my character.

I've already corrected this twice in this thread. Why do you persist in this mischaracterization?

Look at the OP. Almost everyone would call that a railroad, including the GM of the OP. Clearly there was a plot that was intended to happen. The players still declared actions for their characters, they weren't denied the ability to make those choices. But none of them mattered.

Aha! The rest of what I said was needed for a railroad!!!!

There's no need to resort to Max's needlessly extreme version to railroad players.

Or a need to resort to a Strawman of what I said.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

Referring to it as agency is perfectly fine. Declaring that my agency isn't really agency because you prefer to always be making informed decisions isn't fine. The discourse would not have been shut down if they hadn't mischaracterized things like that or had just backed down and admitted that they just wanted their agency to include being informed.