D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Lanefan]

Right. Linear =/= railroad. There are generally multiple ways to get to the end of a linear adventure. You aren't forced down the path.

Truth be told, there's an awful lot of dungeon adventures out there where the only geographical path choices are to go forward, go back, or stay put. I call these "string of beads" adventures, where you need to get to Area F but can't without first passing through all of Areas A through E exactly in that order.

Dullest dungeon design ever.

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.

Agreed.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

I get it, but I don't use the term "linear' for that. (not sure what term I would use, come to think of it, but please hear me out)

To me, what you call pure railroading above, I just call linear adventure design. It's poor design, to be sure, but I see it as being different than a railroad which IMO is even more confining.

This is more easily seen in dungeon design. Where O is a room, X is the goal, -- or / or | is a hallway, and . is just a formatting spacer (and formatting here will be awful, I apologize in advance), consider the difference between:

-- O -- O -- O -- O -- O -- X

and:

. . . . . . . | . . . . . . . . . .
-- O -- O -- -- O
. . . | . . . | -- O -- -- X
-- O -- O -- -- -- -/

Same number of rooms in each, but the first is what I define as linear while the second is not. In the second, you've got three ways in (one above and two to the left) and there are no forced sequences other than one room is a dead end - you can hit the seven areas in pretty much any order you like. Thus, non-linear.

 

[Lanefan]

By not letting the hole have a bearing on the game. Let's say you managed to dig a deep hole in the ground, using only your fingers. If the GM doesn't want the fiction to include the hole, then nobody falls in, traffic moves around it, nothing interesting is found at the bottom, no interesting events occur because of the hole, and not having the guards/mayor/local council/whoever stop/fine/arrest you for making it. You made a hole, but it means nothing to the game.

And why should it? Just because a PC dug a hole doesn't mean that hole ever needs to be relevant to anything again, and there's no requirement on the GM to make it relevant.

What there is is a requirement that the GM accept that the hole is now there, and have the setting react to its presence in ways that fit the situation. For example if the hole is in the middle of a road then people will step around it until someone comes along and fills it in; and maybe someone does fall in during the night unless a warning lantern is put in place.

And judging by some horror stories I've read, some GMs would go so far as to say things like "you sprain your wrist and can't continue digging" or even "no, you don't want to dig." Those would be bad GMs, IMO, but it happens.

The former is IMO acceptable as a possible outcome and not a horror story at all. I mean, I'd almost certanly have the PC roll anyway as a guideline to how successful and-or speedy the digging was, and a bad fail on that roll could very well mean the PC mildly hurt itself in the process.

The latter is flat-out poor form.

 

[bloodtide]

Within this structure, I'm curious where the line is between a merely "cosmetic" change and something that alters "the overall direction of play." Some examples to consider:

Your examples are all from a traditional, classic game: The DM has all the power but allows the players freedom to do things.

This is not what the pro agency, anti-railroad types are talking about. They want the players to have more power then the DM. The players can alter the game reality on a whim and he DM must go along with whatever they say. For example:

*The character comes to a locked door. The player just says "Oh my character knows a guy that makes keys", then the game reality is altered and the character has the key to open the locked door. And the DM just nods and says "yes, player".

*The DM must sit there an do nothing, unless allowed to act by something the player does with their character. The DM can't even just do anything. Only if a player has a character knowingly walking into Dark Dead Alley, can the DM have a wererat jump out and attack by (not) surprise.

*At the players whim, they can just say "the leader of the goblins is a beholder", and game reality is alter to make it so. the DM must never just "make stuff up", and should the DM have lots of written notes describing the goblin tribe and it's vampire goblin leader, the DM must throw all of that out and do whatever the player says, "yes, player".

 

[pemerton]

Haaaaaang on a minute, here. You were framing him into situations?? As in, you were the GM of the game where Aedhros was played?

No.

 

[Lanefan]

Your examples are all from a traditional, classic game: The DM has all the power but allows the players freedom to do things.

This is not what the pro agency, anti-railroad types are talking about.

Nor is the below. I'm pro-agency and (mostly) anti-railroad and yet I fully reject the below as reflective of my desires in any way.

They want the players to have more power then the DM. The players can alter the game reality on a whim and he DM must go along with whatever they say. For example:

*The character comes to a locked door. The player just says "Oh my character knows a guy that makes keys", then the game reality is altered and the character has the key to open the locked door. And the DM just nods and says "yes, player".

*The DM must sit there an do nothing, unless allowed to act by something the player does with their character. The DM can't even just do anything. Only if a player has a character knowingly walking into Dark Dead Alley, can the DM have a wererat jump out and attack by (not) surprise.

*At the players whim, they can just say "the leader of the goblins is a beholder", and game reality is alter to make it so. the DM must never just "make stuff up", and should the DM have lots of written notes describing the goblin tribe and it's vampire goblin leader, the DM must throw all of that out and do whatever the player says, "yes, player".

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not sure this is really true for the way D&D is structured - for the normal case of attacks and saves in at least 3e and later the rule is Bonus + Dice versus Target number. It's fairly straightforward to rearrange this so that, say, the attacker always rolls (this is broadly what 4e did, but doable in 3 and 5e as well by changing saves to defences like 4e) or the defender always rolls (how saves work in 3/5e, and changing attack bonus + dice vs AC to attack bonus + 10 vs AC - 10 plus dice). This is sketched out in at least the 3e Unearthed Arcana and extending it to "players always roll" seems logical.

There are some quirks with this in 5e to do with things like spell resistance, advantage stacking and what counts as an attack, but putting all the dice in the player hands has been possible with official guidance in D&D for close to 20 years.

I do know that PBTA games support PvP of various sorts (Monsterhearts for example, to my understanding is largely about emotional PvP) but I'm not familiar enough to say how exactly.

My own 4e-like game utilizes the universal idea of players rolling for everything. There are some things to be aware of. It means that an 'advantage' for a creature is effectively a 'disadvantage' for the player checking their defense. Monster 'attack' bonuses add to the DV of the defense check, etc. Of course monsters are simpler than PCs and don't get a lot of complicated bonuses and such in this almost-4e engine, so its a pretty simple change.

PbtA games sometimes have moves that work in a different way when the other party is a PC, which is fairly common in AW, as it really lacks a concept of a 'party' in the way D&D or even DW use that. The PCs are generally allies, but sometimes they may have conflicting interests and work at cross purposes. Generally they don't tromp around the landscape in a battle formation doing stuff either. Dungeon World, I believe, lacks any moves of this type simply because the PCs DO act as a group most of the time. But in terms of actual combat, there's not really much difference where PvP is concerned. Again, DW doesn't really provide any rule for it, or even explain how it would work, but AW's 'exchange harm' move is pretty much tailor made for this.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I guess you missed this post.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/fighting-law-and-order.697520/post-9024016

How is this supposed to represent anything different from what I said. To quote you:

You seem to have missed the first part. I'll quote myself so you can see it. "Either you have agency or you don't."

This is you asserting exactly what I just stated, that you believe agency is all or nothing, with the result being as I stated. My position remains both unchanged, and uncontested, that you cannot have agency without sufficient information to make an informed choice. This is still the universal standard! As several of us have said before, what this implies in terms of the resulting sort of game is circumstantial. In a classic Dungeon Crawl you probably don't care, you will be expected to investigate and learn, or use tactics to mitigate negative outcomes, and that's kind of the point of those games. In trad play lack of information diminishes agency directly, though again there could be a mix of trad/classic play elements, or at least in the case of games like 1e the RULES still include the full classic implementation, which tends to give players means to overcome ignorance that the GM will be hard pressed to completely undermine (at least it becomes obvious, yeah, you can put ear seekers in every door, but that game won't go for long).

 

[Maxperson]

How so?

Because non-railroad traditional play meets the definition of agency.

And what is the player seeking when he opens the door? What reason does he have to pick one door over the other? In what way can he effect change that he wants on the fiction?

Doesn't matter. Meaning can be and is present even if the person is unaware of that meaning until a later time.

No matter what they chose, they were going to wind up in that jail cell and meet the stranger. The GM, who just proclaimed himself a Railroad Baron, already said this. Their choices were not really choices… they either saw no other options or else they were trying to do what they were “supposed to do”.

Fair enough. Although I was amused that the Railroad Baron couldn't recognize the railroad example that I set up.

I think it really depends on the situation. I think it depends on the scope of what we’re talking about. I don’t think it’s really easy to grab one moment of play and hold that up as indicative of an entire game.

I agree with you on this. One moment doesn't dictate what kind of game that it is.

 

[Maxperson]

How is this supposed to represent anything different from what I said. To quote you:

This is you asserting exactly what I just stated, that you believe agency is all or nothing, with the result being as I stated. My position remains both unchanged, and uncontested, that you cannot have agency without sufficient information to make an informed choice. This is still the universal standard! As several of us have said before, what this implies in terms of the resulting sort of game is circumstantial. In a classic Dungeon Crawl you probably don't care, you will be expected to investigate and learn, or use tactics to mitigate negative outcomes, and that's kind of the point of those games. In trad play lack of information diminishes agency directly, though again there could be a mix of trad/classic play elements, or at least in the case of games like 1e the RULES still include the full classic implementation, which tends to give players means to overcome ignorance that the GM will be hard pressed to completely undermine (at least it becomes obvious, yeah, you can put ear seekers in every door, but that game won't go for long).

Why don't you read that post and it will explain it.