D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[AbdulAlhazred]

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".

But this is a complete parody of how actual narrativist games work. Its nothing like that in terms of GAME, for example. So, yes, in BitD a character could come to a locked door in the middle of an adventure and spend stress and loadout to describe a flashback in which they played out an attempt to get a key for this door which they have anticipated (an informant told them, their locksmith friend gave them inside info, etc.). They will also have to pay, as in Acquire an Asset, for the key itself, locksmiths don't work for free. These resources must be balanced against other possible uses, which may well mean that it is a better idea to just try to pick the danged lock! Also, even if you try to get a key, you might fail, or the key might not work, etc. There's no 'freebie' here, the player cannot simply walk around manipulating the fiction to be whatever they want, that's bulls**t.

Nor does every narrativist game work this way, AT ALL, BitD is a particular game in which you can, by constructing plausible fiction and spending resources, potentially do that. In PbtA games there is NOTHING LIKE THIS AT ALL. I mean, I could maybe go up to a door and say "I'm trying to get through this locked door", but if I have no move which that triggers, its purely up to the GM, she can simply say "well, its locked, you cannot go through" and that's it! Or they might say "Ok, someone left the door unlocked" or "Earlier you noticed one of Jed's men drop a key, it fits this door." A lot of things COULD happen. Maybe in DW you are the thief and have a move for picking locks.

 

[Maxperson]

How much information does it take to meet the threshold of "sufficient"?

If the answer is "all" then sorry, that's just not gonna happen very often if ever - similar to real life, that way - rendering this definition of agency as meaningless.

If the answer is "some" then that represents a sliding scale between 1% and 99%; and at 1% the answer might as well be "any at all".

My position is that you still have agency even if the answer is "none", provided you're still free to make a (perhaps random) choice rather than have that choice made for you.

You aren't going to get an answer because there isn't one. They have no way to tell us exactly what sufficient is or exactly how much information equates to making an informed choice. All @AbdulAlhazred can tell us is that 100% is absurd. That makes the entire thing subjective beyond belief.

This would be fine if they would stop trying to use their personal preferences for what "sufficient" and "informed" are as some sort of objective measure to call our preferences a railroad. And showing us a False Equivalence between the much higher bar of an informed medical decision and opening two doors in an imaginary fantasy game isn't at all helpful.

Hell, even an "informed" medical decision usually isn't informed. They can't tell you all the ways a surgery could fail and often won't tell you the exact failure rates. Nor can they tell you how bad a failure will be or how successful success will be. Going by @pemerton's example above where he shows one way to be "informed", we don't actually have agency when we get medical information for a medical procedure, so clearly what qualifies as "informed" varies considerably.

 

[Vaalingrade]

You know, I felt so clever when, after watching Leverage, I added a mechanic to WoE where you can spend an action point to have a mundane item or piece of information via flashback, only for Oxventure to do an actual play of BitD a week later.

 

[hawkeyefan]

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:

Thanks for the thoughtful post, and for providing examples to discuss. Probably a much more productive response to the question at hand. I'll comment on each example, though my comments are based mostly on initial impressions, and all within the overall context of the game as you've described it.

A PC buys new clothes or decides that they whistle while they walk. Maybe the clothes affect NPC reactions. Whistling might prompt wandering monster checks. Neither is likely to cause any big changes to the GM's scenario. Safely in the "cosmetic" category?

Probably. I think the clothes may be more significant if it's a decision made with the intention of influencing certain NPCs rather than just a happy accident.

PCs decide to do further research in town before heading off on some quest. Based on some good die rolls and GM improvisation, they learn something significant which changes their strategy (or gear or spell choices, etc.) such that their odds of success have improved significantly (or the cost of such success has been reduced). The adventure is unaltered in the sense that the GM already has a map and background info and NPCs and whatnot, but it will play out quite differently due to the choice to do some research. Still cosmetic? Or is this a substantial change?

This is an interesting one. I'm not really sure? I mean, on the one hand, the opportunity to influence the trajectory of the encounter was there, and I think that's important. But on the other hand, once the encounter is resolved, things proceed as they would have either way.

I think there needs to be some amount of uncertainty of how things progress in play... that what the characters do don't just indicate failure or success, but that the way they fail or succeed makes for different trajectories. Killing an enemy removes them from play, and may improve your standing with some folks, but will also make you some more enemies, or leave a power vacuum that disrupts the status quo. Choosing to somehow talk things out with the enemy leads to entirely different things... the people who'd rather see him dead may not be happy, perhaps the players now find their characters in bed with people they'd rather not be, and so on.

I think this breadth of outcomes is what needs to be present. It's great for players to come up with different tactics based on their ability to gather information and apply it to play... that's a good thing, and I think is indicative of agency. But if all that is lost to an outcome that's a given no matter what they do? I feel like that's a wasted opportunity.

In the midst of their quest, the PCs encounter a dangerous adversary. They elect to engage in conversation rather than combat. Through brilliant role-playing and/or dice rolls in combination with the GM's understanding of the adversary's personality and goals, they forge some sort of agreement or truce. This has shifted the plot significantly. Perhaps patrons or allies of the PCs will be upset. Perhaps the adversary will double-cross them. The GM will have some work to do before the next session to think things through.

This is likely the most important element, as I touched on above. The players have done something that alters what will happen next. The GM isn't just going to roll out what they already had planned... to lean on the metaphor, they can't just continue laying tracks... they have to come up with something new based on what the players did.

I think this is the kind of stuff we need to be looking at and discussing if we really want to examine the idea, rather than just arguing about the label. Thanks for offering some examples!

 

[Gradine]

Because players in traditional games that aren't turned into railroads have agency. Agency and railroad are mutually exclusive things.

How so?

 

[CreamCloud0]

There is a problem here though. I'd call it Easy Button Players (players that think they should be able to alter game reality on a whim, in their favor) and Buddy DMs (When the DM is a "fan" of the and lets the players alter game reality at will). Or when the players only do a tiny effort, but expect reality to be altered.

A classic example: A bunch of foes are in a tavern. Instead of just doing a direct attack, the players try something they think is "clever". The characters go over to the store and buy twelve flasks of lamp oil. Then they sneak over to the tavern and spread the oil around. Then light the oil with a torch and wait for the tavern to explode and automatically kill all the foes inside. Though as DM I point out while the tavern does catch on fire....nothing explodes. This is where many players will complain that "It's a Railroad".

your overly dismissive choices of names aside, these are different issues, the main one you seem to be identifying on the player side of things is 'main character syndrome', however a single ineffective action not resulting exactly out how they desired or requiring more effort than initially presumed does not a railroad make, even if the players call it one.

and a GM who's overly inclined to let players rewrite reality isn't exactly a 'problem GM' in the same sense, sure it'll probably create inconsistencies down the line but anyone willing to make those changes in the first place probably isn't too concerned with continuity in the first place, either that or they're just letting their players walk all over them which is more an issue of lack of ability to assert themselves or misconception of how the game is meant to be run?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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

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

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

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

Does it? You have DECREED that traditional play meets THE definition, which you then insist is your bespoke one that the rest of the world largely doesn't use.

More reasonably, you seem to be able to see that agency is a matter of degree and is also context dependant. Beyond that we all seem able to agree that agency, per se, is not always central to play (IE classic DC play to a degree).

 

[pemerton]

I push back on this because several posters seem to believe that if the GM has anything less than total control, he has no control at all.

Good post.

In Burning Wheel, the GM has a lot of authority, especially when it comes to framing and establishing stakes (whether express or implicit). The player has a lot of authority around their PC, especially during PC build.

When actions are resolved, the dice determine whether (i) the player's desire, expressed via intent + task, becomes part of the shared fiction, or (ii) the GM is allowed to author some adverse consequence, in which intent is not fulfilled (and perhaps task isn't either).

The repeated suggestion that this sort of RPGing is GMless seems silly to me, and not grounded in any attempt to actually take seriously the explanations and examples that have been posted.

 

[hawkeyefan]

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

I have to say... your approach to this topic comes across as an attempt to grasp any shred of agency possible just so that you can be technically correct.

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

Nope. That there will be different outcomes doesn't mean that the player is making a meaningful choice. Based on what they know, there is no difference... they may as well flip a coin. That's just luck. It has nothing to do with exercising agency.

How much information does it take to meet the threshold of "sufficient"?

If the answer is "all" then sorry, that's just not gonna happen very often if ever - similar to real life, that way - rendering this definition of agency as meaningless.

If the answer is "some" then that represents a sliding scale between 1% and 99%; and at 1% the answer might as well be "any at all".

Or, we can start looking at it more broadly. Instead of one instance with a pair of doors, we can look at the overall game structure and how often this kind of thing is present. Who's determined what the game is about? Who determines what's next? Why is that next?

To adopt your idea of agency as a percentage, a game with 1% agency still is much closer to a railroad than it is to a game with much higher agency.

At what % will someone be satisfied with a game? Yes, it will vary. That's what we should be discussing.

My position is that you still have agency even if the answer is "none", provided you're still free to make a (perhaps random) choice rather than have that choice made for you.

What agency are you exercising with a random choice?

Unless I'm playing a fool as my character (which I've done many a time ) I'd hold the bolded as true no matter what system or playstyle I'm in; as that's realistically what any halfway wise character would try to do in the fiction, and thus to be true to the character that's what I'd have it do as its player.

And a system or GM that doesn't let me (try to) do these things is denying me my agency as a player to declare my character's actions.

What game do you think denies these things? What kind of authority structure do you think is more likely to deny these things?

 

[pemerton]

As shown, I hope, in my examples, the "traditional" style that my groups typically adopt provides quite a bit of player agency over the game state. Our GM does, typically, have final veto authority.

<snip>

even classic games sometimes have mechanics to allow for this sort of thing. GURPS, for example, has an advantage called Serendipity which allows a PC to have one "fortuitous-but-plausible coincidence" per game session (and you can buy additional levels to allow for additional lucky breaks). Admittedly, the "GM has the final say," but knowing "a guy that makes keys" seems well within the intended scope of the advantage.

As I've mentioned upthread, I've played AD&D - which is a pretty "classic" game - using my preferred approach. It's a bit creaky, but not hopeless!

In the absence of formal mechanics and principles, like what I described just upthread for Burning Wheel, a lot of the distribution of authority between participants is handled in an informal, give-and-take fashion (at least in my experience).

And some "classic" games even have formal mechanics. You mention GURPS. Classic Traveller (1977) has rules for Streetwise checks which are, in structure, basically the same as Wises or Circles in Burning Wheel: player says what/who their PC hopes to find; the referee sets a difficulty (there are guidelines for this in the book); the player makes a roll to see if they succeed. What is missing is a clear discussion of consequences for failure. In my experience, it can easily be adjudicated PbtA style - so on a failure, the GM can make as hard and direct a move as they like, given the fiction.

Furthermore, in my limited experience with non-traditional RPGs (congruent with the descriptions from more knowledgeable folks in this thread), overcoming the locked door would typically require a "move" with a die roll to determine the degree of success or failure. Assuming there are any stakes (and the desire to get beyond the door suggests that something is at stake), one would roll to see if they succeed or fail or succeed with complications. It is not a simple declaration that the GM must accept.

An alternative (found, eg, in Prince Valiant) is to gate some of these things behind limited or single-use resources (in Prince Valiant, that's called a Storyteller Certificate, which despite the name is a resource that accrues to a player and can be spent to permit narration of a single effect from a list - some of those effects are various sorts of auto-success).