D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[pemerton]

Is something interesting going to happen if the books aren't found?

<snip>

If yes--say, an NPC will find the books and use them for themselves, possibly causing complications down the line--then certainly the book should be placed and exists whether or not it's found.

Why?

As GM, I can introduce an element in to the fiction (say, as part of framing; or in the AW/DW context, as a soft move) which is that the PCs hear that some enemy of theirs found the spellbook. Or I can make a hard move - a NPC they're confronting them blasts them with a spell that could only have been learned by studying Evard's spellbooks!

Making these moves doesn't depend on any "placing" of books whether or not they're found.

 

[Faolyn]

I think what you're saying here is that if the approach that I regard as railroading isn't used, then it won't be a railroad. On that we agree!

Except you seem to think that any GM-created material is railroading.

I'm not sure what "PC-generator" means here.

PC-generated. I typoed.

That will depend on particular details.

The first time that I went to England, I was struck by how familiar it was. Wildly different from going to the US, although both are English-speaking countries that are, in a superficial sense at least, quite similar to Australia.

When I first went to North Africa, it was not familiar in the same way.

I would expect PCs in an imaginary setting to have similar sorts of differences in their experiences of places that they visit. There are probably various ways to achieve that. One would be to set the difficulty of Wises-type checks in a way that reflects cultural and historical proximity or distance.

And in a fantasy world where most people don't travel much at all, and there's no long-distance communication that allows people to be at least vaguely aware of other cultures, and those cultures might be made up on completely inhuman beings?

You can say "I've got this immortal character who has been there, done that, so of course they know all this stuff"... but IMO, that kind of makes all the other players beholden to your ability to make up the world--which suggests that you would be the one "railroading" them, even though you're not the GM!

No. I've made multiple posts explaining the resolution frameworks that I use, which are not generally "fiat"-type ones.

But you would say that, since a game like D&D doesn't have those resolution frameworks, D&D is automatically railroady?

 

[pemerton]

My familiarity with Burning Wheel is almost nil, but I expect that there's some risk or cost involved with the roll

Right. The risk is that instead of spellbooks you learn that you're the grandson of a demon-summoning evil wizard, and so your plan to redeem your family and restore your ancestral estate to glory might be doomed from the start!

More generally, a point that @AbdulAlhazred often makes is apposite here: at my table there's no shortage of ideas for exciting things to happen. And there mechanics of the system guarantee that from time to time it will be someone's job to narrate them. If the spellbooks get found, that's a win for the PCs (and their players), no different in basic character from any other success; if the check fails then unhappy things follow, as they would on any other failed check. Either way, we'll be able to think of more scenes to frame and more actions to declare!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm still a little unclear about this myself, but I expect the phrase "scene framing" will come up a lot (not completely sure about that either, but it seems to come up a lot).

Nothing is mysterious here. If a fact is one the PC would already know, then the GM doesn't dictate it. If it is a new fact, one they are just learning then the GM telling the player the fact is obviously fine.

Now, we could get into a whole swamp about various classes of facts, like basic physics or whatever, but I note that @pemerton restricted his examples to elements of the character's life and similar stuff, not "is the world round or flat" and such, which might be subject to genre convention or whatever.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I can tell you, having a bolt of lightning split Megloss's house in two, as the shadow-thing leaves Krystal dead, steals Fea-bella's spellbook, and carries it into Megloss's dreams, was not what the players were hoping for!

But I'm sure they found it interesting, and it was still done in service to the players.

 

[Gradine]

This is a problem as old as the game: How does a DM get the players to stop just outright slaying all NPCs, but more specifically the "good guys". Assuming that the PCs are at least sort of good, or at least want open access to good/neutral civilization.


This is not a problem in my Hard Fun Old School Unfair Unbalance style games. So here is what happened over the weekend:

Another DM could not make it to his game, so he asked me to cover for him. He gave me his notes, but we had no time to chat. So it's an urban set game, I'm not sure it it's published or homebrew as I only had his notes. Last game the PCs did a task for an NPC, and the game ended at a big party. This game picks up at the party. The players have fun for a bit and then the plot kicks off: the NPC is found murdered...and the PCs get blamed for it. The PCs surrender and get taken to jail. They get informed that they will spend the night in jail as the judge won't be in until morning. The players panic a bit here and try to escape...but fail. As per the plot, later that night a shadowy figure shows up and offers to free the PCs if they do a job for him. The PCs agree to this magically bound quest. While the PCs could have made a quiet escape....they don't. The guards get alerted and alarms are sounded.

And as the city guards attempt to recapture the escaping prisoner PCs, the PCs just go full blown murderhobo on all the city guards. So this is the good city where a lot of the rest of the game is set, going by the notes. And the PCs getting arrested for falsely killing the NPC, that they could have been found innocent for, does not even matter now. The PCs have now just become the worst mass murderers in city history killing many guards and such.

The players never give any of this role playing any thought. They are LOCKED into the idea that ANY combat encounter MUST be a murderhobo slaughter fest to the death. A guard hits them with a net, they must use thier most deadly weapons, spells and abilities to do a ton of damage and slaughter the guard.

After the slaughter fest, the PCs flee the city and go to hide in some caves. And this ends the adventure for the night. Of course, next game brings up the problem: what will the city do about the most vile and evil mass murderers in all of history. Sure you could just ignore it. But most DMs like to have a bit more 'reality based games' where consequences matter.

I sent the game notes to the games DM, and he was a bit shocked the players did the murderfest. There is a chance, he said, he might need me to cover the game next week. So that puts it back to me of what might happen. My reaction would be the super harsh way...killing the characters. And maybe reseting the game with some time travel or something like that.

But this leaves the issue of talking to the players. I'm not really a fan of talking. They think they did nothing wrong by slaughtering so many NPCs, but then still "get" that they had to flee the city as they are now mass murderers. I know from many past "talks" that nothing much will come from such a talk. I'm sure the players will say "anything in the game that gets in my characters way will be slaughtered!!!!!!", as that is exactly what they did.

But....here I am. Asking for maybe another view point? Is there anything new to say on this topic? I guess someone might say that a game must have a session zero where the DM very slowly and carefully tells the players the way good, evil, slaughter and common sense work in the game. Though in this case it's not "my" game. Still the players "get" that it was wrong to slaughter all the guards......but that did NOTHING to stop them.

So, anyone?

There are a couple of things that might have prevented this, as well as a few ways to "fix" it, to varying degrees of desirability.

Now I don't know what game you're playing, but at least in 5e, by RAW as long as you're doing melee damage you can choose to deal non-lethal damage. There are plenty of house-rules that are feasible to strengthen or weaken that rule. That said, if PCs are purposefully killing "good" guards (more on that in a second), they aren't good.

There are a couple of ways to signpost this to your players before they actually go through the action. They're all fourth-wall breaking and I know that some people don't like that, but I recall those older Bethesda games where you could actually kill plot-critical NPCs, but you'd get a big pop-up warning you that you'd messed up the flow of destiny or whatever and you should probably reload a save. "Reloading a save" doesn't happen in TTRPGs which is why I think it's fair for GMs to provide a bit of a "are you sure about that?" warning ahead of campaign-breaking decisions.

This, of course, brings up a number of other issues, primarily about the risks of planning a campaign arc too far out in advance, because you never know when your heroes are going to turn into notorious villains. There are plenty of ways to resolve this moving forward, but they really should all be done OOC in discussion with the players (and in this case, the GM).

1) You memory-hole the session. We'll call this Plan A. This is not as outrageous or as radical of a choice as it may sound. People will definitely have objections to the mere suggestion, but it is a choice and in certain situations it's a good one. I can see a DM handing their campaign off to a guest-DM for a few sessions, seeing everything come crashing and burning down around them, and saying "well that was a fun little jaunt through an AU, but let's get back to the real campaign." Not ideal, but it's there.

2) Plan B: The players decide to embrace their roles as villains. This, of course, changes the nature of the campaign, but if it's what the players seem to want, you can certainly roll with it. It might not be what the original DM wants, but there's clearly been a disconnect between the DMs and the players on the expectations on the nature of the campaign. That's something that really ought to be ironed out in a Session Zero and if you haven't got something like that set in stone then maybe you shouldn't be handing the keys to your kingdom to somebody else for a spin. I hope you've recognized that you were set up for failure here.

3) The players decide they have to find a way to redeem themselves. This is a classic trope, I'm sure I don't need to get too far into detail about it. It's also a more deeply involved affair, so we'll call this Plan C.

4) The players actions were retroactively "good". I like to call this Plan ACAB. The PCs, still trying to clear their name from the original murder, uncover rot and corruption so deep that it's infested the very city guard itself. They have, it turns out, unwittingly cleared the city of a substantial population of dirty cops, and the more evidence they uncover, the better chance they have of clearing their names for both "crimes", clearing their names, and restoring their standing in the city. As far as retcons go, it's certainly not terrible. And you can still have at least an NPC or two call them out and/or harbor continuing resentment for slaughtering them all before finding out they were corrupt. But it solves the problem without dramatically altering the course the campaign while also opening up complications in the relationships the party has with several members of the community. I think I like this one best.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Nothing is mysterious here. If a fact is one the PC would already know, then the GM doesn't dictate it. If it is a new fact, one they are just learning then the GM telling the player the fact is obviously fine.

Now, we could get into a whole swamp about various classes of facts, like basic physics or whatever, but I note that @pemerton restricted his examples to elements of the character's life and similar stuff, not "is the world round or flat" and such, which might be subject to genre convention or whatever.

Sure, but most RPGs I'm familiar with are about a lot more than just elements of the characters' life and similar stuff, and I refuse to accept the idea that any game that doesn't always focus on such personal things is actually a railroad.

 

[pemerton]

PC-generated. I typoed.

OK, so you say "This is why I keep saying you seem to think it's an all-or-nothing deal, when it's not. It's not entirely PC-generated or entirely GM-railroad."

What is or isn't PC-generated is part of the content of the fiction. I'm not saying anything about the content of the fiction. I'm talking about how the shared fiction, which is a bunch of jointly imagined stuff, is established.

Except you seem to think that any GM-created material is railroading.

You seem to have misread my posts. Here are a few of them:

I find games where the GM is the one who provides the choices and their consequences to be railroads.

The basic difference between a railroad, and a game I enjoy (as player or GM) is about who decides what the focus of play is, what the stakes are, what the dramatic needs and themes are that will be addressed in play.

_
I am saying it's a railroad if all the possible event of play are merely combinations of elements pre-authored by the GM (plus the GM's logical extrapolations from those things).

I'm not making any assumptions about what the players are "allowed" to choose. But I am making an assumption about how stakes and consequences are established, namely, by the GM in authoring the setting/situation and then extrapolating from it.

<snip>

the difference between what I am calling railroading, and the sort of RPGing I prefer, is not about what powers the players enjoy <snippage> but rather is about the techniques that are used to establish stakes, consequences, and "what happens next".

I've also posted multiple illustrations of the sort of play that I regard as non-railroading, plus links to multiple actual play posts.

in a fantasy world where most people don't travel much at all, and there's no long-distance communication that allows people to be at least vaguely aware of other cultures, and those cultures might be made up on completely inhuman beings?

I don't understand what your point is. I mean, yes, a GM can set up a setting so that it make sense that the PCs are space aliens. I personally don't find it very engaging, and the last time a GM did it to me I left the game.

Apart from anything else, if the PCs are space aliens then they are dependent on the GM to give them any "levers" to even manipulate the fiction at all. So it ends up that the GM is the one playing the game with themself!

I've made multiple posts explaining the resolution frameworks that I use, which are not generally "fiat"-type ones.

But you would say that, since a game like D&D doesn't have those resolution frameworks, D&D is automatically railroady?

There's nothing inherently railroady about 4e D&D. And as I've posted about a billion times in this thread, I've run non-raidlroady AD&D, though the system is not ideal for it.

You and others seem to want to make this about "D&D against the world". By equating a rather narrow idea of how D&D might be played with D&D as such.

 

[pemerton]

Where it begins to look like a railroad is going to be very subjective.

In that case, why am I not able to talk about things I find railroad-y, but when I nevertheless do so you're allowed to rather forcefully tell me that I'm wrong and they're not?

How has your subjectivity become the universal arbiter of truth?

 

[pemerton]

But I'm sure they found it interesting, and it was still done in service to the players.

Why, as GM, would I possibly want to say stuff at the table that the other participants don't find interesting?