D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[AlViking]

But there must be someone adjudicating the world, right? If the intent is to find a ship captain and they succeed, who describes the NPC? Who decides how large the ship is and what the fee will be?

I appreciate your description of the mechanics you had in mind which followed. But I think it is getting into the weeds of system, and doesn't for me explain the salient point: why do you think the fixed world sandbox can be railroading, but player driven is not? I don't think this requires a detailed explanation of how tests are made to be answered.


I also appreciate your attempt to bring nuance to these scenarios. But again I fear that it is over complicating the analysis and I still don't have a good understanding of what precisely you think is railroading. At the moment it seems to me like a "I know it when I see it" standard. And maybe that is the extent of it.

If that isn't the extent of it, what is the minimal working example to your mind that illustrates it? Can it be captured in a sentence or two? E.g., "If the party wants to head east but the GM comes up with unrealistic barriers which prevent their action then it is railroading".

I feel I've seen a lot about specific mechanics, but little about the general principals that make them better or worse (in your view) for these purposes.

I think I understand Burning Wheel more from the Wikipedia entry The Burning Wheel - Wikipedia than from the descriptions we've seen. I'm still unsure how you would weave any of this into a long term campaign of any kind, I'd have to watch a live stream or similar to get a better idea.

It just seems to have more player directed play than anything. I don't think it's necessary for a sandbox, it's just a different approach.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

If this is the basis for a short adventure that's deliberately based around a specific idea, it's fine. If this is intended to be the start of a longer campaign, I'd say it's quite railroad-y. Of course, having pre-gen characters built entirely around competition for the same object doesn't help.

"The Sword" has two main functions: it's (1) a demo game used at conventions (2) to show off the Duel of Wits rules. I'm sure you could kick off a campaign with it, but it's a roughly 15-30 minute game without extrapolating more material.

 

[robertsconley]

To me realistic means logically consistent with how the world works. Whether that world is Star Wars, Star Trek, Toon World or The Forgotten Realms, most people who are fans of those worlds will know the logical underpinnings of how they work. A GM will typically have a better idea, even when something happens that doesn't seem realistic for that fiction.

I think Terry Prachett's Discworld is a good example of as setting that had a consistent logic but a utterly fantastic foundation unmoored in anything we would call realistic.

He co-authored GURPS Discworld and the book has this to say.

Then goes to discuss specific elements of this like Metaphor and Belief, Narrative Causality.

And keep in mind this is all in-game, characters who live in the setting are aware about this and will try to use the "laws" of Discworld to further their goals.

Like the History Monks

 

[pemerton]

If this is the basis for a short adventure that's deliberately based around a specific idea, it's fine. If this is intended to be the start of a longer campaign, I'd say it's quite railroad-y. Of course, having pre-gen characters built entirely around competition for the same object doesn't help.

Well, the whole point of the scenario is that the PCs are in competition with one another. But I'm not sure how that makes something a railroad.

Don't get hung up on the pre-gens: any example in its nature requires presenting the example; and where a system like Burning Wheel is involved, that means presenting the characters to whom the situation is addressed. But suppose that @Manbearcat and I decide to play The Fighter and The Fisherman, say with @Old Fezziwig as GM. We build our PCs together, choosing Beliefs and Instincts that make sense for our characters and the situation that we've come up with together. Old Fezziwig imagines a starting situation, based on the context and the PCs that have been developed: and he frames us into it. Maybe it puts our two PCs into conflict from the outset!

I don't see why the situation counts as railroad-y just because it is high stakes rather than low stakes.

EDIT:

"The Sword" has two main functions: it's (1) a demo game used at conventions (2) to show off the Duel of Wits rules. I'm sure you could kick off a campaign with it, but it's a roughly 15-30 minute game without extrapolating more material.

I haven't downloaded the version I linked to, so I don't know if it is the same as my version, which I downloaded in 2011. But my version has the following:

Continuing The Sword
If you want to continue playing after completing this brief scenario, I suggest that you stop play and end the session once either the sword’s owner has been determined or the group has returned to the surface. Do artha awards. Encourage the players to rewrite one or two of their Beliefs to reflect the new situation in the game. For example, if Robard manages to escape with the sword, Fidhean and Brechtanz might change their Beliefs to reflect how unworthy and untrustworthy Men are - thus they must recover this priceless artifact from Robard. The next scene would involve the aggrieved parties trying to stop Robard from selling the heirloom on the black market. Men are such scum!

Once you have new Beliefs, start up the action again.​

This is followed by more detailed discussions of possible ideas, depending on how the conflict over the sword resolved.

 

[Maxperson]

Sure as hell could've fooled me with the way you and others talk about how harmful and disruptive players are.

I've never said harmful. Disruptive, sure. Disruption is not harm.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Continuing The Sword
If you want to continue playing after completing this brief scenario, I suggest that you stop play and end the session once either the sword’s owner has been determined or the group has returned to the surface. Do artha awards. Encourage the players to rewrite one or two of their Beliefs to reflect the new situation in the game. For example, if Robard manages to escape with the sword, Fidhean and Brechtanz might change their Beliefs to reflect how unworthy and untrustworthy Men are - thus they must recover this priceless artifact from Robard. The next scene would involve the aggrieved parties trying to stop Robard from selling the heirloom on the black market. Men are such scum!

Once you have new Beliefs, start up the action again.

Ah, nice. It's been ages since I've run it or read it, and I can't remember if it had these instructions then. I did play through a demo at PAX East with Luke Crane, and my buddy played the Dwarf. He had us write one belief for each character, and my buddy wrote up one about destroying the sword, which I guess was fairly uncommon for the scenario based on our little debriefing after the end of the DoW. I could see running a campaign off of that belief and the competing beliefs of the other players.

 

[Faolyn]

"The Sword" has two main functions: it's (1) a demo game used at conventions (2) to show off the Duel of Wits rules. I'm sure you could kick off a campaign with it, but it's a roughly 15-30 minute game without extrapolating more material.

Makes sense. I think it would turn me off the game entirely, unless it was very carefully presented. Especially if there's no world presented to help avoid the "dwarfs and elves hate each other" cliche.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Makes sense. I think it would turn me off the game entirely, unless it was very carefully presented. Especially if there's no world presented to help avoid the "dwarfs and elves hate each other" cliche.

BW has an implicit setting, but not a mandatory setting. As a scenario, "The Sword" presents a setting that lends itself to Tolkienesque dwarf-elf mutual antagonism and distrust. It's just one way you could play the game. It's really pretty modular.

 

[Faolyn]

I think Terry Prachett's Discworld is a good example of as setting that had a consistent logic but a utterly fantastic foundation unmoored in anything we would call realistic.

He co-authored GURPS Discworld and the book has this to say.

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Then goes to discuss specific elements of this like Metaphor and Belief, Narrative Causality.

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And keep in mind this is all in-game, characters who live in the setting are aware about this and will try to use the "laws" of Discworld to further their goals.

Like the History Monks
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The world of Discworld may be fantastical, but the actual lives of nearly all the people on it (History Monks notwithstanding) are very realistic. Individuals may try to alter reality because of narrative conventions--the actions of the Watch trying to create exactly million-to-one odds come to mind--but that was very much under desperate circumstances (and it failed to work), not an everyday thing.

 

[pemerton]

It's what is realistic according to the internal logic of the setting. If the Millennium Falcon is being chased by Star destroyers and has sufficient time to charge its (working) hyperdrive, it will make the jump to light speed. That isn't 'realistic', but it is realistic within setting.

The real world is a place about which near-infinite data can be and has been collected, and which has millions of people working hard to generate and disseminate predictions. And yet it is hard to make reliable predictions outside certain rather narrow domains (physics, chemistry, and associated engineering are the main domains; also some aspects of biology).

Judging what is "realistic" in the context of a fiction is - in my view - considerably more difficult. For example, what are food reserves like in The Shire? Given that it's whole economy is utterly implausible - it has a material living standard comparable to late 18th or early 19th century England, albeit apparently without the same prevalence of disease, while having no industrialisation and being an isolated, hinterland area - how is one to extrapolate?

Your example is interesting itself, because the brackets around "working" tend to elide what appears to be a major feature of the actual Star Wars films: the hyperdrive of the Millenium Falcon is, apparently, not trivial to maintain. Does this generalise? How many engineers are needed on a vessel with a bureaucratic crew structure, rather than the more "freelance" approach of the Falcon?

Or to move from "realism" in the technical field to "realism" about human behaviour: when a mid-ranked officer picks up a signal from a probe droid coming from an out-of-the-way system "known" to be uninhabited, how realistic is it that - if Vader is not on board - they will just ignore it?

As I said, I don't see how the heuristic extrapolate what is most plausible/realistic is meant to be applied in these sorts of cases. Given that these fictional setting are characterised by tropes rather than (imaginary) causal laws, it's also seems to me that there must be a very strong aesthetic component to what counts as "realistic" (or "true to the setting") - which is not always going to be straightforwardly consistent with impartiality.

(This is an area where the contrast to free kreigsspiel breaks down, because free kreigsspiel does have clear guides to what is realistic - ie the referee's knowledge of how actual human warfare, in actual real battles, has unfolded.)