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

[Micah Sweet]

When I’m a player I usually play it straight. I generally save the comic relief for when I DM. Although I still smarting from when a player stole my Dr Strangelove joke seven years ago.

I'm usually serious most of the time. When I play, the GMs are usually serious too, but the players often are not.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Thing is, and it's sad to have to bring this up, there's those who would say "But it's the DM's decision to have made those guards loyal to the King, so it's still railroading!"

Because to those people, anything the DM does that isn't forced by a game rule is railroading. It's an untenable and ultimately undefendable position, but that's the definition they use and it makes discussion of the topic an exercise in frustration.

No, that's not what anyone has said.

What people have said is that the GM making the guards unfailingly loyal to the king... along with the background details to support that, the opportunity (or not!) to find out about this loyalty, the consequences of dealing with the guards in any way, the presence (or not!) of alternative means of bypassing the guards, the difficulty of any such potential alternative means and their consequences, any number of other unknown factors, the bypassing of any mechanical process that may disclaim decision making on the part of the GM.... and also probably the reason that the PCs are trying to get past the guards in the first place...

Yeah, it's more about all those things combined.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Which, absent any other information, on a failed roll comes across as the game stone-cold telling me how to play my character.

As the character's player I should have the agency to freely decide in the moment whether or not my character commits that murder. If there's downstream consequences either in-game (e.g. now the cops are after me and I gotta run) or out-of-game (e.g. an alignment check) then so be it, but if player agency is to matter the game shouldn't have mechanisms to prevent me doing something in-character before I've even done it.

And if the game is intentionally designed so as to reduce or remove player agency, why would anyone ever play such a game?

Come on, Lanefan. You've been involved in these conversations for literally years. Have you really not realized by now that folks play games for different reasons?

Is it really so hard to imagine other approaches to play? Especially when years' worth of explanations and examples have been provided to you?

 

[Bedrockgames]

No, that's not what anyone has said.

What people have said is that the GM making the guards unfailingly loyal to the king... along with the background details to support that, the opportunity (or not!) to find out about this loyalty, the consequences of dealing with the guards in any way, the presence (or not!) of alternative means of bypassing the guards, the difficulty of any such potential alternative means and their consequences, any number of other unknown factors, the bypassing of any mechanical process that may disclaim decision making on the part of the GM.... and also probably the reason that the PCs are trying to get past the guards...

Yeah, it's more about all those things combined.

But people weren't advocating the GM bring all forces to bear against the party from getting past the guard. People were advocating for the GM being able to give NPCs concrete character traits that could include 'can't be bribed'. Wouldn't you agree there is a big difference between a GM simply trying to give a guard a strong personality and a GM pulling out all the stops to make sure whatever it is they are trying to do through that bribe, never happens? I don't think anyone here is advocating throwing up artificial barriers to the players in that moment. They are talking more about something that happens to arise as a personality trait and becomes a barrier (but it wouldnt' follow that the rest of the prison scenario is going to be a railroad)

 

[The Firebird]

No, that's not what anyone has said.

What people have said is that the GM making the guards unfailingly loyal to the king... along with the background details to support that, the opportunity (or not!) to find out about this loyalty, the consequences of dealing with the guards in any way, the presence (or not!) of alternative means of bypassing the guards, the difficulty of any such potential alternative means and their consequences, any number of other unknown factors, the bypassing of any mechanical process that may disclaim decision making on the part of the GM.... and also probably the reason that the PCs are trying to get past the guards...

Yeah, it's more about all those things combined.

Hmm, maybe the term 'railroading' wasn't used for that, but the idea of a guard being unbribable at all has been criticized extensively.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Come on, Lanefan. You've been involved in these conversations for literally years. Have you really not realized by now that folks play games for different reasons?

Is it really so hard to imagine other approaches to play? Especially when years' worth of explanations and examples have been provided to you?

I can understand it, and I expect @Lanefan gets it too. That doesn't stop it from coming across to them as a violation of the ability to make your PCs decisions, or their feelings about that.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm usually serious most of the time. When I play, the GMs are usually serious too, but the players often are not.

I’m usually cracking dumb jokes most of the time, so when I roleplay I like to play as someone different. But my players are rarely serious.

 

[pemerton]

It's an interesting thesis but I think it bakes in so many assumptions about how the players are approaching the game already as to not be generalizeable to D&D. It works if you image that RPGs are about improvisational storytelling first, and then you want to layer on some rules. But it's just as easy to imagine the opposite--they're a game with rules first, like a wargame or chess. And then you decide to give the players more flexibility, and there is ambiguity in resolution, so you introduce a referee. In this case it's clear that the characters are game pieces first, and you're personifying them after. With that approach, saying the character sheet has nothing to do with the character misses the point.

I think it's pretty generalisable to the original dungeon-crawling game. I imagine my character with nothing but their arms and armour, a pack of supplies, perhaps a trusty fedora. I say what they do, the GM tells me what happens, if there's disagreement we roll the dice. As Baker describes, the PC sheet gets built up as we need to record more details of the resource/capabilities I (as a player) am allowed to bring to bear (as the design grows more sophisticated).

The wargame-y stuff is different, I'll agree, but D&D took a while to integrate those two components (eg originally my STR stat didn't influence the wargame-y part of resolving combat).

 

[hawkeyefan]

But people weren't advocating the GM bring all forces to bear against the party from getting past the guard. People were advocating for the GM being able to give NPCs concrete character traits that could include 'can't be bribed'. Wouldn't you agree there is a big difference between a GM simply trying to give a guard a strong personality and a GM pulling out all the stops to make sure whatever it is they are trying to do through that bribe, never happens? I don't think anyone here is advocating throwing up artificial barriers to the players in that moment. They are talking more about something that happens to arise as a personality trait and becomes a barrier (but it wouldnt' follow that the rest of the prison scenario is going to be a railroad)

Yes, I understand that. But, the way I see it, is that what you're arguing for allows for all those things I said. That all of that is potentially the GM's choice. ALL OF IT. Yes, you don't want him to actually do it all simultaneously in such a way as to block players, as you say here... yet you still advocate that all of that should be up to the GM. You argue in favor of rules that allow this situation to occur, and then hope that GMs are wise or aware enough to know better. It seems an inherently flawed way to approach a rules system.

This is why some of us have advocated for more specific processes. That allow us to know how such a situation can be navigated as a player of the game. Not as the character... I understand the character may not know all the relevant factors. But when it comes to gameplay, I don't accept that as absolving the GM of responsibility for making functional play.

The GM can just as easily broadcast the fact that the guards are unfailingly loyal, or share any number of other details that turn this scenario from the kind of black box guessing game that is pretty devoid of player agency into a playable scenario. The GM is so responsible for what the players know or don't know, that I cannot accept blaming anyone but the GM when play arrives at this type of situation.

That's the thing. Yes, the game involves portraying a fictional world. But it's still a game. When you place the importance on this idea of "realism" or living world or what have you over the actual game play, you are choosing to do so.

Now, that's fine in and of itself. But to go on about player agency when you make such choices, or defend the system that would allow them... that seems incongruous to me. It is incompatible with player agency.

It's placing the GM's conception of the setting above the players' ability to engage with the setting in play.

Like, why is it so important that the guards are unfailingly loyal? Why must this be secret from the players when it could just as easily be shared? What purpose does that serve the game? Not the setting... the game. I've advocated in these recent discussions for remaining aware of and considering both layers of play... the make believe of the setting, and also the actual playing of a game.

 

[Lanefan]

I think I've established that I don't see these rules as forcing PC behavior. For me, they move play along. I have a low threshold for participating in or observing RPed arguments where neither party has a clear end-game and/or is willing to back down from their assumptions, whether it's GM-player or player-player.

So, player agency gets sacrificed on the altar of efficiency. Bleah.

Whenever I hear talk of "move play along" or the like, I imagine a DM impatiently looking at a clock and thinking "We're behind schedule - we have to get through six more pages of adventure tonight and all they want to do is argue!". To me, unless it's a con game or similar that has a hard-set time limit, there should never ever be a 'schedule' of havng to achieve x-amount of in-game progress in y-amount of real-world time.

The campaign lasts as long as it lasts, and if it goes ten sessions longer because of all the in-character roleplay they did, to me that's a very strong positive - it shows they enjoy roleplaying the characters they've got - rather than something to complain about.