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

[hawkeyefan]

I know, it's a pretty outrageous setting to posit that cold blooded murder might require someone to screw up their courage!

But my Paladin Sir Felgar would slaughter creatures by the dozen and never struggle with it in any way and he was a paragon of righteousness!

 

[pemerton]

People do research to inform their decisions in real life too. Don't really see a problem here.

You're talking about the fiction: in the fiction PCs can research out the wazoo, or not, depending whether the feel of our game should be HPL or REH.

I'm talking about the game play.

 

[pemerton]

Because the players decided that doing XYZ was worth the information they would get? It's still their choice. This really seems like some folks are trying to twist the terms and definitions so that anyone who doesn't agree with them seems objectively wrong.

Well, I just thought I was explaining why I find that sort of thing pretty railroad-y.

 

[pemerton]

Likewise, describing an approach as 'player driven' might imply other approaches are not player driven.

Yes. That's the point, at least for me, in using that phrase.

 

[Campbell]

Player agency within the setting is the main antidote to railroading, so it seems odd that some of the most strident anti-railroaders are also eager players of systems that intentionally deny some of that agency.

Looked at from a different angle it's almost like low-grade system-based railroading instead of DM railroading. I fail to see how one is any better than the other.

There are sometimes limitations put on autonomy or carrots or sticks for particular actions, but these come as a consequence for decisions that are made with clear eyes. What we get in exchange is the ability to impact the setting in reliable ways. That autonomy is wagered for irrevocable change in the same way that entering a combat in D&D is wagering the ultimate loss of autonomy for the ability to eliminate a threat and take its treasure.

If I do not want to risk my character in Apocalypse Keys falling further into Ruin then I do not declare actions that risk that. If I don't want to risk bodily harm in Apocalypse World I do not declare actions that would trigger Go Aggro or Seize by Force.

I consider it a net gain in agency, but then I weigh the ability to reliably impact the shared fiction more than autonomy, especially autonomy above and beyond what we have in real life.

 

[pemerton]

Yup. Imagination time with no rules is not IMO a game. More a storytelling exercise at best.

Upthread, didn't you say you want the GM's imaginative decision-making about the setting, and the outcomes of actions that take place within it, to be unconstrained by rules?

Now are you saying that that sort of "GM imagination time" is not a game?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

No it doesn't. Listen, I played the original game, a fair amount. It was almost totally pawn stance exploit what is on your sheet. We still put names, notes about allies, pictures, etc. on the sheet. I think @pemerton pretty much has it right. Character sheets were resources, maybe also restrictions at times. While D&D has wargames as a source element it also has rules-mediated RP.

 

[Lanefan]

Didn't you once talk about how you had an entire session where the party went out and painted the town red or some such?

Bleah.

If you're thinking of the story where the carousing party charmed the harlot who turned out to be a royal agent etc., that was a hypothetical example I made up for that post in order to highlight the idea of unknown and unknowable possible downstream consequences of what at the time seems like something trivial.

But I have run many a session that was pretty much nothing but in-character roleplay and-or hijinks and-or infighting, where whatever adventure or mission or etc. they were in theory doing didn't get advanced in the slightest. Fine with me; if that's what they want to do then that's what I'm DMing, and they (or whoever's left, depending) can always get back on mission next session or the session after that or whenever.

The game is open-ended, including in overall duration. I'm not running it on a clock; and having hit 1100 sessions as of last Sunday I'd say it's so far, so good.

 

[The Firebird]

Player agency within the setting is the main antidote to railroading, so it seems odd that some of the most strident anti-railroaders are also eager players of systems that intentionally deny some of that agency.

Looked at from a different angle it's almost like low-grade system-based railroading instead of DM railroading. I fail to see how one is any better than the other.

I want to highlight this, because it appears to me to be one of the crucial observations from the discussion. I alluded to it before in the Rules Elide post, and some responses to @pemerton. But here's a thesis:

The major innovation of the narrative systems like BW is not giving the players agency. It is about removing agency from the GM and placing it in the hands of the system.

As we've seen, the players don't actually have any more agency in these games. Their choices are more subject to the whims of the dice. They might get a bad roll and then find their character can't act the way they want. Their choices are less meaningful, because the world they are interacting with is not going to react in fixed ways. If the world is fixed, the decision to sneak past or shoot some guards has weight--one may be better than the others. But if similar dice rolls are used to resolve in either case, then the choice doesn't really matter.

The main benefit, instead is to prevent the DM from having to make too many choices. This occurred to me when reading @pemerton's posts about railroading and the faction reprisal scenario. I thought it was interesting that the primary complaint there didn't seem to be that the players were complaining; but that the DM found themselves at a loss for how to proceed. What they really want is a way for the system to decide, so they don't have to.

 

[FrozenNorth]

do you think the players are significantly better at this?

I don’t think the players think they are being objective or would make claims to that effect.