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

[Bedrockgames]

@pemerton has always been pretty clear about his definitions. It is equally necessary for others to read and comprehend. I don't think you're wrong about using terms, but requiring strict adherence to your formulations (and note @Campbell not agreeing that your definition of agency is normative) precludes any easy way to discuss alternatives at all. And again, our experience has been that there's a lot of hostility to introducing new terms. It seems to be a kind of linguistic tyranny at times.

The problem is all his definitions point towards his preferred style of play and either make other ones, particularly trad, lesser value, or incapable of doing what they promise. That has been a very consistent feature of these conversations

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which, if you are looking for a rules-based system, seems odd; in that a game that has to cover so many different bases and types of things that require rules would seem ideally suited for exception-based rather than unified design. Exception-based design allows this rule to apply to that situation while that rule applies to another, similar situation - i.e. the rules can be made more bespoke to what they are trying to accomplish when modelling or abstracting the fiction.

There's nothing stopping non-exception based design from doing that; you just have a set of rules that explains how to apply the extent system in different situation. Among other things, then you don't need to have every spell and feat be a special snowflake done up ad-hoc; they'll show relationships to other things.

I can point out games that were doing that 40 years ago.

Unified rules tend to push against or even outright disallow unusual situations (i.e. the type that require non-unified rules) from occurring, preferring to try to shoehorn everything into the same system whether it works well in that instance or not.

Or, alternatively, they don't think "require non-unified rules" is actually a thing, as compared to some people preferring them.

 

[Maxperson]

No

Yes. You can't make me have railroaded people when I don't.

 

[Maxperson]

I have not framed sandbox style play as “ideologically suspect”. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that it’s a perfectly valid way to play, and one that I engage in myself.

However I do think that a large part of what you’re talking about is GM led play. The focus of play is the setting more so than the characters. Again, that’s not bad.

And although the players do have the freedom to move about the setting and engage with different elements, their ability to do so is largely dependent on the GM.

This is why I don’t think it’s as player driven as is often claimed.

Your premise there is flawed. The focus isn't on the setting more than the players. Even in a living sandbox, the focus is on the players far more than the setting itself. It's just that instead of the DM making it about the PCs, the players make it about the PCs themselves by forging their own destinies and goals.

It's VERY player driven.

Sure. But to lean on your analogy a bit, the GM’s the one who also made the parts. So what the players are able to turn the car into very much depends on what the GM has provided.

Or what they come up with themselves.

 

[robertsconley]

Again, stuff like "present a setting that feels real" is the sort of thing that gets some of our hackles up. This post here suggests that Doskvol can't feel real because of the other framing you've added. I'm not sure that follows at all, considering that Doskvol is a really rich setting that is full of living factions and interests that are all spinning from the go; has more detailed and evocative descriptions then pretty much all conventional setting books within its limited scope; and then encourages each player to make it feel even more real to them individually by contributing things.

I would accept something like "lived in" or "objective" or whatever, but this sort of post is what gets many of us here rubbed the wrong way because to us there's nothing "more real" about a pre-written world the GM has reams of info that we get to slowly poke at. It's all about how much the fiction itself comes alive in our shared imagination at the table.

That makes no sense. It’s like accusing The Pitt of dissing other medical dramas just because it focuses on realism. Blades in the Dark is very clear about its intended approach, look at sections like Playing a Session (structured like a TV show) and Touchstones (Peaky Blinders, Lankhmar, Thief, Crimson Peak, Ronin, etc.). That framing directly shapes how Doskvol is meant to be played. And yes, it has narrative and thematic depth, John Harper knew exactly what tone he was building toward.

Should I also be reading Harper's work as a veiled critique of Chaosium’s Thieves’ World or the Thieves’ Guild RPG? Because those settings also focus on different tones and priorities. If that's where your logic is headed, it's not a great direction.

Seriously, not everyone who disagrees with you is from the darkest timeline. That kind of take derails discussion and makes it harder to actually engage on substance. Like any setting, Doskvol can be as rich or shallow as the group wants. And given its inspirations, there’s plenty there for a group that does want depth to work with including presenting the setting as if was real.

Lastly, my interest and work in presenting a setting as if it really existed goes back long before John Harper wrote Blades or Ron Edwards posted on The Forge. If I applied your logic, I should be demanding apologies from every designer who’s ever emphasized narrative structure over world simulation for “dissing” my campaign style. But that would be ridiculous, and I’d rather spend that energy actually talking about how different styles work.

 

[pemerton]

My living world sandbox avoids the contradiction Edwards raises because I’m not trying to tell a story or construct a narrative arc.

My response to this is similar to what @thefutilist has posted: when I play (say) Burning Wheel, or Torchbearer, or Prince Valiant, or Classic Traveller, I'm not trying to tell a story or construct a narrative arc.

If I'm playing, what I do is describe what my character is doing, and why, and what they are hoping to achieve. If I'm GMing, what I do is present situations as the game tells me to; make sure that dice get rolled when they are supposed to (in accordance with the rules of the game); and also make sure that outcomes - especially failure outcomes - are clearly established.

To the extent that play generates something like a story with rising action, crisis/climax, and thematically-laden resolution, that is not because anyone tries to achieve those things, or sets out to achieve them. It is because the game systems are well-designed to produce that experience. (The analogue in bridge would be: no one has to set out to create a degree of suspense as to who is holding the crucial off-suit ace; playing the game in accordance with the rules of the game will produce that experience.)

I’m focused on presenting a setting that operates independently of the players, a world in motion. My goal is to bring that setting to life so that the players feel like they’ve truly been there as their characters, making meaningful decisions and pursuing the adventures they choose. If a story emerges, it does so after the fact, as an account of what happened, never because I authored it in advance.

And so as to be crystal clear: neither the playing of the RPGs I like to play, nor the GMing of them, requires or invites authoring a story in advance.

It's true that there are one or two Prince Valiant scenarios in the Episode Book that do have the character of a story authored in advance, and I've posted my critical analysis of those scenarios on these boards. When I used Mark Rein*Hagen's A Prodigal Son - In Chains (over the course of two sessions, I had to depart quite a bit from the written text in order to remove the railroad elements:

Mark Rein*Hagen also has a relatively intricate scenario in the Episode Book, and its contrast with Grayson's is pretty marked. Just reading it through was enough to trigger alarm bells: its scene descriptions begin with phrases like "The Adventurers must now scour the forest to find Quink" and "As soon as they enter the duchy" and "Bryce’s sister . . . receives the conquerors in the great hall . . . One way or another, the Adventurers should be in attendance of this meeting". When I used this scenario I took up most of its key ideas, and the NPCs, but used a different framing and just ignored Rein*Hagen's railroaded sequence of events.

While I haven’t played Torchbearer or Burning Wheel, I have played other games in that orbit, like Blades in the Dark and Fate, and I’ve refereed Fate.

As you may know, I regard Burning Wheel and Fate as pretty different in orientation and technique. Fate seems to me to be mostly about character fulfilment, or emulation - and seems to encourage players to take control of outcomes at key moments of play.

BitD I think might be closer. I suspect that the closest game to BW that is not from the same family of games is The Riddle of Steel - which is why Jake Norwood wrote the preface to BW Gold.

This is not how hobbyists understand railroading.

<snip>

Your definition re-frames railroading in terms of player agency, specifically, the degree to which players co-author or control the shared fiction. That is a significant shift in terminology, and it’s not one that most players or referees will immediately recognize. The result is confusion, your critique gets mistaken for a definitional disagreement rather than illustrating your main points.

<snip>

when you use "railroading" in a way that diverges so sharply from common usage, it obscures the real point you’re making.

When someone redefines a widely-used term like “railroading” without noting the shift, it leads people to think they’re being critiqued on their terms, not his. That’s where the confusion and tension come from, not just the redefinition itself, but the way it reframes the discussion around the poster’s way of thinking.

If someone is going to debate RPG theory and practice, they should be familiar with how terms are commonly used.

Likewise, my campaigns don’t engage with the contradiction you’re pointing to, because we don’t treat the shared fiction as something co-authored by the group. The players understand that they are visiting a world that exists outside of them. The only way they affect it is through their characters’ actions. What changes is a result of play, not through any negotiated or shared control of the fiction.

Because of that, my campaigns aren’t railroads in the classical sense, where player choices are blocked or overridden. And with respect to your definition, where railroading is about the GM controlling all or most of the fiction, it’s simply not a concern for us.

When I put "railroad rpg" into Google, the entries that come up offer various characterisations, that are not all consistent. And Google's AI opens with this:

In RPG (Role-Playing Game) contexts, "railroading" refers to a game design or game master approach where players have little to no agency in shaping the story or outcome. The game feels like a predetermined route, limiting player choice and potentially undermining their enjoyment.​

That AI offering is consistent with the inconsistency among the blogs and posts whose links follow it: because its first sentence and its second sentence are not equivalent. The second is about a feeling, and refers to predetermination; the first is about player agency in respect to outcome. Which is what I am referring to by the term railroad. It goes all the way back to Lewis Pulsipher's 45-year-old discussions that I quoted upthread, of players being receptive of the GM's material.

I don't treat the shared fiction as something to be authored by the group, at least in a collective sense. As I posted, there are bits of it that the GM authors, and bits that the players author. However, in multiple posts in this thread, including the one that you quoted, I have contrasted control and authority. I think that contrast is pretty fundamental to a lot of game play. For instance, in bridge, each player (but for the dummy) has the authority to play their own cards, in accordance with the rules of the game. But the skill of playing bridge is to (i) infer what cards others are holding, and (ii) play your own cards, so as (iii) to exploit the rules in order to (iv) control what others play. This is mostly about length and strength in suit - it's how your run the other players in trumps, manage your off-suit, etc.

The contrast is also important in RPGing. It's fundamental to Gygax's account of Successful Adventures: the GM is the one who has authored the dungeon; but the players - if they play well - exercise a lot of control over how play unfolds, by (i) gathering information, (ii) planning and then (iii) enacting those plans. By choosing which levels to explore, which doors to open, etc, the players are able to control which scenes get framed, even though it is the GM who is the author of those scenes.

To turn from classic D&D to Burning Wheel, it is the GM who has the principal responsibility for framing scenes. But the players exercise control over the GM, by establishing priorities for their PCs, which the GM is obliged to have regard to in the exercise of scene-framing authority. This is how BW is able to use a very conventional RPGing allocation of authority, while reducing the GM control over the shared fiction compared to some other non-dungeon-crawl approaches to RPGing.

The referee maintains the world, but the direction of play comes from the players. They aren’t constrained; they choose what to pursue, and the world reacts accordingly.

Calling that GM-led overlooks the core point: the players decide what happens. The world doesn’t guide them; they guide themselves through it. That’s player-driven, just with a different structure than what you’re used to.

Generally, when I post a general description, or in terms of "if . . . then . . .", I am not setting out to describe any particular person's RPGing. Whether any given poster feels that their RPGing fits under the descriptions I am setting out is something from them to judge, not me!

In what I've just quoted, however, you do say something about your game.

From what you have posted that I have quoted, what I can see is that the players choose to "activate" certain of the GM's prepared elements - eg the players have their PCs go to the castle, or go to the village, or perform a ritual at the shrine, or whatever else. But it seems - though it not entirely clear - that it is the GM who decides what happens when an element is activated (that is, it seems that it is the GM who decides how "the world reacts").

What's not fully clear to me is how much knowledge the players have, or are expected to have (eg if the play well) of how "the world reacts" in advance of prompting its reactions (ie prompting the GM to say what happens next). It is the element of knowledge that is crucial in Gygax's account of Successful Adventures, in making dungeon-crawling play player-driven rather than an essentially blind exploration of the GM's set-up. From how you describe your sandbox play, I can't tell how much player knowledge is supposed to figure.

(There are other posters who, as I read them, have expressly disavowed the significance of player knowledge. That gives me the impression that the play in their sandboxes involves quite a bit of blind activation of things by the players, with the result that it is predominantly the GM who is controlling what happens in the shared fiction.)

 

[robertsconley]

It is equally necessary for others to read and comprehend. I don't think you're wrong about using terms, but requiring strict adherence to your formulations (and note @Campbell not agreeing that your definition of agency is normative) precludes any easy way to discuss alternatives at all.

I never offered a definition of agency. I gave a description of how agency functions in my own campaign structure. Not sure how that’s any more challenging to grasp than Pemerton’s or Ron Edwards’ descriptions, which, by the way, were also treated as intelligible and worth engaging. So we have multiple “formulations” being discussed in parallel, not one dominant or exclusionary claim.

As for “strict adherence to my formulation”, is this referring to when I push back on reframing? Or when I acknowledge another poster’s point as valid given their creative goals? Or maybe when I asked how to summarize someone else’s multi-paragraph post with a label that avoids misrepresentation? If you’ve got a specific example, state it. Otherwise, it feels like an overgeneralization that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Regarding the charge that I’m being normative: again, I was describing how agency plays out in Living World sandbox campaigns. That’s inherently a bounded context, not a universal claim.

It seems to be a kind of linguistic tyranny at times.

That’s ironic.

From the comments of this 2014 post:

Remembering the Forge

This is a post prompted by Shimmin, who was asking after a simple introduction to subjects surrounding the Forge. I realised that I couldn’t think of many that weren’t highly biased one…

refereeingandreflection.wordpress.com

“There’s also an Emperor’s New Clothes effect, where people feel less able to challenge you if you express yourself in a needlessly baroque way because they feel intimidated by the language you use.”

If anything, that sounds like an accurate description of the Forge-era habit of using arcane phrasing to intimidate rather than clarify. If we're going to talk about "linguistic tyranny," let's be honest about where that tradition comes from.

 

[zakael19]

@robertsconley Baker recently posted about revisiting Narrativism (which is distinct from whatever a "narrative RPG" is and good god it's all very easy to get backwards and confused isn't it), which I think somebody else shared in this thread but, in his words this is narrativism as a play style/dynamic:

1. The PCs have vision, self-interests, best interests, passion, an ideological commitment: something they want and care about. Lajos Egri says “passionate.”

2. Their passions put them in conflict with others — other PCs or other NPCs, it doesn’t matter. Their passions oppose others’, threaten others’ interests, provoke others into passionate reaction.
3. Both the PCs and their counterparts are equipped to pursue their passions in conflict. Egri says “fit.” They’re physically equipped, emotionally equipped, morally equipped; they have skills, tools, initiative, stamina, followthrough, staying power.
4. Nobody pre-plans how it’s going to turn out. The characters are passionate, conflicted, and fit; now turn them lose. Play to let them pursue their passions. Play to find out how far they go, how they escalate, who comes out on top, who compromises, what they win, what it costs, what they prioritize, what they abandon. The only way to know how it plays out, is to play it out!

It sounds like the way you construct your sandboxes and do the up front work, if your players do 1 & 2 you're quite possibly playing a game in the narrativist dynamic per 4. It sounds like your factions in the world have goals that they're pursuing the PCs may run up against, the PCs have drives and interests in the world, and you're not planning ways things turn out. This may not be your intention or goal, and maybe your players are a little less doing 1&2, but while games like BITD or AW or whatever may be designed from the get go to essentially force narrativist play dynamics that's just some creative intention.

 

[zakael19]

That makes no sense. It’s like accusing The Pitt of dissing other medical dramas just because it focuses on realism. Blades in the Dark is very clear about its intended approach, look at sections like Playing a Session (structured like a TV show) and Touchstones (Peaky Blinders, Lankhmar, Thief, Crimson Peak, Ronin, etc.). That framing directly shapes how Doskvol is meant to be played. And yes, it has narrative and thematic depth, John Harper knew exactly what tone he was building toward.

Should I also be reading Harper's work as a veiled critique of Chaosium’s Thieves’ World or the Thieves’ Guild RPG? Because those settings also focus on different tones and priorities. If that's where your logic is headed, it's not a great direction.

Seriously, not everyone who disagrees with you is from the darkest timeline. That kind of take derails discussion and makes it harder to actually engage on substance. Like any setting, Doskvol can be as rich or shallow as the group wants. And given its inspirations, there’s plenty there for a group that does want depth to work with including presenting the setting as if was real.

Lastly, my interest and work in presenting a setting as if it really existed goes back long before John Harper wrote Blades or Ron Edwards posted on The Forge. If I applied your logic, I should be demanding apologies from every designer who’s ever emphasized narrative structure over world simulation for “dissing” my campaign style. But that would be ridiculous, and I’d rather spend that energy actually talking about how different styles work.

Idk man, when I read this:

By contrast, the point of my Living World Sandbox campaigns is to present a setting that feels real, where players feel like they’ve been there as their characters. Everything I do flows from that. I handle the World in Motion because the players only have access to what their characters could plausibly know. Their agency comes from choosing what to pursue and how to act, not from framing scenes, asserting authorial control, or sharing the fiction.

What I get from it is "in contrast to these other games we're talking about, because of all my hard work my game actually feels real and players feel like they're actually there as their characters."

Because that's how it reads to me? My imagination feels like Im there to the best of my ability to pretend when I'm running stonetop, but it's not working from your guidelines. The only way for me to read your commentary is as dismissive of that experience I have. If that wasn't your intention, cool

 

[pemerton]

These definitions stem from agency theory wherein a person is given authority to exert towards some particular purpose on behalf of the person they are an agent of. It also is consistent with how we talk about agency in political science and most game design texts. The ability to exert your will and create meaningful change in your environment.

There are various ways of talking about agency in social sciences, philosophy, law, etc. In the context of RPG design and analysis, though, I think we can sidestep most of that controversy. Because we're talking about game play, which is a pretty specific thing.

Game play, in general, tends to involve making moves to change the state of <the game situation>. The change is generated via a process that may be mechanical (eg a die is rolled and the number on the die is itself the game situation), non-mechanical (eg the person in charades performing the pantomime signals that they're finished performing), or both (eg I roll the die - mechanics - and then I move my piece on the board - non-mechanical). The rules of the game should explain how to set up an initial game situation; how to make moves and resolve them so as to change the game situation; and (if the game is not completely open-ended) when the game has come to its end.

We can then talk about how much control my moves give me over those changes to the game situation.

In some games, the answer is none (eg snakes and ladders).

In some games, the answer may be potentially much (eg chess) although that may depend a lot on my skill at the game (eg chess, again).

In some games, my moves don't affect others' moves (eg in Pictionary, my team's play doesn't affect your team's play). But in many games, they do - and part of the skill of playing the game, and thus exercising agency, is using my moves to guide or control (via the rules of the game, and the processes that those establish) your moves.

RPGing is not, at its core, different from other games. There is a game situation (a shared fiction). The participants make moves, and the purpose and effect of those moves is to change the shared fiction. Those changes are worked out, by the participants, by applying appropriate processes in accordance with the rules of the game.

Just as other games vary wildly in what counts as the pay-off for playing, so do RPGs. There are all sorts of pay-offs that can be associated with a shared fiction as the game situation. Gygax and Arneson identified one sort of pay-off - wargame-style victories that improve the player's position, thus enabling the game to step up in difficulty, allowing more elaborate challenges and victories, etc, etc. This has proven to be a pretty popular sort of game play pay-off, though probably in RPGing (as opposed to video gaming) it has ceased to be predominant.

For me, the pay-off from playing Burning Wheel is pretty different from the Gygax-Arneson pay-off. But the game still has the same very basic structure of play: participants, asymmetrically situated, who make moves with the purpose and effect of changing the shared fiction.

The degree of agency that a player of a RPG has is just like any other game - how much control do their moves give them over the game situation? This will differ depending on the details of what moves are permitted and how the outcomes of those moves are determined. In many RPGs, there seems to be something of a default that, outside of combat, the outcome of player-participant moves will be decided by the GM-participant, in accordance with a rough heuristic that references the GM's prep, plus the GM's sense of plausibility-within-the-fiction, plus the GM's sense of what seems like it might be interesting or "further the story".

A lot of references to "trusting the GM" seem to implicitly point to that heuristic.

To me, it seems fairly apparent that RPGing that uses that heuristic gives a lot of control to the GM, and only modest control to the players. And it doesn't alter that appearance to point out that the player's modest degree of agency corresponds, in some fashion, to the modest imagined agency of their in-fiction character.