What is "railroading" to you (as a player)?

[Thomas Shey]

I enjoyed 2e's Skills and Powers - an Intelligence 10 meant you could have a Knowledge of 8 but a Logic/Reason of 12.

There's almost always more splitting you can do with attributes if you're of a mood; my college roomate and I once sat down and split out the original D&D set into, I want to say something like 21 attributes? I know there were at least three for each one.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Why? I don't think Hero was any more adamant about forcing players to make choices that the GM arbitrarily deems correct for a given intelligence score.

How is that functionally different from the way Psychological Limits or things like Berserk could force behavior, though? Both of them are traits on a character that can force behavioral actions. The psych limits may be spelled out more, but in the end they're still things a GM has a right (and expectation) to make calls on you obeying as a consequence of taking them. A low attribute (which effectively leaves you more points for other things) doesn't seem more intrinsically protected.

Stats have mechanical effects. Those are what they do.

If they inform the player in how to role play, that's great! Role playing is fun. But the GM should not be able to veto any player action that is possible in the fiction of the moment.

A Hero character who has taken Acrophobia (Total) can be forbidden to act in certain ways when heights are present. That can even be true in the Strong case by the die roll, and even the mildest case is expected to guide the roleplaying and for the GM to judge if that's being done.

Also, where do we draw the line. Is it just for solving puzzles? Setting up tactics? Planning a heist? What are the thresholds for various actions that are out of bounds based on stat values? How do background and class interact with it? Is a fighter "smarter" than their Int with regards to battle plans? If so, how much so?

If you're asking are they somewhat subjective, of course they are. But that's true with the things I mention above, too.

My point is that it is a way of running the game that runs counter to player agency and is completely unsupported by the actual rules, so no one should do that. A PLAYER can decide their character is not smart enough to come up with a thing, but no one else can.

And again, I'll point out that (and not just in the above) there are game systems that demand that of the GM for certain things all of the time. GURPS does it. Savage Worlds does it. Pendragon does it. They're more overt and up front about it than a game with just attributes, but again, unless you're forced into it by random rolls, there should be a price for trading down attributes, and one of them should be an expectation that you'll play a character according to their mental attributes, or they shouldn't be there.

 

[zarionofarabel]

Pendragon does it.

Pendragon doesn't have mental attributes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The question is « who decides whether an Int 8 character is smart enough to toss a pebble to distract the guard? ». The rules are pretty clear that the decision is supposed to be the purview of the person who plays the character.

I must point out this thread is not only about D&D.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Pendragon doesn't have mental attributes.

It does have virtues and flaws, however, which can still force players to play their characters in ways they wouldn't, which was my point. "Only the player should decide how their character decides things" is a position any number of games do not share in various places; they aren't usually about attributes, but they're still things that can entirely be cases where the GM, the mechanics, or both are overriding the player. So if you want to say that this sort of thing is entirely off the table, you have to limit that argument to some games, or make an argument why a low mental attirbute is intrinsically different from a psychological disadvantage or the like.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Huh.

There are so MANY potential ways to roleplay a character, most of which don't really have anything to do with attributes. Personality quirks, phobias, cravings, addictions, fetishes, habits, mannerisms, physical descriptions, speech patterns, signature sayings, etc.

And, sure, leaning into a stat can also be good fodder.

But emphasizing that a player must be roleplaying all six of their stats? That just feels....narrow.

I suspect its only going to be viewed as relevant in most cases in extreme cases, some of which may not even be able to occur in many modern games.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Then you have the issue of how the other uses of the stats can muddle things. I want to play a super creepy Warlock who stinks of brimstone and gives the evil eye to children -- but I also have a 20 charisma! What?

I think it’s meant to be like “force of personality” or something… but yeah, breaking down the spectrum of human ability into six categories requires a good deal of simplification.

Never saw it. Can't answer without seeing the character in action.

Well, not only is the brilliance of my post lost on you… but you now have a new saddest post.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I have a hard time imagining the sort of play that would make it desirable for any participant to violate table expectations to control the choices of another player's character. What do you have in mind?

As I averred, its a particularly dumb or uncharismatic character who is regularly being played as smarter or smoother than they are because the player took advantage of them as a dump stat, but doesn't want to reflect that in any way. Now if the table expectation is "they just get to", that's as it is, but I think that's a problem.

(As I noted, its less likely to happen these days because for the most part the bottom of the traditional D&D attribute range has largely been pushed up for PCs. Some game systems don't force that, however, and if non-random its a way of making a tradeoff that may be utterly painless but free up resources for other attributes that matter much more to the character).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Everyone can't have the same core stat. People need to share a little. The nature of the six stats is a very odd bit of accreted hobby lore. Might as well spit into the wind as try to make rational sense of all of it all at once.

Wisdom was always the oddest-man-out of the traditional D&D stats anyway. Its not a coincidence you virtually never see it in systems that aren't D&D derivatives.

 

[Reynard]

How is that functionally different from the way Psychological Limits or things like Berserk could force behavior, though? Both of them are traits on a character that can force behavioral actions. The psych limits may be spelled out more, but in the end they're still things a GM has a right (and expectation) to make calls on you obeying as a consequence of taking them. A low attribute (which effectively leaves you more points for other things) doesn't seem more intrinsically protected.



A Hero character who has taken Acrophobia (Total) can be forbidden to act in certain ways when heights are present. That can even be true in the Strong case by the die roll, and even the mildest case is expected to guide the roleplaying and for the GM to judge if that's being done.



If you're asking are they somewhat subjective, of course they are. But that's true with the things I mention above, too.



And again, I'll point out that (and not just in the above) there are game systems that demand that of the GM for certain things all of the time. GURPS does it. Savage Worlds does it. Pendragon does it. They're more overt and up front about it than a game with just attributes, but again, unless you're forced into it by random rolls, there should be a price for trading down attributes, and one of them should be an expectation that you'll play a character according to their mental attributes, or they shouldn't be there.

These things are not remotely the same. In Hero, a player chose a disadvantage, giving the GM explicit permission to include elements of that disadvantage insofar as the rules allowed (frequency being a MAJOR component here). A player rolling a low Int is not the same thing.