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

[pemerton]

I don't think that's actually true; its entirely possible for the GM to give hints to a player playing a particularly smart character to represent things they've noticed or might have thought about that the player may not have.

I'm not a very big fan of this. It's like the GM playing the game with themself.

 

[Fenris-77]

I'm not a very big fan of this. It's like the GM playing the game with themself.

We all know that leads to blindess.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Some clarifications:

I did force them into the faewild as a side trek, but as with most "adventuyres" I write, it is a situation and the players are free to deal with it as they may.

The player who is unhappy (it is only one person, not the whole group) did NOT expend the spell slot. I told them their tuning fork was gone as they were preparing to cast.

Right before this all happened, the players drew from the Deck of Many Things and one PC got voided. They used some magic to discover that the PCs soul was not in the faewild, and have a good idea of where it is in the prime, and what is guarding it. This matters in context because now they know that the object of that self imposed quest is not in the faewild. But the doors are still locked, as such.

Your clarification here sort of takes me to where I personally would feel railroaded or not.

If the spell casters tuning fork ended up missing was because of GM fiat off screen I would feel like I was on the Adventure Express direct to Missiontown.

If the tuning fork was stolen during play, with the players having agency over it potentially NOT having been stolen by their actions and choices and die rolls then it's fair game.

Essentially....if the players had a way of preventing the loss of Plane Shift it's kosher...but if you just forced that little extra bit in to make your adventure work then it's not.

 

[pemerton]

I do expect the player to play that themselves. That doesn't mean in all cases they do, and some cases can be pretty egregious, and in those cases I think some method of addressing it is legitimate, even if I prefer some over others.

What do you do when someone cheats at cards?

When people break the rules of the game, it's time to step outside of the game and fix things up. I think the idea that seems to come up in relation to RPGs, that the GM can fix rules breaking by making moves within the game is a pernicious one.

 

[FrogReaver]

Your clarification here sort of takes me to where I personally would feel railroaded or not.

If the spell casters tuning fork ended up missing was because of GM fiat off screen I would feel like I was on the Adventure Express direct to Missiontown.

If the tuning fork was stolen during play, with the players having agency over it potentially NOT having been stolen by their actions and choices and die rolls then it's fair game.

Essentially....if the players had a way of preventing the loss of Plane Shift it's kosher...but if you just forced that little extra bit in to make your adventure work then it's not.

How exactly does having something stolen look to a character when the thief rolls high?

 

[Hriston]

Okay, so let’s take an example. It’s silly, but I hope it’ll be something that everyone gets.

Rodney Dangerfield’s character in Caddyshack… is he a low Charisma character who somehow makes all his checks? Or is he a high Charisma character whose player has decided to play him as crude and obnoxious but somehow everyone likes him?

Is there only one answer? And if either is possible, then the question is “what do the stats really say about the character?”

I love this example! Al Czervik (played by Rodney Dangerfield) is extremely effective socially. It's clear the background characters find him funny and entertaining, even lovable. He's a natural leader and life of the party. The main impact on the plot of his nouveau riche boorishness is to infuriate Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight), making him lose control on several occasions and eventually accept his challenge to play a golf match for a sizable wager. When Smails refuses to pay up, Czervik sends some thugs after him, telling them to "help the judge find his wallet."

So, in D&D terms, he's making several checks related to Performance (one-liners) and Intimidation (interpreted broadly as manipulation; seeing his uncouth behavior as abusive, this is basically how he operates). He also makes at least one attempt at Deception, when he pretends to be injured during the match because his team is behind, which fails to achieve his desired result of having it declared a draw. He then succeeds on a Persuasion check when he gets the main character, Danny Noonan, to agree to be his his substitute in the match, promising to "make it worth your while."

And yet, if you watch Dangerfield's performance, there seems to be little in the way of guile behind most of these actions. It may be a limitation of the performer; for all his truly enormous talent, Rodney Dangerfield wasn't what I would consider a great actor, but it's as if he just stumbles into most of these situations like a force of nature, prevailing through dumb luck. So it's difficult to say if it's natural Charisma that gets him through, or skill, or some kind of "lucky guy" class feature, or a combination of things.

If I was to try to play this or a similar character in D&D, I think he would be a Warlock, Pact of the Gopher, (warlock because nouveau riche, i.e. his money/power was come by through "unscrupulous" means, in the eyes of old money) with some Bard thrown in for one-liners.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

How exactly does having something stolen look to a character when the thief rolls high?

It isn't about what the characters see, it's about how the GM goes about setting up their walled garden adventure.

If one wants to use the railroad it's a tool in the box, but at minimum they should get the player buy-in that occasionally the Adventure Express will show up and deliver them to Missiontown.

I recently converted a sandbox campaign to instead a 5e conversion of Age of Worms. Part of this process was having a conversation with the players and making sure they knew that the walls and keep off the grass signs were going up in the playground.

I can steal the PCs items by GM fiat, and have doors literally impossible to bypass without fulfilling Quest 27 without guilt because all the players signed up for that experience. I would never use those tools when I was running the sandbox game.

I don't know how the NPCs in OPs game stole the tuning forks....but in a sandbox game I believe it's important to work within the rules of the universe as expected by the players. As far as I know any sort of "Every person ever teleporting to this plan has their items stolen and delivered to me" isnt a magical effect in the power level of a mortal, fey, or even most gods.

Were I running it I'd have spiked that fey-cabin Deck of Many Things draw with the classic devils bargain and have the dealer demand payment in the form of the tuning fork before they went through the portal. The obviously fey connected entity is working for the Winter Court and helping them achieve their goal of collecting wayward travellers in a way that the players can react to and respond with agency.

 

[TwoSix]

How exactly does having something stolen look to a character when the thief rolls high?

It looks like GM fiat, which is why I don’t do it.

 

[pemerton]

To me it's mostly waste of session time. But i witnessed it few times, both as a player and as a DM, with few different groups. It happened when people wanted to try character driven, open ended, sandbox games.

Could you share some examples of those metods? Preferably one that could be used in d&d sandbox style games.

Most of the methods I have in mind are about sharpening the situation, by having the players - whether via PC build, or some aspect of play (eg Apocalypse World first session) - contribute core concerns for the starting situation.

But for a D&D-ish sandbox, there is the method that Mythic Bastionland uses: the knight PCs have all sworn the Oath:

Seek the Myths
Honour the Seers
Protect the Realm​

This gives players guidance. When I started my game, the players decided to try and find a seer. They didn't find one, but their effort to do so helped propel the adventure:

I showed the players the player map of the Realm <Mythic Bastionland - initial impressions, and making a Realm>, and asked for a vote on whether to start in a random hex, or at the castle - which is the Seat of Power. I found myself overruled when the majority vote was to start at a lesser holding, ie the island town, in a tavern.

The players knew that their Knights had been knighted by Seers - though we did not pay any attention to the canonical knighting Seers set out in the rulebook - and that the Seers know secrets of the Myths. So in the tavern, they asked about Seers.

Given the game is meant to be procedural, at least to a significant degree, I decided to deploy some procedure: I rolled on both columns of the Appearance, Voice, Desire and Task tables, and got:

Short physique, drab dress; mumbled tone, rambling manner; ambition mastery, motivated by legacy; task to break a Seer​

A roll showed that this was a man, with Vig 11, Cla 11, Sp 5; and I decided that his legacy pertained to The Mountain (that being the nearest Myth) and the Seer was the Enthroned Seer (I can't remember how I decided this - maybe I rolled?).

I told the players that, at their mention of Seers, a short man wearing a drab cloak with his hood on indoors approached them, and started talking: but he was mumbling, and rambling, so only those who could pass a Clarity save could work out what he was talking about. The Free Knight and Mirror Knight both failed, and suffered d4 loss of SPI, being disheartened by their inability to converse with this man and learn about the Seers, and so instead having to chat to one another and drink.

The Lance Knight also failed, but he then used his Mystic Sight, and saw that this strange man regretted never having climbed The Mountain. So he didn't suffer any SPI loss.

The Hive Knight and the Chain Knight listened to the man, and learned that he wanted to climb The Mountain, and blamed the Enthroned Seer for his failure to have done so - and so wanted to break the Enthroned Seer. They learned that The Mountain is to the east. I think there was another roll here, for some reason I now can't remember - but the upshot of someone's failure was that the Enthroned Seer would know that the Hive Knight and Chain Knight had spoken with this man, and would be hostile to them as a result.

When the strange man was leaving, the Free Knight showed him his shield - with its pattern that pains Seers - and the man was very excited by it. But the Free Knight wouldn't give it to him.

<snip>

The next morning, down some SPI and CLA, the Company set out. They looked at the mountains on their map, and decided to head along the eastern bank of the south-east flowing river.

And the rules of the game ensure that the journey produces events.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Ok, but, again, HP are in the game, too. But if you have low HP it "means" something, even if that something is abstract. Shouldn't somebody with unlucky/low HP somehow be roleplaying that, and likewise somebody with lucky/high HP?

HP are in part derived from your CON, which i think a high or low score in that attribute is a better indicator of the narrative of if a character is hale and hearty or delicate and sickly than the number of not-always-meat points they have, especially because there is not a good relativity for HP, they just go up, for instance, is a 1st level barbarian with max CON 'less sturdy' than a max level wizard with negative CON who rolled all 1's but still has more HP than them? but that barb and the wizard both having 20 CON tells the same narrative.