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

pemerton said:

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And as a more general point, I would say that secret GM decisions about what NPCs will do in certain situations is a core part of the railroader's repertoire!

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It's also one aspect of what makes the game enjoyable to me as both GM and player. As a player I don't want to know enough about every NPC I encounter to know why they make their decision. Do you really want to know everything about every NPC you encounter in a game?

AlViking said:

The players rarely, if ever, know the whole picture.

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This is something else that I regard as a key tool in the railroader's repertoire.

That is not to say that all RPGing involving secrets is railroading. But pointing to the fact that the GM has secrets, and is using those secrets to make decisions about whether action declarations succeed or fail, is not going to persuade me that railroading has been ruled out!

EzekielRaiden said:

Not a quote from you, but an example of this principle not contradicted, written by someone else:

And another:

And here, from you:

All of these hinge on the same thing: "What the DM already knows". How does the DM already know that? This has been, repeatedly, used as a "this isn't and can't be railroading"--but HOW "what the DM already knows" is left almost totally unstated. Like I've gone back through and seen multiple posts which reference this, even reference that the "how" matters...and then never actually say a word about the "how".

You may not have been the one to explicitly use the word "it's not a railroad", but the arguments are all there and they're all fundamentally the same. This is being given as a defense against railroading, but it does nothing of the kind. It simply shifts the place where railroading may occur away from "DM response to player input" to "how the DM decides what she already knows".

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Here's how I approach it:

When I prep a sandbox campaign, I start by building a setting that would make sense even without the players. I populate it with factions, locations, conflicts, and situations that are plausible given the premises of the setting, not constructed around the assumption that players will interact with any specific element. This principle is crucial to avoiding railroading.

This material forms part of my "Bag of Stuff": a body of prepared details that give players meaningful choices once play begins. But none of it demands players act a certain way or follow a predetermined path.

Consistency with setting facts does not mean outcomes are preordained. Players are free to interact with, ignore, oppose, or support any part of the world, and because the world responds plausibly, the course of the campaign is genuinely emergent. Player decisions, not my prep, drive what matters and what changes.

Naturally, any setting reflects some aesthetic or thematic choices. But I work carefully to ensure that these choices establish the world's tone and initial context, not dictate the players' story outcomes.

One part of my approach that often gets overlooked is how this all manifests at the table: through first-person roleplaying. I don't just describe the world abstractly. The world comes alive when I roleplay NPCs in the first person, and players respond likewise.

This matters in two ways to the points you raise:

1) It grounds later discussion with players. If a question arises, we can review how I roleplayed the NPC based on the established notes and setting facts, for example, whether my portrayal of Thranduil in the Rhovanion sourcebook for AiME was consistent with the material.




2) First-person roleplaying ensures players are presented with environment where they have the full range of options that exist in real interaction. This makes it virtually impossible for me to control player choices or railroad them into specific outcomes.

This process is reinforced by my emphasis on referee impartiality. The referee's job is not to shepherd players to a "correct" outcome, but to present a living world, adjudicate fairly, and let consequences unfold naturally, even when it surprises me.

What the DM already knows matters. But the key is that the referee must build a world that invites free interaction, not one that hides a script the players are expected to follow. That’s the heart of running a sandbox campaign fairly.

Wrapping this up, this crucial topic is why my first book I wrote on the topic of Sandbox Campaigns, is about How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox

pemerton said:

This is something else that I regard as a key tool in the railroader's repertoire.

That is not to say that all RPGing involving secrets is railroading. But pointing to the fact that the GM has secrets, and is using those secrets to make decisions about whether action declarations succeed or fail, is not going to persuade me that railroading has been ruled out!

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I'm not ruling railroading out as a possibility. I'm saying that I don't want complete transparency of NPC motives and goals at all times. It wouldn't be fun for me or my players.

EzekielRaiden said:

I think you're missing the point here.

Who establishes that the character has that trait? Why is it established so?

This is what I mean when I say the absoluteness of DM power in (some) D&D-alike games gets in the way. If the DM wants a specific situation to come about, they merely have to only allow things into the fiction that only permit that, and don't permit other things. The act of "staying true to the established character trait" is not and cannot be protection from railroading because the railroading can be any that trait was established in the first place. And, at least in some cases, the DM may not even realize they're doing this.

Also, having the following things in sequential order...


...kinda shows exactly what @pemerton is talking about. To Bedrock, this is so strange as to be almost alien. To Firebird, it's par for the course. If two people can understand the exact same thing to be weird to the point of almost inapplicable and common to the point of universal, surely you can both see how just "guidelines" and "coaching" and "structured frameworks" might not be enough to achieve a particular end.

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All of this where that trust that your GM isn't going to be a controlling jerk comes in. Without that (and it seems a good number of folks on this forum lack that trust), you run into all sorts of other issues that need their own solutions. IMO it's an attempt at a mechanical solve for a social problem.

AlViking said:

It's also one aspect of what makes the game enjoyable to me as both GM and player. As a player I don't want to know enough about every NPC I encounter to know why they make their decision. Do you really want to know everything about every NPC you encounter in a game?

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You've already caused a problem just in the jump between sentence 2 and sentence 3.

The first is "know enough...to know why [any given NPC] make their decision". The second is "know everything about every NPC you encounter". The two are not the same, and pretending they are the same is blatant equivocation.

soviet said:

Why is it that we are told GMs will only ever make decisions in the best interests of the game, but if you give players even an inch they will attempt to climb rainbows and persuade the King to give them his kingdom?

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It’s ok, we just set the DC to get an audience with the king so high they’ll never succeed.

Micah Sweet said:

All of this where that trust that your GM isn't going to be a controlling jerk comes in. Without that (and it seems a good number of folks on this forum lack that trust), you run into all sorts of other issues that need their own solutions. IMO it's an attempt at a mechanical solve for a social problem.

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Whereas I see this as attempting to leverage an almost always imperfect social contract to solve a mechanical problem!

Remathilis said:

Not wanting to make this about skill systems, but my point is that if a player can at all times have the autonomy to play their PC they see fit, a DM (being a player at the table) can call on the same privilege. It's no more a railroad to say an NPC won't drink (except under pain of death) than it is to say the PC paladin will not be seduced by the NPC strumpet in the bar, regardless of how well she rolls because the player won't allow it.*

* Barring magic like mind control, of course.

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I was agreeing

Lanefan said:

What does "Dollhouse Play" mean here? That's a new one on me.

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You and I have been involved in a lot of threads together over the years. In the past you've talked about play anecdotes (I don't know if those are mere moments, brief interludes, session-spanning, or longer) that are low to zero stakes, color-focused, freeplay where play concentrates on benign (benign here doesn't mean "not interesting to the participants") affairs like baking, or wedding parties, or having a tailor make a dress/suit for you, or kitting out your lair/castle/hideout in furniture/paintings (etc), or tavern singalongs, etc.

Kind of like "we interrupt this horror & action D&D game of dungeon delving for a The Sims interlude." Dollhouse Play would be that interlude.

And I'm sorry, but that is not derogatory. It is merely a (correct) description of what the thing actually is. If I were to instruct someone on "how to engage in Dollhouse Play" I would be very open and exacting about it. And that above would be my detailing of the concept-space and then I would engage in the technical aspects of how to implement that concept (two of which would be "intentionally reduce the stakes/stress to zero or nearing it" and another would be "play color & affect forward, be theatricality-rich in your depictions and rendering"). It isn't derogatory in the same way that someone calling my beloved Torchbearer a "Misery Simulator" generates no offense from me. I get it. It is amusing and, though it is reductionist, there is enough "there...there" that I can totally get how some folks (even folks who have played the game aplenty) would derive "Misery Simulator" from the concept and even the play. It is actually pretty useful to start a discussion about the game's core concept-space, its various architecture, and how it does "the thing" (for some folks, that might be Simulate Misery!).

I don't know this for sure because I don't have exposure to these designs, but my (weak...yet possibly correct) inference is that this new trend of "Cozy RPGs" might actually be a Dollhouse Play. Not sure, but it might be...at least a form of it or an iteration.