D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

pemerton said:

My observation is that there is a widespread preference (though not universal - see eg @TwoSix above!) to start play in a low stakes environment - like a tavern or the city gates in D&D, or a starport in Traveller - and then have a situation with actual stakes emerge "organically" from there, by way of player action declarations for the PCs.

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I agree. As it is common in modern fiction, people see it and focus on it.

pemerton said:

I'm not 100% sure of the origins of this preference within RPGing, given that it is not what Moldvay recommends (he recommends starting at the dungeon entrance) nor what Gygax describes in his DMG (which, again, has the PCs starting at the dungeon site). To me it seems connected to literary tropes, where the author starts the character in a low-stakes situation and then has the action rise as the situation is established/revealed - REH's Tower of the Elephant, LotR, Star Wars (for Luke), I think Dragonlance (starting in the tavern), all work like this.

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The Lord of the Rings is the Ur Classic here....

It has also been the TV Formula for action, adventure and drama shows for nearly 100 years: show your main characters relaxing and having fun. Then do a sharp 'Hook' for the episode, and fade to the opening credits and commercials.

For RPG's, I'm not sure where it was first said, but by 2E that idea was sure firm of "start your game in a tavern and let the players role play their characters a bit to 'warm up' ".

TwoSix said:

I think a GM has pretty wide latitude to start a game by framing the players into a specific situation, as long as the players are aware of this. None of that power is railroading.

I almost always start my games in medias res, with a group of PCs who already know each other and are comfortable working together.

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I agree, though there is no limit on how I would start a game and I don't think the players need to be "aware" of anything.

EzekielRaiden said:

Does "thespian" play require...well, for lack of a better term, "theatrical" acting? Because I don't see these benefits as confined solely to folks I would consider engaging in "thespian" play. E.g. I can see pawn-stance groups still preferring this approach over the immediate "you are at the dungeon" start, because it's a lower-stakes environment, yet it encourages the kind of question-asking that the rest of the game will warrant, because the player can directly imagine a person they're asking questions of.

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I generally think of "thespian play" as play that prioritizes participant dialogue (both players and GMs), both inter-PC and PC to NPC. There's generally an expectation that relatively little stakes will be established or consequences endured, as the bulk of play isn't mediated by any resolution system (maybe an occasional skill check or weak spell use).

Even if the the likely outcome of the roleplayed scenes is that the characters pick up the quest and head to the dungeon/haunted castle/etc, I think that it is usually worth playing it rather than just skipping directly to the "adventure location." The roleplaying is important for establishing the context of the quest, creating emotional connection to the NPCs involved, and generally getting the players invented beyond "lets kill some monsters for XP." And yes, here some thespian skills on the GM's part certainly help a lot.

TwoSix said:

I generally think of "thespian play" as play that prioritizes participant dialogue (both players and GMs), both inter-PC and PC to NPC. There's generally an expectation that relatively little stakes will be established or consequences endured, as the bulk of play isn't mediated by any resolution system (maybe an occasional skill check or weak spell use).

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I think this is really weird thing to say. I think this sort of roleplay is the best way to establish the stakes so that they have actual emotional weight. And of course it can have consequences too, you do not need rules for that.

Paul Farquhar said:

I’m pretty sure “meeting at an inn” draws heavily on the At the Sign of the Prancing Pony chapter of LotR.

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bloodtide said:

The Lord of the Rings is the Ur Classic here....

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The only meeting in an inn, in LotR, is Strider meeting the Hobbits. And that is not a "quest-giver" looking for doughty adventurers.

The Hobbits are already well-known to one another, and friends/relatives/staff. Gandalf is well-known to them. And they meet Gimli, Legolas and Boromir at the Council of Elrond.

So I don't think the standard D&D "start in an inn" trope and wait for a quest-giver is very close to LotR. It's a bit closer to Tower of the Elephant, where Conan overhears a Kothian kidnapper refer to the "Elephant Tower", and asks about it. In FRPG terms, this is a paradigm of acquiring rumours in a tavern.

EzekielRaiden said:

Does "thespian" play require...well, for lack of a better term, "theatrical" acting? Because I don't see these benefits as confined solely to folks I would consider engaging in "thespian" play. E.g. I can see pawn-stance groups still preferring this approach over the immediate "you are at the dungeon" start, because it's a lower-stakes environment, yet it encourages the kind of question-asking that the rest of the game will warrant, because the player can directly imagine a person they're asking questions of.

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Keep on the Borderlands is an example of a module where the intended play is pawn stance, and the starting point is low(ish) stakes. But the players are still given the full set-up from the outset: they know that they are at the Keep to defeat the humanoids of the Caves. Acquiring further rumours can be an aspect of skilled play. (And so is avoiding allying with the evil priest; which is why I call it "low(ish) stakes".)

I don't think the idea of "hunting for the adventure" or "motivating the PC into the adventure (in the way that the current iteration of D&D talks about) is part of pawn stance play. Almost by definition its part of author stance play, in that the player knows that their job is to have their PC take up the GM's proffered opportunity for adventure, but they author in motivations for their PC to take it up. And that is done via the sort of roleplay that you described in your earlier post.

As for whether we are talking about theatricality in roleplay, no. As per @TwoSix's reply to you, its the prioritisation of back-and-forth largely freeform dialogue, which is low-stakes and mostly about colour.

Thomas Shey said:

I think that model also survives because its relatively era-agnostic; at least once you have community gatherings significantly bigger than dispersed agricultural communities, some kind of public house is present all the way from ancient cities to most SF settings.

<snip>

its why you can see something like the "find a job in a tavern" thing work all the way from fantasy up to cyberpunk, space travellers and post-apocalyptic settings.

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I don't know sci-fi literature well enough to know how many sci-fi stories start with the PCs as mercenary-types who are hired in a starport dive. I don't think I've ever seen it in a sci-fi film, but maybe I've forgotten some example of it.

I don't know how important inns are to the contemporary recruitment of mercenaries. I assume that the internet plays a much bigger role!

EDIT:
In the film Ronin, the characters come to a cafe to meet their recruiter, but it is not a chance meeting. It's a pre-arranged rendezvous.

pemerton said:

The only meeting in an inn, in LotR, is Strider meeting the Hobbits. And that is not a "quest-giver" looking for doughty adventurers.

The Hobbits are already well-known to one another, and friends/relatives/staff. Gandalf is well-known to them. And they meet Gimli, Legolas and Boromir at the Council of Elrond.

So I don't think the standard D&D "start in an inn" trope and wait for a quest-giver is very close to LotR. It's a bit closer to Tower of the Elephant, where Conan overhears a Kothian kidnapper refer to the "Elephant Tower", and asks about it. In FRPG terms, this is a paradigm of acquiring rumours in a tavern.

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Personally, I've never found there to be much correlation between LotR and D&D save in the most ephemeral of ways. Basically, outside of pseudo-medieval [very loosely applies] setting and the names [and names only] of some of the "peoples" around, D&D and LotR have almost nothing in common. Even the early editions of D&D, to me anyway, were very very different than LotR. I find it kind of strange that so many folks draw comparison between the two, as I fail to see them having much in common at all.

pemerton said:

I don't know sci-fi literature well enough to know how many sci-fi stories start with the PCs as mercenary-types who are hired in a starport dive. I don't think I've ever seen it in a sci-fi film, but maybe I've forgotten some example of it.

I don't know how important inns are to the contemporary recruitment of mercenaries. I assume that the internet plays a much bigger role!

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There's a large old tradition of crooks gathering in the back room at a bar in film; I don't know I've seen an SF take on it, but then, there's few SF takes on what would consider freelance troublemakers anyway. When there is, its usually a group that's already together and often in a Traveller-esque ship wandering around (see Firefly).

I don't know how often this happens in SF literature, but then, prior to D&D derived fiction, I don't think it happened that much in fantasy either. I'm mostly talking about how it functions as an ongoing trope in gaming.

zarionofarabel said:

Personally, I've never found there to be much correlation between LotR and D&D save in the most ephemeral of ways. Basically, outside of pseudo-medieval [very loosely applies] setting and the names [and names only] of some of the "peoples" around, D&D and LotR have almost nothing in common. Even the early editions of D&D, to me anyway, were very very different than LotR. I find it kind of strange that so many folks draw comparison between the two, as I fail to see them having much in common at all.

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To me, it seems that a lot of RPGers identify resemblances based on features like names, appearances, and the like, rather than by reference to theme, the way events are framed and resolved, etc.