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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8698407" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I've probably missed some posts I would normally respond to, but this is already on the order of a dozen quotes and my posts run long as it is.This explains some of the logic behind your past comments, which were opaque to me before.Yes, I agree it is the DM's job to make a thing which is not real, in the sense that a table is real, seem to be real in the sense that a table is real. That is NOT the same as "It is the DM's job to make the player think the game is actually what they claim the game is, when in fact the game is NOT that." This is a gulf so large it is very difficult for me to believe you truly think the two are absolutely identical. They are not. At all. This is what I keep referring to when I say "fooling the characters" (diegetic, in-universe, "Watsonian" misapprehension of what the "real" contents of the fictional world are) versus "fooling the players" (in the real world deceptions about the kind of experience being offered to the player.)If I do everything in my power to get you to believe that you are, in fact, buying a plot of land on the Moon, even though you are not actually buying a plot of land on the Moon, that is deceptive. Even if I am extremely careful to never legally say or imply that you are buying a plot of land on the Moon, it is still deception. (Whether or not it is fraud remains for a court to decide.)Further, you know what the best technique--literally foolproof, in fact, so long as you do it consistently--for getting a player to treat the contents of the fictional world as though they were real? Actually have them behave like real things do. Which is (part of) what I'm asking for. The deception is not foolproof; even if you uphold the deception indefinitely, it's always possible to see the man behind the curtain. If you aren't deceiving, if you actually do model the world honestly and fairly and consistently, there's nothing to see behind. The world is exactly what the players think it is.Well-said.Absolutely not. "In the manner they feel most comfortable with" IS NOT affirmative consent. Affirmative consent is what is needed here. As I have explicitly said, several times.Why is it so friggin' hard to just SAY, "Hey guys. I see the rules as suggestions, and I believe my role as DM is to push things in the right direction if they get off track. So, some of the time, I'm going to invisibly bend or break the rules, or make it seem like you're in control when you aren't. I promise not to do this for any reason other than to make the game more enjoyable for you guys. As long as you're okay with that, we should all have a great time." That's all that's required! Just a couple sentences! Why is this so hard?!Several reasons, and I'm honestly confused why you would think they're the same. (For simplicitly, I will generally assume the work is a book, and thus the audience is one or more readers, but this applies to most forms of media.)1. Audiences do not have agency. They are passive observers. By engaging with a work (book, film, TV show, etc.) they are necessarily accepting that they have no control whatsoever over the process of the narrative. A reader cannot change what words are written in the book without, in essence, writing a new book that plagiarizes some portion of the old one.2. By contrast, TTRPG players in a railroaded game are being told they have agency when, in fact, they do not--whatever agency they have is at best provisional and at worst completely illusory, as the OP put in the very first sentence: "What if I told you it was possible to lock your players on a tight railroad, but make them think every decision...mattered?" (Emphasis added.)3. Video games actually present us with a useful point of comparison here. By definition, a video game can only have a fixed set of ending options, purely because video games are finite things. Only an irrational player could expect a video game to have all possible endings accounted for. However, many RPGs feature multiple different endings, depending on player choices. And we see a very similar argument to the one we're having here about railroading whenever a video game offers endings which either (a) do not make sense within the context of the story, or (b) are essentially identical despite the players making very different choices and being told that those choices would matter. Mass Effect 3 is probably the poster child of this problem, where they had built up choices and history across three games, with some of those choices being pretty major, like whether to spare the last queen of an alien hive-mind race or whether to hold onto data acquired from utterly deplorable medical experiments but which could potentially save a species. By the end, despite all the build-up and even having major, story-ending choices come up even in ME3 itself, the game boiled down to your choice of what color the explosion would be, and how damaging that explosion would be. People were rightly pissed about the ending of Mass Effect, because it boiled down literally ALL of the decisions you'd made before into a singular boring number.....which you could increase regardless by just doing the PVP mode. So they essentially made all the choices from all three games meaningless, and then left you with a final A/B/C ending despite having explicitly said they would not do that. So, even though some amount of "railroading" (really authorial force, but whatever) was accepted, even expected, the players pretty clearly expected that SOME consequences would still come up and matter, when in fact essentially nothing did. The illusion was revealed, and the players HATED it. The "extended cut" ending was a band-aid on a bullet-wound as far as I'm concerned, but at least it showed they were trying.Sooo...yeah. Even in contexts where railroading is logically required because, y'know, there's only finitely many things a computer program can do, there's still often expectations that choices will matter enough to truly affect endings and consequences. Video games are a sort of midway-point between a pure passive audience experience (books, movies, etc.) and a pure audience-driven experience (like a TTRPG where, as the OP wrote, "every decision they [the players] made mattered.") And wouldn't you know it, video games have people respond rather badly to railroading! You can see a similar, but perhaps more useful, example with the controversial "white phosphorus scene" in Spec Ops: The Line, where the player is forced to use white phosphorus (a horrifically damaging chemical weapon) on a target they believe to be an enemy camp. Turns out, it was exclusively civilians, meaning if the player went ahead with dropping the white phosphorus, they've just committed a blatant war crime. Prior to that point, the game was much better about recognizing player choice, giving situations which LOOKED like they could only be solved with violence, but which were totally resolvable peacefully if the player so chose. For example, you need to disperse a crowd of civilians at one point, and are given a prompt to shoot your gun. If you shoot into the crowd, you'll kill someone innocent. But if you shoot into the air, the crowd will still disperse, and you won't hurt anyone doing it. People (again, IMO rightly) criticized SO:TL for this blatant use of force in the "white phosphorus" scene. To be very clear: If you try not to shoot the white phosphorus, the game will send infinitely-respawning waves of enemies at you, so you will eventually run out of ammunition and die. You absolutely must use the white phosphorus to proceed. You are not allowed to not do so. And then the game will repeatedly criticize you for thinking you're a hero when you just "willingly" committed a war crime. One of the lead developers even gave the god-awful excuse that the players DID have a choice: they could choose to turn off the console and stop playing!So yeah. In interactive media, where player decisions are supposed to matter to some extent, people really dislike railroading. Even when it's obvious! This isn't new or weird or illogical. It's something that arises from the interactivity of the medium.That's an incredibly impoverished view of player choice. You're basically saying all choices ever made in every campaign ever in the history of humanity were completely without meaning. That's...a stance, I guess, but I can't say I expect anyone to agree with it.More importantly for this conversation, however, IF that "metagame" choice of what to play today IS in fact presented honestly and fairly--so the players are explicitly informed in advance that the game may involve the illusion of choice and/or a pretense of obeying the rules while actually breaking them--then, as I have repeatedly said, THAT IS PERFECTLY FINE. Because you have, in fact, respected player agency. They get the chance to decide for themselves whether that's a game they want to participate in or not. You have not deceived them.But that's not what people actually DO, is it? Because in that case, the rails aren't invisible. Oh, the DM doesn't call attention to them, sure. But they're still there. The problem isn't, and never was, whether or not there are rails. The problem is, and has always been, whether any present rails are invisible.It is the invisibility that is the problem. And it is the invisibility that is the deception. This is why the "magic trick" analogy and the "reading a book" analogy and indeed pretty much every other possible analogy you could come up with always fall down. With a magic trick, it's right in the name: it's trickery. You know it isn't real, it will merely have the illusion of being real. (Well, it will be physically real in the sense that you will see physical phenomena, but it won't be "real" in the sense that the apparent physical processes observed will not be what is actually happening. This is the problem with the word "real"--it has several different senses and it's very easy to get them jumbled up.)Again, with literally every single one of these, the problem is that any so-called "deception" is part of the initial buy-in. When you watch a magic trick, you know it's an illusion, that the trick COULD be explained with mundane stuff. There is no "deception" of this kind at all in fiction, since...the book is literally right there and doesn't contain anything other than what it contains, so I have no idea what you mean by that. (There is deception in the sense of fooling characters, but you cannot lead a reader to believe that reading the book is somehow not actually reading a book...) A surprise party is not a deception, it's just unexpected; unexpected things are not deceptions. I would actually call it wrong to intentionally deceive someone about the party though, so that's...not a great example.Games and sports, again, you are buying into the idea that you are competing against someone. When you compete, that person will try to deceive you about what strategies they are using. That is "fooling the character" deception.Now, imagine if you wanted to play rugby, but your group of friends think you won't actually enjoy playing rugby. (Let's say you happen to live in the US, so you have no idea what "rugby" actually entails, other than being a contact sport similar to gridiron.) So they invent a careful deception to make you think you're playing rugby. They never, technically, SAY that you're playing rugby, but they never contradict you when you say you are doing so, and because you have no reason to look deeper, you believe you are playing rugby. Then something breaks the illusion--maybe you become a real enthusiast for the sport and make a new friend on an online forum, and you suddenly realize that all the things you thought were true about rugby are in fact false, because your friends made you believe you were learning and playing rugby when you were not learning nor playing rugby.Do you not see how there is a difference between "I want to make my opponent think I'm going to dodge left when I will actually dodge right" and "I want to make my friend think he's playing rugby when he's actually playing some sport we invented on the fly"? The difference seems perfectly clear to me. And that's what I have been expressing when I contrast "fooling the character" (diegetic deception within the fictional or strategic space) and "fooling the player" (non-diegetic deception about the game itself and what the IRL human participants are actually doing.)If you believe that, then it is impossible for us to discuss further.The character is a persona worn by the player. The character, as instantiated by the player, has certain beliefs about the in-fiction universe. Those beliefs may be correct, or incorrect. If those beliefs are incorrect, and were engendered by one or more NPCs, then it seems perfectly valid to say that the character has been deceived. Yes, that deception only has any value so long as the player is playing the character, but the idea is that the deception is solely confined to the actions, events, and entities that "exist" within the fictional world.Contrast this with fooling the player. The player, who is a real living human being, has certain beliefs about what kind of game they are playing and what kind of actions they are taking as a real human being playing a game. Those beliefs may be correct, or incorrect. If those beliefs are incorrect, and were engendered by the DM, then it seems perfectly valid to say that the player has been deceived. More importantly, it seems perfectly valid to say that this deception is of a very different nature from the deception in the previous paragraph. Instead of being one about beliefs regarding the interaction of fictional entities within the fictional space, it is a deception about the interaction of real-world entities with one another, namely, the interaction of the players with the rules and with the DM.What's not to get? I mean, you're incorrect to say that the DM "just says some random stuff." The statement needs to be fairly specific, actually, though it can obviously take a variety of forms because there's a zillion ways to say the same thing. Ultimately, the DM needs to do one of two things. Either they need to state well in advance, "hey guys, sometimes I'm going to make it seem like you have a choice when you don't." Or, they need to state at the moment they do it, "hey guys, I had some stuff prepared for this, but you would miss it by taking this path, so I'm gonna shuffle some things around so that you don't miss anything cool, alright?" The first one gets affirmative consent as a blanket: the DM has been pre-approved for using a large amount of DM "force" (directly making stuff happen, regardless of what the players are doing) without needing to provide notice to the players. The latter gets affirmative consent for the given moment: the DM secures buy-in for a deviation from the norm in this case to use a large amount of DM force.Seems correct to me? I would personally be at least somewhat cautious with this, as it could drift into railroading if one isn't careful. But this doesn't seem problematic to me: the players have chosen something which made a hard swerve in the campaign, and now the DM is responding to that. New discoveries are made, which would not have been made if the players had chosen differently. Their agency is respected, because instead of forcing the players to do any particular thing, the DM is supporting the direction the players chose for themselves.You keep using this word "randomly." It's not "randomly" at all, neither the previous example nor this one. These are very clearly purposeful things; the players are purposefully working toward creating a new political body (perhaps a city-state), and the previous stuff was about the DM purposefully, specifically seeking player consent for taking a particular action. These are ABSOLUTELY NOT random. They are done with purpose and the form of the action is pretty specific. That's not random at all.Firstly? You're being incredibly rude and mocking here. Is that productive? I don't really think it is.Second, I think your reading is completely wrong. Supporting what the players do is absolutely not the same as any of the scathing descriptions you've given here. Just because you lean into what interests the players does not mean you "let the players DM the game" or any of that stuff. It means that you recognize the stuff that excites them, gets them enthusiastic, and you work to ensure that that stuff will be supported going forward. They could quite easily fail to make their desired nation. They could make it, but it might be full of problems they didn't anticipate. Or trying to make it could push them toward taking actions they find reprehensible, causing them to re-evaluate their priorities and maybe abandon the new nation idea. Or they could find that it's just a really hard, long, tedious task to put together a new nation, and thus freely choose to focus on other things instead. There are probably more directions that could go that I'm not thinking of--because I wasn't present for that game and haven't the foggiest what the players' goals were.Supporting your players' goals does not mean making a trivially-easy game where every single thing they ever ask for is instantly delivered to them on a silver platter. The fact that you assumed so, and then went full-bore for put-downs on that assumption, does not reflect well on your argument.I'm sorry....you're literally going to say that the players choosing to do something which doesn't comport with an adventure they literally don't know is coming and could not possibly predict makes them jerks? Really? Come on man. You're not a jerk if you tell someone you can't make it to their party when you don't realize your SO intends to propose to you at that party. That's not how this works.To me? Absolutely. Because a very large portion of the fun I derive from roleplaying is knowing that when I make a decision with consequences, those consequences are because of my decision. Likewise, when I'm playing a game, I expect the game's rules to be enforced both fairly and consistently, so that I can actually learn to play better. If either of these principles is violated--if my actions are irrelevant to the consequences I face, or if the rules are not fairly and consistently enforced--then nearly all joy I derive from the roleplaying experience is gone. (I say "nearly all" because if it's an entirely non-serious game, where we're just screwing around, then I can handle some fudging because I'm not there to learn to play, I'm there to goof off--the enjoyment becomes restricted mostly to "spend time with friends" and "say or do something funny," the roleplaying game being reduced to just a tool to have that happen, rather than the core of the experience.)You need only read Sun Tzu to get your answer: "Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." To fight and conquer once battle is joined is certainly excellence, but to forestall even the need to fight in the first place is true excellence, because you spend no resources and take no risks, and yet still achieve your goals.Not at all, and again you insert this hostility and peevishness into the players that is simply not present. It is rational (as Sun Tzu said above) to wish to avoid putting yourself at risk in order to achieve your ends, so long as those ends can still be achieved. (It is, of course, cowardice to shy away from dangers that actually do have to be endured in order to do things you truly need to do, but it is foolhardiness to rush into dangers you DON'T have to endure.)There is no need to presume hostility. The players are being rational agents trying to reduce their exposure to unnecessary danger.</blockquote>

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