Avoiding Railroading - Forked Thread: Do you play more for the story or the combat?

[LostSoul]

Isn't having degrees of success available in a challenge one of those holy grails of dungeon mastery?

Yeah, it's a good thing. I'm not talking about degrees of success, though, I'm talking about the DM not taking into account what the players do.

In any case, the problem is that you want the players to be able to outsmart encounters that haven't yet been written, and you want them to do so by happily metagaming the situation and trying to intuit DM motives, but you want the Dungeon Master NOT to do any of those things. You have D&D backwards.

What I think is good play is when the DM takes into account the goals of the players and gives them opportunities to make meaningful choices. Future encounters are affected by earlier ones. The way in which the future encounters are affected depends on what's important to the players and the choices they made.

For the lieutenant example:

We have a group of players who likes to overcome challenges through smart play.

They decide to kill the lieutenant because they think he'll make future encounters more difficult. This is their whole reason for killing him.

In future encounters, even if they are not written up yet, the DM should make allowances for the absence of the lieutenant - and in a meaningful way*, to reflect the success of the PCs earlier on, to show them that their choices have an impact in how the game unfolds.

(Since the players want to overcome challenges through smart play, meaningful - for them, in this example - probably means that the encounter is going to be easier.)

If the player's choices did not affect the future in any meaningful way to them - maybe the lieutenant isn't there, but they could care less; all they care about is the difficulty of the encounter and not the specific NPC - I don't think the game will be as rewarding. What I think is bad is when you pretend that the future encounter was changed in the way they wanted it to, when you pretend that their choices had the effect they wanted.

I say be upfront about it.



Let's change the example slightly and give the players different motivations. They want to kill the lieutenant because, even though he's a spy on their side, he's been a real dick about things to the PCs. He's hurt them personally and so they make the choice to kill him, even if it means letting the town burn because they don't have access to his intel any more.

I don't think these players would care if the future encounter is just as tough as had been planned. But what would bother them?

You make up an NPC who is the real spy on the spot so that the intel gets to the town and the PCs and they can make use of it. (Illusionism - when you tell them the lieutenant was never the real spy, that you planned this out the whole way.)

In both cases, the player's choices have no meaning; in the first case, the encounter was no harder or easier given the death of the lieutenant, and in the second, the moral weight of the choice is taken away because the get the intel no matter what.

 

[S'mon]

Right, I totally get what you're saying. I just think that its myopic to equate "your choices matter" with "your choices affect the Challenge Rating of the upcoming encounter."

Its also straight up metagaming, for whatever that's worth. Because the only way in which you can say that the choices in question did NOT affect the challenge rating of the upcoming encounter is if you have some sort of metagame knowledge of what the upcoming encounter "ought" to have been. I prefer a more Schroedinger's approach- nothing is writ in stone until it is conveyed to the players in some manner.

The moment I hear a player say, "Wait, this was a level 7 encounter. We're a level 5 party. Our plan removed one of the key opponents in this encounter before it even happened. But if you add that opponent back in, you get a level 9 encounter, which is like WAY too hard for our group! I bet the DM increased the difficulty to make up for us having killed the necromancer's lieutenant in advance!"

...is the moment I throw a level 15 encounter at them and make them flee for their lives. You know, just to prove that I really will do it, and they really shouldn't make those sorts of assumptions.

Yeah, hmmm, not the kind of GMing I would want to play under. I'm a mix of a 'real man' and 'strategist' player, I like brutal fights but I also like being able to plan and use tactics either to make an Overwhelming encounter merely Difficult, or a Challenging encounter Moderate, etc. The ideal for me would be knowing that the enemy are eg approximately Encounter Level 9, but through planning getting it down to EL 7. I wouldn't want the encounter dto magically adjust in difficulty, far better to make it an encounter of choice in the first place.

 

[S'mon]

The best explanation I can come up with is that you really do believe that D&D is some sort of war between the PCs and the module. I mean, really, you probably don't believe that, but its the only view of the game that makes your position make sense. From that point of view, there is some kind of objective reality that exists apart from the DMs decisions and the player's experience of the game. A pre existing, "correct" world. And if the PCs come up with an unusual way to defeat the module, and the DM adjusts the module to be more difficult to counter that unusual plan, the DM has somehow "cheated" the players. He's altered the "real" way the adventure is "supposed" to work, and he's done to so to negate the PCs decisions.

In Gygaxian D&D the DM is indeed a kind of neutral arbiter between the hostile Dungeon (the module) and the players. Obviously that's not how you do it, and I'm not saying that's the only way to play the game, but it's the way the game was originally intended to be played.

 

[apoptosis]

Yeah, it's a good thing. I'm not talking about degrees of success, though, I'm talking about the DM not taking into account what the players do.



What I think is good play is when the DM takes into account the goals of the players and gives them opportunities to make meaningful choices. Future encounters are affected by earlier ones. The way in which the future encounters are affected depends on what's important to the players and the choices they made.

..........................................

In both cases, the player's choices have no meaning; in the first case, the encounter was no harder or easier given the death of the lieutenant, and in the second, the moral weight of the choice is taken away because the get the intel no matter what.

I think you summed up your point very well.

I am in much agreement with everything you wrote.