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

[Cadfan]

Maybe I wasn't clear. The build choices the players made had no effect on the difficulty of the encounters. That was just the DM's choice. The players wanted their choices to matter, but they did not.

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.

 

[LostSoul]

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."

Why do you think it's myopic?

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.

That's why it's called Illusionism - because the player's operating under the illusion that his choices matter.

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.

But those assumptions are correct. Why make them flee for their lives because they understand what you're doing?

 

[Cadfan]

Why do you think it's myopic?

Because, as I have repeatedly stated, you are ignoring any way that something might matter in a game OTHER than ways which are directly related to metagame concepts like challenge levels and the DM's previous plans.

You acknowledge, in our given suggestion, ONLY the numerical challenge rating of the encounter as "meaningful." Any other change to the encounter, to the gameplay experience, or to the plot of the game, you discard as not being meaningful.

That's myopic.

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.

But that point of view isn't how D&D is really experienced. Its NOT a war between players and a module. There is no "real" world in which the PCs operate, there's an imaginary one that exists as a sort of shared fantasy between the players and the DM. The module might inform it, but it isn't the actual world. The same is true of the DMs intentions before they hit the game table. If a DM intends one thing, then changes his mind because of a player's decision, he's not cheating. He's not rendering a decision meaningless.

That's why I find some of your positions so baffling. You've literally taken the position that a DM who plans one encounter then changes it could be rendering someone's decision meaningless, but a DM who doesn't plan at all and simply creates the latter encounter to start with isn't rendering anyone's decisions meaningless.

I mean, seriously, you really want to take the position that, if a player elects to have his character train in Stealth instead of Intimidate, that you've rendered his decision meaningless if instead of a scenario where he needs to intimidate a guard you put in a scenario where he needs to sneak past a guard? Because that's a really, really myopic view. It only takes into account win/loss chances and final outcomes of the encounter, and completely neglects the experience while the character is IN the encounter.

I think the weirdest part of all of this, is that if you really stop and think about it, you've come up with a theoretical framework that lets the players metagame and use their metagame insights to accuse the DM of metagaming. That's his job.

 

[Cadfan]

But those assumptions are correct. Why make them flee for their lives because they understand what you're doing?

Because the game is about characters outsmarting challenges, not players outsmarting me. And if they HAVE outsmarted me, obviously I need to do things differently so that they no longer believe the conclusions they've drawn about how I run the game. Then maybe they'll start thinking about what their characters are experiencing in game rather than what they are experiencing out of game.

 

[Lacyon]

You acknowledge, in our given suggestion, ONLY the numerical challenge rating of the encounter as "meaningful." Any other change to the encounter, to the gameplay experience, or to the plot of the game, you discard as not being meaningful.

Not necessarily.

We could instead say that any set of choices that does not include the option of reducing the challenge of future encounters is insufficiently meaningful.

Such would hardly be myopic at all. I doubt that you would disagree that (in the given case) a set of choices in which does not include the possibility of changing whether or not the lieutenant survives to the final battle could be reasonably described as insufficiently meaningful.

If the DM twisted and turned and world-built as the game was ongoing so as to make such a choice impossible, I'd rightly accuse him of denying a meaningful choice, regardless of how many other choices he lets me make.

 

[LostSoul]

Because, as I have repeatedly stated, you are ignoring any way that something might matter in a game OTHER than ways which are directly related to metagame concepts like challenge levels and the DM's previous plans.

You acknowledge, in our given suggestion, ONLY the numerical challenge rating of the encounter as "meaningful." Any other change to the encounter, to the gameplay experience, or to the plot of the game, you discard as not being meaningful.

That's myopic.

In this given example, the example players care about optimizing their PCs for success. That's what they consider meaningful. I'm not ignoring other meaningful choices, I just described the player's goals and highlighted how the DM robbed the players' choices of meaning.

If the players don't care that, for example, the DM will keep the encounter level the same no matter what they do, there's no railroading going on. If they do care, then there is railroading going on. If the DM employs the technique where he railroads the players but pretends that he's not, it's illusionism.

I'm not ignoring other player goals, I'm just defining a set of them for an example so that we can talk about what's meaningful and what's not.

 

[Krensky]

Not necessarily.
We could instead say that any set of choices that does not include the option of reducing the challenge of future encounters is insufficiently meaningful.

Why?

Not necessarily.
Such would hardly be myopic at all. I doubt that you would disagree that (in the given case) a set of choices in which does not include the possibility of changing whether or not the lieutenant survives to the final battle could be reasonably described as insufficiently meaningful.

There choice do change whether or not the NPC is there. If they kill him he's not there. It doesn't have to change how difficult the encounter is, however. Before they killed him (and after they decided to try) the encounter existed in an indefinite state. He was both part of the encounter and not part of it. Once they kill him and the GM decides to use the challlnege he wrote up, replacing the henchman with some more minions (not neccerssarily in the 4e sense) to maintain the original challenge rating, the wave state collapses, and they face the encounter with the Mastermind and eight Minions rather then the encounter with the Mastermind, Henchman, and 4 Minions.

Not necessarily.
If the DM twisted and turned and world-built as the game was ongoing so as to make such a choice impossible, I'd rightly accuse him of denying a meaningful choice, regardless of how many other choices he lets me make.

They players had every choice about whether or not to kill the Henchman. If they choose to and succeed, he's dead and not in the encounter. If they don't choose ot, or fail, he is in the encounter. Their choice had a meaningful impact on the world and the encounter.

 

[LostSoul]

Because the game is about characters outsmarting challenges, not players outsmarting me. And if they HAVE outsmarted me, obviously I need to do things differently so that they no longer believe the conclusions they've drawn about how I run the game. Then maybe they'll start thinking about what their characters are experiencing in game rather than what they are experiencing out of game.

I'm trying to describe a situation where the players are trying to outsmart the challenges. The problem is that they can't - the DM keeps moving the goalposts.

I think that if you want to run a game where players outsmart challenges, it's best if you let their choices have an effect on the challenges they face. If you don't want to run that kind of game, it's best to be upfront about it and tell them so.

 

[Lacyon]

They players had every choice about whether or not to kill the Henchman. If they choose to and succeed, he's dead and not in the encounter. If they don't choose ot, or fail, he is in the encounter. Their choice had a meaningful impact on the world and the encounter.

In this example, this is true. The PCs were allowed to kill the henchmen. So he wasn't in the final battle.

If, following the same PC choices, the DM used the "Schroedinger's approach" to invent a sequence of escape hatches, special powers, magical effects and the like such that no matter what the PCs did, they could not kill that henchman, it would be obvious to everyone in this thread that, in spite of the fact that the PCs may have been allowed to make a whole bunch of interesting choices, the meaning of this choice is being squashed.

In this example, no matter what choices the players make, they cannot impact the relative challenge level of the final fight. Following the logic laid out above, the meaning of choices intended to do exactly that is being squashed.

That doesn't mean "ur doin it rong". It just means that you should bloody well be honest about what you're doing.

 

[Cadfan]

I'm trying to describe a situation where the players are trying to outsmart the challenges. The problem is that they can't - the DM keeps moving the goalposts.

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

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.