DM Issues: Railroading

[pemerton]

The 4e DMG2 has some good examples of what WoTC seem to think a long-term campaign should look like. They seem fairly heavily scripted, building towards a predetermined climax and sometimes a campaign-ending revelation. The model seems to be more like literary or cinematic trilogies, rather than the wargames which influenced Arneson and Gygax.

There are similar examples in Underdark and The Plane Above. But I read them differently from you (which is not to say that I'm right and you're wrong - I may have misread them!)

The way I read these is as examles of how the designers envisage a 4e game playing out. They're not scripts - neither actually suggested scripts (what could be worse than a script? a script your players have already read because they've looke at the book too!), nor hypothetical or exemplary scripts. They're hypothetical retellings of actual play.

And read in this way I've found them very helpful - they've drawn my attention to features of 4e as a game - its monsters, its mythology, etc - which I had forgotten about or not properly focused on, and helped me see how I can use those world elements to create (hopefully) compelling situations in my game.

I'm not quite sure what's drawn your eye in the Skill Challenges.

The PHB says this (at page 259):

Your DM sets the stage for a skill challenge by describing the obstacle you face and giving you some idea of the options you have in the encounter. Then you describe your actions and make checks until you either successfully complete the challenge or fail.​

The DMG says this (at page 74):

Begin by describing the situation and defining the challenge. . . You describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results.​

It also says (at page 75):

In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. . . This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth…

However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation. If a player asks, “Can I use Diplomacy?” you should ask what exactly the character might be doing … Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge.​

Given that the narration of results is intended to respond to the skill checks that the players make, which in turn are to be grounded in descriptions of what their PCs do in resopnse to the ingame situation; and given that the GM is told to allow the players actual freedom in this respect; it follows that the GM will not know what results to narrate until the players have actually done what the rules tell them to do.

Now there is more to be said than that, because the skill challenge system is meant to do a wide range of jobs. For example, it is the default overland travel resolution mechanic - and when used in this way, it is probably less likely to produce unexpected overall outcomes (mostly the PCs will make it from A to B) but rather is used to regulate the attrition of resources (the PCs lost X healing surges in transit, or did/didn't get to rest en route). In this sort of skill challenge, departure from anticipated outcomes is likely to be at the margins rather than in the centre - although in my own case, I've found that some of these marginal surprises are still interesting, and create consequences that come back into play sometime downstream.

Published skill challenges have a tendency to approach the skill challenge only in this way, however - even social skill challenges, which turn into metaphorical "journeys" to certain information or assistance with attrition/penalties along the way. But the skill challenge mechanic can also be used not as a travel mechanic (either metaphorical or literal) but as something analogous to an extended contest in HQ or a Duel of Wits in BW. My experience from using the skill challenge guidelines in play, when the stakes are something other than "how do we get from A to B", is that unexpected stuff comes about.

And this is what I've seen in 4e's skill challenge rules that tells against scripting/railroading.

 

[S'mon]

Of course, in the DMG Gygax then goes on to instruct GMs on how they should exercise situational authority - for example, in his well known discussion of how various dungeon occupants might respond to a raid by the PCs. Implicit in this advice, presumably, is that the GM won't have the occupants repsond in such a way as to be unfair to the players and to the capabilities of their PCs - this therefore suggests a degree of tailoring even in classic D&D...

You're reading in something which I really don't think is there. Gygax, the "Never give a player an even break" guy, seems like the kind of DM who'd happily slaughter PCs who wander into a situation above their heads. But he'd expect the players of low level PCs to understand that assaulting an active fortress was a dumb idea.

 

[Doug McCrae]

this therefore suggests a degree of tailoring even in classic D&D, as well as a possibility of play breaking down as the players exercise situational authority via "skilled play", the GM exercises situational authority in response via "rat bastard-ism", and the whole thing escalates and degenerates in the way that is exemplified in some early Dragon and White Dwarf discussions of tricks and traps.

Yeah, there was definitely tailoring in classic D&D. There's the party size and level indicators for all modules and scenarios, the "rooms full with silent monsters" (DMG pg97) to thwart players who bore the DM by being too cautious, Don Turnbull's monstermark system in White Dwarf (an incredibly detailed, mathematically precise version of CR) which "gives dungeonmasters better guidance than previously available on the thorny question of how many wandering monsters should appear against a party of a particular size and strength" and the traps arms race mentioned in several issues of Dragon.

It was obvious that the time had come for a more elaborate form of the pit: the concealed hole with a trap door that opened suddenly, dropping the victims into it. The covered pit appeared on the second level, and this lead to the rise in popularity of the 10-foot pole.
...
By the time the characters had progressed to 3rd level or beyond, the threat of taking 1d6 damage wasn't dismaying. Ah-hah! I came up with a solution for this. Put spikes in the bottom of the pit and the damage is increased by a considerable amount.
...
As the pits were avoided by characters, what better place to locate secret doors leading to the places the party wanted to find? Thus, in addition to being a hazard, the pit then became a place to seek out. To that nuance, of course, was added another: the pit with a secret door leading to another trap.

- Dragon #294, Ain't it the Pits? by Gary Gygax

One of my favorite devices is the pit. However, my players, after having several promising players impaled at the bottom of one, got together and brainstormed on a solution to the problem. Their solution: tie everyone together in mountain climber fashion so that when a player fell into a pit he would be saved by a safety line. My countermove: I decided to have a weight (1 ton) drop from above the pit when it was sprung, which would carry the player and all his confederates into the pit, crushing or impaling (take your pick) them all.

But never underestimate the player! They again brainstormed on a solution and came up with another award winning idea: since my traps were sprung by weights they would take a small cart with them, loaded with lead, which they would push in front of them. They also would bring several pairs of wheels and a carpenter, so they could continually reuse the same cart. My countermove: I decided that when a player reached a trap it would not only activate but would also activate several other previously-unactivated traps that would lie along the player’s approach paths. Not only did this prevent the players from using their cart idea, it also deterred them from ever trying to weasel around my pits again!

- Dragon #26, Notes from a Very Successful D&D Moderator by Michael Crane

The second quote is hilariously RBDM-y imo.

 

[S'mon]

There are similar examples in Underdark and The Plane Above. But I read them differently from you (which is not to say that I'm right and you're wrong - I may have misread them!)

The way I read these is as examles of how the designers envisage a 4e game playing out. They're not scripts - neither actually suggested scripts (what could be worse than a script? a script your players have already read because they've looke at the book too!), nor hypothetical or exemplary scripts. They're hypothetical retellings of actual play.

Again, I very much did not get this impression. They seem expressly to be sample frameworks upon which the DM pre-builds the outline of his campaign before play begins. The idea seems to be that campaigns should always have a "point", and this point is determined by the DM in advance of play.

I like your misinterpretation better though.

 

[nedjer]

The models do include revelations and major events at the beginning or end of each Tier. If you're playing for 5 hours every week you can level up about every 2.5 sessions, and cover a 10-level tier in 6 months, which as you say is still a long long time. Anything less and it will stretch out interminably - eg 2.5 hours a fortnight, 5 session to level at standard XP, gives 2 years per tier, and 6 years for a 30-level campaign!

I think WoTC would do better to look at the design of fully satisfying campaigns focused on a single Tier, because I suspect that's a much more practical model for most people if you want a literary/cinematic approach. The big climaxes should be at most every 3 levels, not 10. And a typical significant adventure should be 1 level, not 3-4.

Edit: Looking at the literary sources, I think the 1-Tier model fits them better too. Eg the hobbits of LoTR have an Heroic Tier campaign, going from plucky novices to battle-hardened veterans. Fafhrd & Mouser start at the beginning of Paragon when we meet them, and edge into Epic at the end of their 40-year careers. Elric starts off at the beginning of Epic when he's the first guy for centuries to summon a Chaos Lord, and caps out at 30th at the time of his demise.

Most teen and adult media are fixed narrative, so it must be a pretty hard sell to walk into the hallowed Stables of the Lords of My Little Pony and say, 'we'd like to do something flexible, flexible.'

Probably not the way to collect on a set of those mystic Golden Pony Spurs.

 

[Vespucci]

Given that the narration of results is intended to respond to the skill checks that the players make, which in turn are to be grounded in descriptions of what their PCs do in resopnse to the ingame situation; and given that the GM is told to allow the players actual freedom in this respect; it follows that the GM will not know what results to narrate until the players have actually done what the rules tell them to do.

Ugh. If this is what it takes for a campaign to be "unscripted", then why bother pointing to the skill challenge system? The obvious case of this sort of thing, long-standing in the game, is combat: ref describes scene, players describe actions, dice mediate success, ref describes outcome. The storyteller generally doesn't fill in the whole of the work in an rpg: they'll generally have "the PCs fight this bad guy, it's a sweet fight, and the good guys win". It's very uncommon, even in the New School, to script how the characters will overcome opposition - but just scripting that they do is bad enough.

In case that's obscure: no, I don't think that bringing the dice into it makes the story unscripted. Even less so in a game which invites the ref to fudge the dice.

IMO, the related point about such skill systems sidelining player skill is a consequence of more scripted games. In a scripted game, players who focus on problem-solving and getting around challenges (rather than going through them) are a kind of "problem player" - they'll take that mindset to the plot, too! By the same token, the player who has specialized in going along with the story and adding dramatic color with their descriptions may not be very good at solving problems. (I don't mean that there are no roleplaying polymaths. But these are different skills.) Taking player skill out of the game compensates for turnover in the hobby's player pool without needing to change the genre.

Published skill challenges have a tendency to approach the skill challenge only in this way, however - even social skill challenges, which turn into metaphorical "journeys" to certain information or assistance with attrition/penalties along the way. But the skill challenge mechanic can also be used not as a travel mechanic (either metaphorical or literal) but as something analogous to an extended contest in HQ or a Duel of Wits in BW. My experience from using the skill challenge guidelines in play, when the stakes are something other than "how do we get from A to B", is that unexpected stuff comes about.

And this is what I've seen in 4e's skill challenge rules that tells against scripting/railroading.

Please note: scripting and railroading are not the same thing. Scripted games have, perhaps, a greater chance of including railroading (for reasons excellently explained by Ariosto, upthread), but my storm/cottage example showed that railroading can be done in an unscripted game.

That out the way: I'm still a bit confused about your position. It seems like you're saying that the paradigm in the published 4e material is for scripting, but you see a way to use the mechanics otherwise? It's a matter of interpretation, but that doesn't encourage me to think of the game as leaning towards unscripted play.

 

[S'mon]

The second quote is hilariously RBDM-y imo.

Ridiculously rat-bastardy IMO, and entirely not a style I'd support. I guess it could sorta work if you embrace the concept of the dungeon as a living hostile entity actively reacting to and trying to kill the PCs. Sits very poorly with a naturalistic approach though.

 

[Jhaelen]

The second quote is hilariously RBDM-y imo.

You could say that!

An arms-race between the DM and the players - how great! The DM might as well just tell his players: "A giant fist strikes down on you from the heavens. You're all dead. I win!"

Pathetic!

 

[the Jester]

Of course, in the DMG Gygax then goes on to instruct GMs on how they should exercise situational authority - for example, in his well known discussion of how various dungeon occupants might respond to a raid by the PCs. Implicit in this advice, presumably, is that the GM won't have the occupants repsond in such a way as to be unfair to the players and to the capabilities of their PCs...

Not just no, but WHAAAAAT???

I am looking at those pages right now, searching for any sign of this "implicit" stuff you are making up, and here's what I'm finding:

(In discussing a second assault on a small town)

The town will have sought whatever reinforcements they could by means of employments of mercenaries, request to nearby fortresses and towns for men-at-arms, and all [italicized in the original] able-bodied persons will be formed into militia bodies. Any destruction wrought by the initial assault will have been repaired as time and ability allowed. Guards will be doubled or trebled, and local spell casters will have their most effective and powerful offensive and defensive magicks ready. Scouting parties will have been sent out and the approach of the attacking party will be likely to be known. Pursuit will be very likely if the second attack fails so as to allow it.

So: Massive increases in the number of enemies, all spellcasters prepped for battle, repairs made, merciless pursuit. I see no sign whatsoever of tailoring, nor do I see anything at all that "implies" it.

(In discussing a second assault on a fortress)

The fortress will most likely have replaced all losses and have reinforcements in addition. An ambush might be laid for the attackers when they approach. A sally force will be ready to fall upon the attackers (preferably when engaged in front so as to strike the flank or rear). Siege machinery, oil, missiles, etc. will be ready and in good supply. Repairs to defenses will be made as thoroughly as time and materials permitted. Weak areas will have been blocked off, isolated, and trapped as well as possible under the circumstances. Leaders will be nearby to take immediate charge. Spell casters might be disguised as guards, or hidden near guard posts, in order to surprise attackers. Any retreat by the attackers will be followed up by a hot pursuit.

So: ambush, beef up defenses, use oil and siege weapons, use trickery and tactics, press when the advantage is secured, have spell casters ready to spring nasty surprises.

The only tailoring here is when the tailor needs to make the pcs' funeral shrouds!

 

[Stoat]

On the other hand, I've seen early modules that suggest modifying the opposition based on the number or level of the PC's.

Tomb of Horrors suggests modifying the PC's based on the number of players and their skills.