Dookie in the Sandbox?

[Teflon Billy]

I've also called my games "sandboxes" though, because I plan very little and the setting reacts to what the PCs do, rather than the reverse. I'm somewhat OCD about giving PCs their head, almost to the point of them wondering what they're "supposed" to do sometimes. When they start looking like they're floundering and confused, then I'll nudge them along, but otherwise, like I said, I'm kinda OCD about not railroading.

That's me as well. I've never really done more than the following...

• Prepare a setting fairly extensively
• Play a session.
• Review PC actions that would affect the setting.
• Adjust the setting accordingly
• Repeat from step 2

The vast majority of the work of DM'ing is (for me) done before we ever start playing.

As long as I can understand the setting elements, I need no overarching metaplot.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Yeah I find myself constrained by maps as well. Setting down a map in my eyes means that you are constrained by past-ideas and thoughts and the current momentum and avenue that the plot is going on can get skewered or have less impact without the proper locations. This is especially true considering that my players are allowed to place their own cities/towns, NPCs, unique landmarks, etc. in the world. So having a defined world makes this much harder.

I totally disagree. Making a map is my first step when creating a new setting and, for the most part, it triggers my imagination rather than limiting it.

 

[The Ghost]

I'm not redefining, I'm stating that it's difficult to define.

If it is so difficult to define could you stop defining gaming ideals that differ from yours as "railroads"?

Like I said earlier, what you are calling a railroad I call a plot hook.

 

[takasi]

Like I said earlier, what you are calling a railroad I call a plot hook.

You can pretty much sum up a lot of my statements earlier:

One DM's plot hook is another player's railroad.

 

[Krensky]

The GM created a setting with a lot of plots and stories that have happened before the players assumed their characters. Ideally, he worked together with the players to build a world based on their backstories.

And all of that suddenly stops once the world starts. That makes absolutely no sense. Once the PCs enter the game everyone else stops acting and going about their business until the players walk close enough to them? It just doesn't make any sense. The real world is not as static is you claim. It never was.

Villains don't need to be so proactive unless they're directly threatened. That's not an unbelievable scenario. It's less believable, to me, that the overlord just happened to pick on the PCs simply because they're cleaning up an area that's outside of his domain. Once they impact his realm then sure, it makes sense. Otherwise it just smells like the DM is picking on the players.

How is it unbelievable that a immoral political leader would take steps to remove indirect threats before they develop into direct ones?

To answer your question I need to ask questions about the cult. Why are they in such a hurry? Who designed it the world that way? The DM? Why?

It's your example. Even if they're not in a hurry, which given the nature of doomsday cults would be unlikely, why should they go into a holding pattern because the PCs decided to sit in the tavern for a month or go do something else entirely for a year. Once you introduce villains with motivations other than "sit here and wait for the PCs to show up and kill me" you need top keep those villains pursuing the goals, even if the players ignore it.

See that doesn't really fit the style I'm talking about. If the village is beseiged by goblins, is this a regular occurance? Is this something new? If it's regular, and the town survived before then it will survive again. It sucks, but then again life in that world sucks. There are monsters and goblins. That sucks. Oh well. If the players move along and come back, the goblins might be there again, but it's not like they were frozen in a nonsensical siege.

That's how you have described the play style.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm not redefining, I'm stating that it's difficult to define. I don't think any DM would say 'Railroads are aweseome!' yet so frequently I hear players from various groups complaining that their game is a railroad. When I talk to the DM he says 'why of course not, they have tons of freedom!' I think it's sort of a grey area, and I've been explaining the components that make people think they're in a railroad and why. I'm sorry if my posts sound like trolling to you, but I guess I feel like I'm having trouble getting my points across. I think it's because it sounds like I'm attacking event based games, but honestly that's really the only game style where I hear frequent complaints about railroading.

I don't think it's difficult to define at all. A railroad is, as I already said, when the GM uses GM fiat to cause any intended player action to autofail except for the one, "correct" action that he's predetermined. I've never (until now) ever heard anyone try to use the term in any other way in all the years I've been discussing gaming. It's not only easy to define, it's a well accepted and commonly agreed upon definition.

You are using it to refer to any consequences that are the results of PC action. Well, I take that back. You make exceptions based on criteria that I can't understand.

 

[ST]

You can pretty much sum up a lot of my statements earlier:

One DM's plot hook is another player's railroad.

I'm a broken record, I know, but I think this is a social, group contract issue. It's not specifically a gaming issue.

I define railroading as "GM taking control over an aspect of the game I expected to have authority over." As in, it's always totally subjective. Nothing that someone's agreeing to do can be coercive.

I know this is kind of a fuzzy definition, but I've personally heard it used that way. Heck, I've heard people label GM descriptions of how their character acts (stuff like "You're frozen in fear") as railroading, even though that's not much to do with the classic definition. It's a sense that you thought you'd have X control over your character, agency to play so to speak, and now the GM is telling you X instead of letting you do it.

It means the group has to have a bit of a chat before the campaign starts about what their expectations are. Are the PCs going to be expected to follow a sequence of events? Are they all going to be expected to act together, as a party? That's pretty linear. Is everybody at the table cool with that, as in they're thinking "Okay, sounds like fun for this campaign"? Then it's not railroading, even if it's fully linear.

This means there's no way the argument as to what is railroading can be settled -- it varies from group to group.

So any level of GM input from "It's raining" to "This guy has a quest and I'm going to assume you're all going to agree to it" to "Your character's in the market shopping for goods and someone pickpockets you and runs off, what do you do?" might be totally fine, or might be excessive control ("railroading"), but that line has to be set group by group.

 

[Tewligan]

If the DM is making some crazy, fast moving dynamic world, why not play an eccentric character who builds his own impenetrable tower and watches the DM tell us how his setting unfolds?

Because that would mean the player is being a passive-aggressive jerk. "Oh, you want to make things happen in the game too? Fine, well, I'll just have my character not do anything while you tell your little story then." Man, any player who acted like that in a game I was running would get kicked out of the group fast.

 

[MarkB]

It's all a matter of time, which determines priority and pressure. The sick villagers are going to die. The mine isn't going anywhere, at least not as soon as the villagers.

And the people who would be helped by clearing the mine are going to stay poor - and probably edge-of-subsistence starving, since you favour a wasted world - right up until you clear the mines, after which their lives will begin improving. In either situation, you will do more good, to more people, if you act now rather than later. The time pressure is just as present in either situation.

To say that, if a person's act can improve matters, they are not causing a worse result by choosing to act later rather than immediately is to be wilfully disingenuous. So long as there is anything the characters can do to help people, there is an utterly real time pressure.

I agree. There are levels of infestations, and just general obstacles to player freedom in world design, and players will have different tolerance levels.

"Obstacles to player freedom" is, at least, a better term than "railroad". It's not accurate IMO, but at least it's not a misappropriated term that has an entirely different meaning.

The presence of scenery, creatures and people for players to interact with does not constitute obstacles to player freedom - though they may indeed be obstacles for the characters. Instead, they constitute opportunities for player interaction with the gameworld - something that is essential if any actual game is to take place.

A good DM is aware of that too and takes it into consideration. Ideally he builds the world for his players and their characters with their desires in mind.

But in that case, why is the presence of the sick villager such an imposition and the presence of an infested mine not so? They're both built with the players' and characters' desires in mind, and they can both be acted upon or not as the players desire.

Whether the players' inaction will cause the world to become worse, or simply fail to make it better, is irrelevant to these choices on a player level. Those are purely character-level motivations, and it is dependent upon the characters, not the players, whether either or both situations will result in any feeling of time-pressure.

 

[Vegepygmy]

Inaction is a choice too. That's why you can (and likely will) be charged with a crime if you watch a man drown without trying to help.

Off topic, but...I am a criminal lawyer, and I don't know of any jurisdiction where this is true. Maybe that's a law outside the United States, or maybe there's a state out there with a "good samaritan" law like you're describing, but I can assure you that under the English common law most American law is rooted in, there was no such obligation.