Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6307277" data-attributes="member: 4937">'Engage the fiction' is such broad and vague term that I can't tell whether I agree or not, nor can I tell if the assertion that players want to 'engage the fiction' represents an actual contradiction to anything I said.  But in 30 years of gaming, I can count on one hand the number of times that a player chose death, retirement of the PC, or maiming of the PC as preferable to the sacrifice of what the PC believed in.  And in general, I find that if you examine the priorities of the PC's ethos, players who prioritize their PCs interests above the interests of NPCs and above any higher philosophical cause vastly outnumber the contrary. As best as I can tell, they are all 'engaging the fiction'.  That's not what I asserted.  In fact, you yourself have agreed with what I asserted - trading loss of an actual game resource for the color of increased adversity in the fiction is a win-win for the average player.   Not only do they get to keep all their stuff, but they get to feel good about it.  However, I'm not at all convinced that this sort of metagame doesn't in fact change the way that player's approach play and challenges within play, nor is it clear that this is the same experience as having actual 'loss loss' be a possibility.  If you want to say, it's good for the PC's to never really lose, then sure, make that argument.  But I think it is a mistake to assume that the players don't have the mindset, "Any crash we can walk away from is a good landing."  or that there is necessarily any difference between "failing forward" and "winning at cost".And since in general, most players treat loss of anything that isn't on their character sheet as mere color, mostly "failing forward" means "winning".  "Following the rules" is not a contradiction to "railroading".  It's quite possible to write rules that encourage or even require the GM to engage in railroading.  That is to say, the rules can require and explicitly encourage the GM to metagame not only in the creation of the myth (that is to say, in protagonizing the character Luke within the Star Wars universe by making Darth Vader actually his father) but in recreation of the fiction and extemporaneous invention to respond to player propositions.   Paranoia for example explicitly encourages the GM to railroad in sadistic, creative, lethal ways to every player proposition, so that every plan not only goes awry but becomes profoundly and ludicrously complicated.  Indeed, Paranoia even encourages railroading as a metagame construct - for example, punishing the PC in game for any assertion that the player makes about the rules.  Rules lawyering is - per the rules - punished by PC death.Gygaxian D&D treats retreat as a valid strategic and tactical choice that does not bear any special penalty beyond the difficulty of extracting oneself from a situation and the time it provides your enemies to regroup and carry out plans (if they have the intelligence to do so).   But, we could always create rules that encouraged the DM to lay a heavier hand on the PC's choices, for example, in penalizing them with the loss of XP if they retreated, causing a certain amount of gold to inevitably spill from their bags, or in some other way forcing a loss on the player by the heavy hand of fiction ("You return to find the village devastated.").  That we made this a metagame consideration by also promising the players that a retreat would be otherwise successful if this cost was paid does not make it less railroading.  Such rules place the GM in the role of track layer, with the PC's choice being simply "Which set of rails do we wish to follow?"   We can at least hope the scenes are broad, because all the transitions are assuredly narrow.</blockquote>

Verification