Gaming Style Assumptions That Don't Make Sense

[S'mon]

It's a sad day when having *adventurers* encounter *adventure* sites is damned as Railroading...

 

[cmad1977]

The most boring railroad I've been on has been reading people argue about 'railroading'.

 

[cmad1977]

It's a sad day when having *adventurers* encounter *adventure* sites is damned as Railroading...

But... Agency!! And teh sandboxx!!

 

[steenan]

After reading the discussion here, I feel that one of the nonsense assumptions is that an RPG must be either a sandbox or a railroad (or, in the best case, some mixture of these two). In reality, it's not two states, or even a linear spectrum. Sandbox and railroad, as characterized in this thread, are only a minor part of a multidimensional space.


What about games that focus on relations and interactions between the PCs, where locations are only a background and the role of the GM is mainly pushing PCs towards each other while introducing conflicts that divide them (with no story in mind, because it's all in the players' choices)? Games like In a Wicked Age, Smallville, Monsterhearts, Hillfolk?

What about games where the majority of setting-building decisions are made by players, not the GM, like in Apocalypse World, Urban Shadows or Dresden Files?

What about games where the story is partially pre-planned and it's known to everybody in advance? With the pre-planning done by the players (eg. Arcs in Chuubo's) or by the game itself (eg. in Polaris)?

What about games where the story is built by players' decisions in a non-linear fashion, like in Microscope?

What about any game that uses strong scene framing, but gives players freedom in how they resolve the scenes and have their choices drive the game forward?

 

[Umbran]

After reading the discussion here, I feel that one of the nonsense assumptions is that an RPG must be either a sandbox or a railroad (or, in the best case, some mixture of these two). In reality, it's not two states, or even a linear spectrum. Sandbox and railroad, as characterized in this thread, are only a minor part of a multidimensional space.

Yah. Words to that effect were already mentioned in the thread. By Celebrim, if I'm not mistaken.

Remember - he's not arguing that railroading is universally bad. Or even often bad. I believe he's said several times that it is often a *good* thing. He's just very hard-line, black-and-white about what he considers to be "railroading".

 

[GMMichael]

Assumptions that don't make sense:

It's dangerous to be a first level character.

Leads to wonderful decisions like max first level hit points, healing surges, and death saves - making first level WAY too complicated.

The video game/Hollywood assumption:

Problems/drama must involve finding your enemies and killing them.

And perhaps a less popular one I'm trying to solve:

I need a publishing company, not the community, to provide me with good adventures, prestige classes, magic items, etc.

On the last one - has anyone ever seen a Wikipedia-style creative site, that allows the content to be edited by the community?

 

[Celebrim]

After reading the discussion here, I feel that one of the nonsense assumptions is that an RPG must be either a sandbox or a railroad (or, in the best case, some mixture of these two). In reality, it's not two states, or even a linear spectrum. Sandbox and railroad, as characterized in this thread, are only a minor part of a multidimensional space.

My work here is done.

 

[Celebrim]

It's a sad day when having *adventurers* encounter *adventure* sites is damned as Railroading...

Said every conductor of a railroad ever.

 

[Celebrim]

Assumptions that don't make sense: It's dangerous to be a first level character.

I don't understand this at all. First level has historically been objectively more lethal than other levels. That's not an assumption. The reason for this is pretty simple. Second level characters can always be pitted against first level challenges to control the lethality. But there is nothing meaningful to pit against first level characters that doesn't threaten immediate death because there aren't any degrees of challenges smaller than first level challenges. This has led to the trope that first level play involves killing rats in a basement. But even that risks high lethality, as there is no way to be more granular than a single hit point. If you don't have maximum hit points at first level, the PC's are threated with death with every blow and lack any ablative protection at first level. That's not an assumption. That's just math.

This has been a problem since the beginning of the game that people have sought solutions for. Probably the most complicating one in the history of the game has been death is not automatic at zero hit points, which is a very old modification to the game that I know was widely in use by like 1985. Some of those other attempts at solutions you mention are also relatively old. I encountered max hit points at first level as far back as 1989.

Problems/drama must involve finding your enemies and killing them.

I'm not sure what to make of this as an assumption. The reasons combat tends to be a focus of play is complicated and varied. One of the most important is that the fictional position of being dead is one of the most absolutely helpless that a character can be in. Combat just tends to trump all other strategies because of that, unless you have some sort of mechanically enforced fiction in your game that killing your enemies doesn't solve problems (because it massively debuffs your character or because it massively makes the problem worse). Note even then that these problems probably wouldn't effect NPCs, who could still generally trump any PC strategy through simply making them dead.

I need a publishing company, not the community, to provide me with good adventures, prestige classes, magic items, etc.

For the vast majority of the community, this isn't an assumption. Skilled rules smiths and skilled designers are the exceptions in the community and not the norms. The vast majority of players, even pretty good players, aren't also skilled rules smiths or skilled designers. And ideally, they are capable of recognizing this and recognizing that content provided by the skilled designers is superior to what they could make themselves. I guess it would be a false assumption that all the best content comes from professionals and that there aren't amateur designers of equal worth, but one thing about professionalism that isn't a false assumption is that the marketplace tends to weed out the inferior work over time. Thus, the average community member is making a reasonable assumption that the professional stuff will be more reliable than picking something from the community. Remember, low skill designers can't reliably recognize bad designs. This is the reason that the amateur community often tends to be dominated by the lowest skilled designers who, suffering from a specific case of Dunning-Krueger effect, assume that they are actually very good designers. It's not that there wouldn't necessarily be a lot of good amateur content out there, but if you had a Wikipedia or something where content could be added, very quickly it would fill up with tons of ill thought out suggestions alongside the better quality stuff.

 

[S'mon]

Said every conductor of a railroad ever.

You know me so well.