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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5721993" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not at all. Railroading would be when the GM dictates how things unfold without reference to the action resolution mechanics.I think railroading is generally unsatisfying. But the other thing that I think can be unsatisfying - and here I'm influence by the blog that LostSoul linked to upthread - is when the players pose their own challenge for their PCs. That blog cites it as the Czege principle:The “Czege principle” is a proposition by Paul Czege that it’s not exciting to play a roleplaying game if the rules require one player to both introduce and resolve a conflict. It’s not a theorem but rather an observation; where and how and why it holds true is an ongoing question of some particular interest.A situation in which players are able to use their knowledge skills in the form of Burning Wheel "-wises", essentially to introduce facts into the setting that circumvent the challenge that the situation poses, runs the risk of violating the Czege principle, because the players are both framing the challenge, and trying to overcome it via the play of their PCs.This is what could happen in the 20 mile journey scenario: the GM frames a situation which the players are to engage via their PCs, but then - by using their knowledge skills - the players in effect reframe the situation (in fact, no 20 mile journey is requires) and thus set their own challenge.Now, it may be that it would be unusual for the 20 mile journey to be a challenge. As you say,But if it's not a meaningful challenge at all - if there's nothing at stake - then it wouldn't even matter whether the PCs go 20 miles or go to a closer hamlet. This would be where the injunction to "say yes or roll the dice" that [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] quoted upthread would become relevant.And if the challenge isn't to travel 20 miles safely, but rather to find some habitation or other, then using knowledge checks to find a closer hamlet, or a ford that cuts distance off the journey, would be fine (provided it is not already establishd in the fiction that there is no such hamlet). But in my view this should be built into the action resolution mechanics (in 4e, the relevant mechanics would be a skill challenge) rather than just the players ad hoc getting the GM's permission to roll their knowledge skills.I think maybe some misunderstanding, and some disagreement. I hope the above makes clearer what I mean by it being unsatisfying for the players to pose their own challenge.Where there probably is some disagreement is that, if nothing is at stake, I would just say yes rather than make the players faff around with knowledge checks. And, conversely, once the challenge has been framed, I think it can be unsatisfying for the playes to use skill checks to circumvent it rather than overcome it. And if the GM is framing challenges that the players find boring (like, say, a 20 mile journey) then I don't think the solution is for the players to use skill checks to circumvent the challenge. The solution is for the GM to stop framing boring scenes. To put it another way, I'd rather handle the issue of boring scene framing all at the strictly metagame level, rather than relying on failsafes in the action resolution mechanics.</blockquote>

Verification