Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Jester David]

It seems to me that the what which is set in motion is something like the Village of Hommlet (not to be confused with the Hamlet of Viloge, I guess) described by Gygax in T1.

If you have a read of T1, you will see that the village has a "persona" as well as individuals with their personae; but it is not going to move on its own. Without the PCs it is a largely static situation - there are spies for Verbobonc, spies for the Temple of Elemental Evil, prospective henchmen and hirelings, etc - but there is nothing written in the situation about how it will change in the absence of the PCs.

This is quite different from a situation in which NPCs have their own character arcs (as [MENTION=37579]Jester David[/MENTION] said and [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] seemed to agree with). And it's quite different from a situation in which the world is in motion on its own, and will change fundamentally in the absence of actions by the PCs. Unsurprisingly, though, it's fairly similar to the Keep in B2.

In literary/film terms, the logic of T1 seems to be similar to that of many Vance stories, some westerns, some Arthurian-type stories of wandering knights - the situation is static but contains within it the seeds of its own evolution (or destruction), but is waiting for some outsiders who will enter into the situation and upset things.

And that's why I don't think these examples, or Gygax's advice in his DMG on how to create them, are consistent with the claim that traditional D&D is fundamentally GM-driven. To reiterate: these Gygaxian starting settings will not enter into motion on their own. They have no inherent or self-moving "plots". I've never use Hommlet, but the same properties of B2 mean that I've been able to use it more than once as a backdrop for the sort of game I GM, simply by adding in a few embellishments that link some of the pivotal characters (eg the priest of chaos, the castellan, etc) into the concerns of the PCs and their established trajectory of play.

It's almost as if the conventions and assumptions of the game have changed and evolved over the almost forty years since those adventures were published.
It's almost as if Gygax - with his six or seven years of experience creating adventures and DMing - might not have been as adept at adventure design as someone now who might have two or three decades of continual experience running the game and writing adventures and building on the collective adventure design advances made by dozens of official adventure writers and designers.

I respect EGG a lot for his contributions to the hobby. But he was making it up as he went along. I don't think we should be beholden to his ideas of adventure design in 1979 any more than we should be restricted to his ideas of racial or class balance, or required to abide by his worldbuilding tropes.
Gygax makes a lot of claims for gameplay in 1e that we often conveniently ignore. Like the importance of having players map dungeons. Acquiring hirelings and gaining a keep. Name levels. Alignment languages. Tracking game time being "of the utmost importance".

But on the issue of "tradition": I think that Gygax is a pretty authoritative articulator of theD&D tradition! And the sort of set-up he talks about is found not only in published modules like T1 and B2 but also fits with accounts of dungon and world design that I'm familiar with in the magazines from aroudn the same time (late 70s/early 80s).

The thing is, Gygax was continually changing how he wrote adventures. The "D&D tradition" changed dramatically between OD&D and 1e, between Against the Giants to Temple of Elemental Evil. Every year brought new changes and advancements to how he designed adventures. Let alone the stuff he was doing after he left TSR.

You can look at a single small sampling of his stuff at the very beginning of his career and say that's definitive. It's like looking at ET, Close Encounters, and Jaws and using that to define the career of Steven Spielberg and how movies should be made.

That's not to deny that the GM-driven adventure also exists from an early stage in the hobby. But I don't think that it has any sort of exclusive claim on "tradition". And I would say it's not until the mid-to-late 80s that it becomes near-universal.

Grognardia puts the blame at Dragonlance.
So it's *only* existed for 3/4ths of the lifespan of the hobby.
Judging by published products of course. There's no guarantee people weren't creating their own vast GM plots far earlier.

But if you're actually curious, books have been written on this:
https://www.amazon.ca/Creation-Narrative-Tabletop-Role-Playing-Games/dp/0786444517

 

[Jester David]

Honestly, I think this who thread is just doomed. Mostly because of statements like the below, from earlier today:

As I've posted multiple times upthread, from a mere description of the fiction it's impossible to tell. Railroading isn't about the content of the fiction, it's about the method of its generation.

Emphasis added.
The problem is pemerton has invented his own definition of "railroading" that is incompatible with the established definition

We're trying to have a discussion about baking, but the initiating participant keeps insisting fruit cobbler is pie. No matter how much we dance around the other issues at hand, we're just not using the same terminology. We might as well be speaking different languages.

 

[Lanefan]

Gygax makes a lot of claims for gameplay in 1e that we often conveniently ignore. Like the importance of having players map dungeons.

Never ignored here.

Acquiring hirelings and gaining a keep.

Yeah, we should do more with these.

Name levels. Alignment languages.

And class languages e.g. Thieves' Cant; we ignore these too.

Tracking game time being "of the utmost importance".

Here he speaks great wisdom...not so much regarding the tracking of time in and of itself but the tracking of what happens elsewhere (offstage) duirng that time, and how much time it has available to happen before the PCs turn up.

Lanefan

 

[Maxperson]

And that's why I don't think these examples, or Gygax's advice in his DMG on how to create them, are consistent with the claim that traditional D&D is fundamentally GM-driven.

The following are quotes from the 1e DMG with regard to the campaign.

"You will order the universe and direct the activities in each game, becoming one of the elite group of campaign referees referred to as DMs in the vernacular of AD&D."

"This will typically result in your giving them a brief background, placing them in a settlement, and stating that they should prepare themselves to find and explore the dungeon/ruin they know is nearby. As background you inform them that they are from some nearby place where they were apprentices learning their respective professions, that they met by chance in an inn or tavern and resolved to journey together to seek their fortunes in the dangerous environment"

"In short, you will have to create the social and ecological parameters of a good part of a make-believe world. The more painstakingly this is done, the more "real" this creation will become."

"Whatever you settle upon as a starting point, be it your own design or one the many modular settings which are commercially available, remember to have some overall plan of your milieu in mind. The campaign might grow slowly, or it might mushroom. Be prepared for either event with more adventure areas, and the reasons for everything which exists and happens."

"It is no exaggeration to state that the fantasy world builds itself, almost as if the milieu actually takes on a life and reality of its own."

"Similarly, the geography and history you assign to the world will suddenly begin to shape the character of states and peoples."

Surprisingly, as the personalities of player characters and non-player characters in AD&D world will take on even more of their own direction and life. What this all boils down to is that once the compaign is set in motion, you will become more of a recorder of events, while the milieu seemingly charts its own course! "


How is that not a DM driven game? How is that not the world coming to life and moving on its own, as well as with the PCs? Much of that was also from the "Setting Things in Motion" section.

From the "Ongoing Campaign" section.

"Furthermore, there must be some purpose to it all. There must be some backdrop against which adventures are carried out, and no matter how tenuous the strands, some web which connects the evil and good, the opposing powers, the rival states and various peoples. This need not be evident at first, but as play continues, hints should be given to players, and their characters should become involved in the interaction and struggle between these vaster entities."

That says outright that there are ongoing struggles and interactions between other entities that the players should become involved in. Those struggles don't happen when the PCs arrive. They are already ongoing and have been determined by the DM.

 

[Jester David]

For the record, what did Mr. Gygax think of railroading?
We don't need to wonder.

From a Q&A:

Hello Gary,

How important is the ability of “winging” an adventure? Particularly, when players take actions the DM did not expect. Apparently, allowing players true freedom in determining their PC’s action provides them a better gaming experience. Is “railroading” something the DM should strive to avoid. If so, then to what extent should the DM give freedom to the players when they choose a course of action the DM may not have accounted for?

thanks,
Joe123.

Joe123,

Noting your query, I went back a page and found your earlier post. Sorry, but I missed it somehow.

The opinions of some folks to the contrary, I have always "winged" most adventures--the exceptions being play-tests of material in a ms. for a module, and a few set-piece places I developed. All the outdoor adventures I ran, and most of the dungeon crawls were half or more made up on the spot.

When extemporizing, the GM must be prepared to handle all manner of unexpected actions by the players. If they are foolish, I always invent a number of opportunities for disaster. If the course taken is one that is clever and innovative, I add in rewards.

Before a party goes off on a likley disasterous course I will try to deter them from such action--wandering monsters have much usefulness in this regard.

As for "railroading," there are some scenarios where a bit of that is absolutely necessary to further the whole of the adventure. This is not to say that an entire adventure should be linear and force the party into a situation with a foregone conclusion. The use of a predetermined outcome should be only to set up an interesting and challenging scenario where the players are absolutely free to manage the outcome on their own, that outcome offering penalties for wrong decisions, rewards for correct ones, large rewards for innovation and creative solutions

Cheers,
Gary

From:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...ygax/page171&p=1241455&viewfull=1#post1241455

 

[pemerton]

I don't so much see it as a puzzle. Instead, it's a chain of events - much like an AP - such that if you don't do task a before attempting task b then the outcome of task b must be failure.

<snip>

I see the difference now. To me "forward" is defined by how the failure relates to the characters' goal(s) - do they get closer to their goal, go nowhere, or go backward. To you it relates to advancement of the story; and your example of the night watch capture would in my eyes be a fail-backward.

It occurs to me one big difference between fail-forward/backward and fail-status-quo is that with fail-status-quo the characters have to come up with a plan B with (usually) no new information to go by, where with a fail-forward/backward something changes and one way or another they have (because the DM has provided) new information simply by narrating the changes. Fail-status-quo puts the onus on the players (in character) to generate movement; the other is easier on the players as it hands them the movement (for better or worse) and simply asks what they do with it.

For some definitions of "easier", maybe.

Your account of the players needing a "Plan B" reinforces, to me at least, that essentially here we're talking about a puzzle. Attempted solution A failed, so we try solution B instead.

But for some definitions of easier, not so much: if your overall goal, in character, is to redeem your brother from balrog posession; and then you discover that he was probably evil before he got possessed, so that evil cause possession rather than vice versa; then I don't think going on is especially easy. If you're immersed in your character - which the relevant player in my game certainly was/is - then that's actually pretty hard.

Of course they can be surprised in that way. But that would be the result of failure; not it's cause.

Why could it not be the cause of failure as well?

Well, the sort of surprise you describe catches the players unawares and undermines or in some other undesired way reframes the experiences of the PCs. In the sort of approach to GMing, and to RPGing, that I am describing, that is a type of failure. The PC's intentions in action have not been realised. That is an appropriate consequence of failure. It's not just something for the GM to impose on the situation.

So nobody other than you knew ahead of time that the brother was evil. Cool!

No! No! No!

I - the GM - did not know either. The likelihood of the brother having been evil all along was not established as an element of the fiction until I narrated the failure of the attempt to find the mace in the ruin.

This is what [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] and I are trying to get at in talking about a game in which everyone, even the GM, plays to find out what happened.

And this is why I have been asking [MENTION=37579]Jester David[/MENTION] what exactly he takes the connection to be between prior planning and depth of the shared fiction. And why I reacted so strongly to your suggestion that a player-driven game, in which the GM does not adjudicate by reference to secret backstory, cannot involve surprises.

Because my experience with this sort of example gives me the opinion that the sorts of connections or dependence the two of your are positing is not true as a general matter - although it may be the way, at some tables, that certain sorts of events are introduced into the fiction.

from a mere description of the fiction it's impossible to tell. Railroading isn't about the content of the fiction, it's about the method of its generation.

If the DM generates that someone has a secret, and that secret influences their interactions with the PCs, is that railroading? By my definition absolutely not.

<snip and reverse sequence>

But - the fact that the brother was secretly evil all along would have influenced his earlier reactions and interactions with the PC mage, would it not; never mind that he could also have been working aganst the party's (or at least his brother's) interests behind the scenes perhaps causing them to fail where they otherwise might have succeeded.

<snip>

Hidden obstacles to the party's success don't fall under the definition of railroading

<snip>

If the DM generates that something that happens off-screen influences some NPC interactions with the PCs, is that railroading? Again, flat-out no.

example: most everyone in the party's base town has always been friendly and usually cheerful; but this visit there's been lots of dour faces and surly attitudes. PCs have no idea why. They can ask, of course, and soon find out the Baron just doubled everyone's taxes; and this isn't railroading - it's just an off-screen event that has changed how some NPCs interact with...well, everyone.

Because this is moslty focusing on the content of the fiction, not on the way it is generated. But railroading is all about who generates content, and how. Which is why, merely from content, we can't tell.

For instance, vis-a-vis the brother: for all we know, his conduct towards his brother (which up to that point had occurred only in backstory, and mostly involved teaching him magic) was motivated by evil. Maybe he was preparing his brother to be a worthy sacrifice to the balrog!

I think I've already quoted this passage from Paul Czege in this thread:

I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.​

If it turns out, in play, that the brother was evil all along, well that throws some new light on all his past dealings. But clearly those past dealings don't preclude him having been evil all along (because, if they did, then finding the cursed black arrows would not be a tenable failure, because it would contradict backstory that has already been established at the table).

But the claim that this sort of thing can't be done unless the GM works it all out in advance is simply not true.

Your example of the taxed townsfolk is another one where, until we know how that was established at the table, and what its significance is to the participants, we can't say anything about it from the point of view of GM authority, player influence over the shared fiction, railroading, etc.

For instance, if the PCs return to town and the GM frames them into a scene of sullen townsfolk, with the idea in mind that the sullen-ness is due to raised taxes, is that railroading? If the adventure the PCs have just returned from is one in which they won a social conflict with the baron over the level of taxation, then probably yes - it's just fiating a failure over the top of the players' success.

If the state of the village and the wellbeing of the villagers is something the players (via their PCs) have a clear commitment to, then it doesn't look like railroading but rather framing: it's setting up the situation with which, presumably, the PCs are going to engage. (By pushing the baron to lower taxes.)

If the village is just somewhere the PCs are passing through, then it seems to be simply colour, and nothing of any significance is going to turn on it.

nor does hidden support leading to success where otherwise they'd have failed. It's perfectly valid and very realistic that the PCs (and players) don't know everything; and nor should they.

I'm not sure what you mean by "valid" here - that just seems to be a marker of your preference.

As for realism - it's realistic that the PCs not know everything. There's nothing realistic or unrealistic that the GM not know everything, as the GM doesn't exist within the fictional world and so has no ingame cognitive relationship to elements of that world.

what if one of the PCs has a secret that none of the other PCs* knows about, that influences how they interact with the party and the game as a whole?

That's a different thing altogether. Speaking purely for myself, I find that Robin Laws gives good advice in this respect in Over the Edge: the game generally becomes more fun when the players are in on the secret even if their PCs are not.

 

[pemerton]

Speaking personally, there are 2 reasons I find it hard to engage:

(1) When you guys use what I've dubbed Forge-speak (e.g. terms like GM Force or Illusionism) that I need to try and decipher, I find it hard to understand. Often it comes across as overly analytical and ungrounded to me, and wading through multiple paragraphs of that kind of writing just isn't enjoyable to me. Maybe simpler (and terser) language would help?

(2) In the way they're presented they come across as "here's what we did, and it's done", rather than questions or particular insights (at least, that's my judgment based on what I can discern). Maybe presenting a question would be more inviting rather than a play report?

Obviously I'm not [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], and he can speak for himself.

But I think I can see at least a little bit of what prompted his post.

When, in a reply to a poster, I provide an example of how a surprise occurred at one particular point in a campaign, and explain the method whereby that surprise was generated, it is odd to have that same poster then assert that surprises are impossible when using my method.

More generally, when it is claimed that a GM making stuff up ahead of time is necessary to having a depth to the fiction, that claim is odd when (i) not based on trying other ways of doing things, and (ii) made in the face of others posting actual examples of fiction having depth that didn't depend upon the GM making stuff up ahead of time.

Even more generally, what is sometimes surprising is reading an ultra-confident assertion that such-and-such is impossible in a RPG, when hundreds and thousands of RPGers are reliablty doing just that in their games, every day, and have been for 20+ years.

Just to elaborate upon one example: upthread [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] conjectured a campaign in which the PCs have a mentor, and do work for him, and eventually it turns out that the mentor is a vampire, and the PCs have really been helping his evil schemes all along.

Lanefan took for granted that this campaign would take place by the GM deciding, from the start, that the mentor is a vampire; dropping hints and rumours that won't tip off the players, but will enable them - after the big reveal - to recognise the signficance of those hints and clues.

I said that, in my approach, this sort of revelation would not be something built in by the GM, but might be narrated as a consequence of failure. And I gave an example of something a little bit similar happening in one of my campaigns. That was the discovery - narrated as the consequence of a failed check searching for a mace in the ruined tower that was formerly the home of the PC and his older brother - of cursed arrows in what had been the brother's private workroom. The significance of this was that the revelation that the brother was a manufacturer of cursed arrows strongly suggests that he was evil before the brothers fled the tower under orc attack and the older one became possessed by a balrog; ie it strongly suggested that being evil led him to be possesed, rather than vice versa; which completely pulled the rug out from under the PC's goal of redeeming his brother and freeing him from possession.

Yet even in responding to my reposting of this example, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] replies "So no one but you knew the brother was evil up to that point" - which seems to completely miss my point that no one at the table knew the brother was evil before the narration of that failure result.

Which was the whole point of the example: you can have twists, hearbreaking surprises, conspiracies, etc, without having to plan it in advance - it can be managed as part of the narration of consequences of failure. (As the OP illustrates, you can also have searching or perception checks, and frame and resolve them in a meaningful way, without it having to be the case that the GM has noted in advance the contents of the area being searched or looked at.)

Surprise and other twists can also be introduced as part of the framing of ingame situations and conflicts. When introduced this way, it is introduced by GM fiat, but is immediately presented as something that is up for grabs for the players to engage with, or push against, via their PCs.

As I've posted a few times upthread, judging what sort of stuff should be introduced in which sort of way - as consequence for faiure, or as framing - is an important GM skill for the approach I'm talking about. If the GM treats something as up for grabs in framing, which the players regard as something that they're entitled to rely on unless they lose it via failure (such as, eg, the implict open-ness of their brother to redemption), then the players will feel de-protagonised and the game will not deliver the experience that it is meant to.

Now obviously no one expects everyone to be interested in this sort of GMing - as I posted in my OP, I expect my conception of railroading is broader than some other posters'. What is weird, though, is repeated assertions that it can't be done.

 

[pemerton]

When was that truth established, though? Had it always been true that the brother was evil, even when the events of that backstory were taking place, and you were aware of it while the players were not? Or did it only become true in the aftermath of their search?

As I've posted upthread in response to [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] and some other poster (maybe [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]?), this seems to involve a category error.

In the fiction, it is either true or false that the brother was evil. That truth doesn't change.

At the table, that element of the shared fiction has to be be settled through some process or other - fictions don't just write themselves! At my table, it was settled by narrating the consequences of the failure. Up to that point, the relevant element of the ficiton hadn't been written, and so - not having been written - I was in no better position to know it than anyone else.

Ah. I see we've entered into the realm of quantum roleplaying!

You seem to be making the same category error, of confusing the truth within the fiction and the process of authoring the fiction.

What colour were Frodo's socks on the evening of Bilbo's birthday party? No one knows, because JRRT didn't write anything about them.

That doesn't mean that Frodo was wearing quantum socks.

 

[pemerton]

I also think that failing forward could be just as likely to become a railroad.

Can you explain what you have in mind?

 

[pemerton]

Which to me is a mistake of omission.

All the set-up would better be presented as a snapshot of how things are when the PCs first arrive (or the game starts, whichever). There should then be at least passing mention of how things will likely develop over the next few days/weeks/months if left uninterrupted; or failing that some sort of advice to the DM as to how to move the village forward.

<snip>

In the Keep a self-moving plot isn't all that necessary, though you could put one (or more) in if desired, as the Keep on the whole is more scenery than scene.

I don't think I've ever used the Caves of Chaos (except to borrow the cultist section for setting up cutists temples in all sort of places, most recently the catacombs of Hardby). But I've used the Keep multiple times.

I've never used Hommlet, but not because of any railroad-y element - more because I didn't have a copy back in the days when it would have been most useful (eg low-level Greyhawk games).

But the presence of a "self-moving" plot would make it less appealing to me.

It's like a version of the "freeze-frame" room in a dungeon: you don't need it to change because (i) when the players first encounter it, it doesn't matter that the fiction was authored by the GM some time ago and hasn't been touched since, and (ii) onece the players encounter it, they will generate changes.

"Railroading" is when the DM makes on-the-fly changes to the game world to steer the PC's in a particular direction contrary to where they want to go.

Having a plot prepared in advance is not railroading, letting the PCs automatically fail when they attempt something impossible is not railroading, and having NPCs with plans of their own is not railroading.

These things are all matters of opinion. I would regard all the things you say are not railroading - having a plot prepared in advance, automatic failure in a context of genre-appropriate action declaration, secret backstory including NPCs with there own "character arcs" - as railroading. I wouldn't do them, and I wouldn't enjoy a game that featured them. (Outside the context of something like a CoC one-shot.)

And - somewhat contrary to [MENTION=6846794]Gardens & Goblins[/MENTION] defence of Gygax's modules as having been authored 30+ years ago - I think it's a strength, and a deliberate strength, of those modules that they don't include the things you refer to: no NPC characer arcs, very little secret backstory that will mandate failure for player action declarations, no pre-scripted plot; instead, an expectation that the players will impose their will on the fiction, and that the GM's job is to respond to this and manage the unfolding events of play, not dictate them.

It's almost as if the conventions and assumptions of the game have changed and evolved over the almost forty years since those adventures were published.

<snip>

Grognardia puts the blame at Dragonlance.
So it's *only* existed for 3/4ths of the lifespan of the hobby.

Yet oddly, it's as if the most recent 25 years of RPG design and play (I'm choosing Over the Edge as my marker - I could easily set it 9 years earlier, at James Bond; or 5 years later, at Maelstrom Storytelling) never happened.

No one posting in this thread is confused about the existence of your preferred style. But some people posting in this thread seem confused that other approaches exist, or that others might think your preferred GM-driven style is too railroad-y for their taste.

(And before someone says - but we're talking about D&D! - where do you think skill challenges came from, including the example of the narration of failure in the 4e Rules Compendium, which is exactly like the sort of "fail forward" I've described in this thread, with the GM drawing on estabished elements of the backstory to introduce a new and adversarial element to the fiction; or where do you think 5e's Inspiration rules came from, with the idea that by playing so as to engage self-chosen character descriptors a player can acquire resources which make it easier to impose his/her will upon the fiction?)