Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Lanefan]

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.

Just to be fussy: the vampire's schemes aren't evil at all, and neither is he (well, not any more; he sure used to be). The secrets are a) that he's a vampire at all, and b) just how long (centuries!) he's been pulling strings behind the scenes.

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.

By who? And when? And, if the DM's intent is that he be a vampire all along, what if a player narrates something that contradicts that...even something as simple as the guy admiring his reflection in a mirror.

And again, why a failure? Maybe learning this information qualifies as a success for the PCs (and thus a failure for the vampire, I suppose). It all depends on context.

For clarity: the vampire example comes from my current campaign, with the difference-for-discussion-here being that he keeps his secrets from the PCs for much longer than he did in actual play.

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.

Which in the moment is really cool! It's just the invalidation of what went before that's not cool.

Another example where I as DM got hosed by this: years ago I was running a party through a big somewhat-linear adventure. The weird element was, this adventure was in fact being written (by someone else) as it was being played; and sometimes the author had to struggle to keep ahead of the advancing party. What this led to was a few rather glaring instances of an element being written in later which, had I known of it earlier, would have been rather obvious to the PCs. (wagon tracks on a trail was one example I can remember: the party follows this trail for ages but it's not until the wagons are written in later do I realize they should have been seeing wagon tracks all along) So, much to my annoyance I had to retcon some things, which thoroughly offended my sense of internal consistency and meant some things that might have been done differently at the time had this info been known were not.

Lan-"type type type"-efan

 

[pemerton]

It seems to me that under your definition 99% of D&D games would fall under "railroading", making it a not very useful distinction.

I don't think this is right.

Most OSR games would not. Many other sandbox games - where the sandbox is a T1/B2-style sandbox, ie a situation of largely static equilibrium until the PCs enter it and set it in motion.

There are plenty of posters on these boards who run games in various incarnations of D&D who don't run railroads.

Not all games - for all I know, not even a majority of games - are run in the Dragonlance style, where the main determiner of what occurs at the table, and how it turns out, is not the choices that the players make in responding to the GM's framing, but rather the GM's behind-the-scenes manipulation of backstory elements.

 

[pemerton]

Why on earth would anyone use "outcome" to describe a set-up???

Well, Gygax is no longer with us, so we can't ask him. But here is what you quoted him as saying:

The use of a predetermined outcome should be only to set up an interesting and challenging scenario​

So he talks about using an outcome as a set-up. As I said, I think he has in mind something like the Dungeon of the Slave Lords. Other examples would be Ghost Tower of Inverness (PCs as suicide squad) or Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (from memory, the PCs are shipwrecked).

 

[pemerton]

the idea that the low risk searching for a pre-magic item is used to add a high impact change to the campaign fiction

Then I think you've misunderstood the situation (as is evident by your comparison of it to "a shopping trip".

You seem to be conflating "stakes" with "risk of physical danger". Searching the ruins for a lost mace is low risk in that sense. But it is not low stakes. The PC has chosen to return (for the first time in 14 years) to the site where he last saw his brother; the tower they had to abandon when it was assaulted by orcs; the place where, in trying to fight off those orcs, the brother tried to summon a mighty storm of magical lightning and instead opened up a conduit to hell and was possessed by a balrog.

Having returned, the PC hopes to find the item he was working on, seeking to enchant, when the orcs attacked.

That is not a low stakes situation. It's a high stakes one. The player chose to put all this to the test; and failed.

 

[pemerton]

It is literally, objectively true that the brother retroactively became evil-all-along as the result of a failed perception-based check. We know this because we have access to the source code by which that reality was generated.

No. It is literally, objectively true that the brother's past moral status was authored, and thereby became an element of the shared fiction, at that moment of play. But that is not a causal event in the game.

It's well known that Dickens wrote two endings to Great Expectations. The two endings cast some of the earlier events of the novel in a different light. They resolve the amibugity in the motivations of some key character in different ways. In the fiction, howeveer those motivations were whatever they were. It's not a story about backwards causation.

As a general proposition, it's not true that the time sequence of authoring a fiction must correspond to the time sequence of events within the fiction. This general proposition applies also to RPGs.

If it was actually true that the brother was evil, or that the brother was not evil, then all evidence would always be consistent with that truth

Obviously. This is why when backstory is settled it operates as a constraint on narration.

Nothing in the settled backstory of my campaign was inconsistent with the evilness of the brother. And some things - that a balrog found him a suitable vessel for possession, and the established facts about how he had behaved once possessed - might even have been thought to point that way.

That's the nature of amibiguity and nuance in fiction. It admits of resolution in multiple directions (as Dickens nicely demonstrated in his writing of Great Expectations).

 

[Lanefan]

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.

But, when the PCs leave said room does it (have to) become static again? I think that's the crux here, particularly when you replace "room" with "town" or "region" or anything else.

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.

Then I posit your definition of railroading is, simply put, far too broad.

I wouldn't do them, and I wouldn't enjoy a game that featured them.

If you're ever up here in BC let's put that to the test, shall we?

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.

The PCs impose their will on such of the fiction as they can access, but they can't be everywhere at once and where they're not, life goes on. This to me seems goes-without-saying blindingly obvious if one's intent is to run a living breathing game world, and by no means whatsoever is it railroading in any accepted sense of the word I've ever heard of - other than what you've posted here.

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.

I'm not so much confused that other approaches exist, but I am confused as to how they are able to function while maintaining consistency, keeping character knowledge and player knowledge in step, and allowing long-term secrets or hidden backstory to be part of the plot. (never mind allowing some plot layout in advance)

(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?)

I got into a discussion with some of our crew last night about this, in fact, where we quite quickly (and unanimously) concluded - though using different terms for it - it's not usually the player's place to impose their will on the fiction in any great degree, but instead to react and deal with what is already there. We-as-players can change it, steer it, tip it on its head, even crumple it into little balls and throw it in the corner, but we cannot generate it from nothing and nor can we expect it to go away if we ignore it. We also can't expect the world to stay still over there while we take care of this mission over here.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

As far as I can interpret that, he seems to be referring to framing:

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​

The "predeterined outcome to set up a scenario" looks like framing to me - eg the start of the Dungeon of the Slave Lords module. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with negating player choices.

Where to me that A3-to-A4 changeover is one of the more blatant early examples of bad-form railroading.

They're scripted to lose the fight at the end of A3 (no matter what they try to do their only real choice is to either fight and lose or surrender and lose) and they're scripted to wake up in jail at the start of A4. The wake-up-in-jail bit is a cool sort of railroad and can lead to some excellent stuff after; but the must-lose-the-fight bit is pure bad railroad. Flee? Not an option. Sneak past? Not an option. Actually win the fight? Not supposed to be an option, though I believe there's passing mention of it being a possibility.

I guess that's where scene-framing becomes railroading: when you can't ignore or get around or escape the scene that's framed.

Lan-"if every picture tells a story, what does an empty frame have to say"-efan

 

[Maxperson]

It's clear that Gygax intended the DM to be the one in charge and to set things up for the game. From the 1e DMG preface. Pretty much the first thing he says.

"As the creator and ultimate authority in your respective game, this work is written as one Dungeon Master equal to another."

 

[Lanefan]

I'm kinda stuck on the idea that the low risk searching for a pre-magic item is used to add a high impact change to the campaign fiction that negates a player's goals by altering fundamental facts about the situation. Personally, I have zero interest in a playstyle where a failed shopping trip means that the world can fundamentally shift.

Failing on a high risk challenge should have big consequences. Failing to successfully locate a hammer you think it would be nice to have shouldn't.

Funny you should mention this: in the game I played in last night we in fact hit a high-risk situation (we'd set off a trap and completely walled ourselves in) in which it would have been really nice to have had a hammer (to beat our way through a wall); and nobody did.

Lan-"not always the sharpest hammer in the toolbox but I try my best"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

Well, examining a single parameter of a complex system (say albedo in earth's climate system) is not only useful to understand the latter, but infinitely less entangled! We don't need to even have a conversation about the earth climate system to discuss/analyze albedo.

True, but without the surrounding context the study results become rather meaningless.

The same goes for an instance of GM Force and a campaign that can be classified as a railroad. It can be discerned if "this is an instance of play where (a) the GM suspends/subordinates the action resolution mechanics to impose their preferred outcome or (b) undermines the impact on play of a/the player(s) thematically/strategically/tactically significant choices (these choices could be at build-stage or during play)."

Whatever your threshold is for a full campaign to be the equivalent of a railroad doesn't need to be answered to examine that.

While I see what you're saying here I think there's a bit more to it:
1. Micro-railroading (or scene-framing, sometimes) is vastly different than macro-railroading
2. There's the context of intent in both cases - whether the DM is railroading out of spite (bad), out of incompetence (bad but maybe forgiveable), or out of a genuine attempt to generate a better game/experience (good)
3. Looking at micro-instances is probably going to lead to different conclusions than looking at macro-instances

1. Thanks I'm not sure if you'd enjoy it, but the optimism is noted!
2. My 1e AD&D games make heavy use of the granular hex-crawl and wilderness survival mechanics. As a result, its much more gritty and likely too laborious for folks that aren't keen on that. But the guys that I have historically GMed it for love that. I wouldn't call them "mechanics-first", but they're definitely "mechanics-intensive" (as 1e is, especially with WSG). My guess is a lot of people currently posting on these boards wouldn't enjoy my 1e games so much.

I don't mind gritty and laborious but I've little patience for mechanics when they get in the way.

I'm a big (huge is probably more like it) fan of chute traps that go down to the next dungeon level. So this could easily have been an instance of that.

I'm also a big fan, and I'm well accustomed to DMing a split party.

I've actually got to get out, so I'll get to the rest of your post later this evening. I'll focus in on a couple things in that post.

Sorry for cutting things in half.

No worries, though it'll maybe be a day or two till I get back to you.

Lanefan