Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Imaro]

The primary reason why I am so down on a flexible approach comes down to expectations. The value of any social system is setting expectations and granting permissions.

Yes but if the expectation that various techniques will use within the framework of the games rules... and the DM is transparent with said techniques... isn't that value still attained/maintained?

When I am playing in a game where GM techniques are bound to change moment to moment I have no way to meaningfully make impactful decisions. I cannot feel the ground underneath my feet. If a game does not optimally fit the experience I am looking for I can either sit this one out or take on the interests of the game and have a measure of fun. When I have tried running games like this in the past the cognitive weight of constantly reading the room and prioritizing one player's desires over another was soul crushing for me.

So is it from a DM perspective, a players perspective or both that you find the mixing of techniques non-satisfactory? Also I'd like to delve further into some of the comments above but I want to make sure I have a grasp on and am on the same page when it comes to what you are expressing here... Can you give an example where meaningful decisions are made untenable through the using of various techniques in the same game or play session?

On a side note I find [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s (and I believe [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s as well) way of playing (at least as they have described it and given examples of it in this thread) to have the same type of dissonance for me (the feeling of not having the ground beneath my feet)... where my chance to spot something, instead of determining whether I see it, actually determines whether it exists in the fiction or not at all... and/or whether my brother is evil. How do I determine what the consequences of failure for an action are when it can be anything deemed appropriate by the DM.

The pain point for me is this: we get a situation where we all sit around the table and try to play our own individual games instead of playing the same game. We do not address our very real conflicts of interest. Instead we depend on the GM to smooth them over. When things become untenable socially we look to the GM to resolve our social conflict and lack of trust in each other. We put all the responsibility on the GM for our own fun making running a game an onerous task. Because the GM takes on this extra social responsibility this can often shift the dynamics away from one where we are peers, fellow gamers, and creative collaborators.

I'm not sure I agree with all of this. We are still playing the same game if the DM is transparent about how he will be running it (even if using a variety of techniques). We do depend on the GM to smooth over (I would say give screen time too) the conflicts of interest that individuals may have due to their differing desires and goals for the game.

Now where I disagree...I would say that the GM arbitrating social conflicts is not a requirement in a GM-Driven game... players are just as free to work out their social conflicts with each other as they are to call on the GM to intervene. And where you see this as a lack of trust in the players I see this as giving trust to the DM. I often find this preferable because the DM tends to have an overall view of the game and isn't advocating for one particular character (remember we are not discussing the worst case scenario but instead are assuming DM's with integrity as the default).

I also don't agree that a DM driven game puts all the responsibility for fun on the DM. It give the DM certain parameters in which to design so that he accommodates the various player types at his table but they still are responsible for engaging with and making choices about the DM generated content and fiction that bring about fun for themselves. As a DM I don't find this onerous at all... but instead relish the creative experience of designing the world and the uncertainty around how or even if the players will choose to have their characters interact with what is put before them. For me that's what I enjoy about running the game. While I agree that all playing the games are peers and collaborators... I don't agree that in order to achieve this we all must have equal say in all parts of the game. I see the player and DM roles as fundamentally different but equal for the enjoyment of the play experience.

Upthread [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] bulked a bit when I suggested that any player could air a grievance about the fiction or group direction openly. This sort of thing as a common fixture of my play group. It is expected that we are all going to work together to resolve player level conflicts of interest. It is a necessary component to ensuring that all players remain engaged and motivated. Hacking the game is something that is always on the table as well as making adjustments to our characters and the fiction.

I can't speak for [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] but I can say that I have no issues with a player airing a grievance about the fiction or group direction openly... as long as it doesn't bring the play to a screeching halt for 2 hours. See the thing is sometimes with a group, especially of individuals advocating for themselves... these types of discussions can drag the entire game down... where as one trusted person who makes a decision all are willing to accept can keep the game going and avoid deadlock arguments. I would have to know more about the type of hacking and adjustments you are speaking to in your last sentence to comment on it. Are you saying in the middle of the game a player can change the abilities his character has? Rewrite the fiction of a room? Add fiction to said room? Or what exactly?

 

[Imaro]

Because this is a quick one and I've answered it before, I'll just do this right quick. Couple easy examples:

1) It places a greater cognitive burden on players. To some that is a feature. To others it is too mentally taxing/exhausting (3 buddies of mine I solely run AD&D and B/X for are in this camp).

2) Why would someone smuggle "ask questions and use the answers" in the midst of a B/X dungeon crawl?

a) We don't need answers. The prep is already done to create those answers.
b) The system machinery works beautifully as is. Interesting, challenging stuff is going to spin out of orthodox play. All it's inclusion would likely do is render something coherent and functional incoherent and disfunctional.
c) There is no system machinery and play principles to account for/integrate it. Challenge/puzzle gaming can become compromised then with unintegrated player authorial control (coupled with neutral refereeing) that works at cross purposes.

A-C above makes "ask questions and use the answers" a bad fit for a game like B/X.

Ok... number 1... I get and understand (actuallyI agree with it and it serves to illustrate a big component of whether certain techniques are a good fit having to do with players and type.

But you've totally lost me with number 2... I'm reading it but I think I may be having a hard time parsing exactly what you are saying, but I'm not sure why...

 

[Nagol]

Ok... number 1... I get and understand (actuallyI agree with it and it serves to illustrate a big component of whether certain techniques are a good fit having to do with players and type.

But you've totally lost me with number 2... I'm reading it but I think I may be having a hard time parsing exactly what you are saying, but I'm not sure why...

I'll give a shot at answering. Apologies if this is stuff you already know.

The phrase "Ask questions and use answers" is a principle of Dungeonworld GMing. One of the expectations of the game is the GM cannot know everything and will seek input to keep momentum going. Another expectation is the GM is curious how the situations will be resolved. So the GM is encouraged to ask questions and incorporate the answers into the fiction as it is playing out at the table. One of the easiest and most common questions is "Now that X has happened, what do you do?" but any time the DM doesn't know something, he is encouraged to ask some form of question to help fill in the blanks. So if the PCs declare they don't trust the chest in the middle of the room and prod it with a pole if might in fact be a mimic. It wasn't a mimic until the PCs decided to engage with it but now that they have, there it is. Dungeonworld play is best characterised by the question "What is going to happen?"

This principle conflicts with the base B/X DM stance which Is that is neutral adjudicator who primarily reacts to PC gambits. The chest in the middle of the room either is or is not a mimic as dictated by the map key and notes. B/X play is best characterised by the question "How well will we do?"

Play is engaging and fun for those involved for somewhat different reasons in the games.

 

[Imaro]

Apparently "summary dismissal" has some meaning in American English that is different from its meaning in Australian English.

In the usage I'm familiar with, replying to someone and trying to tease out possible reasons something undesirable might have happened in a game - on a very thing evidence base - isn't a dismissal, let alone a summary one.

Wait a minute... what? these were the replies to that example...

Not too surprising - either that a 25-year veteran of traditional TTRPGs would pull a gaff like that, nor that the table's reaction was to toss the mechanic rather than try to master it. You spring a new idea in an otherwise comfortable and familiar environment, and the most likely consequences are going to be clumsily leveraging the idea within the priorities of the existing paradigm and/or rejecting it outright.

Ok, in this post we are given "the" reasons for the reaction by a poster who knows absolutely nothing about the group... how does this type of reply do anything but make assumptions and shut down conversation? Nowhere is [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION] asked anything about the assumptions being made about his group... he is instead told why they reacted the way they did.

also...

Not having been at your (Sadras's) table for this event, it's hard to comment, but as you present it it looks like a pretty tightly GM-run game (eg the hurting of the PCs' allies in the organisation is similar to the assassination of the marquis that was being discussed upthread - this seems to have been narrated by the GM as a "failure off-screen" consequence for the players having their PCs deny the boss's request). Was the player being juvenile? Deliberately disruptive? Didn't have any other ideas? Couldn't conceive of anything else being feasible in the fiction?

I don't see this sort of example as any sort of "case against" player input into the shared fiction.

Now you at least pose some questions and are trying to suss out what happened... but again the last sentence seems to indicate that you've already decided what you opinion of the example is without any of the pertinent information you asked for...

 

[pemerton]

It still, however, completely defeats the point of creative role-playing by reducing a social interaction to a series of dice rolls.

Luckily that's not what the systems that I GM (4e, BW, Cortex/MHRP) do.

 

[pemerton]

Ideally, [the gameworld is] presented in exactly the same way to:
- an angst-riddled Elf Druid who just wants to sort out his feelings for his father and then save all the poor defenseless trees
- a roaring drunkard of a Part-Orc warrior whose only motivation is to kill anything he can and then eat it afterwards
- a lonely Mage who is looking for her husband, who long ago ran off to join the militia and never came back
- a happy Dwarf Rogue who has no real motivations at all other than adventuring is more fun than mining

If this is the party that gets rolled up I'm just going to find a way to get them into a field adventure and then run that adventure.

Well, that is pretty different from how I run a game.

I don't run what you call "field adventures". And I frame the PCs into situations that speak to their needs and aspirations as characters.

Your job (and my job, in my game) is to as neutrally as you can present the game world, the setting, the opportunities for adventure, and the inhabitants of all of the above.

That might be a reasonable description of your job. It's a terrible description of mine, though!

My job (as I conceive of it) is to apply pressure to the players, by presenting to them ingame situations that - in light of their PCs' concerns, aspirations, etc -drive those PCs to action. To quote Paul Czege,

Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently.

<snip>

I'm having trouble capturing in dispassionate words what it's like, so I'm going to have to dispense with dispassionate words. By god, when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out.

<snip>

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.

<snip>

the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.​

I suspect my RPGing is pretty lowbrow by Czege's standards, but his statement of method is one that I often come back to. The gameworld is not something that I present "neutrally". I'm doing my best to turn that "firehose of adversity and situation" onto the PCs: to force the players to make choices that will push them in terms of their aspirations and motivations (both in character, and in their capacity as third-person-barrackers-for-their-PCs).

In my experience, that's how RPGing produces dramatic characters and dramatic story.

 

[pemerton]

I am still somewhat uncomfortable with the player driven vs. GM driven framing. Under that framing it feels like the point is to resolve creative conflicts between players and GMs. That's not what I want. Ideally when we sit down to play a game our interests as players are the same. What I want rules to bring to the table is a fiction that is not what either of us wanted, but is compelling enough to accept. I want the game to actively contribute.

I think I agree with all this.

My reason for the qualifier "I think" is that what counts as the game actively contributing might be understood differently. I'm thinking of both mechanics and princples, which - together - generate constraints on what new stuff can be introduced into the shared fiction, when, and by whom.

When I'm talking about player- vs GM-driven, I'm not trying to point to a conflict of interests, but rather where the impetus for the content of the shared fiction comes from. In talking about player-driven RPGing, I'm trying to get at the idea that the player - through the building and playing of the PC - is at the heart of the shared fiction; and that the GM is riffing off the players, and introducing material to challenge or respond to what the players have put out there.

Again, as with my earlier post, none of the above is intended as persuasion or even justification, just elaboration/explanation. (And I think you'll see that ideas around "intent" or player aspiration/motivation are figuring in the previouos paragraphs in a way that you may not fully identify or agree with. I'm not trying to be bloody-minded in doing that. Rather, it's the framework within which I'm able to articulate my approach - though, as I hope has come through in some of my posts contrasting MHRP/Cortex with BW with 4e, I don't see my approach as being entirely monolithic.)

 

[pemerton]

It was binding. The check was for him to reveal himself. Not to reveal himself and then not do anything about it. Once he revealed himself, you were no longer bound with regard to his actions. An advisor presumably has an agile mind and would try to mitigate the revealing the first check caused. Those are two different actions.

I think it's a sufficient response to say that I (and my players) were there and you were not. And hence we had a better handle on what had been established, and what happened, then you are going to have by reading a couple of posts several years later.

For instance, what was central to the situation, but what you are completely missing (and I think [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] missed it also), was that the advisor's revealing of his treachery affected the other NPCs present, especially the Baron - that is, his treachery was revealed to them. And the PCs had succeeded in their goal of not embarassing the Baron: the opprobrium had fallen entirely on the advisor.

This mattered to how subsequent events unfolded, and when I started to frame things without full regard to this my player correctly called me on it.

 

[pemerton]

How do I determine what the consequences of failure for an action are when it can be anything deemed appropriate by the DM.

Luke Crane explains (Adventure Burner, p 251):

I find the results of failure implicit in most tests. If I'm doing my job correctly as GM, the situation is so charged that the player knows he's going to get dragged into a world of **** if he fails. We project the consequences into the fiction as we're talking in-character and jockeying before the test.​

In my case, there is also out-of-carachter talking and jockeying.

I would relate this to [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s invocation (from PbtA-type games) of honesty in relation to the fiction. The consequences are implicit in the trajectory of things: past events; PC Beliefs/background/aspirations; the framing of this particular check.

I can tell you, at the table, when the search for the mace revealed the black arrows, there was shock (in the sense of horror), but not shock (in the sense of confusion). No one was puzzled as to where that bit of fiction came from.

I'm hoping that some of the more Player-Driven-Minded folks will be willing to share their views on the drawbacks of that approach

I'd be interested in this as well... [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], and any others that would be interested in chiming in?

By "drawbacks" do we mean "bad things"? In that case, I can't say I've encountered any.

If we're talking about weaknesses in particular systems, well that's a different topic. 4e has well-known issues about the interface between combat and non-combat resolution.

If we're talking about challenges for or demands on participants, that's a different thing too. MHRP/Cortex Heroic puts a lot of pressure on the GM to manage the Doom Pool effectively, which is often not easy to do at all. BW is demanding on players, because (i) it asks them to give so much to the game, and (ii) a lot of the time it punches them in the gut as a reward for that giving. But I wouldn't call this a "drawback" - it's the system doing exactly what it says on the tin!

So, I don't know of any general disadvantages to running a game in which the action and the focus of the shared fiction has its origin with the players' choices for their PCs. Unless one doesn't want to run such a game. But that's not really a "drawback", so much as a mismatch of methods with preferences. [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] gives an example of this with respect to B/X. I ran a session of AD&D fairly recently, using random dungeon generation, and obviously that's a very different thing - but I ended up reaching the following conclusion:

I think if I was going to try AD&D again I would really need to put the effort in to designing a more interesting dungeon - the number of empty rooms was a real issue. On the other hand, a greater density of inhabitants increases the proportion of combat to exploration and the likelihood of a TPK, so I'm not sure that that is a straightforward solution. And increasing the "story" elements (eg chaotic sigils and ancient scrolls) tends to push things in a direction that other systems are probably better at. So, in the end, I'm not sure that this sort of classic D&D is the best fit for our group.

So, as I said, no drawbacks for my group.

 

[Maxperson]

I think it's a sufficient response to say that I (and my players) were there and you were not. And hence we had a better handle on what had been established, and what happened, then you are going to have by reading a couple of posts several years later.

Sure. Why would the advisor have gone Forest Gump, though, and not have tried to mitigate what happened? That doesn't make any sense to me. Perhaps you could clarify.

For instance, what was central to the situation, but what you are completely missing (and I think [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] missed it also), was that the advisor's revealing of his treachery affected the other NPCs present, especially the Baron - that is, his treachery was revealed to them. And the PCs had succeeded in their goal of not embarassing the Baron: the opprobrium had fallen entirely on the advisor.

How does the advisor trying to mitigate things 1) somehow embarrass the Baron, or 2) rewind time so that he didn't reveal his treachery? It seems to me that both of those goals are still accomplished regardless of his attempts to mitigate the damage.