Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Lanefan]

But the event in the fiction doesn't cause that!

What causes that is a whole lot of stuff in the real world: the GM describes a monster entering a room in which persons A, B and C are; certain other people at the table understanding that A, B and C are their player characters; there being rules of the game that establish how to decide what happens when player characters are charged by monsters, and those rules requiring the rolling of initiative; etc.

If every event in the fiction correlated uniformly to a particular real-world event, the conflation mightn't matter. But that isn't true in anyone's game. For instance, not every charging of a monster through a door triggers the rolling of dice at some table (eg no one rolled dice because the gelationous cubes "charged" into the room where the advisor was trying to get the tapestry).

<trying and failing to wrap my mind around the idea of a charging gelatinous cube>

Was this event onstage or offstage? I ask because if onstage I just can't imagine an adventuring party not taking out the g-cubes when they had the chance...and that, as always, would involve dice.

Upthread I've said a bit about what might count as a significant change in the context of the advisor episode. The passage of two weeks between sessions doesn't count!

The passage of two weeks in the game world, however...? (and no, I'm not assuming you use Gygax's suggestion of real-world time passing = game world time passing)

The advisor episode happened in 4e, which does have non-combat resolution with finality (namely, skill challenges).

Every system has its bugs...

Even in AD&D, non-functionality is not the relevant criterion for finality, however: a subdued dragon, for instance - which clearly is still functional - "remains subdued for an indefinite period, but if the creature is not strongly held, well treated, given ample treasure, and allowed ample freedom, it will seek to kill its captor and/or escape" (MM p 30). UA (p 109) elaborates that a subdued creature "will not further attack the group that subdued it . . . [and] will submit, but seek the first chance to escape and, if the party that captured it is weaker than itself, turn on its captors. This subdual will last as long as the party has a clear upper hand."

As long as the party has the upper hand, and - in the case of a dragon - is treating it well with treasure and freedom, the subdual will last indefinitely. The subdued monster is not "able to keep going, trying to mitigate the losses, try a different gambit, and so on".

That's finality of resolution without requiring, in the fiction, non-functionality.

Not sure how you read it, but "seek the first chance to escape and ... turn on its captors" and "try a different gambit" seem pretty similar to me.

Also, the subdued monster is able to keep going and can try to mitigate its losses - only not at the expense of those who have subdued it. For a dragon, its captors have to treat it well with treasure (so it continues to amass wealth) and freedom (which seems to automatically imply it'll have a chance to escape sooner rather than later...odd contradiction there) so it's a win-win for the dragon.

Yeah, not much finality there.

Lanefan

 

[Tony Vargas]

Honestly, this insistence that the DCs are based on the level of the skill challenge not the PCs is getting a bit obsessive

It's just a fact.

when the skill challenge is probably being designed for the group of PCs and the recommended level of the skill challenge starts with the levels of the PCs.

In a tailored style campaign, that'd be one way to do it. In a status-quo style one, not so much.

4e gave players a lot of 'agency' but it was still D&D, and still pretty DM-driven in the sense that it made it easy for the DM to build an encounter or skill challenge in advance with the expectation that the PCs would, well, encounter it (not merely DM-driven, but tailored). That was especially true in the organized-play Encounters format. Later Encounters scenarios were less linear, that way, and some 4e adventures were outright status-quo 'sandboxes.' FWIW.

It would be pretty pointless to design a skill challenge at level 25 and throw it at a bunch of level 4 PCs, particularly if you're trying to engage in a player-driven, scene framed campaign. You'd just be railroading them into failure.

Hey, that's actually getting back on topic!

If you're using player-driven techniques, you probably design challenges in general (skill or combat) in response to what the PCs are trying to do. If they try to do something that'd be very difficult for them, it'll be higher level than if they tried to accomplish something easy. Far from 'railroading them into failure' presenting them with a challenge that they probably can't resolve in their favor when they attempt something that is entirely beyond them arguably preserves their agency. A system that gives you more dependable level of challenge in a mismatch as well as in an 'appropriate' one is handy in that kind of situation.

I guess the 'framing' could come into it to find a path of lesser resistance. The classic example in status-quo design is the dragon that the party can't fight (combat challenge) successfully, but may be able to bribe/flatter (social challenge) or find an alternate route (exploration challenge) past. The combat option might be far beyond the PC's abilities, the social challenge difficult & perhaps at a high cost, and the exploration challenge relatively easy (find a clear path around the dragon's territory) but time-consuming, for instance. Or, they might all be non-starters.

 

[Lanefan]

When I say that I don't like "GM's secret backstory", I've been talking about the use of such secret backstory as a consideration in action resolution. I think there was quite an extended discussion of this upthread,wih [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION].

An example (hypothetical only) of secret backstory operating as a consdieration in action resolution: the PCs try to out the advisor in a way that will damage his relationship with the baron, but fail because - unbeknownst to the players - the GM has decided that the advisor is holding the baron's niece hostage, and is thereby exercising leverage over the baron.

Which would be an interesting twist - the PCs have unknowingly already succeeded by default at their main task (alerting the Baron to the fact that his advisor is a rat) because the Baron in fact already knows this, and their real task that they don't know about is to somehow convince the Baron they're on his side and that they are themselves aware that the advisor is bent.

So in play they succeed in outing the advisor - not to the Baron, but to the rest of his court - and the Baron dismisses them. Later, they get a secret message from the Baron telling them how things really stand; and away things go...

(4) The PCs defend a homestead against goblin attackers. They learn (i) that the homestead contains a magical tapestry, and (ii) that the goblins are searching for it. (How they learn those things now escapes me, as it was many years of play ago; my best guess would be talking to NPCs.) When approaching a goblin fortress, they see a wizardly type wearing a yellow robe fly off on a flying carpet. They have heard other stories of a wizardly type in yellow robes hanging out suspiciously in the local area. In a tunnel beneath the fortress they find a torn scrap of yellow robe in a place that (they work out somehow - again, I can't remember the details) the tapestry had once hung. Somehow (perhaps a scrying spell of some sort?) they learn that the yellow-robed wizard was driven out by the gelatinous cubes which they just defeated.

GM commentary: This begins as colour: the goblins need a motivation for attacking the homestead, and the presence of the tapestry provides it. The presence of a
yellow-robed mastermind zooming around on a flying carpet adds to the colour. The colour becomes part of the framing of the skill challenge, however: the PCs play on it in the course of making skill checks (eg obliquely taunting the advisor about his defeat by the cubes, by boasting how easily they - the PCs - were able to defeat said cubes;
and then taunting him about his torn robe).[/indent]

There is no secret backstory as an element of action resolution in any of the above. The resolution follows from the framing and the checks.

The example above is from Night's Dark Terror, and that thing is nothing but a whole string of mysteries and secret backstories the PCs have to wade through and figure out! Who is this yellow-robed wizard? Where and how does the Iron Ring crew fit in? What's the relationship between the (three?) different goblin tribes? How does any of this relate to what those bozoes up the valley are doing; and what are they doing anyway? What's this bloody tapestry got to do with anything? And that's just the ones I can remember off the top.

The first time I tried running it even I as DM couldn't entirely figure out what was supposed to be going on; small wonder the players couldn't either!

Lan-"sometimes the best adventures come from setting out to do one thing and - knowingly or not - in fact doing something else much more significant"

 

[Lanefan]

[The GM's] job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments . . . by introducing complications. . . .

[O]nce the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character . . . . The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.​

This also relates back to my discussion with [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] about "GMing blind". I hope it's clear that a GM can't run a game in this sort of way without understanding, both in general and at the crunch point, what the player takes to be motivating his/her PC.

Which seems to me to be a) all about the character's introspection (earlier I called this emo-gaming) and personal story rather than anything on a grander scale, and b) very closed-ended; sure the character may have resolved her own internal issues but there's still a great big world out there to go adventuring in, so why stop now?

Well, what you call a system fault, I call a system strength.

(I also don't see this radical difference between befriending someone and picking a lock. How do you know that you gave it your best shot? Only because the dice tell you! Yesterday I was having trouble with a stiff lock - I thought I'd given it my best shot, and didn't want to break the key in it. Then I jiggled a bit more and it opened! But there's this colleague at work whom I'd like to befriend, and whom I've tried to befriend, but for whatever reason I just think it's not going to happen between us.)

There's people I've known who were friends once but are not now; while others who I once had little use for I've come around to. This more commonly happens over the long term but I've seen it happen during the course of one evening. Social interactions are dynamic things.

EDIT: Also, re combat: in D&D nothing tells you that the ogre is dead except a mechanical process of tabulation of successes. Why, in principle, can the same procedure not be used to tell you other stuff about the ogre? What is it about death that makes it uniquely suited to being established, as an element of the fiction, in such a manner? Nothing that I can see.

As I said earlier (somewhere), we can't play out the combat in real life at the table so we need a mechanical representation of it; but we can play out the social-interaction side and thus usually don't (or shouldn't) need mechanics to represent such.

Lan-"more than once I've known people who couldn't stand each other on first meeting end up happily married to each other"-efan

 

[Ilbranteloth]

My own view is that what I think you mean by "shared authoring" can often be overrated, or at least exaggerated, as an element of player-driven RPGing.

In the OP there is "shared authoring" in one sense: the player declares a Perception check, and its success results in it being true, of the fiction, that it contains a vessel in the room. But the player didn't author that by any sort of fiat: it was a part of the process of action declaration and action resolution.

4e has less of that sort of mechanic than BW; MHRP/Cortex has more of it. Rolemaster, which I GMed near-exclusively for nearly 20 years, has none of it.

At least as I approach GMing, the key to a player-driven game is not that the players get to directly author the fiction in the moment of play. Rather, what is key is (i) that the GM frames scenes having regard to the evinced concerns/interests of the players, and the dramatic needs of their PCs (these might come out in part by the players' authoring of PC backstory, which is not the same as authoring fiction in the moment of play), and (ii) that the GM, in narrating consequences of action resolution, allows player success to stand, and connects failures back to those concerns/interests/dramatic needs.

So the players are not driving in virtue of authorship (in any literal sense). Rather, they are the ones who establish the focus, the stakes, and - via their successes - at least some of the consequences.

OK, if that's what you're referring to, then I totally agree. I do think it's very important to pull the characters into the campaign world and the adventure. Which is exactly what I mean when I say the players/characters write the story.

Luke's motivation was to go to university. His goals didn't include joining the alliance and fighting the empire.

A separate story was occurring in the same vicinity. A droid had a message to get to Obi-Wan. This story is entirely independent of Luke's, and doesn't address his motivations at all, although it does tie into his backstory (even if the whole backstory wasn't written yet - typical of my approach too).

When the two stories intersect, though, a new motivation is given to Luke by the story when his family is killed.

A lot of the time, I'm tying into unwritten or unknown parts of the PCs backstory. For example, one player indicated his character is divorced. So I added an ex-brother-in-law, who was (not so) secretly the cause of the divorce, who also happens to be a lycanthrope and part of an evil organization, which he didn't know. What he chooses to do with that new information is up to him.

Another's ranger was "estranged" from his family, no specifics yet. As it turns out, he was sold into slavery by his older brother, after he killed their father. He later found out that his "brother" was a doppelgänger, and that his brother was very likely sold into slavery as well. In addition, he had a very disturbing encounter when he found himself battling the zombie of his father.

The druid was given the family Moonblade in part for safekeeping. She later found she (and the sword) were being hunted by a distant uncle, and following the battle between them where the uncle was killed, that he was being controlled by an evil artifact. So she made it a mission to return his body to Evereska to clear his name and give him a proper burial, along with looking for a way to destroy the artifact. I didn't have to directly address her motivations to learn how to use the Moonblade or find her way home, since she took actions to accomplish those.

Not everybody has such motivations, or hooks in their backstories, though. Just like I don't want every story to be a "save the world" epic, I don't want every character to have a dark secret, or family with ties to evil organizations, or to great power. For most of the characters, I want them to simply be normal people, working to help their family have a place to live and food to eat.

Essentially, a Bilbo-type character. One that has no initial desire to be part of the dramatic stories of the world, that finds them drawn in by other events. Sure, Gandalf selected Bilbo for specific reasons, but in many cases it's not even a selection.

A character that's a farmer in a village, that is attacked by giants. In the process of helping to hunt down the giants, they find friends and adventure along the way. After which they decide to look for more. Deep backstories, and ties to sinister plots need not always apply. One of the reasons I really like this approach is it gives experienced RPG players and opportunity to let the story unfold for the characters in much the same way it does when you're a first time RPG player.

So I get it, the initial hook is protecting what's important to the farmer. But it's a simple hook, and really, that's often all you need.

 

[Ovinomancer]

It's just a fact.

In a tailored style campaign, that'd be one way to do it. In a status-quo style one, not so much.

4e gave players a lot of 'agency' but it was still D&D, and still pretty DM-driven in the sense that it made it easy for the DM to build an encounter or skill challenge in advance with the expectation that the PCs would, well, encounter it (not merely DM-driven, but tailored). That was especially true in the organized-play Encounters format. Later Encounters scenarios were less linear, that way, and some 4e adventures were outright status-quo 'sandboxes.' FWIW.

Hey, that's actually getting back on topic!

If you're using player-driven techniques, you probably design challenges in general (skill or combat) in response to what the PCs are trying to do. If they try to do something that'd be very difficult for them, it'll be higher level than if they tried to accomplish something easy. Far from 'railroading them into failure' presenting them with a challenge that they probably can't resolve in their favor when they attempt something that is entirely beyond them arguably preserves their agency. A system that gives you more dependable level of challenge in a mismatch as well as in an 'appropriate' one is handy in that kind of situation.

I guess the 'framing' could come into it to find a path of lesser resistance. The classic example in status-quo design is the dragon that the party can't fight (combat challenge) successfully, but may be able to bribe/flatter (social challenge) or find an alternate route (exploration challenge) past. The combat option might be far beyond the PC's abilities, the social challenge difficult & perhaps at a high cost, and the exploration challenge relatively easy (find a clear path around the dragon's territory) but time-consuming, for instance. Or, they might all be non-starters.

Outside of environmental challenges, how does one go about designing skill challenges in the world that player may encounter that wouldn't be railroading? I mean, take the encounter in question: get the Advisor to out himself to the Baron. How would one place something of similar scope, a high stakes social challenge, out in the world without preassuming the nature of the challenge and theyby fixing how players must interact with it. It seems to be that the very concept of skill challenges have a heavy bias towards being player driven.

The caveat, as mentioned, would be things like environment challenges. You could certainly prescript the skill challenge for climbing to the top of Very High and Dangerous Mountain, for instance, or crossing the Trackless Sea of Hot and Deadly Sand, Plus Snakes, but outside of fixed geography challenges like VHDM or TSHDSPS, I'm not seeing how you can prescript skill challenges without knowing player intent.

Note: I played and enjoyed 4e for five years. Skill Challenges took me awhile, but I liked them for the kludge they were. And I say kludge because there's an attempt to use unsuited mechanics (D20 rolls and scaled bonuses) in a way that made non-combat encounters less reliant on the swinginess of the core mechanic.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Outside of environmental challenges, how does one go about designing skill challenges in the world that player may encounter that wouldn't be railroading?

The same way you'd design a combat or anything else.

D&D has a bias towards combat, that way. Most creatures have combat stats, so you place a creature, *boom*, you've created a combat challenge. D&D, when it's had skills at all, has had a fairly simplistic skill system, generally with little more than opposed checks (which are very swingy) to handle a skill-based conflict, and mostly just individual pass/fail checks. Skill challenges were at least something to work with.

Skill Challenges took me awhile, but I liked them for the kludge they were. And I say kludge because there's an attempt to use unsuited mechanics (D20 rolls and scaled bonuses) in a way that made non-combat encounters less reliant on the swinginess of the core mechanic.

Ouch. That is a very un-flattering comment on the d20 system (D&D and SRD games from 2000-present), itself, but I suppose it's not entirely undeserved. In addition to Skill Challenges (which improved from non-functional at introduction to merely kludgy in their final form, about two years later), d20 has also used 'complex skill checks' (just repeating a binary check a certain number of times to complete a task), equally binary qualifiers like trained-only, passive scores and the somewhat more useful group skill check - as well as the afore-mentioned even-swingier opposed checks. Skill Challenges, group checks, and secret rolls vs passive scores seem like the best of those mechanical attempts to make a go of d20 skills.

 

[Lanefan]

That does mean the modeling of PCs is pro-active and action-oriented, PCs do things, move the story, and are the focus of that story. Everything else provides the back-drop and challenges of the PCs' story. An NPC isn't ever a protagonist, even if it's an ally of the PCs, and helping it accomplish something is a focus of their story for a time. An antagonistic PC, like the one in pemerton's example, is, by definition an antagonist to the PC protagonists, it would be absurd, not just in the sense of silly or counter-productive, but logically nonsensical, to try to give him 'protagonism' or agency.

[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] - something doesn't quite parse here, at least when I read it.

Did you mean to type "An antagonistic NPC" where I've bolded?

If yes, why is it absurd for an NPC to be protagonistic or proactive rather than simply antagonistic or reactive?

If no, then what are you trying to say?

I think the point is, rather, that the abilities of the NPC should figure into the skill challenge, as that paints the challenge more vividly and makes it more interesting. The basic SC mechanism - n successes before 3 failures, at DCs determined by the level of the Skill Challenge (not the party) - does not have a lot of space for an opposing NPC. The opposition (or just involvement) of an NPC might determine the level of the challenge and influence the difficulty of checks & number of successes required.

I wonder...what's stopping a DM from going one step further and in fact allowing the NPC (in this case the advisor) to run his own skill challenge against the party? In other words, allow the NPC to make the first move and be the aggressor (proactive) rather than just sitting there waiting for the PCs to come to him (reactive).

Or better yet, simultaneous competing skill challenges!

Lanefan

 

[Tony Vargas]

Did you mean to type "An antagonistic NPC" where I've bolded?

Yes. Sorry about the typo.

If yes, why is it absurd for an NPC to be protagonistic or proactive rather than simply antagonistic or reactive?

It's absurd for an antagonist to be protagonistic. It's a bit absurd for an NPC to 'lack agency,' too. The DM is running the whole setting, not just the one NPC.

I wonder...what's stopping a DM from going one step further and in fact allowing the NPC (in this case the advisor) to run his own skill challenge against the party?

Nothing stops a DM from doing whatever he wants, of course, but what would be the point? The DM would make a bunch of die rolls. Yippee. Kinda like having two monsters fight eachother - you can go through the motions, but most of the time it doesn't add anything.

In other words, allow the NPC to make the first move and be the aggressor (proactive) rather than just sitting there waiting for the PCs to come to him (reactive).

It shouldn't change the mechanics, if the NPC were the aggressor in a social challenge, the Skill Challenge would still be a skill challenge - the PCs would have to get n successes before 3 failures to fend off the NPC aggressor's social gambit. It might be more or less successes at lower or higher difficulty, depending upon how good the NPC is at that kind of thing relative to how good he is in the 'reactive' mode.

Or better yet, simultaneous competing skill challenges!

That's the kind of lack I was lamenting some pages back, yes. I could imagine 'contested challenges' in which it's some number of 'net successes' (3 perhaps, for symmetry) to win, for instance. But, I've never heard of or tried anything like that, and I'd be concerned that they'd have the same issues as contested checks - it'd take some playtesting, I suppose, just another thing that might've been had Skill Challenges been kept around a while longer (or invented a couple decades sooner, I suppose).
What I have done is give an NPC a trait or power(s) that was applicable to a skill challenge, so they could mess with the PCs and have a more active role in its resolution.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The same way you'd design a combat or anything else.

D&D has a bias towards combat, that way. Most creatures have combat stats, so you place a creature, *boom*, you've created a combat challenge. D&D, when it's had skills at all, has had a fairly simplistic skill system, generally with little more than opposed checks (which are very swingy) to handle a skill-based conflict, and mostly just individual pass/fail checks. Skill challenges were at least something to work with.

I don't follow. Combat encounters don't have fixed outcomes, but skill challenges do. A combat encounter can end with one side defeated, one side injured, one side running away, one side surrendering, one side being captured against their will -- pick multiples. Combat encounters have fixed entry points (usually), but not fixed exit points. Skill challenges, on the other hand, usually have both fixed entry and exit points -- the exit points are success at the challenge or failure at the challenge. So, to predefine a combat encounter, I just have to set where it is and what it is, but I don't have to set how it ends. With a skill challenge I also need to set how it ends, and this means I must know what the challenge is about. As I noted, things like environmental challenges are easy to guess -- you need to travel across this dangerous terrain -- but social challenges aren't possible to predict as they're very dependant on the immediate goals of the players. Unless you're railroading, of course, and will force a particular challenge with set parameters at that particular place.

Again, skill challenges are just more suited to being reactionary events to stated player intentions. They do not work very well being pre-scripted in a sandbox style.

Ouch. That is a very un-flattering comment on the d20 system (D&D and SRD games from 2000-present), itself, but I suppose it's not entirely undeserved. In addition to Skill Challenges (which improved from non-functional at introduction to merely kludgy in their final form, about two years later), d20 has also used 'complex skill checks' (just repeating a binary check a certain number of times to complete a task), equally binary qualifiers like trained-only, passive scores and the somewhat more useful group skill check - as well as the afore-mentioned even-swingier opposed checks. Skill Challenges, group checks, and secret rolls vs passive scores seem like the best of those mechanical attempts to make a go of d20 skills.

All skill systems in D&D that have been tied to the d20 core mechanic have been kludges, and many of them have not worked well. The swinginess of the d20 does a decent job of making combat exciting, and, since combats usually involved multiple rolls and are often a focus of D&D games, the swinginess averages out so players cans still make reasonable estimations of risk. But the skill systems don't do well with the swingyness of the d20, and so various kludges have come up to smooth out expectations and provide players with a reasonable estimation of success. 5e's incarnation is bounded accuracy and objective DCs. I'm meh on this as a resolution mechanic for skills, but then I've been meh on skill resolution for some time in D&D. It's not a huge hurdle for me, else I'd find a different system, and I've grown to dislike extensive house rules. My current set of house rules can fit on an index card and doesn't require small font.