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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5297096" data-attributes="member: 80487">Whereas the glossary in the 1st DMG offers:"Encounter -- An unexpected confrontation with a monster, another party, etc."If we've got to go through ABC... because the GM has determined that we shall, then that is EXACTLY what "railroad" means to me.I guess this is archaic in a certain subculture, but "normal" people seem still to understand it quite readily:Where there is game, there is no plot. Where there is plot, there is no game.  A thing that is as a whole called "a game" is not necessarily game -- as opposed to plot, or sheer randomness, or something else -- throughout. Snakes and Ladders or Candy Land is all randomness, no game. The player has no choices, no control.Star Wars (movie, book or comic) is all plot, no game. The viewer or reader has no choices, no control.A Choose Your Own Adventure book is much plot and some game. The reader has clearly limited choices, control only over which pre-written chapter comes next.Interactive fiction tends to benefit greatly from the resources that computerization affords. It's a big leap from CYOA to a sophisticated parser system! A human can do even more, but the power is largely wasted to the extent that there is nothing but plot to unroll. It is the game that calls for a game master."Plot, plot, eggs, ham and plot" may have not so much plot as some other things, but it is excluding game possibilities. The trend I see is toward exchanging the old D&D campaign game for the CYOA model that was pressed into service -- most notably with T&T, and secondarily with TFT, as "engine" -- for solitaire play. When one has no fellow players, not even one to be GM, the expedient may be better than no game at all.It can also, of course, be entertaining in its own right. However, compared even with such "primitive" computerized efforts as Ultima III it is notably constrained.Compared with old D&D, it is a world apart.</blockquote>

Verification