"Railroading" is just a pejorative term for...

[Ariosto]

I'm not sold on the idea that a sandbox has to explicitly be non-level appropriate.

That's not the idea.

Everything is "level appropriate" for someone!

Dave Arneson came up with levels in the first place so there could be something for everyone. The Superheroes and Wizards could find Balrogs to deal with, while the weaker figures could have a range of challenges better suited to them.

If all you've ever got is the same handful of people in lockstep, then you could run the game like a video game with sequential levels, I guess. I'm not sure what kind of world that would be; it might (depending on your setup) get pretty bizarre in terms of role-playing. Adequate variety for a touch of strategic interest, though, probably involves only a portion of the range of possibilities.

TIME is another important element in the "bang for buck" of a wider and richer playing field versus a more constrained one. In board games, it takes a lot more than a single day to get the full value out of something like Empires in Arms or Pacific War (although one can play very engaging limited scenarios using the latter). Something like Ogre or Illuminati or Nuclear War can certainly hold interest for replays, but it's basically a way to pass an hour or several -- not real-time years!

 

[pemerton]

we shouldn't assume the worst in how somebody else says their game works.

I can't XP you at this time, but wanted to express my agreement with this.

One thing I've enjoyed about this thread (and its "GM by the nose" predecessor) is that a lot of different viewpoints have been expressed and techniques discussed in a much more explanatory/exploratory fashion than is often the case on ENworld.

 

[Hussar]

I'm wary of hussar's approach as may abrogate my right to decline to pursue the hook. Granted, I have started games in "media res", already in the middle of action, but I try to limit the framing to a state that I think the PCs would realistically be in and minimize assumption of players actual choice.

Thus, forcing acceptance of being hired is risky to me. My PC may have no interest in being a hired guard. Though as a player, I might be resigned to accept it, for the sake of getting the game going. I'm certainly wary of a starting situation of "being in jail" as the DM's asssumption of my behavior on how I got there may contradict with my own view on what would get me incarcerated.

It's a catch-22, I may not be happy with Hussar's starting me in a scene I didn't actually make a prior decision to accept, versus pemerton's dislike of being presented with a hook that it is implied that you should accept.

When I'm GMing, IF you reject my hook and there is no reasonable way to re-use the material, I must aquiesce and make up stuff (possibly pausing the game). I guess pretty good, and I haven't had that happen, but if it does, I chalk that up to a bad GMing decision.

/snip.

Fair enough. As you and Pemerton have later expounded, it's not a hard and fast rule. Hard scene framing is exactly what I would call it. And, we don't really get too fussed about it because it's been 100% up front that this is what was going to happen. Again, since we're round robin DMing, and none of us has the time/energy to build an entire campaign, we've pretty much compromised by saying, "Ok, you are DM this week, you get to set the initial conditions and we will trust you with that power."

I have been involved in groups in the past where this would certainly never fly. I'm really lucky right now to be in the group that I'm in, so, the whole trust issue never comes up. Yeah, the initial conditions might be a bit wonky, but, hey, variety is the spice of life, so, if the DM, for example, started us off incarcerated, we'd probably run with it.

It's a really different style of gaming.

Pem - you mentioned The Dying Earth. I only got to play a couple of very short sessions of that, but, MAN, do I want to play that game again. That was a total blast.

 

[pemerton]

For those still following this thread - an actual play example of a railroad and the ensuing player/GM meltdown can be found here.

From my point of view, the problem here isn't the lack of sandbox - that is, the GM presenting a detailed situation with which the players are expected to engage via their PCs - but with the GM trying also to dictate the form that that engagement will take, leaving the players little to do but make local tactical decisions and roll the dice.

This also sheds light, for me, on the "4e is a dice rolling exercise" notion. As the example shows, a 3E game can also reduce (for the players) to nothing but tactics and dice. It's just that in 3E it is harder than in 4e to describe tactics and dice rolls without using language that also engages with the gameworld, whereas in 4e this is possible using almost entirely the metagame rules vocabulary.

But to my mind this doesn't make a game like the one described in that post more of a roleplaying game. It's just a dice-rolling exercise with colour.

4e, then, might be seen as a system that makes railroading harder because it makes it harder to cloak the railroading in the colour of roleplaying - the fact that it's nothing but tactics and dice becomes transparent. (For the same reason, 4e will make the drift from roleplaying game to self-evident wargame/boardgame easier.)

 

[Hussar]

Meh, the whole "4e is a dice rolling exercise" is overblown. I mean, back in the day, when tactics had no mechanical benefit unless your DM gave them to you, all we ever did was throw d20's at the monster until it fell down. Zero description, zero narration. I rolled a 15, I do 7 damange, next! was pretty much how it played out around our tables.

Personally, I love the fact that mechanics are divorced from narration. It means I can describe things however the heck I want to, rather than be shoehorned in based on mechanics.

I mean, someone here, and I forget who, mentioned in one of these threads running something like 14 combats in 4 hours. Assuming an hour of non-combat play, that's 14 combats in 180 minutes, or just about 15 minutes per combat.

How much color are you actually going to get when combat is paced that fast? And, after the fifth combat, who's actually going to bother when every combat has to play out with pretty much zero tactics. The reason I say you can't have tactics is because, well, how much tactical play are you going to get in a 15 minute combat?

There really is a happy medium between fifteen minutes of dice wanking and 4 hour grind fests.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Spambot reported.

 

[The Shaman]

Meh, the whole "4e is a dice rolling exercise" is overblown. I mean, back in the day, when tactics had no mechanical benefit unless your DM gave them to you . . .

Hussar, do you really want to go there again? Seriously?

. . . all we ever did was throw d20's at the monster until it fell down. Zero description, zero narration. I rolled a 15, I do 7 damange, next! was pretty much how it played out around our tables.

The experience of playing a game is generally enhanced by reading the rules first.

Our table was nothing like yours. I'll leave it at that.

Personally, I love the fact that mechanics are divorced from narration. It means I can describe things however the heck I want to, rather than be shoehorned in based on mechanics.

I can definitely understand this.

Then again, I like games in which the mechanics and the narration are seamless - "I'll parry and riposte with a thrust to the gut!" is both fun narration and the mechanical description of a character's turn during swordplay in Flashing Blades.

I mean, someone here, and I forget who, mentioned in one of these threads running something like 14 combats in 4 hours. Assuming an hour of non-combat play, that's 14 combats in 180 minutes, or just about 15 minutes per combat.

How much color are you actually going to get when combat is paced that fast? And, after the fifth combat, who's actually going to bother when every combat has to play out with pretty much zero tactics. The reason I say you can't have tactics is because, well, how much tactical play are you going to get in a 15 minute combat?

Maybe their combats are short because their tactics are really good.

There really is a happy medium between fifteen minutes of dice wanking and 4 hour grind fests.

I'll take fifteen minutes of fast, furious, fun action, thanks.

 

[The Shaman]

This Saturday will be the first time I actually have two of three players in the same room at the same time.

Unfortunately this didn't come to pass - one of the players is sick with the flu, so we pushed game-night back to next Saturday instead.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the events from last month play out - I used Mythic GME to determine some of the npcs reactions, and I'd like to start a new thread about how that worked, but I want to wait until after the next game-night, to see how it turns out in actual play.

 

[The Shaman]

Its a style choice of whether the GM gives a hoot if the PCs go into too dangerous parts or parts he hasnt planned on.

I'm not sure what you mean here.

What I mean is a GM who doesn't care if the 1st level PCs decide to walk the 20 miles to kill the 20th level Lich because he's bad and he's there. I think there's some GMs who put that stuff in there, hoping the party gets killed, under the argument of "it's realistic that the world has dangers you should avoid". When its really just idiot bait.

Contrasted with a GM who is also vested in the PCs and would like to see them succeed, or fail as a genuine, non-idiot failure, and not because they wandered onto the double-black slopes.

I don't think I've met a referee who "hoped" the adventurers would die since I was about fourteen or so. And I don't assume adventurers, or players, are idiots to be duped.

I'm vested in the adventurers' success - in my ideal game, the adventurers leave giant boot prints all over the face of a game-world which trembles as they walk. What I don't do is presume they will succeed, that's it's inherently their place in the cosmos to be successful - their success is earned, with skill and perseverance and luck, and I give them a game-world filled with resources they can use to be successful.

The double black diamond slopes are there, and yes, it's possible the adventurers can wander onto them. That's one of the hazards of the game, and that risk adds luster to the adventurers' triumphs.

[There's valid arguments for both styles, and I think it comes down to what the players and GM's goal for the campaign is.

I think there's rarely an argument for hoping the adventurers fail.

 

[Hussar]

Then again, I like games in which the mechanics and the narration are seamless - "I'll parry and riposte with a thrust to the gut!" is both fun narration and the mechanical description of a character's turn during swordplay in Flashing Blades.

So, what rules in AD&D would this engage?

Since I'm being told that older editions contained all sorts of rules for tactical play, let's see an example.