D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[pemerton]

I have a vague idea of what's going on with them, but honestly not any more than the players do. It's a nebulous "they have evil plans" sort of thing. Past rolls, and/or me filling in details in response to player questions, have established that the cultists have more than once had to fight against the orthodoxy, so there are some reasonable extrapolations one can make, but I've written nothing down nor planned anything out about it. I don't really see this as a "mystery."

Suppose that the player start declaring actions for their PCs with the goal of finding out who is supplying the cult with weapons. I don't see how that is - in structural terms - any different from them deciding to start declaring actions with the goal of finding out who killed such-and-such a NPC.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, I enjoy a well-GMed CoC session as much as the next person.

It's been quite a while. I wouldn't describe the experience as passive - the player (ie me) has a job to do, namely, portraying their PC's descent into madness and leaning into the GM's scenes and story.

But it's obvious that the player's (ie my) action declarations are not having an impact on the overall trajectory of play.

Yeah, I'm kind of not seeing why participationism is being viewed as synonomous with "passive play" here; I'd characterize it as more playing within certain comparatively tight borders and understanding that you're going to try and stick within that, but you can choose how and why you're their. Its not anything like an open-ended game with mostly free choice, but its hardly passive.

 

[Ovinomancer]

All very valid questions! And all questions that are being thoroughly hashed out in 5e-centric spaces among people who both object to the blatant use of GM force and railroading and also genuinely want to play the 5e adventure paths. Or people who have been genuinely influenced by games like Dungeon World and want to bring some of those principles to bear even when running 5e adventure paths. Or people who watch critical role and are "using" dnd as the base to create more open experiences. Or, OSR spaces where people are rethinking the role of what you call backstory and how it is developed. (Or people in those spaces going further and mixing their experiences with games like blades in the dark and rules-lite OSR.)

One reaction to your questions is to give up on "trad" games and play story-now games. But there's lots of interesting cross-pollination and experimentation going on that I think is worth paying attention to, personally.

The Alexandrian really doesn't avoid railroading, he's more about moving from the blatant and obvious Force built into the modules into a much better prepared Illusionism. The stations are still left in play, they're just better hidden from view. I've read his rewrites of the APs. They're good, but they're still very much railroady stuff of doing the story but rather instilling the proper participationism covers (hooks, engaging story elements, etc.).

Critical Role is very much GM storytelling, and largely railroady as well. You don't get that kind of fanbased without a carefully considered storyline.

And the goals of Trad play are very much diametrically opposed to Story Now play. That one reason it's hard to merge these kinds of play (my best results have been clear switches between the two). There's really not a lot of possible cross-pollination there.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yeah, I'm kind of not seeing why participationism is being viewed as synonomous with "passive play" here; I'd characterize it as more playing within certain comparatively tight borders and understanding that you're going to try and stick within that, but you can choose how and why you're their. Its not anything like an open-ended game with mostly free choice, but its hardly passive.

It's passive to the GM's story. The players are not driving play, they're consuming it. That's what the term means.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't see why waking up from unconsciousness in some sinister person's house is any different, in its fundamentals, from these. (EDIT: And my memory was also correct, that I said nothing about who put the PC in the manor, nor who might be guilty of anything. All I did was describe waking up from unconsciousness in a particular, recognisable and salient place. Which as I said seems to me like standard AW GMing.)

I don't really get how one would wake up from unconsciousness in such a place and not have it explicitly mean "this person has been up to no good." Like...sure, maybe they aren't guilty of one particular thing you thought they were, but especially as the result of a failed roll, this screams "suspicious manor-owner IS guilty!" to me. And that looks exactly like a blatant use of force: "I'm making the guilty person be this one and no other."

Suppose that the player start declaring actions for their PCs with the goal of finding out who is supplying the cult with weapons. I don't see how that is - in structural terms - any different from them deciding to start declaring actions with the goal of finding out who killed such-and-such a NPC.

No one is supplying them; they've been stealing them. That's why the PCs were there in the first place--a player decided he needed a magic shield, so they went looking for one, but a 6- on Supply revealed that raiding on weapon caravans had heavily affected all weapons trade (but especially magic ones). They sought out a prominent weapons-merchant (via prior contacts), who offered money and a fancy magic shield as payment for solving her "my caravans are being raided" problem. The party took up the offer and collaborated with her to make a trap caravan with only themselves in it, so they could catch the thieves in the act. I used this golden opportunity to explore the cultists more, as the players had pretty thoroughly crushed the evil druids and this stuff fit the fiction about the cult very well but made less sense for the other fronts.

They have sometimes used the records they recovered from that place to investigate other locations of interest related to the cult, but their priorities have often been elsewhere and will probably remain so for a while. (I prefer treating such delay not as "aha! you have failed and now I will punish you!" and more as "this explains why threats tend to escalate; the party faces tougher foes because they tend to have had more time to prepare.")

In thinking about it, perhaps I've come across what the issue might be. (I want to emphasize perhaps; I still am not sure this is more than a gut feeling that has no rational explanation.) They feel like different types of ignorance. There is "ignorance-what/who" and "ignorance-why." "Ignorance-what/who" reflects a lack of understanding about the chain of events that produced a certain result and/or the persons responsible for those events. But the chain of events had to be whatever it always was, and the persons had to be whoever they were. It feels wrong, to me, to say explicitly that it is not only unknown but unknowable what the chain of events was and who conducted them up until the point that it is declared, and then forever after that is exactly what it always was and never anything else. "Ignorance-why" reflects a lack of understanding of the motive or purpose behind some event or behavior; in principle, you already know what the event was (e.g. in your example, someone getting possessed) but are trying to figure out the motive behind it. It feels perfectly natural, to me, that you not only don't know but couldn't know what a person's true motive was until the moment of a shocking reveal, and I have no problem with it being a declaration.

I would argue that we can see some examples of this discontinuity playing out in ordinary fiction. Leia was established as Luke's twin sister in Return of the Jedi. But as early as the previous film, the writing includes stuff like her kissing him, which becomes deeply awkward if they were always intended to be related. It's pretty clear that they were inventing the story as they went along, retconning what they needed to (e.g. consider Luke's deep frustration at Obi-Wan's "from a certain point of view" line) in order to keep things going. That is the kind of problem I have with declaring the real killer or the like. But plenty of stories, whether singular or in series, have ambiguous character motives (be they heroes, villains, or something else) that only get revealed later. Such very rarely, if ever, require any actual re-alignment of any facts-of-the-matter--the events still played out however they played out. What has changed is the audience's understanding of the events, not the events themselves.

So while, yes, your "we found black arrows" is theoretically an alteration of the facts of the matter, in practice the only thing it actually changes about those past events is what the players know about the context of those events. The brother wasn't pure as the driven snow (unless "driven" means "driven-upon"!), he was already morally dubious. That doesn't make any part of those events play out any differently than they did before. But it does mean the characters must now reconcile their original beliefs with this new information. It was still the brother, still defending the tower, still against those specific orcs, still being possessed by that specific demon. The causal chain remains unmodified. Only the context in which that chain occurred has changed. That feels acceptable to me. But changing who the demon was due to a player (or DM) declaration triggered by a successful (or failed) roll? That's now actually altering the events themselves, not just the context surrounding them, and that would bother me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I realize that Story Now players aren’t a hive mind, but when I provided this example earlier, this wasn’t considered an example of GM Force.


The issue is not what it should be called, but lumping in something like the Rainbow Rocks scenario, where player agency is not affected, with something like @hawkeyefan ’s example, where to all intents and purposes, the PCs are in a cutscene.

Let’s try with an example: one adventure within a campaign. The party starts trapped in a demi-plane filled with various biomes and factions.

How the party got trapped is not relevant for the example:

• it could have been GM Force;
• it could have been bad luck (a poor roll in trying to identify what a magical item does);
• it could have been the premise of the adventure (“Hey guys, what do you think of an adventure where your party is trapped in a demi-plane and is trying to escape?”)

The module provides several ways out of the demi-plane. Notably, the players can ally with various factions. As they wander through the demi-plane, they can learn more about the wizard that created the demi-plane.

The table plays out the adventure in the usual way: the party goes from place to place, interacts with the various denizens of the plane and the locations, and try to find a way out. Some of the factions have their own plans for the characters, and potentially, if the players do not act, the equilibrium in the demi-plane can shift, potentially catastrophically.

So, I would say, this sort of thing is pretty genre-appropriate for the default genre of Dungeon World (which is basically 'Story Now in the milieu of D&D'). So, basically, I don't think you would want to ENTIRELY separate the reasons for/circumstances which lead to the entrapment in the demi-plane from the action therein, although I can envisage plot trajectories where it is largely irrelevant. Still, as a rule I would think that the getting into this pickle and the getting out of this pickle are somehow rooted in relationships between and goals of the PCs. So that might factor substantially. Beyond that, what the environment consists of is also going to need to be open to story elaboration and bend to the needs of character development, etc. THAT is the real reason it would hard to separate out content from circumstance. If some idiot move of the thief got the party trapped, well, then there's an interpersonal issue that is playing out, and it is likely to have some impact on the agenda, and thus the plot, and thus the content of the fiction. Ditto other possible scenarios. Note that these are, probably, mostly not CAUSAL in nature, but reside within the fiction.

And that kind of brings me to a point, isn't the PbtA equivalent of a railroad more like "the GM engineering the META plot?" lol.

 

[Fenris-77]

Good gravy, this far in are people still talking about AW moves as force because they, ahem, have no idea what they're talking about? Oookay. Fenris slowly closes the door and backs away...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's not. I had a recurring 5e villain who wasn't supposed to get away the first time but did. He continued to be a thorn in the side of the PCs and escaped at least 3 other times that I can easily recall. The trick here wasn't to use Force, but to play a bad guy that would cut and run quickly. A few times, he used his escape plan right off the bat because the situation had already tilted against him.

Thing is, if he got killed or captured he got killed or captured. I never Forced his escape because I didn't care to. The fun way really having a bad guy the player hated and wanted dead but who's primary motivation was to get away.

Right, there was a bad guy in my first 4e game that was like that. He got away after fight, and he was a fairly scummy villain, so the PCs were like "yeah, we would love a piece of that guy." Well, NATURALLY he didn't go far, he just hooked up with some nastier villains and got a bit of an upgrade, and there he was again! I think they finally went all out and just clobbered him on the third iteration. Its a story game, I'm not deciding what will happen in some sort of preplanned way really, its playing to find out what happens. They nailed him, he was wiped out, that's it, he was gone. Obviously you might imagine this sort of villain being a persistent story arc, but that would be DECIDING what happens, why play it?

 

[Maxperson]

Good gravy, this far in are people still talking about AW moves as force because they, ahem, have no idea what they're talking about? Oookay. Fenris slowly closes the door and backs away...

So. AW forced you to do that. Muahahahaha!

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's passive to the GM's story. The players are not driving play, they're consuming it. That's what the term means.

No, really not. The fact they're only interacting within the context of that story still doesn't make them passive. They're still doing a lot more than just absorbing the story, and that would be passive.