D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[pemerton]

I wanted to say something more about this:

This was an epic moment of play, for me at least. And a regretful one, for the player who found his (as his PC's) conception of his brother dashed, all because he was greedily trying to find a different artefact in the ruined tower that he had written into his backstory.

If we assume that the adjudication of outcomes should correlate to in-fiction causal processes, then what I've said will make no sense: how does looking for X cause it to be the case that, 10 or more years earlier, my brother manufactured Y?

But story-wise, there's a tale of a protagonist whose pursuit of material desire comes unstuck, and ends up being the means whereby his hopes for his brother are dashed: his brother is revealed as having been sinister, perhaps greedy or worse, all along - and hence possessed by a Balrog.

Had the player's checks succeeded, of course, the story would be quite different.

That's why we call it "story now"!

 

[FrozenNorth]

APs on the other hand by their nature have limited scope. But ultimately every game has limited scope; they have a premise. If we decide to play Star Trek game about Starfleet officers working on a starship and boldly going, but the PCs decide that actually the best way to better themselves is resign from Starfleet and become non-profit horga'hn merchants on Risa, then what? So I don't really see any stark binary divides here, merely scopes of different breadth.

I would go further than that. My impression is that a lot of people don’t play their APs like straitjackets. The AP forms the backbone of the campaign, but the PCs are free to wander, try different things and interact with the environment.

Like in Rime of the Frostmaiden, there is an important element in the background (the unending winter), but the players are free to spend their time interacting with the Ten-Towns.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The difference between the players can declare whatever actions they like for their PCs and the players are expected to declare actions that conform to a pre-established sequence of events is clear.

Yes. It's just that the games in former category do not exist in practice. Every game has a scope and premise. If in your Prince Valiant game the characters decide that hereditary rights of aristocracy are unjust and fighting and having knigtly quests is dangerous and dumb and harassing non-christians is morally wrong and decide to become pacifist cabbage farmers what then?

The difference between the GM secretly changes mechanical details like dice rolls and hp totals on the fly and the GM doesn't alter those details, and/or manages them in the open, is clear.

Yes, somewhat clear. Then again the fact that the GM often chose or made up those mechanical details in the first place muddies things, as then the question becomes when the GM decides them.

The difference between the GM creates new bits of backstory - second-stringers to replace defeated BBEGs, or clues to prompt the players to make the "right" action declarations - in order to keep play "on track", and the GM doesn't do that, is clear.

Not really. GM makes up stuff anyway, and the made up stuff always directs the players to some direction. And as a human being the GM will always have some ideas what would be cool or interesting.

The difference between the GM uses their authority over scene-framing to ensure that a series of pre-authored scenes take place and the GM frames scenes in accordance with some other principle - eg extrapolating from the prior backstory (as in a sandbox or map-and-key dungeon) or following player cues (as in Burning Wheel) or building on the fiction and the action declarations in a soft-then-hard-move pattern (as in AW or DW) - is clear.

Except it again rarely is so clear. It might not be "These exact scenes must happen in this specific order" it might be more like "vaguely something like this could happen."

Who is confused about these differences? The controversy, as best I can tell, is around asserting that these difference might matter to someone's engagement with RPGing. Actually spelling out these differences, and asserting an unequivocal preference in respect of them, is taken to be some sort of tactless faux pas.

Pretty much none of the things here are stark binaries like you imply, they're muddy spectrums at the best.

 

[FrozenNorth]

This assumes that on your saying this they players wouldn't just sit there for a moment, then - thinking force is just something a Jedi uses to lift rocks - look at each other, shrug, and maybe ask "What the eff is he on about now?".

Naaah…force is clearly the type of damage inflicted by magic missile. I’m not sure why all these GMs are flinging magic missiles at their players, though.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I would go further than that. My impression is that a lot of people don’t play their APs like straitjackets. The AP forms the backbone of the campaign, but the PCs are free to wander, try different things and interact with the environment.

Like in Rime of the Frostmaiden, there is an important element in the background (the unending winter), but the players are free to spend their time interacting with the Ten-Towns.

This is said, but it's not taken further to examine what play is being allowed. Interacting with the Ten Towns in Rime doesn't do anything on it's own, especially if the level of interaction is engaging in the prepared material and/or some improved shopping/free roleplay. In this interaction, what is the focus of play? Can the players enacts real and lasting change to the course of the game (and this doesn't mean that they make a friend that stays a friend, I'm actually talking about changing what future play is about)? Can interaction in the Ten Towns actually change who the villain is or alter the current plans of the 1st act transition bad guys?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This puzzles me in two ways.

(1) Maybe they rescued me but thought I was dangerous? Maybe they're on holiday and their groundskeeper kidnapped me? Etc etc? I think there are multiple possibilities here - just as, when the PC in my BW game found the black arrows in the ruins of his brother's former workroom, his first instinct was to try and determine who had made them, his hope being that it would be someone other than his brother. His hope was dashed. (I can't recall with certainty, but I'm guessing he failed an Aura-Reading check.)

Could just be that I'm extremely jaded about any kind of "horror" gaming, so if a failed roll happens in a game like CoC, I expect it to mean The Absolute Worst Possible Result. Horror just...isn't my thing generally, and is just so damn soul-crushingly depressing. Either way, from the words used, I got an impression that the guilt of the mansion-owner was inherent in the waking-up, which struck me as being a form of Force.

(2) How is this Force? It's not any sort of manipulation of backstory to predetermine a result. There's no fudging of dice. There's no formal or informal pressure placed on permissible action declarations. Isn't this exactly how reveals unfold in DW/AW play - ie hard moves reveal unwelcome truths, including about the identities of villains.

Does "Force" not mean "GM making things happen a specific way"? Because that's what I'd understood it to mean. Of course, I'm quite fuzzy on the specific terminology of a lot of things, so perhaps I've just got a mistaken understanding of "Force."

So wouldn't it be open - for instance - that the cultists have a spy/agent among the manufacturers, or in one or more of the caravans, or at the caravanserais?

Oh, sure. The very idea that they'd moved any weapons they had was, itself, an Unwelcome Truth being revealed, and I could easily have revealed something else instead. I just went with something that seemed to make sense and implied a looming broader threat (thus, hopefully, inviting the players to follow up on it and thereby lead the adventure in some other future direction). Going with something like "the woman you worked for was secretly one of them!" could also have worked, I just didn't consider it at the time.

This goes right back to @Ovinomancer's post upthread - it's all just fiction being authored, and so doesn't matter.

It matters a lot to me and my fellow players. I don't really know how to express it better than that. Both the recently-returned Druid player and the Bard player (the one player who has stuck through the whole way, not a late-joiner nor taken a hiatus) have explicitly said that one of the great joys of playing in this game, besides their genuine feeling of being able to act as they like rather than being on rails, is that the world feels living, vibrant, and self-consistent. Things fit together naturally, explanations click, and several times they have uncovered a fact or made a connection only to realize that the pieces really were there all along, they just didn't see the pattern before. Some of that has been invented as I go along. Some of it is ground-work I did in advance, which may or may not be discovered. But since my players have explicitly thanked me for it unprompted, I think it matters more than you give it credit for.

Locking in the "who" of causation in advance then feeds into action resolution - because now there are constraints on what further fiction can result, based on that established-but-unrevealed backstory. This is the whole premise of sandbox RPGing; but it sits in a more delicate relationship, I think, with an approach that encourages players to exercise substantial authority or at least influence over backstory (eg via asking questions of them and building on their answers), and that encourages outcomes of actions to have high salience to player-established goals/aspirations for their PCs. To spell these out: too much that is locked in, but unrevealed, can clash with the answers the players give to questions; and stuff that is locked in might turn out to provide the answer/outcome to some declared action, but at that moment of play may be of low salience to the player's established goal/aspiration for their PC.

I do my best to keep whatever might be relevant to PC answers as minimally-planned as possible to maintain consistency without violating player freedom. The only thing I asked at character creation was that no one play evil PCs, and the only thing I've generally held to from there on is that any violation of the deeply-held values of the region (respecting the Bond of Salt, opposing slavery, and opposing necromancy) should happen only as a huge last-resort thing because the characters would know how serious such violations are. (Bond of Salt cheerfully stolen from Al Qadim.)

As best as I can tell, the only constraints this places on action resolution is that...well, players can't do the thing I described, where they declare that the murderer must have been the Countess and thus she always was. I have yet to see any situation where my players' declared answers to questions formed any situation like this, nor where they declared a thing that we all accepted but which caused some kind of fundamental contradiction within the world. Indeed, I have on numerous occasions had an unexpected windfall of players conveniently doing exactly something symbolic or copacetic, in ways they literally could not possibly have known in advance. (As an example, the Ranger has a raven companion; the Barbarian came from the Raven clan and had a raven tattoo; the druid repeatedly took the form of a desert raven to attack enemies. I had meant for there to be some subtle raven symbolism that the party could dig into if they wanted. They independently and repeatedly went whole-hog for it, multiple times, some even before we even got started playing, and it has worked out beautifully. And I can say 100% for sure it was independent, because things like the Barbarian's clan and tattoos or the Ranger's companion happened even before session 0; harder to say with the Druid since that began to take place after the first couple sessions.)

From your posts I can't see how you reconcile your different, backstory-first approach with the standard (as in, book-prescribed) way of adjudicating and framing in DW. That's not a criticism. It's an observation.

I just...do? It's hard to be more specific than that. I support my players with what they want to do. Often, I have a pretty good idea of where things are likely to go, but they still surprise me regularly as well.

That just shows it can be done better or worse. All serial fiction depends on this sort of retconning. Frankly if my RPG campaigns could be half as compelling as the Star Wars trilogy I'd be pretty happy!

That's...honestly very disheartening if true. I've always appreciated it when fiction seems to have had a clear plan for where things are going, and where they "did their homework" so that events that happen in book 3 are clearly traceable to their origins in book 1 when the early foreshadowing happened.

Using a relatively spoiler-free example from Final Fantasy XIV: At the end of the baseline story for the A Realm Reborn reboot (usually called "2.0" by fans after its patch designation), you have to complete a dungeon called The Praetorium, where you fight some important NPCs and there's a crapload of voiced cutscenes, something like 45 minutes in total, it's kinda ridiculous. Before the penultimate fight, one of the Ascians (manipulative evil worshipers of a dark god) gives a long monologue about why he's doing what he's doing, full of stuff that sounds like BBEG blather. But after you complete the original story for the Shadowbringers expansion (5.0, so quite a ways after the 2.0 story!), you realize that literally every single thing he said is relevant and, in its own twisted way, "correct." It's to the point that you can see how they were slowly planting seeds even that far back that they could reap later, without any retconning or overwriting necessary. We'll be getting the final chapter of the story that started in 2.0 with the expansion that launches early next month, and people are extremely excited to see them finally answer all the questions we've had thus far--and where we'll go next, as 6.0 will completely conclude the current story arc (almost a decade in the making), with 6.1 being the start of a new arc.

I aspire to such levels of consistency and forethought in my game, and based on my player response, I have done that reasonably well.

I personally find this a very significant misdescription.

What matters is not that black arrows were made <by someone or other>. It's that they were made <by the brother>. Hence, the possession is not <an innocent person is a victim of failed magic or Orcish magic> but rather <a sinister person finally came to their end, of being possessed by a Balrog>. That was a fundamental moment and revelation in play - unfolding over a failed Scavenging check (to use AW language, a soft move announcing the badness of the black arrows being there and hinting at worse> and then (I think) a failed Aura-Reading check (a hard move, driving home the irrevocable fact of who made the black arrows).

I'm not at all trying to imply that this isn't the important thing. It absolutely is the important thing here. I apologize for whatever I said that implied otherwise.

What I'm saying is that, to me, exactly this kind of reveal is wonderful because (at least as I see it) the thing that the character (and thus player) really cared about was the real motives of the brother, the real inner nature of the people involved and why they did the things they did. Now, things were a lot fuzzier before so I had a slightly mistaken idea of what happened; I thought it was just "oh no, you discovered these black arrows, which proves your brother was collaborating!", when it was actually the character desperately trying to prove that the arrows weren't made by the brother. That is, of course, a little different and a little harder to square, but...I dunno.

It still feels different and I cannot explain better than I already have why it does. "Oh no, you discover, despite all your efforts to prove otherwise, that your brother was already evil all those years ago and merely getting his comeuppance!" is a-okay to me, and feels like unfolding drama. "Oh no, you discover that the murderer was <Trusted Ally>, who has been using you this whole time!" isn't, and feels like blatantly rewriting the world solely and exclusively because someone got a bad (or good, or whatever) roll and nothing else. The former feels natural, even exciting; the latter feels so blatantly artificial that I can no longer engage my imagination about it, and have to think about it purely in terms of computer-simulated die rolls and text written into Google Sheets character sheets. It's like the difference between someone giving you a cup of freshly-squeezed concord grape juice, and a cup of grape Kool-Aid. Even if you like how Kool-Aid tastes, you know instantly that it isn't fresh fruit juice, though I probably couldn't tell you better than "that one tastes natural, the other tastes artificial."

This was an epic moment of play, for me at least. And a regretful one, for the player who found his (as his PC's) conception of his brother dashed, all because he was greedily trying to find a different artefact in the ruined tower that he had written into his backstory. It couldn't have worked as it did if I adhered to your backstory-first norms of content-introduction. That's not a reason for you to change your practices, obviously; but is intended to illustrate why I think the situation-first/backstory-first contrast is of more than abstract theoretical interest.

Well...I guess I'm saying it could have because, again, this situation feels different, and I don't know how to explain why it feels different other than what I've already said. Maybe there is a real, rational difference between them, but I gave my best shot at describing it and that evidently failed to communicate anything at all to you.

 

[Cadence]

Can interaction in the Ten Towns actually change who the villain

I can see why play would introduce new villains/concerns/goals or maybe take some concerns off the board. I'm having trouble picturing why it would or should change the main villain?

The Fellowship in LotR going to different places could change a lot of things and maybe even take some major pieces off the board -- but I don't picture it removing Sauron as the bad guy that needs to be dealt with. [Edit: Although I can see them making a choice that kicks part of the problem of him getting the ring down the road a long time and alters the story greatly.]

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yes. It's just that the games in former category do not exist in practice. Every game has a scope and premise. If in your Prince Valiant game the characters decide that hereditary rights of aristocracy are unjust and fighting and having knigtly quests is dangerous and dumb and harassing non-christians is morally wrong and decide to become pacifist cabbage farmers what then?

You moved the goalpost. The contrast here wasn't "do they have to stay in genre or not" it was on the axis of having to engage the GM's prepared events or not because the GM has to frame events based on what the PCs do?

Yes, somewhat clear. Then again the fact that the GM often chose or made up those mechanical details in the first place muddies things, as then the question becomes when the GM decides them.

No, it's still "how are they used and why are they made up." You're right that until it's on the table a detail is in flux. but, once the monster hits the table, it's stats are in place. If you change them for the GM's reasons once it's in play, then we're dealing with Force. If you change them right before they hit play in order to cause a specific outcome, we're in Force again.

Not really. GM makes up stuff anyway, and the made up stuff always directs the players to some direction. And as a human being the GM will always have some ideas what would be cool or interesting.

This is a false equivalency. You're trying to suggest that since the GM is a player and will introduce things to the fiction that will affect the course of play, that ANY such introduction is therefore the same thing. It's not. There's a reason the definition of Force isn't just "the GM introducing content," but rather it talks about the purpose of introduced content and what's being disregarded to cause that to come into effect. If nothing is being disregarded, no Force. So, the GM introducing content -- even if it's content they want -- that doesn't trample on the players or the system is not Force.

Except it again rarely is so clear. It might not be "These exact scenes must happen in this specific order" it might be more like "vaguely something like this could happen."

And this is arguing that requiring an event in specificity (you must do exactly A) is a truly different beast from just requiring that a thing happen without specificity. That the latter is somehow not the GM requiring wickets be jumped through because they're using much larger wickets.

Pretty much none of the things here are stark binaries like you imply, they're muddy spectrums at the best.

They aren't that muddy. This is one of those few things where there's not really a big grey area. Force is pretty easily defined once you know what's happening in play. The GM, for instance, should really never mistake what is Force or not. Depending on the game, and the easy with which Illusionism is deployed, the players may or may not be able to easily tell as well. It's easy to tell Force in Blades in the Dark, for instance. When @EzekielRaiden posted about their DW game, quite a number of us immediately sniffed out Force through the shallow descriptions of play being offered. This doesn't make their game bad, by the way. Force isn't bad in and of itself, although tolerances for it vary. This isn't a judgement call on play except at the very individual level based on those preferences. It is, however, a thing that happens and being aware of it -- whether you like or not -- can help you better understand what it's doing in your games and provide a means to target improvements.

Hell, most of the Alexandrian's post aren't about removing Force, but making the Force applied more fun for players and filing off the really rough edges. It's still Force, it's still extremely linear, but the AP mods he suggests move Force from blatant and near abusive (the start of Descent, I'm looking at you) to much softer and more encouraging of participationism. They're good stuff for understanding Force and how it can distort play and then how to better approach it to be less disruptive in play and more Illusionism. Thus the 3 clue rule and his node based design. The best thing he has in there is Jaquaying a dungeon, because that's actually getting to remove dull, linear dungeon design. This makes Classic play better, if not really Trad play. That's a useful bit of advice all around, if tangentially about Force.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I can see why play would introduce new villains/concerns/goals or maybe take some concerns off the board. I'm having trouble picturing why it would or should change the main villain?

The Fellowship in LotR going to different places could change a lot of things and maybe even take some major pieces off the board -- but I don't picture it removing Sauron as the bad guy that needs to be dealt with. [Edit: Although I can see them making a choice that kicks part of the problem of him getting the ring down the road a long time and alters the story greatly.]

If you are still requiring play go through the end wicket, what have you really changed about the structure of the game? You've allowed maybe some player stuff, but it's not the important parts, it's mostly at the level of color or minor interest -- some side plots. This is akin to the train pulling into the station and you can get out and tour the area before reboarding. Does any amount of this touring actually change the structure of the trip?

I'm not throwing shade at this -- again, one of my most memorable games was playing in a game that was exactly this. I'm pointing out that such kinds of minor freedoms to do minor sideplots don't really change the nature of the overall play. Add in that all sideplots require GM approval and we're still in the same kind of playspace.

 

[FrozenNorth]

To me it looks the same - in its structure - as my GM who establishes a Halfling-hating Ogre knowing that when the PCs approach the Ogre the players will have the Halfling PC be the "face". I described my example as Force-ish. Your example, if I've understood it, is the same.

Let’s dig in a bit more into that Ogrish example in which you are playing a charming halfling bard.

In DW (or MotW, with which I’m more familiar), your character takes the “Investigating a mystery” action. On a 7-9, your character succeeds with a complication:
“Your attempt to locate the mob boss of the town has led you to his top enforcer. Just one problem, he loves halflings…for lunch!”
On a 6-, it is a failure.
“Your questioning has drawn the mob boss’ attention, he has sent a team to deal with you, including a halfling-hating ogre”.
In both cases, the DM is explicitly placing a challenge to the halfling player.
None of those, as I understand it, are GM Force.

On the 5e side, the halfling bard would make an appropriate check (or simply succeed, if he has the criminal or urchin background), and that would lead him to the mob boss’ top enforcer, an ogre who eats halflings for lunch. In this case, if the DM placed a creature that he knows will be a challenge to the halfling player, it feels that you would conclude that this an exercise of GM Force. After all, the GM chose the opponent (preferred outcome) and the opponent goes against one of the player’s ideals (being the sort of person that can talk their way out of trouble).

The principal difference I see between these two examples is that the mechanics are transparent in the first case. If the player rolls poorly, they know they are going to be the recipient of a complication or a hard move. And I get that if you are particularly sensitive about why the DM includes one type of challenge rather than the other, that transparency is extremely useful.

But to me, 1) transparency is the wrong metric to evaluate GM Force, as you will get a ton of false positives;
2) from the player side, it is really easy to jump to conclusions about the use of force

For my own part, I don't really understand why this GM is faffing around with Rainbow Rocks at all - why not just frame the PCs into Dark Clouds? The only reason I can see is to maintain an illusion that the GM is indifferent to what actions the players declare for their PCs. But in fact the GM isn't indifferent to that! So why pretend otherwise?

Why do you assume that the GM is indifferent to the actions the players declare? Even if the AP’s next link is in the Dark Clouds, maybe the PCs will be able to find something useful in the Rainbow Rocks?