D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Thomas Shey]

Sometimes the only way to shut down annoying table chatter is to flat-out rule that if you say it, your character says it.

Well, it'd certainly shut down mine because that's be a cue for me to wave and head out.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But we were not talking about determining. We were talking about considering what might happen. And I think avoiding that is basically impossible. And the idea that somehow not considering such things would be a virtue sounds blatantly ludicrous to me.

I am talking about how considering can possibly become determining. The stronger you start to feel about what you’re considering, the more you may favor that route and consider it the “correct” way. Even subconsciously.

So again, if you’re prepping session 2 before you’ve played session 1 based on how things may go, then I think you’re far more apt to be forcing things toward your prep.

I’m citing it more as a thing to be on guard for as a GM if one cares about this stuff than and not as the universally true declaration you seem to be taking it as.

 

[pemerton]

Ultimately, the sequence of events matters, and that'll be complex, mixing in- and out-of-game things. Using the murder mystery from my home game, I prepared six distinct clues, and would never have added more (because the point of the murder was to disrupt the court, not stick around and commit more crime). The party then had the responsibility to question and learn. There were false leads and a single perpetrator

<snip>

Their results, right or wrong, would have significant political and diplomatic consequences. Knowing I couldn't prepare for all possible accusations and consequences, I prepared loosely for a variety of options but kept myself open to change.

If things look like they might be drifting in that direction, I generally try to rely on the "your character would know" response: even if the player doesn't see the information, the character knows many things the player wouldn't. That option, or excuse if one prefers, makes it much easier to simply tell the player information they need. I used that excuse more than once in some of the recent sessions, involving the party Bard learning the doctrine of the assassin cult...and how that cult's understanding of that doctrine had been selectively focused, when it could be focused elsewhere without being negated. Now, the bard has the responsibility to use the enlightenment (or perhaps endarkenment?) he has gained to find ways to rehabilitate these folks, while still respecting their faith.

This all seems to describe fairly straightforward "backstory first" play.

I'm not sure where the impetus for the fictional trajectories - solving the murder in the first quote, responsibility to rehabilitate the cultists in the second - is coming from.

By taking these allies and opposing the black dragon, the players made meeting Shen inevitable. The reveal didn't happen right away, it took a while for Shen to feel it was worth the risk. The party had made active efforts to earn his trust, and in turn, he saw that the party had a lot of potential and wanted to see them grow.

Likewise. There is unrevealed backstory authored by you - the stuff about the way these various NPCs are related - and the actions declared by the players "activate" the scenes latent in it, including meeting the hidden dragon.

that "why devils are Always Evil" thing I blather about came to me...last year IIRC. I already had four obvious sources for who would tell this story: a devil the party has worked with named Al-Ikhino (an arabicized "Alichino," from the Divine Comedy), the party bard's succubus great-grandmother, or an expert/book from a Safiqi or Waziri institution. None of these were the true first glimpse. Instead, a character accidentally had a soul connection with a (different) succubus as she was dying, the result of a partial success on a roll, and saw the darkness within. Wanting to know WTF that was, he turned to the bard's family, specifically his mother. I hadn't thought of that, but she made perfect sense.

This seems a little different, and to be about the revelation of setting information, but not pertaining to any particular situation - which gives it a different role, in play, from clues to a murder or meeting a hidden dragon.

I'd feel like a huge failure if my players ever said, "Oh, yeah we did that only because we thought you wanted us to."

<snip>

I used other hooks. Family members making requests, Hafsa discovering something in her research, the Sultana requesting the aid of adventurers that had already helped protect the city, a friendly NPC disappearing, etc. Things I truly hope weren't done because I wanted it, but rather because they found them interesting, or felt their characters would respond to them in adventuresome ways.

Again, this all seems like straightforward "backstory first", where various devices - such as scene framing (requests for aid) or resolution outcomes (discoveries) - are used to establish opportunities for the PCs, which the players pick up on.

Any person, place, thing, or event that depends on one and only one sequence of actions is always to be avoided.

I'm not sure what depends means here. What are the things that are in a relationship of dependence?

 

[pemerton]

If, you had an adventure path that had the following story board, would this be railroading?

I think it entirely depends on what happens if the characters try to diverge from these paths. For example if they try in some logical but unforeseen way take a shortcut between bubbles that don't have arrows on these charts, will the GM use force to stop them from doing so? The GM merely anticipating likely course of events is not railroading.

To me it looks like all the outcomes are predetermined - eg if the PCs steal the dead king's heart from the tomb, then they become fugitives.

So to me that looks like we have a very strong helping of Force, in the sense of scene-framing as a form of reducing options and also the control over outcomes of certain key actions.

Whether it counts as railroading or participationism depends on the preferences of the participants in the game.

 

[Lanefan]

But then there’s the question of if even writing down ideas about how it “might go” then influences a GM. I would say that’s certainly possible.

Of course it is. That's the point.

The storyboard is there, at least when I do one up, to tell me what I'm probably going to be running unless the players in-character decide to do something different, in full knowledge that it's inevitable that they will. Some ideas will get abandoned, others will arise as time - and play - goes on, and the storyboard will morph to suit.

And mine aren't nearly as detailed as Scott's. I stop at the adventure level and (almost) never bother detailing anything more specific.

What I will do is lay out some possible mini-APs that I can embed within the greater campaign if it works out to do so, useful in that if I need to write any of the adventures myself I can get a head start on the work. For example one such for my current campaign went:

1 Marauders of the Dune Sea
2 [homebrew adventure at an archaeological site in a desert]
3 Tomb of the Lizard King*
4 [homebrew adventure in a pyramid]
5 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun [much-modified]

That list was on v.1 of the storyboard but didn't get played through until about 4-5 years after the campaign started. And I-as-DM didn't have to do much once things got going - much to my unexpected delight two PCs got themselves captured in 1 and rescuing them** led the party to 2; a cursed item found in 2 led the party straight to 3, and by that point they'd got involved enough to want to see it all through anyway.

* - yes I found a way to put a swamp-based adventure in the middle of a desert!
** - as neither was much liked, they were almost left to rot; which may or may not have ended the AP right there.

 

[pemerton]

And I feel it is completely unreasonable to expect GM to not think what might happen, at least on general sense. I'd go so far to say that it is literally impossible in a game where the GM sets up the setting and the situations.

But we were not talking about determining. We were talking about considering what might happen. And I think avoiding that is basically impossible.

There may be more in heaven and earth than is contemplated in your philosophy!

I've run many sessions where I set things up without thinking about what might happen on the other side of the scene. Eg when I ran my Alien(TM)-modified Annic Nova, I had a ship with Aliens on it. The origins of the ship, the information on its computer, the ecology of the Aliens, was mostly made up as we went along.

I can't remember at what point I decided the Aliens were in the hydroponics.

As it turned out, the PCs befriended the commander of the Imperial cutter, took her on a winery tour for a week which gave them time to finish their inspection of the alien vessel and take control of it, then kidnapped the commander as they jumped both their own vessel and their newly-commandeered one to the alien's homeworld of Zinion. Zinion didn't even exist as a concept in the session I've posted the link to just above.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

To me it looks like all the outcomes are predetermined - eg if the PCs steal the dead king's heart from the tomb, then they become fugitives.

So to me that looks like we have a very strong helping of Force, in the sense of scene-framing as a form of reducing options and also the control over outcomes of certain key actions.

Whether it counts as railroading or participationism depends on the preferences of the participants in the game.

I don't think this necessarily implies force, merely mapping likely courses the events could take. There is no indication that force is used to steer it on those paths. Furthermore, there is a lot of branching. How a situation with three different branches can be predetermined? And if you somehow think it is, how many branches it would take for it not to be? ten, thousand, million? Ultimately there probably is some finite number of things that could occur in the game. And that the GM has though of say, three of them, doesn't mean these are the only things the GM will 'allow' to happen in the game, it merely means that those are the things the GM though were most likely to occur.

I mean, I don't know, I don't do these sort of mind maps, and it seems a tad excessive to me. But I certainly do think likely things that could happen so that I'm prepared for them if they do.

 

[pemerton]

not a nebulous "whoever you think is guilty actually IS guilty" thing (which I consider to be illusionism of a different color.)

What's the illusion you have in mind?

Over the past little while I've run mysteries in different ways.

One is to preplan the murder and clues Agatha Christie style. I adapted an old MegaTraveller adventure and ran a session like this freeform last year. The basic function of player action declarations is to trigger exposition/information revelation from the GM. Then the players make their inference and either get the answer right, or do not. (In my case they got all the information but didn't get the right answer.)

Another is to have a mystery build into the situation, and rely on subsequent action resolution to prompt possible answers. Eg in my first BW campaign, one of the players established as part of his PC's background that the PC had a Balrog-possessed brother. The basics of how this happened were established as part of the background - he had been possessed when he tried to conjure a magical lightning storm to protect his tower, where he and his brother were living, from attacking Orcs. But that leaves open further questions like, why him? And what were the Orcs doing there?

When, in play, the PCs returned to the (now somewhat ruined) tower, they were looking for a particular artefact in it (the existence of which, at least in the past, was also a PC background element). A Scavenging attempt was failed. I narrated the outcome as a failure to find the desired artefact, and instead coming across (so-called) Black Arrows in the ruins of the brother's workroom. It was already established that these Black Arrows were used by Orcs in fighting Elves. So this revelation established that the brother was already evil, or at least sinister, before he became possessed. One bit of the mystery filled in, but more questions raised!

I think that Apocalypse World or Dungeon World would also be well-suited to that sort of approach to running a mystery.

A third way is to do everything in play. This is how I've approached Cthulhu Dark. So the mystery unfolds out of the opening scene(s), where the PCs motivations are established and I - as GM - interweave their narrative trajectories. And then further elements are established, revelations narrated, etc as seems appropriate (i) in response to successful or unsuccessful action declarations and (ii) how far we are through the session - at a certain point it makes sense to try and link things together rather than create yet more possible threads and directions of inquiry. This can be done in response to success - Yes, you do find the signature of so-and-so on those documents you're examining, just as you suspected - or failure - When you regain consciousness, you're in a room with a locked door and barred window. Looking out the window, you recognise the grounds - you're in <prior established and suspicious NPC's? manor!

None of these involve any illusionism, as in covert use of force by the GM. Hence why I'm wondering what approach you have in mind in the quote above.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think this necessarily implies force, merely mapping likely courses the events could take.

Well, that's not how it looks to me. It seems to be a flowchart of events. And the poster who posted it - @Scott Christian - has expressly compared it to an AP structure. Which reinforces my sense of it as a flowchart of events.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Well, that's not how it looks to me. It seems to be a flowchart of events. And the poster who posted it - @Scott Christian - has expressly compared it to an AP structure. Which reinforces my sense of it as a flowchart of events.

But potential events or guaranteed events? That's the question.