D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[EzekielRaiden]

consistently having the conception of your PC be in the crosshairs

Well if that's what's required, it will never work for my group. Most of my players have anxiety, and that anxiety is easily set off by feelings of this specific nature. We never would be able to do that at every session, because it would leave at least three of the four players I currently have dreading coming to each session. They'd never have any fun, it would just be a constant slog of "oh god everything is going to hell."

So...yeah. If Story Now means paranoid players, I'm not at all unhappy I don't do it.

But I still honestly think no one listens when I talk about my prep. I prep POSSIBILITIES, not SELECTIONS.

A possibility is something that could, potentially, happen. A reasonable result from upcoming or player-planned actions. E.g., if the players say they want to meet the Sultana for the first time, reasonable results could include them earning her favor or her ire. So I prepare for those possibilities because...I mean why not? It doesn't hurt to have some idea of how the Sultana might respond to things. What kind of person is she? What does she like? How does her public persona differ from her private one? Etc.

A set of selections, which I emphatically do NOT prepare, would be a "choose your own adventure" story. "If you do X, go to page 7. If you do Y, go to page 13." Selections may not be properly linear, but they're the next closest thing. There are only N selections, you MUST select one of those N things, and you cannot NOT choose something (though inaction may be one of the selections). So, in selection terms, meeting the Sultana will have exactly one of three outcomes, e.g. "favor," "neutrality," "disfavor." No matter what the party does, one of those three will result, and all the direct consequences of that result are pre-figured.

I emphatically DO NOT do that, never have, never will. That's why I say that in the (extremely) rare cases where something has fallen apart and I can only see one way forward, I come clean to my players and we figure it out. Because that's obviously a selection, not just a possibility, and my goal is always to offer interesting possibilities as a supplement to player motives or drives.

I offer my players many possibilities, small and large. I'd say about half the time, they don't use any of them, and instead do something I'd never considered (collectively they are smarter than I am, so the fact they surprise me is not itself a surprise.) I do whatever I can to support these surprises, to explore new territory I had never even thought about before. Sometimes, that means just inventing things from whole cloth. Other times, there are elements of prep I'd already done that can work with this new path, so I may avail myself of such things, or not, it all depends on where the group is at and what seems most interesting or effective.

 

[Manbearcat]

Well if that's what's required, it will never work for my group. Most of my players have anxiety, and that anxiety is easily set off by feelings of this specific nature. We never would be able to do that at every session, because it would leave at least three of the four players I currently have dreading coming to each session. They'd never have any fun, it would just be a constant slog of "oh god everything is going to hell."

So...yeah. If Story Now means paranoid players, I'm not at all unhappy I don't do it.

But I still honestly think no one listens when I talk about my prep. I prep POSSIBILITIES, not SELECTIONS.

A possibility is something that could, potentially, happen. A reasonable result from upcoming or player-planned actions. E.g., if the players say they want to meet the Sultana for the first time, reasonable results could include them earning her favor or her ire. So I prepare for those possibilities because...I mean why not? It doesn't hurt to have some idea of how the Sultana might respond to things. What kind of person is she? What does she like? How does her public persona differ from her private one? Etc.

A set of selections, which I emphatically do NOT prepare, would be a "choose your own adventure" story. "If you do X, go to page 7. If you do Y, go to page 13." Selections may not be properly linear, but they're the next closest thing. There are only N selections, you MUST select one of those N things, and you cannot NOT choose something (though inaction may be one of the selections). So, in selection terms, meeting the Sultana will have exactly one of three outcomes, e.g. "favor," "neutrality," "disfavor." No matter what the party does, one of those three will result, and all the direct consequences of that result are pre-figured.

I emphatically DO NOT do that, never have, never will. That's why I say that in the (extremely) rare cases where something has fallen apart and I can only see one way forward, I come clean to my players and we figure it out. Because that's obviously a selection, not just a possibility, and my goal is always to offer interesting possibilities as a supplement to player motives or drives.

I offer my players many possibilities, small and large. I'd say about half the time, they don't use any of them, and instead do something I'd never considered (collectively they are smarter than I am, so the fact they surprise me is not itself a surprise.) I do whatever I can to support these surprises, to explore new territory I had never even thought about before. Sometimes, that means just inventing things from whole cloth. Other times, there are elements of prep I'd already done that can work with this new path, so I may avail myself of such things, or not, it all depends on where the group is at and what seems most interesting or effective.

One person's anxiety is another person's excitement, curiosity, and forward-siting position in the chair.

But I get it. There are people who have anxiety about these things. I've GMed for them. They don't enjoy the play. It is a thing.


I am reading what you've written. I've read a lot before I've responded.

The simple litmus test is as I wrote above:

* Are your Spout Lore moves (or other content creation moves like Connections or Heirloom or any of the abundance of them in the system) every either (a) gated behind unrevealed backstory (eg you say "no" because of unrevealed backstory) or (b) integrated with unrevealed backstory (the move triggers a GM exposition dump of unrevealed backstory) or (c) players basically asking their GM "do I know x" so they can act upon meta-information.

If any of (a) or (b) or (c) happens in your game...then you've deviated from Story Now play. Once you've done that, any subsequent like move will contain a cognitive orientation by the participants at the table of "is this a, b, or c" and the GM won't be playing to find out (because they already know).

There are lots of other similar things, but this is exemplary of the phenomenon.

But again, there is nothing wrong with this or your play. Its just a different deal.

 

[FrogReaver]

It’s trivial to determine if a GM is taking advantage of their situation framing responsibilities to impose a trajectory of play:

Scene framing seems like that's an imposition on the trajectory of play and the GM still has a large role to play in scene framing.

* Does the current gamestate follow from the prior gamestate?

I don't know that I've ever seen this not be the case. Maybe you have something really particular in mind with this, but it seems universal.

* Does the current fiction honor prior established fiction (party wins and losses and the related orientation of all objects in the shared imagine space).

Seems fairly trivial to achieve in any RPG.

* Is the GM following the rules?

Of course - the whole premise of this was that he didn't have to fudge or do anything like that to railroad.

* Is the GM’s framing principally constrained by system (or is it deviating/arbitrary)?

Does this mean that the GM can use framing that pushes toward a particular situation as long as the system allows such framing? That's kind of my point if so. That a GM can use framing to force players into a particular situation (fictional or conceptual).

It will be obvious if those things are true and obvious if any one of them are not. I screwed up the other day in a game (I forgot a thing). A player (correctly) called me on it because it was obvious. We trivially resolved it and I reframed.

Seems to me that story now systems in general are only eliminating one type of railroading. (Fudging).

 

[Manbearcat]

Scene framing seems like that's an imposition on the trajectory of play and the GM still has a large role to play in scene framing.


I don't know that I've ever seen this not be the case. Maybe you have something really particular in mind with this, but it seems universal.


Seems fairly trivial to achieve in any RPG.


Of course - the whole premise of this was that he didn't have to fudge or do anything like that to railroad.


Does this mean that the GM can use framing that pushes toward a particular situation as long as the system allows such framing? That's kind of my point if so. That a GM can use framing to force players into a particular situation (fictional or conceptual).


Seems to me that story now systems in general are only eliminating one type of railroading. (Fudging).

I don't know what to say here other than "run a game and get back to me" or "let me run a game for you" because your speculated understanding of these things isn't attached to the reality of it.

I don't even know how to respond to the above post. I mean that. I don't even know how to respond to the above. What I have read above is an incomprehensible pile of misunderstanding what I wrote and then repurposing that misunderstanding + some other things that I can't even tell what its supposed to mean in light of what I wrote + a question that completely disregards all the things that have been written (and were just written in the post you responded to) which should utterly disarm the inclination to even pose the question in the first place!

At some point when you're at this level of communication breakdown its move on or "actually play one of these games (preferably under me and with proficient players!) and then we can revisit!"

We've jumped through that breach with your last series of posts (and this one especially).

 

[Ovinomancer]

Just to be clear, as we are on a D&D forum, which is why I keep using the term DM, not GM.

Sure, I don't think anyone's confused. I don't feel bound to honor just D&D when discussing how games work, even when primarily discussing D&D.

So most of D&D played is railroading. Does D&D exist easily with Story Now?

No, it does not easily exist, at least not as D&D. 4e was the only version of D&D that largely supported a Story Now approach, and it wasn't entirely perfect (but very much good enough). And this is okay. D&D isn't actually the everything game, despite many claiming this. It does D&D genre and tropes well, and, so long as you're using those, has a wide array of settings possible. It's also somewhat easy to drift into niches within the Trad/NeoTrad playstyles. But, all of this involves a good bit of likely railroading because of the amount of Force that will show in play. Not a bad thing. As I've noted, APs are predominately railroads, but are still good for the hobby because they create social cohesion through shared experiences.

Now, you can play 5e and avoid railroads but this isn't Story Now, and that's to go to a Classic approach of map and key style dungeon/hex crawls without a plot or plan. Everything is prepped before, nothing is plot just conflict, and the GM operates in an adjudicator role rather than a storyteller role. There's a lot of 5e play that borrows on this, but runs a plot or plan through it which devalues the approach.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Well if that's what's required, it will never work for my group. Most of my players have anxiety, and that anxiety is easily set off by feelings of this specific nature. We never would be able to do that at every session, because it would leave at least three of the four players I currently have dreading coming to each session. They'd never have any fun, it would just be a constant slog of "oh god everything is going to hell."

So...yeah. If Story Now means paranoid players, I'm not at all unhappy I don't do it.

Sure, it's not for everyone, but I'd not exactly assume that it's triggering for your players. This seems like the tyranny of soft expectations.

But I still honestly think no one listens when I talk about my prep. I prep POSSIBILITIES, not SELECTIONS.

A possibility is something that could, potentially, happen. A reasonable result from upcoming or player-planned actions. E.g., if the players say they want to meet the Sultana for the first time, reasonable results could include them earning her favor or her ire. So I prepare for those possibilities because...I mean why not? It doesn't hurt to have some idea of how the Sultana might respond to things. What kind of person is she? What does she like? How does her public persona differ from her private one? Etc.

A set of selections, which I emphatically do NOT prepare, would be a "choose your own adventure" story. "If you do X, go to page 7. If you do Y, go to page 13." Selections may not be properly linear, but they're the next closest thing. There are only N selections, you MUST select one of those N things, and you cannot NOT choose something (though inaction may be one of the selections). So, in selection terms, meeting the Sultana will have exactly one of three outcomes, e.g. "favor," "neutrality," "disfavor." No matter what the party does, one of those three will result, and all the direct consequences of that result are pre-figured.

I emphatically DO NOT do that, never have, never will. That's why I say that in the (extremely) rare cases where something has fallen apart and I can only see one way forward, I come clean to my players and we figure it out. Because that's obviously a selection, not just a possibility, and my goal is always to offer interesting possibilities as a supplement to player motives or drives.

So, here's the question -- why are they talking to the Sultana and what's their goal and where did both of those things come from? What you're describing is still Force, it's just well hidden because you're offering the freedom to choose how to overcome the set goal, but not really on what the obstacle is or what the overall goal actually is.

I offer my players many possibilities, small and large. I'd say about half the time, they don't use any of them, and instead do something I'd never considered (collectively they are smarter than I am, so the fact they surprise me is not itself a surprise.) I do whatever I can to support these surprises, to explore new territory I had never even thought about before. Sometimes, that means just inventing things from whole cloth. Other times, there are elements of prep I'd already done that can work with this new path, so I may avail myself of such things, or not, it all depends on where the group is at and what seems most interesting or effective.

Offering possibilities is on point for Force. These offers are aimed at specific outcomes -- they are ways to do the thing. The establishment of the need to do the thing is the actual crux point -- you're downstream of that and talking about how the deckchairs are arranged. Sure, there are more and less pleasing arrangements of deckchairs.

AND, to be clear, none of this is dismissing your play! It's just getting to the nitty gritty of what's going on. This was a difficult thing for me to do as well. It can be a challenge to 1) being very critical of yourself and get stark and blunt about your own play and 2) lose the feeling that you need to defend it. Your play is just fine! This entire line of discussion is really just about getting stark and blunt about it. I, personally, try to run my 5e games the way your discussing right now. This is how I see most APs working, at least in parts.

 

[Scott Christian]

Sure, I don't think anyone's confused. I don't feel bound to honor just D&D when discussing how games work, even when primarily discussing D&D.

No, it does not easily exist, at least not as D&D. 4e was the only version of D&D that largely supported a Story Now approach, and it wasn't entirely perfect (but very much good enough). And this is okay. D&D isn't actually the everything game, despite many claiming this. It does D&D genre and tropes well, and, so long as you're using those, has a wide array of settings possible. It's also somewhat easy to drift into niches within the Trad/NeoTrad playstyles. But, all of this involves a good bit of likely railroading because of the amount of Force that will show in play. Not a bad thing. As I've noted, APs are predominately railroads, but are still good for the hobby because they create social cohesion through shared experiences.

Now, you can play 5e and avoid railroads but this isn't Story Now, and that's to go to a Classic approach of map and key style dungeon/hex crawls without a plot or plan. Everything is prepped before, nothing is plot just conflict, and the GM operates in an adjudicator role rather than a storyteller role. There's a lot of 5e play that borrows on this, but runs a plot or plan through it which devalues the approach.

Thank you for the answer.

 

[Manbearcat]

@FrogReaver

If all of the below is true, how can a GM possibly railroad players?

* The current gamestate follows from the prior gamestate.

* The current fiction honors prior established fiction (party wins and losses and the related orientation of all objects in the shared imagine space).

* The GM is following the rules.

* The GM’s framing is principally constrained by system (and not deviating/arbitrary).


Give me an example in Dungeon World of exactly what you have in mind. Show your work:

1) Give me a scene A and then the evolution of play to scene B with the GM deploying "Force via situation authority over framing" that you're speculating upon (and you've speculated upon in prior threads yet without any evidence to support it).

2) Show me how this is done without violating any of the above.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The establishment of the need to do the thing is the actual crux point -- you're downstream of that and talking about how the deckchairs are arranged. Sure, there are more and less pleasing arrangements of deckchairs.

...Because they felt like doing so? Like...I don't know how to answer this question. My players investigate things they find interesting, or follow what they just "know" their characters would do, or take risks to see what consequences fall out (usually that's only a couple of the players, two are more explorers than instigators and one, on hiatus, kinda waffled between; the new guy strikes me as more of an actor, but he's new so I don't know for sure yet). They do what they like because...they like it. I often ask them what they want to do at both micro and macro levels. E.g. "you now know the cultists are amassing weapons...what will you do?" Or "the hellcats are stalking you, and if they catch you guys, you'll be in for a fight. What do you do?" for micro level stuff, and then after or between sessions I ask for feedback, commentary, and suggestions, e.g. "what kinds of adventures sound fun to you guys? Are we having enough combats? Has anything been allowed to fester that you'd like to deal with?" etc. Sadly my players often just say it was great and they look forward to more, but I'm getting better at asking more useful questions to get feedback.

The players engage with whatever they choose to engage with. I always leave that in their hands. If that means something gets ignored or diminished in importance, so be it. Sometimes that will have consequences (e.g. letting a known threat go unaddressed), sometimes it won't (perhaps dismissing an opportunity because they have things to do that they care about more).

What other reason could there possibly be? This is why I say I would be so crestfallen if I learned that they were only playing along because they thought they "had" to. That would be...awful. It would mean they were just along for the ride, appeasing me rather than enthusiastic for participating and telling the story. I prepare possibilities so that I can more readily and smoothly support whatever things they decide to do. If they decided that stopping the various "bad guys" was a boring waste of time and that sailing the high seas was where the real ADVENTURE was, well, I'd be sad that the stuff we'd done so far had mattered so little, but I would absolutely shift gears and work with that. The current established fiction wouldn't go away, and the party would likely hear news eventually about various events going on in the lands they had left behind (many of them less than pleasant) but other than that, they would be free to do as they liked. They certainly have enough money by now to just sail off into the sunset if that is their wish.

The Bard is a healer, a poet, an archaeologist, a zoologist. He cares deeply for the people in his life and seeks always to right wrongs and foster reconciliation. He has twice over adopted groups of people as "his" for personal reasons, and in so doing made great changes in the world. I did not prompt any of his desire for healing or protection; even the player did not intend this initially, as the Bard character was intended to be a bon vivant and has instead proved a noble soul, much to the player's surprise.

The party Druid, freshly returned to us, is curious to a fault and deeply committed to finding the true nature of things. He has seen beneath some of the dividing lines of magic and faith and wishes to attain true enlightenment, delving deep into ontology and teleology, at least in his Druid-y, spiritualist way. He has just returned from walking with celestials (something no mortal has done for millennia), and now has found a calling, a mission, even a creed if you will. He's still figuring himself and his mission out, but his life has gained direction and purpose where before he was adrift, ready to go wherever the winds of curiosity might blow him.

Other characters are similar. The Ranger (on hiatus) trying to navigate the difficult path between the ordinary city life his (paternal) grandmother seeks for their clan, the Old Ways that he and his cousins wish would be returned to, or his newly-discovered claims on great power and prestige that would make him even more intrinsically city- (and money-)bound than his grandmother ever dreamed of being...much like his hated (maternal) grandfather, the slimy merchant-prince. The Battlemaster, seeking to advance the height of his tactical acumen...and discover the secrets of his forebears, the ancient elves, spurred on by the powerful and unusual enchantments of the blade his parents left to him before they passed away (a racial feature from one of our resources, Grim World). Our newcomer, the Spellslinger, a world traveller on the hunt for new secrets of arcane gunsmithy and alchemical propellant, but also students ready to learn the art...and scoundrels needing it demonstrated firsthand, as she has served as a bringer of justice in her far-off homeland.

Does that help? I still feel like I may be giving information that isn't what you're asking for but I just don't know how to respond better than "they do it because they, personally, want to, and they have repeatedly told me that they are glad they get to do as they want, rather than having to do what I want them to do."

 

[pemerton]

Earlier, you wondered about my "illusionism of a different color," and this works. I dislike a "quantum killer," only resolved after observation, e.g. leaving the killer undefined until we all "discover" that it was the Countess (or w/e). But that's not the players discovering anything, they're very literally creating the past that led to their current actions, indeed somewhat "causing" that past and not some other past. You can't "discover" things that you, yourself, built with your own hands. It would be like saying Tolkien "discovered" Arda, or that I "discovered" the words of this post. Pretending otherwise is, to my eyes, a form of illusionism. It is the pretense that the story, the fiction, in any way meaningfully "exists" when it not only can be but must be continually overwritten in order that whatever becomes true right now was "always" true even in the past.

For some things, I can't accept that. That much wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey-ball-of-stuff highlights with painful clarity exactly how artificial and made-up it is. I surely don't need literally every factual truth of the world nailed down from session 1, that would be boring. But certain really important facts need to exist independently--so they can be discovered, not just invented.

I think your description of the causal process of authorship in a non-"backstory first" mystery is a bit lacking in nuance. For instance, if a player declares some sort of check for their PC, and it fails, and the GM in response "announces an unwelcome truth" that places someone the PC cares for in the frame, that is not the player who is doing the authoring.

In any event, what you describe as your preferred approach is what I have written about in the past as the players attempting to learn the content of the GM's notes. In this context, learn and discover are near enough to synonyms. Of the three approaches to running a mystery that I described above, it's the first.

Thus I feel a need for a knowable answer to some questions, like "who killed the victim?", before the players piece the evidence together. But if the answer exists, it must be accessible, and I am responsible for that. Being human--flawed and finite--I necessarily do so imperfectly. Mostly this just means my clever group surprises me. Sometimes, though...it means I paint myself into a corner, with facts that are necessary but difficult to access, e.g. even if I wrack my brain I can't conceive of more than one way to do it.

I'm still not clear what this would look like. You seem to be describing here not just pre-authored backstory ("X killed Y in Z fashion") but pre-conceived facts about the revelation.

Eg what stops you narrating a new event as a consequence - eg on a failure, a loved NPC confesses that they know who the killer is but are keeping it secret. Or on success, a detested NPC confesses the same.