D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Yaarel]

This is illusionism, which is a form of railroading. It completely negates player choice. To me, it's the worst form of railroading as it is harder to see than the blatant, "No, you can't do that, you have to do this instead."

I don't like any method where the ogre's location is rolled after the players make their choice. If the path is random, because the ogre wanders and could be on either path, that roll should happen before the players get to the fork in the road and have to pick a path. That way their choice means something. Either they will 100% encounter the ogre or they will 100% avoid it, depending on the path picked.

A DM puts a lot of work preparing a great encounter with an Ogre. Unfortunately, the players decided not to travel in the direction of the Ogre. So the DM reuses the work of that fun Ogre by placing it somewhere else, that the players run into.

Is this "railroading" or good DMing?

 

[The Firebird]

Okay. So we are good with procedurally generating content from a preestablished table.

Is there an acceptable way to procedurally generate the table?

Hmm, I'm not sure where this is going. I guess if you go to a big book of random tables and pull out "forest" and use that for your game, that's ok with me. Is that procedural generation? What if you roll d3 to pick from three separate books? Like I guess that doesn't bother me so much. It doesn't seem as good as hand crafting them and I don't know what it's trying to accomplish.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The "Iike simulation and prep" is the part that's interesting. If I run a game where "the players drive the game forward and the GM just makes sure there's interesting stuff to interact with", but I don't prep, and you hate my game, why is that? What psychological desire isn't being satisfied? Is there some way to bridge that gap? Is there some minimum amount of prep that would be satisfying?

Whereas in my view if you don't like to prep, that's fine. As a player I am fine with a much wider variety of games than I would ever run. But if the style really doesn't work for me I'm unlikely to play long.

 

[FrogReaver]

This is illusionism, which is a form of railroading. It completely negates player choice. To me, it's the worst form of railroading as it is harder to see than the blatant, "No, you can't do that, you have to do this instead."

I don't like any method where the ogre's location is rolled after the players make their choice. If the path is random, because the ogre wanders and could be on either path, that roll should happen before the players get to the fork in the road and have to pick a path. That way their choice means something. Either they will 100% encounter the ogre or they will 100% avoid it, depending on the path picked.

I would never use this method, nor would I stay in a game that did. Encounters should not be present or not depending on whether a PC is alert.

This is only quantum to the DM who is effectively opening the box when he rolls the 1 and determines the encounter. To the players/PCs, it's not quantum.

This is clearly the wandering monster variant.

All of these are quantum only the the DM. To the players, the location of the ogre and the fact that it is an ogre is pre-established and not quantum.

For me, only the methods that are not quantum to the players are acceptable. If players encounter quantum situations, their agency is damaged to a greater or lesser degree, and that's not acceptable to me.

I think your explanation here is probably the best explanation. The difference lies not in objective quantumness but depends on the observer’s perspective - a basic tenant of quantum mechanics is upheld in the analogy!

 

[TwoSix]

Because the second statement is an outright insult to traditional-leaning gamers? It suggests that it's wrong to not be interested in non-traditional games and techniques, rather than just being a preference.

I'll be honest, I find interactions with people who aren't curious about new things and prefer to stick to and defend the status quo to be inevitably exhausting in pretty much every phase of life. It's not wrong; it's a completely common psychological profile and almost certainly necessary for broader social cohesion.

But I also don't like it and generally avoid people with that type of personality. So yea, I'm not trying to be maliciously insulting but it's also difficult to act neutrally about it. I will continually try to be as analytical as possible about it but sometimes my internal irritation leaks through.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I consider a "module" to be any sort of pre-scripted engagement space with a rough semblance of an expected set of outputs. ("You find the demonic statue in the Temple of Grazz't" or "You fail to retrieve the demonic statue from the Temple of Grazz't" or "You die in the attempt.") It doesn't have to be commercial to be a module IMO, you can write your own modules.

Ok, I see "module", I think, "linear adventure", not simply, "event based on prep".

 

[Maxperson]

A DM puts a lot of work preparing a great encounter with an Ogre. Unfortunately, the players decided not to travel in the direction of the Ogre. So the DM reuses the work of that fun Ogre by placing it somewhere else, that the players run into.

Is this "railroading" or good DMing?

It's railroading. The players choices are invalidated and no matter where they go or what they choose, they will encounter that ogre. Part of being a traditional DM is having prep that doesn't get used.

 

[TwoSix]

Ok, I see "module", I think, "linear adventure", not simply, "event based on prep".

Fair. "Exploring a multi-level temple" seems like a fairly linear adventure to me. But since I hardly ever use commerical modules, I probably have a different expectation of what they look like.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'll be honest, I find interactions with people who aren't curious about new things and prefer to stick to and defend the status quo to be inevitably exhausting in pretty much every phase of life. It's not wrong; it's a completely common psychological profile and almost certainly necessary for broader social cohesion.

But I also don't like it and generally avoid people with that type of personality. So yea, I'm not trying to be maliciously insulting but it's also difficult to act neutrally about it. I will continually try to be as analytical as possible about it but sometimes my internal irritation leaks through.

But...it's a leisure activity. Why should you have to be interested in a leisure activity that isn't fun for you? It still reads to me as, "your side is wrong because you're not interested in things you don't like".

 

[Umbran]

Not unless something truly unexpected happens and some degree of improvisation is needed. I try to be thorough in my prep, but things happen.

And that is the point.
Things happen.
If they are going to happen, the question is how much one is willing to embrace Things Happening.

Games or tables that use Fail Forward or Success at a Cost techniques, or that generate Complications (using generic terms - each game can have different names for these) embrace that Things Happen to the point of making them part of the process of play.

Which I think is an important point - these are not the GM doing something outside the scope of their role - they are adopted into the role, explicitly.