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

[Maxperson]

How is expressly blocking a players declared, and presumably 100% legal, action, just because the DM doesn't like it, not railroading?

If the DM feels the action is utterly inappropriate and wants to say something before the action resolves? That's usually appropriate.

If the DM believes the player is being deliberately disruptive? That's an out of game issue and needs to be treated as such.

This.

Plus @bloodtide is assuming the player is trying to ruin fun. Perhaps the king has been being a pain in the rear to the group and everyone there is upset at him, and that's just that particular character's way of showing the displeasure. Such a thing isn't always going to be in bad faith.

It will always be railroading, though.

 

[Lanefan]

I wouldn't say that. It depends on the group. Railroads, linear play, and adventures can be fairly popular forms of play. My partner enjoyed playing a fairly linear adventure path that feels fairly "railroady" in terms of being on the rails. They enjoyed it because it felt like the sort of on-the-rail stories found in video games. However, I would potentially buckle under such an adventure unless I went into the adventure well-aware of what I was getting myself into. But simply describing it as what amounts to degenerative play, IMHO, underestimates the popularity of this form of play where the players are blissfully along for the GM-guided ride.

Agreed, it's not degenerate. Constraining, yes, even boring if the specific rails you're on at the moment aren't to one's taste, but not degenerate in itself.

 

[Lanefan]

If you voluntarily agreed to it then there’s no force involved. Don’t railroads involve forcing the players to stay in the path?

Not necessarily, if the players stay there voluntarily and thus don't need to be forced. But it remains a railroad notwithstanding.

It's the same principle as DM authority: something you'll use only if-when you need to.

 

[Enrahim]

How is expressly blocking a players declared, and presumably 100% legal, action, just because the DM doesn't like it, not railroading?

A railroad requires a track. A enemy checkpoint over the road you are currently traveling, forcing you make a choice of how to proceed, is a blockade. It is more or less the opposite of a railroad.

 

[Mort]

A railroad requires a track. A enemy checkpoint over the road you are currently traveling, forcing you make a choice of how to proceed, is a blockade. It is more or less the opposite of a railroad.

I don't follow?

Here, the DM has presented a scene and is having it go a certain way (the track).

The player, not wanting things to go in that direction, says his character is explicitly picking his nose (trying to get off that track).

The DM, not wanting to derail his scene with the nose picking disallows the action and proceeds as if it never happened (continuing along the track).

Seems straightforward railroading?

 

[AlViking]

The issue got fixed because we had a player who had no problems being loud and angry at the GM for not letting him play his character the way he was supposed to be played. The rest of us? More "table polite." I like to think that if his player hadn't been there, we would have stopped the GM at the end of the session, or at the next session. But who knows?

How many tables have players who are really willing to stop playing with a bad or overreaching GM, especially when that GM is someone they know personally? I don't think it's nearly as common as you might think.

I've had a couple of games with bad DMs over the years, they didn't have second session. Other games I left because the DM was decent but it wasn't for me.

A mediocre GM is one thing, a truly bad GM in my experience (an apparently yours) doesn't retain players.

 

[gban007]

but 'wanting' or 'hoping' and the dice roll isn't the important part of the action resolution of what makes them different from each other, attacking the orc is a closed-potential outcome, there isn't any possibilities beyond 'hit' or 'miss' when you attempt to resolve the action.

deciphering the runes in this situation is not the same case, there is ambiguity to their meaning, if the runes example was the same as the attack example it would be a question of 'can i translate the runes? yes or no' and the GM would know their meaning and tell you on a success, and if the attack example was the same as the runes example it would a question of 'does my attack attempt work? yes or no' but then on a success you could list any type of offensive action against the target, you could damage them, you could inflict status, you could even use magic against them because your 'nonspecific attack action' was successful.

Outside of Ezekiels response showing how in 5e there can be a lot of things decided after the attack roll is made, such as his examples and things like divine smite, in the example provided by Permerton they didn't make the roll than decide what runes meant, they declared ahead of the roll what they 'hoped' the runes meant, with the roll giving a yes or no answer, albeit a no may have opened other possibilities.

 

[AlViking]

Outside of Ezekiels response showing how in 5e there can be a lot of things decided after the attack roll is made, such as his examples and things like divine smite, in the example provided by Permerton they didn't make the roll than decide what runes meant, they declared ahead of the roll what they 'hoped' the runes meant, with the roll giving a yes or no answer, albeit a no may have opened other possibilities.

The results of an attack may be something other than damage but it's still a limited and constrained list.

The runes could have been practically anything. There's nothing inherently wrong with that if its what you want. But an attack and its results are actions with specific results, not deciding the nature of the runes. It's like the paladin declaring their attack will turn the target into a helpful Pegasus that will fly them to safety.

 

[gban007]

The results of an attack may be something other than damage but it's still a limited and constrained list.

The runes could have been practically anything. There's nothing inherently wrong with that if its what you want. But an attack and its results are actions with specific results, not deciding the nature of the runes. It's like the paladin declaring their attack will turn the target into a helpful Pegasus that will fly them to safety.

Well yeah, ultimately the type of fiction being authored is quite different. I was pushing back on the idea that the process is so different, I don't think it is, just one system confines the process to more perhaps direct fiction, stuff that a character could more directly control, towards Micahs preferred state of characters only being able to do what people in real world could do as such, whereas other system pushes more into the characters being like the main characters in a movie or book, or Ta'veren in nature such that wider things can go their way, and less likely outcomes are more likely to happen (narrativum from discworld?) and so the same sort of processes are able to be applied to a wider set of fiction as such.

 

[Faolyn]

I've had a couple of games with bad DMs over the years, they didn't have second session. Other games I left because the DM was decent but it wasn't for me.

A mediocre GM is one thing, a truly bad GM in my experience (an apparently yours) doesn't retain players.

Except for the ones who do because the players have no one else to GM for them, who don't realize that no D&D is better than bad D&D, or have no idea that the GM is bad. The Geek Social Fallacies are a thing for a reason.