Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay

[Lanefan]

"Red herrings" was explicitly called out as an intended result.

Yes it was, said by he who did said calling-out.

The example given was explicitly about confusing the situation with red herrings and extra information so as to force the players to weed through it to find their goal. It was even explicitly said that if they do this weeding in a noticeable way the assassins would be prepared.

Exactly. You've got it.

There's no way for the players to make meaningful action resolutions at the start of the presented scenario because there's no information provided to leverage -- anything they try will be a guess first,

Again, exactly; and as intended. They don't have the knowledge they need and thus have to find a way of obtaining it. Doing so will very likely not be easy, nor safe, nor without some frustration and dead ends - and presenting these challenges is the whole point of the scenario.

And note what I said there: specifically and intentionally included within those challenges is frustration. Impatient players (or players running impatient PCs) aren't likely to do well in this scenario, as it's in part a test of patience and perseverance - a test that I-as-player would probably fail every time, but that's no reason for it not to exist!

at which point the GM will (especially given the later post of possible details) increase the level of chaff with fully details NPCs that have no reason to be present other than to be a red herring and drive the fiction towards a point the GM can use to justify having the assassins alerted.

If the PCs are careless, or careful but unlucky, then the Assassins will likely be alerted. However if the PCs are careful, or careless but lucky, the Assassins likely won't be alerted. There's also the slight-but-not-zero possibility that the Assassins will be alerted in error, either to the wrong threat or by jumping at shadows.

Never mind that if the PCs/players realize they've mis-stepped (perhaps something about the Clothier's behaviour or manner clues them in, or they visit the Wit and Wisdom and things don't go smoothly) and potentially alerted the Assassins, the party still has options: for example they can always step back and wait a few days or even weeks for any alerts to die down before trying again; or if time-pressed they can try disguises or hiring locals to gather info; or they can even make themselves obvious and then try laying their own ambush in hopes the Assassins will come to them.

This is an example of using scene setting as GM Force -- Force being using GM authority to drive to a pre-determined or desired outcome regardless of player inputs.

Ah, but here you're making a big assumption: that I-as-DM or I-as-module-writer have a desired outcome in mind.

But chances are it doesn't matter much to me* whether they find the guild or not, or what they do with or to it if-when they do.

I'll happily run them through the process looking for it; and if they find it I'll gladly run whatever they decide to do next, be it attack the place or alert the authorities or whatever; and if they decide to turn away and ignore it I'll just as gladly run whatever else they get up to instead.

* - exception: in a written module where the whole point of the adventure is in fact to a) find and b) take down the guild, one hopes there's some what-ifs given by the author should the 'find' process go sideways somehow.

 

[Lanefan]

I started to read the last couple pages about orphanages and got extremely bored. I guess I'm kind of a dull DM on this front because unless it's an N1 type situation where finding out who matters and who doesn't is the point, I more or less tell my players if some detail they're obsessing on is irrelevant. If I fill in much information beyond "Well, the orphans live here. Big ol' place," I will definitely try to make it relevant, because players can't help avoid thinking that if I put effort into the description, it's not a total waste of time to look at it.

Which is actually a problem IMO, in that by your descriptions you in effect lead the players by the nose to what's important - or important in your view. Soft railroad, maybe?

As DM I've had entire adventures spawn from players latching on to an irrelevancy and running away with it. In the game I play in, the DM told me not long ago that about half of the 12-years-so-far storyline we've played out arose from us players latching on to some early thing that he thought was irrelevant but we thought was vital, and just not letting it go. (the other half of the storyline is much closer to what he originally had in mind, it seems)

 

[Ovinomancer]

If you take my stance as unchangeable then you really haven't been paying attention to my interactions in this thread. On the other hand, maybe your stance in unchangeable, in which case there really is nothing more to discuss. Let me know.

Um, no. Your statement (that I quoted) moved from asking about my position to characterizing my position in derogatory terms. I'll be happy to discuss, but I'm not going to do so while being personally attacked. I have no take on your position being unchangeabke, and have said nothing at all on that topic, and it doesn't, at all, represent my opinion.

I have had no problem responding to questions about my thought or on expressing my opinions quite verbosely in this thread. Why are people assuming I mean things I haven't said?

 

[Scott Christian]

As I say often, I am fortunate to the point of blessed to have excellent players in both the campaigns I'm now running, one of whom is my wife, who takes copious notes and shares them with the table via Google Docs (Campaign One is 600 pages through 52 sessions; Campaign Two is 180 pages through 19 sessions); it's easy to keep things consistent with that much information.

Thanks for the info. Always appreciated. We are both lucky. And by the way, your wife taking notes - WOW! That is awesome!

 

[Scott Christian]

Interesting.

I'm almost the opposite, in that I prefer a campaign to be open-ended and NOT to have an obvious visible end-point until and unless we reach it. Even when I'm roughly planning ahead as a DM and can see a possible end-point, there's no guarantee we'll ever get there (which is the state in my current campaign; I've a vague end point in mind but for all I know it'll never be reached). Side quests, unrelated adventures, player-driven adventures, extended downtime activities - all of these quite nicely divert from any progress toward an end state, and that's fine with me.

That said, defineable goals and end-points and even quasi-hard-APs can certainly be embedded within a larger campaign; but the end of the AP merely turns those characters loose to go do something else in the setting - join other parties, carry on together, retire, or whatever.

Come to think of it, of the last two quasi-AP's I've had in my campaign one was entirely a long side-quest (literally, as in three characters got Quest-ed to do something) and the other's relationship to the overall plot didn't become apparent until quite some time afterwards.

Nice! I don't ever want to come off sounding like one way is better than the other, just putting my experiences out there. Especially when it comes to making the locale/world feel real. But I have no doubt that many players and GM's experiences differ from mine. Yours is a great example.

The side quest is interesting to me. And not to open up a can of worms by comparing fiction and RPG's, but as a GM, I have always treated them as a chapter - no more. Sometimes the repercussions of their side quest come back into play, but I try my hardest to not let it go over one session. To have a campaign of one long side quest - that is intriguing.

 

[Fenris-77]

Dungeon choke points are not, IMO, railroading. Good dungeon design, especially for larger dungeons, usually requires some gating and separation of various areas. Sometimes that means there's a choke point. That says nothing about how the players should act, or how they can approach the dungeon as a whole. Sometimes the physical reality of a place limits options. Clever PCs might find a way around, and that's also a good thing too, but the place is the place. Walls have gates, so getting into the castle means that there will be limited options. In @Lanefan 's example above, where all entries are blocked except one is maybe extreme, but it's not a railroad. It could be a railroad, but I think that has more to do with how the DM handles player actions than it does the physical space. If the DM is constantly ruling that actions X, Y and Z don't work to gain entry because he had already decided that only the one entry had any chance of success that's a railroad. If the DM is open to the unexpected then it's not, it's just a location that's bloody hard to get into.

Generally speaking the whole idea of railroading centers on adjudication rather than adventure or encounter design. Liner plots, for example, can be railroads or not based on that measure, but aren't inherently railroads simply based on design. It is certainly the case that some linear plots are actually designed to be railroad-y to some extent, but that still doesn't enforce that play type. A focus on the logic of the fictional frame, and a certain commitment to playing to find out what happens will generally keep you off the tracks.

 

[Scott Christian]

I'm not convinced the correlation is as tight as you seem to claim. I'm running a 5e game where all of the PCs have their own agenda, but they have great cohesion -- acting to help each other's agendas and/or following team agendas. Even in games that are fully story-now, they don't have to fracture this much. Blades in the Dark and Dungeon World are fantastic examples of team games that don't feature GM plotting.

Can you lose cohesion? Sure. Is it perhaps easier to do so in a game where the GM caters to individual goals and doesn't push or help develop team goals? Sure. Is it an outcome of allowing for more player input into the fiction? No, I don't think so.

You are correct, the correlation may not be tight. I'm just speaking from my experience. (I feel as though I have a pretty broad range, as many of us here do. My strong points in that experience may be the amount of different groups I've played multiple years with, as I am at 11 because I move a lot.) Beside the point, I feel your Q&A session at the end is spot on.
One thing I would note is the difference, at least in my mind, between a story arc and a character arc. In my experience characters can have different character arcs, and as long as the story arc is solid, there's still a solid cohesion. It's when the character arcs are loose and not well thought out; they are not integrated into the main story arc, that the cohesion is lost. One DM I played with did a great job with this: At the start of the campaign your backstory must include a person who is important to you that disappears. You can also include a plague spreading in your backstory. Our character arcs were written based off our information. Some were sad, some ended happily, but all were integrated into the plague/kidnap story line.

 

[Scott Christian]

Given the above I don't think it's terribly difficult to grasp why others struggle to understand those statements.

So I have a question then. For 5e D&D what rule of thumb would you give to ensure your methodology is used to not produce "outlandish" scenarios?

Got to this and had to respond. So I have not read ahead of this message. But, the question you are asking is something people do naturally (99% of the time) at the table. You have a genre - a setting. The characters act within the setting. No rocket boots invented, no 50' jump at level 1 as a D&D character. Outlandish scenarios rarely happen, and a good DM can deal with them pretty easily.

 

[Scott Christian]

Which is actually a problem IMO, in that by your descriptions you in effect lead the players by the nose to what's important - or important in your view. Soft railroad, maybe?

As DM I've had entire adventures spawn from players latching on to an irrelevancy and running away with it. In the game I play in, the DM told me not long ago that about half of the 12-years-so-far storyline we've played out arose from us players latching on to some early thing that he thought was irrelevant but we thought was vital, and just not letting it go. (the other half of the storyline is much closer to what he originally had in mind, it seems)

This right here - 12 year storyline. I suppose being "loose" in a storyline depends on how long your campaign will run.

 

[Campbell]

@Scott Christian

What exactly do you mean by story arc? Story is what happens when protagonism meets antagonism. How can there be story (rather than exposition) independent of what the characters do?