Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8009506" data-attributes="member: 42582">In many, perhaps most, D&D games, a big part of the game is gathering treasure by using player-side resources to overcome obstacles. That's why talking a dragon out of its horde is not a feasible action declaration.In a game with a different premise - eg Cortex+ Heroic - suddenly talking a dragon out of its horde becomes quite feasible. In that system there is no resource or resolution difference between fighting and talking - the difference is purely in the fiction - and winning a treasure is just adding another trait to your PC sheet. I haven't had a dragon talked out of its treasure in that system, but I have had a PC talk the dark elves at the bottom of a dungeon out of their treasure. It was pretty amusing at the time - the trickster PC escaping with the treasure while the other PCs were locked in battle with a group of dark elves.Are walls in dungeons railroading? Often not - they frame the challenge. The players expect them, and have them narrated to them in advance of action declarations. They are part of the framing and provide the expected ground for action resolution. Are secret doors railroading? It depends on the details, but they can be.Shift the context slightly: can walls and secret doors be railroading in an urban intrigue adventure? Absolutely! Because in that sort of adventure - which doesn't have the exploration-and-map-every-square aspect of a classic dungeon - narrating walls, secret doors etc can essentially become a tool that the GM uses to shape all transitions from scene to scene, block certain approaches to resolution, etc.Re the last sentence: bullies use that particular technique all the time. And there's plenty of them in the world!On the bigger picture: focusing on leverage and ono clever ways to circumvent encourages expedient play. [USER=6795602]@FrogReaver[/USER] already made this point.What about passionate play? I remember when I ran Bastion of Broken Souls (mechanically adapted to RM and integrated into an ongoing campaign): I ignored all the stuff in the module that said (in effect) the only way to deal with this NPC is to fight him/her. In one case there was an angel who was a living lock to the gate the PCs wanted to pass through: they could only open the gate by killing the angel. The PCs didn't want to fight the angel. One of the PCs, through an impassioned oration (as reflected in strong checks using the RM social resolution framework, which is not that sophisticated), persuaded the angel that the only way for her to fulfill her duty was to allow the PC to kill her. Which he then did. It was both more dramatic and more tragic than a PC-vs-angel fight. The fact that the module writer forbade it in his text just tells me that either (i) he doesn't have a very good eye for drama or (ii) he thinks that the game will break down if it drifts away from expedient play, in which NPCs are just obstacles and/or puzzles.But expedient play will never really resemble the source fiction, because very little of the source fiction is about expedient characters. Certainly not LotR. And not REH Conan (despite the occasional assertion one sees to the contrary.)</blockquote>

Verification