Should this be fixed

[Aberzanzorax]

Ignoring the "railroading" discussion for a bit, I've given this a bit more thought.



I think that it might be interesting for the group to do a one shot or two, in D&D or something more wacky like Og Unearthed (where you play cavemen who only know 3-7 TOTAL words).

It sounds like this is actually a really good group, but it also seems like there are some behind the scenes emotions/perspectives that don't mesh.


I wonder if just taking a break for a bit and doing something totally different would help refresh everyone's perspective?


Or, another potential option, sit down and do a "pure roleplay" session or two (including the DM narrating some scenes...work on character development and the resolution of some of the group conflict, including creating ties within/among members of the group).

The best first level adventures come up with reasons for a group to stay together and work together. Then that sort of stops, assuming parties want to do so naturally.

It would potentially be beneficial to have another "get to know you session"


Your group could even potentially take a page from other rpgs and roleplay conflict, even combat (with the assumption that there'd be no xp or gear rewarded) with the goal of creating a story that develops characters as well as a more cohesive group.

Players could even be encouraged to "DM" making up npc villians, etc, etc...as is often done when a player writes up his/her own backstory.


In essence, I'm thinking to save the current campaign, maybe a reboot?

 

[Elf Witch]

I'm still parsing over the railroad parts of Pemerton's post, but I understand his point about the WIS-check. Perhaps a pair of examples would illustrate.

Say you're playing in a modern game featuring enemy Nazis who are using mystical black arts to further their agenda of conquest. Now, as part of the loot, your party finds a cache of non-magical Nazi memorabilia, which is nonetheless quite valuable. However, one of the PCs destroys the Nazi memorabilia, deeming it to be "evil".

This is a reasonable decision. A DM enforcing a WIS-check on that character to prevent destroying the memorabilia is--in a passive manner--overriding the player's ability to choose how her character reacts to situations. The player should determine her own character's morals and values, not the DM.

On the other hand, the DM may think that this situation is more like a character who hates the color red. Then, when presented with a blue statue, the player declares that she destroys the statue because it is red.

Does the DM have the right to override that decision as it makes zero sense? I honestly don't know. But imposing a WIS-check seems like the wrong solution in this case as well.

I have to disagree with this example in anyway being similar to what happened in our game. First of all Nazis and what they did were evil without a doubt. There is no room for argument on that one unless it is an alternate history and the Nazis are the good guys and the Allied troops the bad guys.

In the GMs world necromancy is not evil. Homes, merchants, even the king use undead servants and soldiers. The goddess of death's clerics prepare the bodies and send the soul to the afterlife. Once the body is a shell it can be legally bought to be used as undead. There are laws pertaining to this only family members are the person in question can arrange the sale of the body. A lot of soldiers do it because it gives their families extra money and even in death they can still serve the throne.

Again I think I have typed this several times now the wisdom check was not to stop the dwarf from destroying the items it was to see if he thought it was a wise decision to go behind the party's back. After he killed the necromancer and the entire party paid the price for it the party was upset. She wanted to know if the dwarf thought it was a wise decision to go behind the party back again and risk his dwarf being kicked out of the group.

That was what the wisdom check was for not the destruction of the items per say.

 

[Elf Witch]

The GM determining that necromancy is legal is not per se railroading. The GM determining that necromancy is not judged evil by some NPC or other is not per se railroading. Clearly, this is all just setting up the gameworld. In some circumstances, in combination with other elements of the gameworld, it could turn into or contribute to a railroad - for example, if one player has made it clear that his/her PC's main raison d'etre is to fight necromancy, and the player has been accepted into the game on that basis, and the GM then presents a world where the PC has no practical option but to tolerate necromancy. But those sorts of circumstances aren't all that common (although the repeated threads on these forums about player vs GM choice in respect of PC build, shared world creation, etc etc show that they aren't unheard of either).

In my view, however, the GM determining that necromancy is not evil, in a game where a significant motivation for playing, on the part of one or more players, is to engage with the thematic question of how we should regard acts of necromancy, in my view is railroading, or at least a serious potential prelude to railroading. Because the GM is purporting to settle in advance the very issue which the player was hoping to address by playing the game.

I could see this if the the character had in his background that he thought necromancy was evil and that regardless of it being legal he was going to fight it everywhere it was in the world. That a DM putting in good necromancers might lead to railroading.

But it wasn't, the world where the dwarf is from has no necromancers. He had never encounter it before he got to the human city. His main foe are drow. He decided that regardless of the law and what the humans and the humans gods think it is evil. It is why he killed the necromancer. Afterward when he found out that St Cuthbert's temple, the human god he has chosen to freely serve does not view the practice of necromancy has it falls in this area as evil or illegal he stopped going on about it being evil.

Personally I don't think he was role playing his character at all. I think he metagamed it. I think he was afraid that the skeletons were some kind of trap set by the DM to hurt us and he didn't trust his fellow players to be smart enough to figure it out.

 

[LostSoul]

Yeah, I think S'mon is right. Your use of the term railroad is... unusual. If you have the freedom to choose between helping the angels or the elementals (or helping neither), you're not on a railroad. From what I'm seeing here, you're seem to think that any GM-based structure that labels your PC in a way you don't want to be labeled is a railroad. To me, that feels about the same as not wanting to fall when your PC tries to jump the chasm too wide to jump. Your objection is to the consequence of your actions and decisions even when you have a reasonable chance of knowing what they are, given the GM's cosmology.

What's happening is that the DM is stripping away the player's ability to judge moral or thematic choices made by the players through their characters. The DM has already made that judgement, case-closed.

That's not a big problem if you don't care about making that kind of judgement through play, but if that's why you're at the table, then it is a big deal.

 

[Elf Witch]

What's happening is that the DM is stripping away the player's ability to judge moral or thematic choices made by the players through their characters. The DM has already made that judgement, case-closed.

That's not a big problem if you don't care about making that kind of judgement through play, but if that's why you're at the table, then it is a big deal.

I have to disagree on this. Just because a DM makes world decisions for the world does not take away the players ability to make moral decisions of their own.

I like a good moral dilemma in game play it makes the game world more real to me and part of why I play. Black and white worlds bore me. If a gray world is handled right you can have moral dilemmas that have more than one right answer.

In my homebrew campaign the church of St Cuthbert and its clerics administer the law they are the cops, judges and executioners. To them the law is black and white. If you murder someone the penalty is death no matter the circumstances. Self defensive as they are attacking you now is not murder. If you steal more than once you start losing body parts.

The church of Pelor is often at odds with the church of ST Cuthbert and has been known to hide criminals from them because they see more shades of gray.

My players know this. This has come up in game. A woman poisoned her husband after suffering abuse at his hands she was terrified of him and felt unsafe.

The PCs had several choices they could ignore it, turn her in to St Cuthbert or to Pelor's clerics. The paladin of Bahment argued that she deserved mercy and the party's help.

So they helped get her to some clerics of Pelor who could help her and hide from the law.

The players made the choice not me and I didn't penalize the paladin because imo he did the good thing. If he had turned her over to St Cuthbert I would not have penalized him because he did the lawful things.

The only penalty I would have done was if the paladin choose to do nothing.

 

[haakon1]

Personally I don't think he was role playing his character at all. I think he metagamed it. I think he was afraid that the skeletons were some kind of trap set by the DM to hurt us and he didn't trust his fellow players to be smart enough to figure it out.

Ah, this is a good insight, and makes his action make more sense.

The assumption that the DM is out to "gotcha" the players all the time, like some players assume in Knights of the Dinner Table, probably is still out there in the wild.

 

[pemerton]

If you have the freedom to choose between helping the angels or the elementals (or helping neither), you're not on a railroad.

If by making the choice to help the elementals you're deemed to be committing an evil act, it looks somewhat railroady to me (on the reasonable assumption that the players don't want their PCs to do evil).

From what I'm seeing here, you're seem to think that any GM-based structure that labels your PC in a way you don't want to be labeled is a railroad.

When the point of play was to explore thematic/evaluative material, then yes - it is a railroad, or a prelude to it.

To me, that feels about the same as not wanting to fall when your PC tries to jump the chasm too wide to jump. Your objection is to the consequence of your actions and decisions even when you have a reasonable chance of knowing what they are, given the GM's cosmology.

Falling and gravity aren't (except in very strange circumstances, perhaps) matters of theme and evaluation. Good, evil, freedom, duty, honour, expedience, etc are. That's the difference.

If you want to see how your PCs feel about relationships between freedom and virtue, by all means set up a similar moral structure. Make sure elements of the cosmology have their opinions on the subject and make sure there are consequences for crossing them. And when they do cross them, you'll have your answer in very clear terms. It's when there are few or no consequences, no sacrifices to be made, that you end up with uninteresting and unclear choices.

My opinion is more or less the opposite of that. If the players care about the thematic or evaulative issues, then ingame consequences are secondary, because the realworld metagame consequences - "What did you just do!?" - will be where the meaning resides. I run my gameworld to support this metagame - I don't want to try and sublimate the metagame into the gameworld.

And so far from producing unclear or uninteresting choices, it has produced results like: a paladin willingly submitting to a beating from a taunting demon, regarding this as just penance for killing a man; a wizard betraying his home city in order to pursue greater unity and power with his order by allying with Vecna as a new leader of the order; that wizard's ally joining in the betrayal in exchange for promises of a magistracy and redemption of the mortgage on his home (which he had had to mortgage in order to finance his indulgence in trance-inducing herbs); two monks allying with a fox spirit exiled from heaven in order to liberate a rebel god who had been trapped by the emperor of heaven, and to bring a dead god back to life, in a complicated plan that involved tricking borh the heavens and the hells and dramatically transforming the karmic destiny of the world.

More generally - if the players care about theme, and you as GM want it to matter in the game, in my view the best way to achieve this is to open up the space for the players to develop and express their ideas through play.

 

[haakon1]

The only penalty I would have done was if the paladin choose to do nothing.

I've never penalized a character for moral/religious violations, like this, because I think there are different views -- if I thought it was really off from the rules of their god for a paladin or cleric, I'd ask why they thought it was OK. But honestly, that's never come up in 25 years of DMing.

However, I do have NPCs and the world in general REACT to actions of the PC's. For example, in your example, siding with one church would change its cleric leader's reaction to you, and the other church's leader if they found out. Plus the reactions of other NPC's who know, in different ways depending on the NPC -- family and friends of the poisoned husband might now be an enemy for the PC, but perhaps an Amazon leader might see him as a friend of women, etc. -- whatever makes sense in the campaign.

 

[pemerton]

No one is endorsing that the character gets a WIS check so that the GM can then take command of the character; rather that the character gains a WIS check so that the GM ensures that the player has all the information relevant to taking the action that the character should have.

Here, the information is metagame information (about the effect of the betrayal on player-to-player harmony). My objection is to (i) the GM sublimating that into an ingame matter, and thereby (ii) using the GM's authority over ingame stuff -however subtly and non-determinatively - to try and push the player's play of the PC in one direction or another.

In fact, if there are no consequences to the decision the PC made, then there is also no real decision point. Making the treasure show up elsewhere, in another form, just means that the player doesn't have to decide whether loot trumps ethics, or ethics trumps loot.

Why is that the decision? Rather than the decision to destroy the artefacts? Or to betray the party?

What counts as the meaningful aspect of the decision is relative to what matters to the players.

 

[haakon1]

If the players care about the thematic or evaulative issues, then ingame consequences are secondary, because the realworld metagame consequences - "What did you just do!?" - will be where the meaning resides. I run my gameworld to support this metagame - I don't want to try and sublimate the metagame into the gameworld.

I'm not sure I follow this. Perhaps there's a different meaning of metagaming then I'm used to here -- I think of it as being a powergamer thing about trying to "win".