D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[AbdulAlhazred]

Perhaps you mean - the outcome wasn't the ingame causal or mechanical consequence of the players' action declarations for their PCs? That looks like its true in your description, but I don't see how that is relevant to railroading. If it was, every time a GM said yes rather than calling for a die roll (in "say yes or roll the dice games") there would be a railroad!

And I think you have now gotten to the nut of the whole thing. The THEORY that is being espoused is literally that any action which comes about within the game which isn't 'naturalistically' the consequence of some PC action, something scripted into the scenario by the GM without reference to the players or their PCs, or something completely random, is inherently 'GM Force' because the GM literally makes the declaration 'such and such happens'. Its a very narrow and IMHO philosophically weak definition, but there it is. In the case you are analyzing the fight that is called for isn't a consequence of narrative fiction, a set scripted thing, nor random. I'm sure we are both quite aware of the many reasons that this view is too limited, but maybe the discussion has grown old and strained here. Perhaps it would be better to construct some other thread and discuss the finer points of just certain limited aspects of this? I don't know. I guess I've already annoyed several people, lol.

 

[LostSoul]

First, who is talking about a game of uninformed decisions? Really? Is anyone?

I thought that was what the discussion was about:

First, for clarity: I am talking about a scenario in which (i) the players have a left and a right path to choose between, (ii) there is nothing that suggests either is an unreasonable choice, and (iii) if the PCs go down the left path, and try to examine the documents, it will be fruitless/pointless (foreign language, no info, etc) and the time taken will mean that when they then head down the right path the prisoners will be dead (or whatever - the players will have failed in their goal for that episode of play).

In that situation, I contend that (1) the left/right choice is not meaningful, and (2) the scenario has not been well-designed - as I said upthread, it's effectively a microcosmic version of "rocks fall", triggered by the players making one rather than another of two apparently reasonable choices.

The reason it is not a meaningful choice, in my view, is because making the choice reflects no skill on the part of the players, nor does it reflect any values or commitments. Choosing left rather than right is - under the conditions I specify - basically random. And so the players make an essentially random choice, with one of the choices meaning auto-fail.

For me, (ii) means that it's an uninformed decision. The last line ("And so the players make an essentially random choice, with one of the choices meaning auto-fail.") really sounds like an uninformed decision.

Secondly, as I've noted, whether or not the players are informed is separate from whether the choices is meaningful. Their choice would have natural consequences (if they turn left and explore the library, they arrive too late and the ritual is completed). If the GM takes that away, they've imposed their own desired results, disregarding the decision made by the players (railroading).

I'm not arguing that uninformed decisions are somehow good; I'm not arguing over whether or not the fork scenario is good or bad design; I'm not arguing that railroading is bad.

Is that clear? I feel like I've been very clear on those things.

That's clear. The only point I want to make is that I believe an uninformed choice is not a "real" choice in terms of the game. I agree that uninformed decisions can have meaningful consequences; but from the player's perspective, if you don't have the information required to make a decision, in what way is the player going to think or feel that they made a decision? It'd be like playing soccer without knowing whose team anyone is on or what net you're trying to defend. Striking the ball or tackling someone is just as likely to be the right decision (given the goals of soccer) than not. Do the players in this game have any agency? I'd say very little: the only question is if you want to play to a tie or gamble with a 1-0 result.

For me I think this ties back into the idea of a naturalistic world and how to maintain that while still allowing players to have agency (making informed decisions that affect the outcome of the game). For example: when designing random encounter tables for an area, do you weight the results so that the "more expected" result appears more often, or do you make each encounter as likely as another with the aim to make each encounter interesting? There was discussion earlier in the thread about how to determine how long it would take to cross the Free City of Greyhawk. I'd use a weighted random encounter table for various neighbourhoods, main streets, and back alleys. "Street festival" or "traffic jam" may be a common result on the main street, while "cutpurse" or "backstabber" may be a common result in the back alleys; this creates a (mildly) naturalistic world but also gives the players a choice: risk getting slowed down in the main street or an attack in a back alley?

 

[pemerton]

I guess I want the next wave - Indie Sim!

The Chekhovian play you described above looks like maybe one version of that - it seemed to achieve the "Spartan world" in a verisimilitudinous way, by confining the action to one particular social situation.

Otherwise I'm not enough of a designer to know where to go with this.

The classic Traveller random patron table has an entry for "rumours", but that seems to have the same problem - that the GM has to inject a rumour judged to be interesting from a metagame perspective.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If it was, every time a GM said yes rather than calling for a die roll (in "say yes or roll the dice games") there would be a railroad!

Without that railroad, you'd be looking at a very long walk.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The Chekhovian play you described above looks like maybe one version of that - it seemed to achieve the "Spartan world" in a verisimilitudinous way, by confining the action to one particular social situation.

Otherwise I'm not enough of a designer to know where to go with this.

The classic Traveller random patron table has an entry for "rumours", but that seems to have the same problem - that the GM has to inject a rumour judged to be interesting from a metagame perspective.

Sure, but Traveller shouldn't be a hard system to run in a much more 'indie' way. Given its vintage it of course totally lacks any sort of narrative control mechanic or overt mechanic dedicated to signaling interest, etc. OTOH its a pretty transparent system overall, and clearly when players do things like 'go into the scouts to get a ship' or stack 4 skill points into 'Pilot' they're signaling SOMETHING.

What it really lacks are mechanics that are more thematic and tied to narrative. I think its an obsolescent system at this point, but still playable.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think 'Simulationist' IS an agenda, or at least its some sort of esoteric 'unicorn' agenda that doesn't exist in the real world.

This is where the Forge (or its predecessors) had got to when Edwards wrote his "Right to Dream" essay!

The Sim agenda diverges from Gamist or Narrativist play because of its express focus AWAY from the PC's needs and goals, and focuses on the development of events within the fiction progressing algorithmically, rather than based on dramatic need. The DM acts as the interpreter of these events into descriptions that are within the spatial and sensory bounds of the PCs.

Basically, world and NPC creation acts a set of initial parameters. The algorithms that drive the determination of what events occur are the DM's views of NPC psychology and either random charts or DM's desire as to how larger events within the "world" play out

Your comments about computer gaming are interesting but not anything I can add to. (I'm not a computer gamer.)

The bit I've quoted is interesting too, because it highlights the role of the GM (setting initial parameters, adjudicating changes and developments in the gameworld). But it leaves rather unclear what the role of the players is. What exactly are they doing? And how are they expected to think themselves into the mind of the GM? Is it a type of puzzle they're meant to solve? Or is the goal some convergent aesthetic experience?

Its not necessarily or even predominantly about simulation, it need not in any sense attempt to simulate any extant world at all, or it could simply follow on from some literary source, etc.

<snip>

The game world simply exists. It is composed entirely of exactly whatever the GM has placed into it, and any additions are intended to be purely logical extrapolations therefrom. Adjudication of character actions is intended to be purely causal and INTERNAL in nature, nothing outside the narrative reality is supposed to factor in, and the narrative is supposed to evolve purely according to mechanical rules supplemented by some sort of 'naturalistic judgment' of a notional unbiased participant.

The thing that has really always alluded me, except in terms of purely 'skilled play' of a Gygaxian sort, is what exactly the result is supposed to be?

I'm trying to channel myself of 25 years ago, which was when I had abandoned D&D out of the usual dissatisfactions (AC, hp, classes, poor skill system, etc) and started running Rolemaster.

I (and those I was playing with) definitely wanted a verisimilitudinous action resolution process (or, at least, what seemed verisimilitudinous to us) - armour makes you easier to touch but harder to hurt (RM combat tables); a combatant can shift his/he emphasis between attack and defence (RM parry rules); injuries taken cause debuffing (RM crit rules); caters can choose to parcel out, or alternatively focus, their magical power (RM spell point rules).

But we never assumed a neutral world or neutral/algorithmic motivations for play. Players were expected, and allowed, to make decisions about risk and effort (in melee combat, spellcasting, etc) which reflected not just the PC's ingame motivations but the player's own tolerance for risk vs reward, taking a fun gamble etc (though of course there is bleed, here, between player and PC motivation/personality). And as GM I was deliberately setting up situations (with mysterious strangers, etc) that would engage the players, and was accommodating their expressed play preferences demonstrated via PC build (so the PCs with illusion spells, performance skill etc got to make money busking, to succeed by way of infiltration/disguise, etc) and via PC play.

So it was a type of proto-scene framing world and scenario design, mixed with purist-for-sim resolution procedures. These two things come repeatedly into conflict, and nearly 20 years of handling that, with the conflict becoming more and more evident, is what prompted my move to a different system!

The DM showing off his imagined world with the players as tourists?
Re-running a typical genre story but having it turn out 'right' instead of conforming to genre tropes?
(ie: Thulsa Doom polymorphs Conan into a nematode, Dominates(pi) the hot princess, and takes over the world; Ganfalf uses The One Ring to destroy/become Sauron, Dominates(pi) Galadriel, and takes over the world; Merlin disintegrates the Stone, renders Excalibur for Mana, Dominates(pi) Morgan le Fey, the Lady of the Lake, & Guinevere, and conquers England; etc...)

I think these are both pretty spot-on, at least for a fair bit of play I've engaged in!

The "tour the GM's world/story" is very common. I think it works in CoC but pretty much sucks in D&D (which is a game of heroic protagonism).

The "have it come out 'right'" I think is also fairly common - for instance, you can see [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] in this thread dismissing fictional contrivances as inappropriate for RPGing.

This is one source of the conflict I mentioned in my RM play: the purist-for-system resolution tends towards things "coming out right", but the approach to world and scenario design was looking more for a genuine genre feel.

 

[pemerton]

Traveller shouldn't be a hard system to run in a much more 'indie' way. Given its vintage it of course totally lacks any sort of narrative control mechanic or overt mechanic dedicated to signaling interest, etc. OTOH its a pretty transparent system overall, and clearly when players do things like 'go into the scouts to get a ship' or stack 4 skill points into 'Pilot' they're signaling SOMETHING.

No disagreement there. I would expect it to be a lot like my RM experience described a bit upthread: doable, but needing to handle the conflict between the "indie" goals of play and the naturalistic rigour of the action resolution mechanics.

I think it would be better for this than RQ, though, and for the same reason as RM: RQ is so naturalistic that players can make almost no signalling choices (given how PC build and progression works) and almost no decisions in play (eg combat is almost purely algorithmic, unlike say RM where a player gets to allocate between OB and DB).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No disagreement there. I would expect it to be a lot like my RM experience described a bit upthread: doable, but needing to handle the conflict between the "indie" goals of play and the naturalistic rigour of the action resolution mechanics.

I think it would be better for this than RQ, though, and for the same reason as RM: RQ is so naturalistic that players can make almost no signalling choices (given how PC build and progression works) and almost no decisions in play (eg combat is almost purely algorithmic, unlike say RM where a player gets to allocate between OB and DB).

Yeah, though I think it would be pretty darn easy to incorporate a graded success/fail forward sort of resolution into Traveler that would really do a lot for it. I agree though, in essence its similar in general outline to RM, except of course now that I think about it the HUGE difference is total lack of any character progression mechanism. Its hard for the players to give the DM many leads as to what they're interested in past character creation, since you don't get 'XP' etc in Traveler. Even the very limited progression allowances that people have grafted onto it generally just let you get better at stuff you've done, much like RQ/CoC/BRP.

Its funny that you mentioned CoC, because my first 4e group got bored after a while, so we decided to experiment. We played a set of CoC scenarios where we made up characters for a given set of periods of time and then each player wrote a scenario, set in one of the time periods. It was fun but BRP really was the turkey of that process. It really is as you say a system of PURE GM force. Its odd that I have such fond memories of CoC from the old days, but I really just can't stomach that system at all anymore. We eventually switched to a super lightweight system (PACE) and things were MUCH MUCH better. The characters all died horribly of course, but that is after all the idea!

You should check out PACE, its about 3 pages and rather FUDGE-esque but without dice. We went on and played a 'Knights of the Round Table' scenario with it, which was pretty fun, but I did find that not all the players had an easy time leaving the world of procedural sim games. It all makes me appreciate how 4e can be quite handy for telling stories, and yet there's a veneer of the old ways there that seemed to make it a lot easier to digest for many players, even if a few of the were temporarily befuddled by having their interests catered to.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I wish you would stop making up a hypothetical (whether the players turn left or right they end up at point X) and then asserting that that is how I have, or GMed, some episode of play.

The "arrive in time to rescue the prisoners" is an actual thing that I actually GMed, and have set out in some detail in this and other threads.

It had absolutely nothing to do with turning left or right. I have actually described the geography of the Well of Demons in this very post, and explained how and why I ran it as I did (ie following the map as printed).

I didn't say you did. But I will discuss the hypothetical with others as long as it's used.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Let's put to one side that you are talking about a scenario entirely of your own contrivance (which you are then imputing to me, for reasons that I don't understand since I already mentioned hundreds of posts upthread that the scenario is your contrivance and not mine).

In the hypothetical that you state here, the GM did not force anything. The players asked for something, and the GM gave it to them. Had they not asked, s/he would not have given it to them. So how can you say the players' choices don't matter? It was their choice to ask for something that was crucial!

Perhaps you mean - the outcome wasn't the ingame causal or mechanical consequence of the players' action declarations for their PCs? That looks like its true in your description, but I don't see how that is relevant to railroading. If it was, every time a GM said yes rather than calling for a die roll (in "say yes or roll the dice games") there would be a railroad!

Wisdom save made.

/done