D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[zarionofarabel]

I've seen people pretty actually claim that anything but a complete open sandbox wasn't even an RPG. Unsurprisingly, they were awfully old-school in other ways, too.

Well that doesn't make sense!?! I mean, if is played on a table top (or vtt), features role-playing, and has codified rules making it a game you play...how the heck would it not be a TTRPG?!? That's just a weirdly narrow definition. People really claim that???

 

[pemerton]

Well sure, but I did address that separately. "3: The first part is just false, sandboxes can surprise anyone. 'Narrative twist' requires an established narrative, so that's, again, 'Who likes dogs? They only bark, they never meow.' "

If it were simply a desire for novelty and surprise, then that's entirely reasonable, but is really just a request for better quality. That is, a well-constructed sandbox should not be "empty". The clear implication from the statement was that it should be a "narrative twist", which requires a narrative, much like the other complaints (e.g. about an unsatisfying "endgame").

My point is that there "pre-plotted" and "sandbox" don't exhaust the possibilities in RPGing. It's possible to have surprises, twists, arcs, story and the like without pre-plotting. Without an "established narrative" in the sense of a pre-plotted one.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well that doesn't make sense!?! I mean, if is played on a table top (or vtt), features role-playing, and has codified rules making it a game you play...how the heck would it not be a TTRPG?!? That's just a weirdly narrow definition. People really claim that???

Its not common, but I've hit it more than once. When I pointed out that there were whole genres of games that excluded, they outright said they might be games but since they constrained player choice, they weren't "real RPGs".

 

[zarionofarabel]

Its not common, but I've hit it more than once. When I pointed out that there were whole genres of games that excluded, they outright said they might be games but since they constrained player choice, they weren't "real RPGs".

Well, that's just...dumb.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, that's just...dumb.

I believe it's because they don't think you are "roleplaying" when you do that sort of thing. They would construe it either as "rollplaying", e.g. simply executing rules in a dry/robotic way, or as lacking the taking-on-of-a-role, and instead being merely a slightly improvised take on being an actor in a stage play. So like, if you have Hamlet but the actors are permitted to ad-lib their lines, sort of thing.

I obviously disagree quite strenuously with this perspective, even though I am also pretty opposed to railroading (as I define it).