The purpose of vitiating player choice wasn't so much to achieve dramatic play, but to achieve a consistant story so that any group who played the module would start at point A and end at point B. I would go even further and say that the writer's weren't just trying to communicate a way to make group A and group B's experience of play the same, but that they were trying to communicate there own experiences and own imagined scenes directly to other groups. They weren't merely trying to create dramatic play, they were trying to create a a particular dramatic experience.
I think this is right. My own view is that the attempt is doomed to failure.
If we can imagine ourselves at the table when first games of Dragon Lance are being played by the original players for the purpose of creating a publishable product, it's easy to see that there is mutual understanding between the GM and players that all the force and overriding of the normal action resolution mechanics is being used in order to frame specific scenes that are desired parts of the story. You are absolutely doing the same thing. The only difference is that you aren't pretending, as some DMs running a published story module from the period might have, that you aren't doing that.
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You apparantly play with a group that gives you the expressed permission to vitiate their choices because they enjoy your stories, or they trust that once they pass through your chokepoint that the gamespace will be reasonably broad, or they just don't have any other choice but to do so. What ever reason, you seem to have a group happily rides the rails and you've got long experience with presumably eager participationism.
I think - I'm not sure - that you're misunderstanding the way my game is played.
It's hard to do comparisons about how railroady or scripted one's own game is compared to others when, as in my case, you've been playing in only a few groups with a lot of overlapping personnel for many years. My comparison points are the wider range of games I used to play in when I was still at uni and had time, plus games I read about on messageboards. This mightn't be much, but we all work with what we've got.
Based on those comparisons, I don't think my game is very railroady. I've never GMed an adventure path, and could never imagine doing so - my group wouldn't stand for it. I have bought modules like Expedition to the Demonweb Pits and to the Ruins of Greyhawk because I'm interested in particular elements of backstory, plus certain dramatic situations that I might extract from them, but could never run those modules remotely as written, because they assume that the players will make all and only those choices that are scripted by the writer. (I picked up Dead Gods second-hand because I'd heard many people sing its praises, but unlike the Expedition modules its a railroad with no backstory or situations that in my opinion are worth extracting from it.)
I've had PCs turn from alliances with the "goodies" to the "baddies" - the players thus redefining the campaign's default expectations for which is the good or evil side. I've had PCs choose to betray their lords, or become their most loyal subjects. I've had PCs serve heaven and betray it, as the players choose. I've had PCs addicted to spell-enhancing intoxicants, and had that addiction (a result of the player's attempt to substitute GP + streetwise skill for a lack of meditation skill in his character's build) shape a good chunk of the rest of the campaign.
A couple of sessions ago, the players decided that their PCs would negotiate with the duergar slave traders in H2 rather than fight them - the upshots being (i) that the PCs have to take a 300 gp ransom to a nearby city in a month's time in order to redeem the slaves, and (ii) that a good chunk of that module will not be useable for my group in its published form, given that it assumes an assault on the duergar fortress. This was initiated utterly by the players - I had assumed that they would fight - although (in accordance with a pretty traditional allocation of roles) I was the one who concocted and adjudicated the negotiation skill challenge on the fly.
None of this is meant to be "my non-railroad is less railroady than your non-railroad". It's just to try to indicate what sort of game I play, and why I dislike 2nd ed style railroads, and also why I dislike a range of mechanical systems that I associate with a certain sort of RPG play, like alignment, that try to dictate the answers to moral questions rather than let the players explore their own responses to moral issues.
Where does the scene-framing come in? It's about cutting to the thematic chase. How do I know what the themes are that my players are interested in? Well, sometimes they tell me, and sometimes it's obvious from the character sheet, and sometimes a little bit of both.
You are effectively saying that certain ways of playing aren't things you can choose to do, and hense that certain actions aren't possible. You're like a director yelling 'Cut!' when the actor starts to go off script
You're making assumptions here about how a "scene" or encounter resolves itself which aren't true in my game. Once a scene is in motion it plays out according to the action resolution mechanics. (In 4e, either combat or skill challenge.) Within the parameters of those mechanics, the players can do what they like (to give an example of parameters - I stick to the original rather than the errata-ed skill challenge rules, and require an action from every PC involved in the conflict before allowing a second action from any PC).
Wait a minute... what in the world does bottles on door handles have to do with system? Assuming that we are playing in a world where there are door handles and bottles or some equivalent (strings and pots and pans, whatever), exactly what system do you play where the option to set up a simple mechanical alarm like this is unavailable to the players due to the 'action/resolution mechanics'? That has nothing to do with system, unless you are playing in a game where everything that isn't explicitly described by the system is an invalid proposition.
It's more about (i) how it's mechanically resolved, and (ii) what the default expectations are for when that sort of thing is even on the table.
I'll start with (ii). As I read Worlds and Monsters (the second of the 4e preview books), part of the logic of "points of light" is to create spaces in the gameworld, which correlate to spaces in the actual experience of play, which default to "no encounters". If you're playing that sort of game, there simply won't be bottles on the door handle most of the time. The capture would then be a surprise move, intended to set up a new set of challenges for the players. If the tavern is already part of an existing encounter, or an existing encounter space, then it's a different state of affairs altogether - I agree completely that it would be wrong to cut straight to the capture, because an existing "scene" is still unfolding (unless the game mechanics permit the GM to end a scene in return for granting the players some sort of metagame token - I don't play this way, as it's a bit non-traditional for my group, but I think a game
could be played this way pretty easily).
Turning to (i) - if part of what is involved in a Thievery or Stealth check to secure the room
is that a bottle is placed on the door - and the best you can get from the elaborate description is a +2 to your check - then the bottle manoeuvre simply becomes part of the arbitration of the skill check. If that fails - or is part of a broader skill challenge failure - than capture might be one way of giving effect to that failure.
There are all sorts of ways of handling this situation other than the narrated freeform of AD&D. Rather than having nothing to do with system, I see it as depending crucially upon system.
And some of these systems make it pretty clear when an encounter, or a series of encounters, has ended, and thus when the scope for framing a new scene outside the strictures of "continous play" opens up.
I used to play eight hour sessions of 1e AD&D where not a single dice was rolled. It was very much AD&D, but much of what was being done was play that wasn't governed by system just as a bottle balanced on a door handle will fall off when the door is opened regardless of what system we are playing. And I think you are going to want to say that we weren't playing AD&D
No. What you describe strikes me as quintessential AD&D. I'd add to your list of modules "White Plume Mountain" at least, and probably "Ghost Tower" as well. For various reasons, though, I prefer not to play that way. That's part of why I moved from AD&D to Rolemaster many years ago.
I don't think playing 4e would change any of that experience.
GMing RM I used skill checks to change it quite a bit. And GMing 4e I use skill challenges to change it more. How big the change is is a bit hard to judge - as Hussar likes to say, I suspect that the difference you would notice at my table is probably less than what these long discussions, with their playing up of contrasts, suggests. But the differences would be there. Some simple example: in a game with thorougly implemented social skills, the best you can get for your rhetoric is +2 to the check. In a game with engineering skills as part of the character build, the best you can get for your detailed solutions to modules like White Plume Mountain is to explain what the PC who actually has the skill is trying to do as s/he makes a skill roll. From my own experience, I think it's at least a bit different from AD&D.
The dramatic tension between nationalism and loyalty, and a commitment to a higher ethical standard would have been the same. The dramatic tension of knowing you are allying yourself with traitors who are motivated by self-interest, in hopes of acheiving some higher good would have been the same. Questioning whether the ends justify the means still always involves dramatic tension. These are timeless story questions and what in the world does system have to do with any of that? And for that matter, why would I need (or even want) system support for that and what in the world would it look like?
I think these things are related to system as well, but in different ways that are typically more closely linked to character build than action resolution. For example, playing out a betrayal is hugely different for an AD&D compared to a 4e paladin - the former faces a loss of class, plus loss of level for alignment change. These things are also different in a game with a disadvantage system - a player who gets bonus points for Disadvantage: Blindly Loyal, and who
then goes on to play out the traitor role, is in effect cheating. In either case it can relate to action resolution if the GM applies a "no you can't break your alignment" approach to resolving action declarations - something not unheard of in D&D play.
In more indie games these sorts of things tie more directly into action resolution - eg in The Riddle of Steel spiritual attributes give bonus dice to action resolution, and in HeroQuest relationships, which would include loyalties, can grant augments - but that's not normally the case in more traditional games.
I reject Forge GNS theory in one of its most basic tenents - that a system cannot satisfy all three stances at the same time. I believe that it's quite possible to balance all three stances in a single game
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To a certain extent then, I reject the notion of describing play as 'nar', 'sim', or 'gamist'.
The Forge doesn't deny that a given game can serve multiple agendas. T&T is a standard example for either gamism or narrativism, Marvel Super Heroes a less well known one, and Champions is an example of something that can be played either sim or narrativist. And I know that RM can be played narrativist as well as sim, because I've done so (although a little bit of "drift" - ie tweaking at the margins - is required - but that's par for the course for RM). Of the classic purist-for-system games RM is actually somewhat well-suited for narrativism (better than RQ, for example, and I suspect better than Traveller although I've less experience with the latter) because it has a highly metagameable character build system (good for letting players set the agenda of play) and highly metagameable action resolution systems (because fighers have to choose an OB/DB split every round, and magic-users have to choose what sort of failure chance to risk every time they cast a spell).
As to the balance of all three stances in a single group and a single play session - I'm inclined to say yes for nar and gamism, especially if the system is very crunchy in the traditional sense (like D&D or RM) - at least a certain sort of gamist emphasises the crunch, and it is in the course of resolving the crunch that the narrativist does his/her thing. I think integrating sim preferences is harder - purist for system bumps up against those parts of the game that support the narr/gam options (like hit points, powers etc), while high concept bumps up against the tendency of the other players to want to make the game their own. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I think there would be the potential for a bit more friction. But these are just my own generalisations from my own experience.
I tend to think many Indie games are exagerrated in one aspect to the point of grotesqueness in a futile attempt to make a 'pure' game according to a bizarre theory. They strike me as striving to be shallow one note games that are good at only one thing and which satisfy only a narrow range of players. They are interesting to me mainly as creative design excercises. For that matter, I see 4e in much the same way - futilely attempting to be a pure focused system when that's the opposite of what makes a game satisfying.
As I was reading this paragraph I wanted to ask whether you thought the same of 4e, but you answered for me in the last sentence! In contrast to your view, I see 4e as the only version of D&D I would have any interest in GMing, and probably in playing either - it brought me back to D&D as my principal game of choice after nearly 20 years away.
