What is "railroading" to you (as a player)?

[hawkeyefan]

Sure. I'm willing to experiment, but there are also some things I just know I hate.

I’d say to maybe check out The Between. There aren’t any rules that would compel you to act contrary to what you think your character would do… not unless you introduce it as a potential consequence yourself. But it does require that you not have a fully fleshed out sense of who your character is.

Might prove fun to let go of that and just play a character in response to play rather than based on preconceptions of who they are and must be.

Or it might drive you crazy! But it doesn’t do what you’re saying you can’s stand.

So these games do not ever tell the player how their character feels, how they react etc? What do these mechanics do then?

I wouldn’t say not ever. But not in the way you seem most worried about.

In Spire, yes, mechanics can tell you how your character may behave after a certain point. This is as a result of Fallout, which is a consequence once your character has accumulated too much Stress. There are different types of Fallout… Blood (physical injury), Mind (mental trauma), Shadow (exposure of your secret rebel life), Silver (financial ruin/debt), and Reputation (social standing). This system is designed to show the cost that rebellion takes on people. The character is expected to change as a result of their chosen life. So, it’s going to happen. But it’s not happening all the time or easily.

In Stonetop, examples are even less common. There’s the one @zakael19 mentioned with the barbarian like Stormblessed Heavy. They can choose to roil with anger, granting them storm like abilities in combat. But, it’s not easy to rein in… they need to succeed on a Wisdom roll or else they do some “damned fool thing”. This represents the character’s lack of control, so, in my eyes, suits the situation perfectly. And the player is the one who gets to choose what the “damned fool thing” actually is. So, while there is risk involved, and some loss of agency, this is not a situation where the player is entirely without say.

I think our Blades group is more focused on risk mitigation and resource management than players in my D&D group. In 5e D&D the characters are very powerful and hard to kill. They can afford to act more like superheroes, whereas Blades characters are fragile and the system is quite punishing.

ai agree about 5e characters… which is one of the reasons such caution tends to drive me crazy. As for Blades… all I can say is that based on what you’ve said, I take your assessment of the game with a grain of salt.

 

[zakael19]

In Stonetop, examples are even less common. There’s the one @zakael19 mentioned with the barbarian like Stormblessed Heavy. They can choose to roil with anger, granting them storm like abilities in combat.

In Stonetop, the cases where this sort of thing has come up has been when there's a risk involved and I "State the conditions and ask." Such as where the character may freeze up in fight (generally enemy has the terrifying tag); places are full of lingering magic that might incite people to anger or conversely dull their emotions and make it harder to act; fae with an allure that acts upon all males they see; spirits have moves that dredge up innermost fears or doubts that the PC has to struggle against; etc etc.

The key tends to be that a) the player is affirmatively trying to do something and then b) I tell them that to do so requires something more than just saying they do it. I think the Stormblessed and a couple of other Arcana are the rare "you've done something and now you get to see if you avoid your choices coming back to bite you."

Eg: The player uses the Noruba's Ice Sphere major arcana. They get a roll that involves marking a consequence. They pick the one that says "Your emotions dull. You can no longer be affected by fear, hate, passion, or other powerful emotions (for good or ill)." Now that's part of them. Or perhaps they pick the consequence from the Shield of the Wisent Witch "You become territorial and overly defensive of your allies. When someone or thing disrespects you, challenges your authority, or directly threatens your allies, you have disadvantage to do anything other than set them straight."

Fun times!

 

[pemerton]

So, aside from Pendragon, and the very specific role of bloodlust/rage in Vampire and Werewolf, what are all these games that apparently have dice rolls that control how PCs think and act?

I think the ones I've mentioned in this thread are:

*Classic Traveller (morale);

*Burning Wheel (Steel; compromises in Duel of Wits);

*Torchbearer 2e (compromises in social conflict; also twists for failure in social context, as per my example upthread of Lareth goading Telemere, and prompting Fea-bella to recall memories of her childhood).​

Not based on a dice roll, but rather the exercise of a limited-used fiat ability, is Prince Valiant (the Incite Lust special effect).

I don't think anyone's mentioned The Dying Earth yet, but it has rolls to avoid indulging temptations.

Another example that's a bit more ad hoc/haphazard in its implementation is Rolemaster: as I posted upthread, in our game we had the upshot of Depression crits, and of drug addiction rolls, as well as the Mind Subversion spell list that inflicts things like phobias and neuroses - I can't remember properly due to the effluxion of time, but I think we might have used some of those effects in combination with Depression crit results.

I think that Champiions-esque pscyhological disadvantages would be further examples.

 

[Bill Zebub]

What about die rolls and mechanics? That's not the opinion of other people.

Die rolls and mechanics, sure. Like fear and charm person spells you mean, right?

Die rolls and...the opinions of others about what your characters "would do", no.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Just to check where I believe you to be on this, what is okay is the NPC being "Boring As Hell +5", and the GM asking you to roll to stay engaged or resist being bored or whatever if failing at staying interested comes with some game penalty (later knowledge check is at a penalty, or you're easily ambushed, or whatever), right? Not narrating what your character does, but the mechanical impact is there and you decide if your character falls asleep or yells "I can't handle this anymore!" and leaves, or whatever?

Ehh....once again it would depend on the system. But if the NPC is "Boring As Hell +5" I don't really need a die roll. But if the GM wants to roll anyway, and tell me what the total is, including the +5 I guess that's fine. I can work with that.

But that's just what the NPC did. I don't need my own die roll to decide how my character would react to that. It's not a spell. It's just...people being people. Maybe the thing he is droning on about just happens to be one of my hobbies?

 

[Bill Zebub]

I'm not going to speak of D&D specifically, but I'll say there are games and subsets of games that signing onto them absolutely surrender some agency, depending on how absolutist you are in how you view them. Pendragon has been mentioned, but any game where you take psychological disasdvantages potentially takes some decisions out of your hands.

Yeah, I buy that. Or Torchbearer or Scum & Villainy or....etc.

But I was responding to a post claiming that that by choosing my attributes I was agreeing to give up agency. I think this might have been a reference to "if you are going to dump Int then you are bound to play by that" (and even that I would push back against) but by itself it was a pretty sweeping claim.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Combat actions are largely determined by dice rolls. Yes… that’s not all. The players declare actions and may have resources at their disposal. How they go about things and what they do specifically can matter quite a bit.

But this is all true of social scenarios as well… but when we talk about them, you ignore all that in favor of saying it’s all a dice roll.

This argument is often made....and indeed I have asked this same question...with the assumption that combat is the part of the game that is done well, and we need to bring social encounters up to the same level.

But maybe it's the other way around? Maybe we have no choice but to handle combat with rules and dice because most of us are not familiar enough with, say, fighting giant centipedes using edged weapons and magic, and we would enjoy it more if we could resolve it all narratively through roleplaying in a way that everybody found satisfactory.

 

[GrimCo]

In game like VtM, whole point is that you are fighting for control. Mechanics represent the Beast. And sometimes Beast wins. Player controls human part. Mechanics control Beast part. Game like that is not everyone's cup of tea, and it's ok. People who don't like games like that, don't play them.

When it comes to D&D, personally, i think that game sucks big times when it comes to rules for social combat. As in, there almost aren't any rules besides skill and few spells. 90% of rules in d&d revolve purely around combat pillar. Everything else is afterthought at best, completely left out at worst.

Not only do i think social skills should work both ways, in my games, they work both ways. For simple reason. It makes my life as DM easier and it makes players life easier. If i want my NPC to scare, naughty word or intimidate PC, i have 2 options. One is to role play it out and hope player is convinced enough to make judgement call that his PC is scared, intimidated or manipulated. Which is fine, but personally, i don't always have mental and emotional energy to do it. Decent amount of times, i run sessions when i'm in low energy mode, my roleplaying engine running on fumes. I want that option to just say "NPC tries to intimidate you to leave", roll dice, see who won social contest and go from there. Players have that option by default. They don't need to try convince me trough role play, they can just say "I try persuading a guard to let us trough", roll dice, if they succeed, guard is persuaded, game continues. Sure, they can try to roleplay it, but there are times when players are also running on fumes and just want use mechanics to sort it out and move session forward. And let's be fair, not all DMs and Players are good enough to do it trough role play and some don't really care that much for that aspect, so mechanics are there to sort it out.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Not only do i think social skills should work both ways, in my games, they work both ways. For simple reason. It makes my life as DM easier and it makes players life easier. If i want my NPC to scare, naughty word or intimidate PC, i have 2 options. One is to role play it out and hope player is convinced enough to make judgement call that his PC is scared, intimidated or manipulated. Which is fine, but personally, i don't always have mental and emotional energy to do it. Decent amount of times, i run sessions when i'm in low energy mode, my roleplaying engine running on fumes. I want that option to just say "NPC tries to intimidate you to leave", roll dice, see who won social contest and go from there. Players have that option by default. They don't need to try convince me trough role play, they can just say "I try persuading a guard to let us trough", roll dice, if they succeed, guard is persuaded, game continues. Sure, they can try to roleplay it, but there are times when players are also running on fumes and just want use mechanics to sort it out and move session forward. And let's be fair, not all DMs and Players are good enough to do it trough role play and some don't really care that much for that aspect, so mechanics are there to sort it out.

There's a middle ground between roleplaying and rolling dice, though: just state what the NPC is doing and what the stakes are. If the NPC is trying to persuade the PC, just state what logic or bribe they are using. If they are trying to intimidate them into something, just say what the consequences are for not complying. Etc. You didn't need to "act" this out.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Die rolls and mechanics, sure. Like fear and charm person spells you mean, right?

Die rolls and...the opinions of others about what your characters "would do", no.

Real people's opinions on your character. Not NPCs.