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

[Thomas Shey]

I must have misunderstood your point. My apologies.

It happens.

That said: S&D having attribute point buy does not in any way make it a "point based" game, especially in a way that makes talking about those choices relative to Hero make sense.

It isn't point based broadly, but setting an attribute low to set another high is not different in any way to what you'll get in a point build system. It just siloes the point distribution to one specific area. It still has the same "tradeoffs should matter" issues.

 

[Fenris-77]

IQ is nearly useless as a model for intelligence. I feel like we've hit 88 miles an hour and gone back in time to 1973 for our discussion about models of intelligence.

 

[TwoSix]

The old dragon magazine doesn't really matter. An 80 IQ is mildly below average. An 8 int is mildly below average. They are equivalent.

We're just not going to agree on this. We've had this discussion before, going back to the "geniuses with 5 Int" thread, and I don't think our perspectives have changed.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, people do that all the time. It's hard as a player not to push for every advantage, whether or not it's true to your PC.

I mean, honestly, the whole idea of "dump stat" has always been about the attribute you could set low (whether because of some point distribution option, or just arranging a set of six rolls in the way that suits you) without it causing you much (or in some cases, any) inconvenience.. Whether that's because of low mechanical impact for a character or trying to roleplay around it has just varied as to time period and edition.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Character concept is the core for all PCs and NPCs, stats and classes and such are simply things we layer on to give them a resolution engine. The stats imply, but they do not model.

But the player chose the concept and assigned the stats, so presumably they assigned them so that they match the concept and if they didn’t I certainly would see it as a failure on their part.

 

[saviirkad]

I think, ultimately the flaw to my eyes in looking too much for a score to define the character in this way, whether the Int score or Str, Dex, etc., is that the argument only has merit to me if there are no modifiers and there are no dice rolls.

As soon as you introduce dice rolling to the process, modified by a mechanic derived from the score which is then dwarfed by a another modifier that is entirely divorced from the score, you introduce the only way that I can see is proper to evaluate a character's behavior or actions. The score is benched. It's still on the team but it's not on the playing field anymore. It will have some influence, but not definitive influence.

At the end of the day, if a player tells me they want to roleplay their Int 8 character as slow on the draw, I'll of course let them and think nothing of it. If they tell me that's the only way possible to roleplay such a character, I'll think they're not really that good at roleplaying but not be bothered by it. If the player is new or otherwise looking to improve, I'd do what I can to do help.

I do have the good fortune of only playing with people I consider friends; I know their character. If such a person was a stranger to me, I'd probably have a conversation to make sure that this roleplay preference is not indicative of a prejudiced outlook.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've seen this numerous times over the years. Done it myself also numerous times. Problem is, in D&D from 3x onwards, average being 10-11, anything above is above average (duh), but what's the difference between say 12 and 16 in practical sense outside mechanics, is hard. To correlate to real life iq. For all intense and purposes, in everyday life, there is little practical difference between iq 120 and 140. Uneducated high iq person can sound dumb, and highly educated average iq person can sound smart, depending on the situation of course.

There's something to that on day-to-day life, but I'd suggest the rubber meets the road a bit more on the often intense planning and decision making RPG characters make that is more likely to show that. That said, decisions in the game are also less likely to be under the genuine pressure and stakes the real life equivelents do, so it can be hard to emulate the difference properly. (I.e. its not a coincidence I've mostly referenced attributes lower than you'll ever see in a modern non-OSR game in examples I've used; it might be hard to show the difference between a 12 and a 16, but I'm not sold its equally hard to show the difference between a 4 and a 12).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't really see how it becomes the GM's prerogative to tell a player how to play their PC.

If (say) a low INT is an aspect of the character, then why can't the player play that? When we play Classic Traveller, we expect the players to play their PCs' INT and EDU. That's just part of what it means to play the game.

I do expect the player to play that themselves. That doesn't mean in all cases they do, and some cases can be pretty egregious, and in those cases I think some method of addressing it is legitimate, even if I prefer some over others.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think by using really open setting as the contrast with railroad, you are building in an assumption that at least some RPGers - eg me - don't share.

When I play, and in most of the games that I GM, setting is not all that important. It is a backdrop, and a way of coordinating various events and entities in the fiction. But what really matters in play is not the setting, but the situation and the way that it resolves. What I consider railroading is the GM exercising control over the situation - content, purpose/rationale, theme, consequence, etc An open setting won't reduce the railroading if every situation that the players are able to activate in the setting is still GM-dominated in those sorts of ways.

I suspect I was using "really open setting" in a different way than you read it; I was talking about it in the context of permitting stepping outside the direct situation presented if one was of a will. That may still not be relevant to your view on railroading, but the lack of it is clearly relevant to many people's take on it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

5e had BITF, i wonder how this conversation would be going (in regards to DnD at least) if having low stats actually made you pick and establish specific stat-apropriate flaws for your character, admittedly they were just there as an RP guidance aid but if these character flaws were actually established, even if only as simply as a line of flavour text would that influence perception of players acting their character against those traits...

I suspect you'd just have people arguing that none of the established traits was appropriate, sometimes as a legitimate perception of them lacking, sometimes because people would find it interfered with the ability to make degenerate play choices.