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

[Micah Sweet]

As a passive observer, I can definitely say that some of your posts read as strongly dismissive of other people's opinions that you disagree with. You may not be intending offense, but your words can be offensive. For instance:

This is a remarkably rude and condescending thing to say, and adding in "I prefer" doesn't take away from how demeaning it is to call someone else's preferences "depressing", and the phrasing of "I prefer [x] more than you, apparently" (emphasis mine) is insultingly condescending, again, whether you intended it to be or not.

It's perfectly natural to have strong likes and dislikes but maybe try to treat others who have different approaches to gaming a little more charitably?

Well, I'm pretty confident I do prefer more world modeling than that poster (they've told me as much), but fair enough.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Stats don't and have never mapped even close to perfectly over 'real people'. You're always going to have issues when you try to describe every character in terms of the same 6 stats or whatever. It's fuzzy, and fuzzy here does the job it needs to (more or less). Other games have other fuzzy ways of doing the same thing but suffer the same issues.

I agree with this with the further point that you kind of have to lean into the fuzziness. In D&D, the wizard may be an Arcana savant, but have no idea of the name of the current king, because he doesn’t care. Even without History proficiency, he still has a +4 to History rolls.

Conversely, the dumb merc with -1 Int and 10 years experience is still going to know a hell of a lot about making battle plans to win fights, or else he would be dead.

And who knows, he might end up Master of Coin one day.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I agree with this with the further point that you kind of have to lean into the fuzziness. In D&D, the wizard may be an Arcana savant, but have no idea of the name of the current king, because he doesn’t care. Even without History proficiency, he still has a +4 to History rolls.

Conversely, the dumb merc with -1 Int and 10 years experience is still going to know a hell of a lot about making battle plans to win fights, or else he would be dead.

And who knows, he might end up Master of Coin one day.

Class features and more skill granularity help quite a bit with those types of discrepancies.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I must point out this thread is not only about D&D.

You’re free to introduce examples from other RPGs, but I don’t think it’s fair to ignore examples from the currently most played RPG.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Public service announcement - we are now talking about bad behavior that affects the whole table, and not how someone feels about that dude who doesn't quite nail his low INT score.

That's where these discussions always go, because it's pretty hard to defend one's thinking as logically correct when the negative consequence is just that we get annoyed. Gotta turn it into a big fat "But what if...?!?!?!"

 

[Fenris-77]

Class features and more skill granularity help quite a bit with those types of discrepancies.

Sure, but Shadowdark, as an example, still works very well without that granularity (and no skill mechanic beyond the backgrounds). It just needs a different perspective about how much of what you do is supposed to come from your character sheet (which I don't mean as critique).

 

[Bill Zebub]

"X Int = 10X IQ" is from a 40 year old Dragon article, and doesn't represent the realities of modern neotrad play.

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.

Any attempt to turn any stat into a real life metric is going to result in more contradictions than symmetries.

What was the Str one? Your military press max / 10? Q.E.F.D.

(omg....I went skiing for two hours...fresh snow this morning...and six more pages in this thread while I was gone)

 

[Fenris-77]

(omg....I went skiing for two hours...fresh snow this morning...and six more pages in this thread while I was gone)

My apologies.

 

[Bill Zebub]

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.

It warms my heart to still see references to that, all these years later.

 

[TwoSix]

It does have virtues and flaws, however, which can still force players to play their characters in ways they wouldn't, which was my point. "Only the player should decide how their character decides things" is a position any number of games do not share in various places; they aren't usually about attributes, but they're still things that can entirely be cases where the GM, the mechanics, or both are overriding the player. So if you want to say that this sort of thing is entirely off the table, you have to limit that argument to some games, or make an argument why a low mental attirbute is intrinsically different from a psychological disadvantage or the like.

Oh, it's definitely game specific; any of my arguments against are entirely centering around D&D play. There are plenty of games where deciding if the character has the ability to even take a certain action is a central pillar of play.