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

[Bill Zebub]

Those Players are IMO, intentionally choosing to not play their PCs logical reactions to the situation by basing their response on out-of-character information. And in your example they are doing it flagrantly. To me that is a sign of disrespect towards the GM and the game/setting they are presenting.

These are thought experiments to make illustrative points. I'm assuming that in real life the players and and GM gathered together at a table have bought into the same set of assumptions.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Good roleplaying and trust can get the job done too IMO.

Exactly!

In my opinion the insistence upon relying on dice implies a lack of trust in the players. That if players are left to simply choose their own actions/reactions, without imposing dice on them, they will only choose what is the most optimal without any regard for the story and the setting. That fear/complaint has been voiced many times, even in just this thread.

 

[Bill Zebub]

From the point of view of the structure of a player's engagement with the game, there is no difference between the following two states of affairs:

*Your character is unconscious, so you can't declare actions for them until they recover.​

​

*Your character is petrified with fear, so you can't declare actions for them until they recover.​

Great point!

Using D&D as the common starting point, the rules clearly lay out circumstances in which characters (PC and NPC) go unconscious.

The rules also lay out some clear circumstances in which characters (PC and NPC) become paralyzed with fear.

Interestingly, neither of those circumstances are connected, even tenuously or indirectly, with the skill system.


My response to your overall post is that everything you say makes sense, but it leads to playing Torchbearer, and that is just not the experience a lot of us want.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Exactly!

In my opinion the insistence upon relying on dice implies a lack of trust in the players. That if players are left to simply choose their own actions/reactions, without imposing dice on them, they will only choose what is the most optimal without any regard for the story and the setting. That fear/complaint has been voiced many times, even in just this thread.

The use of the dice isn’t about any lack of trust in the players, it’s about the fact that your GM hamming it up at the table misses out on conveying innumerable swathes of details and factors which are influencing the situation and the character’s perspective in it, the dice are there to simulate that in the same way they’re used to simulate the messy battle melee in attack rolls.

 

[Bill Zebub]

The use of the dice isn’t about any lack of trust in the players,

Over and over and over again in this thread, people (maybe not you) have said that if you don't put some kind of restrictions around it, players will just choose the thing that is best for their player. E.g., refusing to be intimidated, not believing the lie, etc.

Sounds like lack of trust to me.

 

[Bill Zebub]

it’s about the fact that your GM hamming it up at the table misses out on conveying innumerable swathes of details and factors which are influencing the situation and the character’s perspective in it, the dice are there to simulate that in the same way they’re used to simulate the messy battle melee in attack rolls.

...I should respond to the rest of it, too.

I don't understand how the die roll adds any color compared to my suggestion: his own guards tremble and blanch. Heck, have one of them pee himself. To me that's a LOT more evocative than, "And he rolled a 19!"

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, it is forcing a story on the players. But that's because there is a mechanic (or various mechanics) for turning characters to stone, and presumably those mechanics were followed in order to get to that point.

This is, of course, the General TTRPG thread, and there are lots of games other than D&D and its derivatives. So if the style of play you describe is based on a game where there is a explicit mechanic for social skills...something like "Intimidate: as an action a character may make an opposed Charisma:Wisdom check against other characters. Any targeted characters failing will be unable to take offensive actions against the originating character" or something like that...then I would agree that in that particular game this is a specific action.

There are certainly games that don't wall off the effect of social skill rolls as only applying to NPCs. Some of them have more formalized structures than others about that (but then, the less formalized ones do when applied to NPCs, too). In either case, the "social skills only apply to NPCs" is far from a universal.

 

[Micah Sweet]

These are thought experiments to make illustrative points. I'm assuming that in real life the players and and GM gathered together at a table have bought into the same set of assumptions.

You'd think so, but often I've seen it go a different way. We don't choose our table mates exclusively for playstyle compatibility. Sometimes we don't choose them at all.

 

[Thomas Shey]

is that not why we outsource the decision to dice rolls?

Well, at least in part that's because even the social bandwidth that goes between the two characters is not full; there are a lot of factors that influence the success of social attempts, and some of them cannot be replicated easily (if at all) in the game. Its not dissimilar in that regard to why most physical actions have die rolls rather than being purely narrated.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Exactly!

In my opinion the insistence upon relying on dice implies a lack of trust in the players. That if players are left to simply choose their own actions/reactions, without imposing dice on them, they will only choose what is the most optimal without any regard for the story and the setting. That fear/complaint has been voiced many times, even in just this thread.

I was thinking the other way. Trust your GM not to have NPCs behave in a way untrue to the setting and their capabilities. In return, I would want to trust the Players to portray their PCs in a way consistent with those characters' knowledge and capabilities.