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

[Maxperson]

If you fail to resist an intimidation check against your character mechanically, and that means you'll take a penalty to hit, unless the penalty is so extreme its making it impossible to hit in practive, that doesn't "force" you to do anyting; it does however "encourage" you to find a different set of actions. If you can't see that distinction, I'm not sure how any further conversation here can proceed forward.

It absolutely forces something on the PC. It forces intimidation/fear on it, which might run contrary to the player's vision of how that situation would go. It's not just actions that remove agency. It's also forcing feelings and thoughts on the PC.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You can play people that are different from you. But most interesting differences are not about capability, they are about temperament, beliefs values, goals etc. And you don't need rules for those. But of course in most games the character can have different capabilities than the player too and the rules can assist in that. But they assist, they cannot supplant the player's own thinking. You still need to come up with plans, tactics, arguments etc using your own brains, and yeah, those will affect how well your character will do. And I utterly do not understand how it could not be so. As long as the players are making any decisions that have any meaning, their own decision making skills will affect the outcome.

Unless you're the GM, where you are required be an individual with high social skills if you want to your NPCs to be persuasive, intimidating or deceptive, right? That's what's I'm hearing here. Players can roll, GMs have to perform.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What business is it of yours or WotC's if that table over there in Wyoming is playing the game and making choices based on player self-interest? Why should the game try to force them to do it differently?

The default setting of social skills should be 100% player agency over the mundane aspects of their characters. All else can be dialed to where individual tables want to move the dial

Should it? Thanks for letting me know! Didn't realize I was doing it wrong (along with every RPG that doesn't follow your requirements).

 

[zakael19]

What I just do not understand how people's minds work, if they can just use rules as substitutes for actual arguments and things that evoke feelings.

Like we've been arguing about this here for pages. If I suddenly say 38 will it make you agree with my stance?

If I say scary 27, will it make you feel fear?, if I say funny 32, will it make you laugh?

I just do not understand how this can work, unless you just play from some detached third person perspective, instead of trying to inhabit the viewpoint and feelings of your character.

Have.. you never played with somebody that said something like “ohhh, well you know what? I think that TheirCharName is actually deeply affected by this - you see tears start to run down his face as he sinks to his knees by the cooling corpse” or something? Like trying to model how that character is experiencing a situation you can only appreciate at some degree of remove? Possibly because of the outcome of a roll?

 

[AnotherGuy]

I liked @soviet's approach as it left the mind of the PC to the player and the consequences were about how the rest of the world perceive the situation. I have zero issues with that and I've done similar. But the point you are saying that the NPC was so convincing that the PC is now second guessing themself, then you are telling the player what their character thinks and I am way less cool with that.

The thing is, in RPGs the player's say what their chracters want to do, then the mechnics and the GM determine how well that succeeds. But when the mechnis or the GM start to tell the players what their chracter wants, then you short circuit this whole process.

A PC sat down to negotiate with an NPC in Sigil. The NPC attempted to read the PCs mind and find some specific tidbit of information.
The character, who had foreseen this and protected himself somewhat from this, has the Flaw of not being able to keep secrets very well.
I offered an XP to the PC if he let that information slip.

Another PC was meant to attend an extremely important meeting (Council Meeting, ToD) along with his party. However he received an opportunity (the help of Elminster's ward) to covertly gain some valuable information from the personal library of someone (Elminster) attending that meeting. The information related to a topic his PC had an interest in. One of his Bonds is lore being more valuable than ABC. I offered him an XP if he skipped on the meeting (at great cost to his party) to lean into his Bond and use the opportunity to acquire lore from Elminster's library.

A PC had a Bond that considered a certain NPC (previously a PC) his brother and would do anything for him. Well that NPC was caught in a city being pulled into Avernus (Elturel, DiA).
He purposefully split from the party to attempt rescue this NPC earning himself an XP.
I'm essentially running 2 campaigns now (1 the main group and 1 for him, separate sessions).

These are just a few examples of how we leverage the TIBFs to truly test the core of the character. Player has full control over the decision to lean into their TIBFs or not.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah,I get that impression as well. I guess I was hoping for something else. IMO it's really important to be able to roleplay someone who isn't you, and mechanics can help with that (or even make it possible).

To be fair, some of them might like to be able to do that, but they consider the need to mechanize the process too high a price to pay. Its not a new thing; when social skills and other mechanics first started appearing there was a pretty enormous pushback in some circles, and there are still branches of the hobby which avoid it like the plague, for many of the same reasons.

You see some of the same attitude toward some intellectual skills for similar reasons, but the resistance doesn't tend to be as strong except for people who are heavily focused on puzzle solving and the like as a core game-play element.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure. I mean… a lot of the conflict in this discussion seems to come from trying to do this in D&D… which is ill-suited for it and isn’t really designed to handle it.

Its not the only beast where the process is presented as stupidly simple, though D&D is certainly a poster child for it in most cases.

 

[Maxperson]

Should it? Thanks for letting me know! Didn't realize I was doing it wrong (along with every RPG that doesn't follow your requirements).

Maybe read the post instead of going off on something I didn't say.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If there is such a person, I would love for them to chime in on this thread. Anybody?



....or, they think they are a better judge of what will and what will not influence their character than are the dice.

And I think chances are, they're wrong. People are really, really bad at understanding when something will have an influence on them except in the coarest cases, and I have no reason to believe they'll always be better with a fictional character they created.

So here we are.

(And just again, because I'm sure this will slip if I don't keep repeating it, I'm talking about "influence" not "actions".)

 

[Thomas Shey]

But frankly, I think this thread has achieved something that many previous threads about similar matters have not: people actually admit that they like author stance play.

I've never been particularly hesitant to say so. As long as people understand I can shift from one stance to another with the same character at different times and not act like that's weird and alien.