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

[hawkeyefan]

I see systems much like a contract, in the sense of "this, at least, is allowed". That Pendragon does social things way X or that D&D does them way Y is part of the agreement. Those may be unsatisfying ways, of course, but I think when we wonder about where agency lives and pick our lines to defend, we need to be more specific in the system contract in use. Pendragon allows the dice to test a character's vice directly, and D&D does not, yet D&D allows the dice in general defintions of skills to affect... someone. I think I know, but it doesn't seem like everyone here has had the same experiences as me. How much is that getting in the way for everyone, I don't know, but some of these situations being debated seem unmoored to me in a way that I have not been able to form an opinion.

Yeah, agency needs to he looked at based on the specific game in question. Sure, a game like Spire may have more consequences that take away agency than D&D… but it grants agency in other ways that D&D does not.

Examining and judging a single rule or instance of play in Spire by the same criteria one would judge D&D doesn’t lead to very reasonable conclusions.

 

[Fenris-77]

Yeah, agency needs to he looked at based on the specific game in question. Sure, a game like Spire may have more consequences that take away agency than D&D… but it grants agency in other ways that D&D does not.

Examining and judging a single rule or instance of play in Spire by the same criteria one would judge D&D doesn’t lead to very reasonable conclusions.

Spire actually assumes a lot more agency for the players in terms of making broad societal changes a potential outcome of their actions. This could happen in other games of course, but mostly not as direct a consequence of the game's design goals as is the case with Spire.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Spire actually assumes a lot more agency for the players in terms of making broad societal changes a potential outcome of their actions. This could happen in other games of course, but mostly not as direct a consequence of the game's design goals as is the case with Spire.

For sure. That it’s incentivized by the rules in how characters advance is no coincidence!

 

[pemerton]

RPGs are games of shared imagining. The agency of those who participate in the game, therefore, is about how they can shape that shared imagining.

Because, typically, most of the participants in a RPG are in the "player" role, engaging and affecting the fiction via the medium of a particular character within the fiction, that agency becomes about how the play of that character affects the shared imagining.

Because it's also fun, at least for many RPGers, for unexpected stuff to happen - stuff that no one would just choose here and now, if left to their own devices - we use mechanical systems to constrain our imagining and introduce stuff into it. Social mechanics are a way of doing that, just like any other mechanics are.