Thomas Shey
Legend
I did no such thing. I said this was only an appropriate description if you were willing to apply it to most of humanity. For someone who doesn't like other people mistating his statements, you're doing a fine job of it.
D&D General Why defend railroading?
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I did no such thing. I said this was only an appropriate description if you were willing to apply it to most of humanity. For someone who doesn't like other people mistating his statements, you're doing a fine job of it.
Thomas Shey
Legend
If you care to tell me how my observation that people are poor at resolving group social problems internally translates into this--and yes, I haven't proved it, but as I've noted, when I see something enough I don't feel a need to prove it to third parties to have an opinion--I think suggesting someone outside the internal dynamics of a player group is as good as it gets. I mentioned early on that it'd be lovely if it could be a social interlocuter who wasn't the GM, but few groups can support such (since someone would have to volunteer to do this while otherwise not being involved).
You seem to think my suggestion is that gamers are especially bad in this regard. Its not. My observation is people in general are not good at solving in-group problems, and most such solutions end up being abusive to less assertive members in one fashion or another.
If you don't share my opinion of human interactions on the whole that's your business. But at least stop suggesting its a special swipe at gamers or that I think my suggestion is a great choice when I've already referred to it as "the lesser evil" at least once.
What I haven't seen is you present an alternative that I think has a significant chance of working except in a relatively small subset of groups, and most such groups don't need the GM to intervene in the first place. That's apparently because you think group social problems are able to regularly resolved by in-group solutions that aren't, themselves problems, and if that's actually your position we simply have little more we can say because we don't human social interactions nearly the same way.
Don Durito
Hero
I find it interesting how leadership is so often confused with authority.
This claim is controversial.
Here's an example:
If the 5e GM decides that there is no secret door in the wall, then the GM is not obliged to set a DC for a check to find a secret door in that wall. It's impossible.
If the 5e GM decides that the guard is so pure-hearted that s/he cannot be bribed, then the GM is not obliged to set a DC for a check to try and persuade the guard by way of bribery. It's impossible.
That doesn't show that there is no railroading. Deciding that there is no secret door in the wall; or deciding that a guard can't be bribed; can very easily be techniques used by a GM to generate a railroad. And I think this sort of thing is very common in systems like 5e D&D that (i) assume that the GM will be the primary or sole author of fiction that is not on PC sheets, and (ii) assume that the GM is allowed to have reference to that pre-authored fiction in order to decide whether or not players' declared actions can succeed.
The use of a rakshasa (as per your earlier post) could also, quite easily, be a railroading technique. If what the GM is doing is ensuring a particular outcome in the fiction that is largely independent of players' action declarations then it doesn't become less railroading because the GM chooses to use a mechanical element (a Rakshasa with various immunities) rather than to achieve the same result through sheer stipulation (eg the notorious DL "obscure death" rule).
To be clear, I haven't and am not asserting that any use of pre-authored fiction and associated mechanical elements that limit subsequent outcomes of action resolution is railroading. This sort of technique is fundamental to ToH or WPM, for instance, and (at least if played in the spirit of Gygax's AD&D c 1977) those modules might be frustrating and/or boring but won't be railroads. But that's because the whole point of those modules is for the players to beat the GM's tricks and challenges.
I don't think that's the point of a lot of contemporary D&D play, though.
I think this is obviously false.
I'm not a mind-reader. But I am often able to work out what people are thinking and intending, That's part of how I make my way through the social world! Even moreso I can often work out what people are doing.
I've played in RPG sessions where it is quite obvious that the GM is making decisions about the outcomes of player action declarations not based on (i) application of the mechanics, nor (ii) reasonable extrapolation of the established fiction, but (iii) because s/he has certain desired outcomes in mind.
I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "interacted with"? Do you mean incorporated into an action declaration?
In that case, if the GM is negating the consequences of a failed action it seems completely fair game to introduce new elements into the fiction as part of that. I mean, the player declared his/her action, and failed. Which is to say, things turned out differently from how s/he wanted them to. Why shouldn't part of that include it emerging that the ingame situation was different from what it had seemed (and what the player had hoped it to be) up until then?
This is pretty integral to how the establishing of consequences for failure works in (at least) PbtA games and Burning Wheel.
I don't think it's that peculiar. There's a big difference between an honest bet and a rigged game!
In the context in which random encounters were invented - ie dungeon exploration - the players take a gamble by choosing to push on through the dungeon. They run the risk of a wandering monster die coming up 1 (or 6, depending on which convention the GM uses); and if it does, they know that there are monsters of different strengths on the tables, and that there are rolls for the number appearing. This is all part of the gamble.
Having the GM just decide is a completely different thing.
I don't think the distinction is weird at all. There's a clear difference, in playing games, between getting unlucky (or failing to get lucky) and having someone just decide that you lose.
I guess it's possible to design wandering monster rules such that they are almost certain to result in the players losing, but I think that would be widely regarded as bad design!
When I GM, I make up the world on the spot all the time!
This has to be done to frame situations, in games (like BW, or like Classic Traveller as I GM it) that don't rely on prep of situations in advance. Even in prep-oriented games (eg in Prince Valiant I tend to use scenarios from the rulebook or the Episode Book), it's often necessary to add bits of detail to framing that aren't present in the (pre-)authored material.
And making stuff up is also pretty central to the narration of failure, as per my post just upthread.
I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "choice" here. Do you mean a choice made by the PCs, or by the players? And if the latter, do you mean an action declaration, or just a bit of colour narration?
If a player narrates that his/her PC wears a headscarf, should that matter to play? Maybe in The Dying Earth, which makes quite a big thing out of fashion, and hats in particular; but often I think it won't and that's probably OK. It's just colour.
If the players are explaining that their PCs are trekking across Europe, and they explain how they are travelling north of the Alps, or south of the Alps, should that matter to play? Or is it just colour? That will depend a fair bit on the details of the game being played; most of the time I will tend to prefer a game where it is just colour.
As far as the "quantum ogre" is concerned, is it important to the game that the players be able to exercise control over scene-framing? If the game is B/X D&D, then the answer is Yes. If the game is Prince Valiant, then the answer is mostly No. That's not to say that Prince Valiant encourages illusionistic GMing - quite the opposite. It just means that it treats travel and geography, and especially the minutiae of travel and geography, primarily as colour.
EDIT: You mention the ogre tailing the PCs, or seeking retribution against thieves. It seems to me that, in a non-railroaded game, those would normally be states of affairs established by the GM as consequences of failure. Or perhaps if the game is stalling a bit and everyone looks to the GM to see what happens now, the GM might introduce hints of such possibilities to get things moving (a "soft move" in PbtA parlance).
Treating those as "given" elements in the fiction that can then be used to adjudicate action declarations, rather than as a resource for the narration of failure or for framing, strikes me as tending towards railroading.
I'm not an advocate of railroading. But the main reason I see it being adopted is because people enjoy an approach to RPGing in which the GM is an entertainer who reveals his/her story via play, and in which the main function of the players is (i) to appreciate the story thus revealed and (ii) to embellish it a little bit with their characterisations of their PCs.
TheSword
Legend
That’s one way of playing, and I guess that might be an interesting way to play. I’ve played and enjoyed board games that operate on similar principles.
However, as a general rule I don’t want to play and procedurally generated adventure. We play with a DM because that way we always win that random bet and get an interesting and fun encounter. The DM doesn’t waste our time with repeated chaff encounters and doesn’t wipe us out with unlucky ambushes piled on to already tough fights.
Rolling a dice as an means of inspiration because the DM wants a prompt is one thing. Being enslaved to the dice because they are somehow a check on DM tyranny and purer than a DM deciding what the next encounter is, is alien to me.
We trust our DMs will keep the game fun and when I’m DM my players trust me. I don’t think I’d want to play it any other way.
Don Durito
Hero
A random encounter is not even close to being a procedurally generated adventure.
A random encounter is not a "chaff" encounter. If a DM is throwing in random encounters as some kind of punctuation to a game than that DM is, sad to say, completely cluessless about what they are doing.
A random encounter is simply a way of applying risk as a consequence.
If the party decide to short cut through the Forest of Yoth known to be haunted by monsters there are three possibles consequences in terms of danger.
- DM decides nothing dangerous happens
- DM decides something very dangerous happens.
- DM decides that something dangerous might happen.
Edit: And of course a random encounter that presents danger does not have to present automatic combat. Once again clueless DMs don't mean that random encounters are bad. The best random encounters are not just consequences of previous decisions, like all encounters they are also decision points in their own right.
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TheSword
Legend
There is a lot of interesting stuff in the interaction between what the DM intends to happen and what the players do. Whether there is a plot or not.
In my opinion, far more interesting things occur then than when the players don’t have a detailed and consistently interesting set of events to bounce off.
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