D&D General Why defend railroading?

[Paul Farquhar]

I hate procedural generation - nothing removes player agency more than making the consequences of their decisions random.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I find it interesting how leadership is so often confused with authority.

Leadership is a duty. I've been clear I don't think the GM should have either the authority or the duty. No confusion here.

 

[Ovinomancer]

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.

You seemed to apply it thusly. If this was a refutation, it wasn't clear at all, and you did nothing as the conversation continued to correct course on this. Don't blame me, I took you literally.

 

[Ovinomancer]

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.

My argument was that the GM should not have either the duty or the authority to be the supervisor of the social contract -- a claim put forth by others in the thread. I, instead, said that this duty is shared equally throughout the social group -- that each and every person present has the duty to enforce the social contract, and that each and every person present has the authority to call out breaches and negotiate corrections.

This is what you're arguing against. To do so requires that you're arguing for the duty and authority to be vested in specific individuals or that no duty is present at all. Since the latter is not what you've been saying at all, and the former is very close, then your position has to be that the GM has special duty and special authority to enforce the social contract. If the GM has this special duty/authority, then others do not, and that makes the GM the supervisor of the social group, responsible for ensuring the proper conduct of others. This is the source of my assessment of your continued arguments that people are bad as resolving in-group problems and therefor need a minder of some kind. I don't see how you can escape this conclusion given your continued arguments.

I also agree that people are, in general, bad at resolving in-group arguments. This is, however, because people are uncertain of whether or not they can stand up for themselves without receiving social opprobrium. In other words, they feel disempowered to deal with the situation, and this is a reinforcing loop. Your solution is to further disempower them by stating that the GM is in charge and so if the GM says nothing, they're wrong about the situation. Given that GMs are only selected because they are willing to take on that role in a game, and that there's often quite a lot of power fantasy that attaches to that role, assigning this to the GM seems like a terribly idea -- they're no more qualified than anyone else at the table to successfully navigate in-group problems, and they're also often likely to confuse social contract issues with their role as GM (I mean, look at threads on this topic here and you'll clearly see that there's a strong feeling that GMs are special because they do more work and so their opinion carries more weight!). This is a poor recipe.

Instead, I recommend that everyone be aware and empowered to understand that they have both the duty and authority to call out breaches of the social contract. This doesn't mean everyone for themselves, it means everyone for everyone. If Betty is shy and has a hard time confronting Bob's antics, Paul or Angela should step in and say something, because they also have the duty. Please, though, in this example, identify who the GM is for me? Exactly my point -- you don't need to know for there to be a strong and healthy social contract here, and not everyone needs to be good at social issues or standing up for themselves. The difference here is that we're not putting this on the GM, who should not be the leader of the social unit just by dint of their role in a game.

 

[pemerton]

That sounds like railroading to me!

The vast majority of encounters, in my experience, offer the PCs a choice to try and avoid, or fight, or negotiate.

Wouldn't it depend on what the encounter is? If the encounter is with a band of wights for whom the GM has rolled a 2 on the reaction table, and you don't have a cleric, then I think that's probably a threat that has to be avoided!

Or if you're a group of badly injured mid-level PCs who suffer an unlucky check on the table and encounter a giant slug! (On the Appendix C charts, that's a one-in-two-thousand chance for each random encounter on the 5th or 6th dungeon level.) Time to find another way to your exit!

I’m talking about my opinion. I’m not a fan of procedurally generating stuff and the DM being a slave to the choices it generates. I just have a very different opinion of the DMs responsibilities to you. As we know, and has been demonstrated in several past threads. We just like different things.

I can distinguish my preferences from more abstract discussion of a GM's responsibilities. These can be stated for various approaches to RPGing in a way that is largely independent of preference. (As I posted upthread, I'm not a very big fan of classic D&D play, but I think i can talk pretty coherently about how it works, and can engage in it with a modest but not very great degree of skill either as player or GM.)

 

[pemerton]

I hate procedural generation - nothing removes player agency more than making the consequences of their decisions random.

Isn't this the canonical way of resolving combat in D&D?

It's also how turning undead, and Sleep spells, and many other effects have also been traditionally adjudicated.

 

[FrozenNorth]

No it isn't, unless the DM tells them what is going to happen. If it's obvious to the players the DM isn't doing it right.

I would say that the opposite can also happen with some frequency: the players believe they are being railroaded when an encounter is the consequence of a previous encounter or the result of random dice.

 

[Cadence]

My argument was that the GM should not have either the duty or the authority to be the supervisor of the social contract -- a claim put forth by others in the thread. I, instead, said that this duty is shared equally throughout the social group -- that each and every person present has the duty to enforce the social contract, and that each and every person present has the authority to call out breaches and negotiate corrections.

This is what you're arguing against. To do so requires that you're arguing for the duty and authority to be vested in specific individuals or that no duty is present at all. Since the latter is not what you've been saying at all, and the former is very close, then your position has to be that the GM has special duty and special authority to enforce the social contract. If the GM has this special duty/authority, then others do not, and that makes the GM the supervisor of the social group, responsible for ensuring the proper conduct of others. This is the source of my assessment of your continued arguments that people are bad as resolving in-group problems and therefor need a minder of some kind. I don't see how you can escape this conclusion given your continued arguments.

I also agree that people are, in general, bad at resolving in-group arguments. This is, however, because people are uncertain of whether or not they can stand up for themselves without receiving social opprobrium. In other words, they feel disempowered to deal with the situation, and this is a reinforcing loop. Your solution is to further disempower them by stating that the GM is in charge and so if the GM says nothing, they're wrong about the situation. Given that GMs are only selected because they are willing to take on that role in a game, and that there's often quite a lot of power fantasy that attaches to that role, assigning this to the GM seems like a terribly idea -- they're no more qualified than anyone else at the table to successfully navigate in-group problems, and they're also often likely to confuse social contract issues with their role as GM (I mean, look at threads on this topic here and you'll clearly see that there's a strong feeling that GMs are special because they do more work and so their opinion carries more weight!). This is a poor recipe.

Instead, I recommend that everyone be aware and empowered to understand that they have both the duty and authority to call out breaches of the social contract. This doesn't mean everyone for themselves, it means everyone for everyone. If Betty is shy and has a hard time confronting Bob's antics, Paul or Angela should step in and say something, because they also have the duty. Please, though, in this example, identify who the GM is for me? Exactly my point -- you don't need to know for there to be a strong and healthy social contract here, and not everyone needs to be good at social issues or standing up for themselves. The difference here is that we're not putting this on the GM, who should not be the leader of the social unit just by dint of their role in a game.

Thank you for restating your previous posts. I found this one very helpful.

 

[loverdrive]

I kinda don't understand who's arguing what. Can I have a quick recap?

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

I have to note that random encounters were used as largely punctuation for a lot of the early run of the game. They were also time pressure tools, but I don't think you can separate them off the way you're doing here.

And I'd argue there was definitely a procedurally generated idea that was used on occasion early on; Gygax himself created a dungeon generator that added up to that in all but name, and a good part of many wilderness games early on could be read through that light.

This is not to say that those, without a GM adding in some elaboration are particularly high quality adventures, but I think it gets a bit much to call someone clueless who is using a procedure that's been used since the start of D&D on occasion.