Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory

[Malmuria]

A question of clarification: is the assumption that I've bolded, in your usage, sufficient for railroading, or rather necessary for the broad structure within which railroading is a narrower phenomenon?

The latter—the GM coming up with and playing the npcs is not railroading, in my usage

 

[Campbell]

The latter—the GM coming up with and playing the npcs is not railroading, in my usage

Agreed. As long as there is no intention in either the design or play to direct player behavior.

 

[Malmuria]

Cthulhu Dark is not a complete RPG, in that it doesn't fully set out the rules for either framing or for resolution. (The author is aware of this: I'm not criticising him.) I used Apocalypse World-techniques of asking questions and building on answers, and Burning Wheel intent-and-task resolution. There were no "nodes", no "key witnesses", no "necessary clues". It worked fine.

I definitely want to try both Cthulhu Dark and Brindlewood Bay

I bristle at "coded as an antagonist". Unless you just mean that the GM describes them doing something that the players (as their PCs) would rather the NPC not be doing.

If a player says "I say 'Hello'", and the GM responds "roll initiative" then I guess I want to know a few things: is this something that, within the system being used, is a legitimate hard move? For instance, is the attack by the NPC a consequence for a previous failed action?

Or is the player declaring an action - an attempt to talk in a peaceful fashion with the NPC - and the GM is deciding that action fails without calling for a dice roll? In that case, what are the resolution rules for the system? 5e D&D, for instance, says the GM decides if an action has a chance of success or not. Maybe the GM has decided that this NPC is very angry, or is mind-controlled to attack, or whatever. There are other systems, though - eg DitV, BW - that tell the GM to "say 'yes' or roll the dice". In that case, saying "no" would be breaking the rules.

If you are suggesting that a GM who has decided that the NPC is angry, or mind-controlled, or whatever - and hence will attack - should change that decision because the players want a different scene, now we're in the territory of the GM rewriting the setting details based on player desires/suggestions. But above I've quoted @overgeeked saying that it's not railroading for the GM to author a setting or NPC responses.

By coded as an antagonist, I just mean contextually. So the players are working for the harpers and the npc is an ancient evil lich, or the players are aligned with law enforcement and the npc is a mob boss, etc.

I suppose I see the role of the GM in this case to play the NPC “honestly.” If the PCs want to try to bargain with the lich, the GM should consider the lich’s motivations and such, along with whatever die rolls occur, and use that to guide the ensuing action. That is, the GM is not reacting to player interests extra-diegetically, but to what the characters are doing and how the lich will respond.

Though that’s just me; I think other people (like Colville) suggest GMs pick up on player interest and sometimes modify things ‘behind the screen.’ Not my style.

 

[overgeeked]

I definitely want to try both Cthulhu Dark and Brindlewood Bay

Cthulhu Dark is a fantastic game. I’ve played and run Call of Cthulhu for decades and I honestly like CD better. Not any pointless cruft between the referee, the players, and the world. This really helps with immersion. The lighter rules also have an isolating effect on the players. Most players are used to rules-heavy games. So without that crutch, it causes a bit of anxiety. Which can help a lot when running horror games.

And no, you don’t need anything that’s not in the book. If you’ve played an RPG before you can handle CD just fine without any extra procedures. If you want them, go ahead. But they’re not required.

 

[Umbran]

I'm still somewhat at a loss: Umbran says the framing is not relevant to an adventure being linear, but then I'm left with nothing but the text, which is inevitably linear (it begins at page 1, and finishes at page <whatever>).

The framing does not matter, in the sense that, given a path, what motivates you to get to the path doesn't change the path itself. Whether you get on the water slide because you have been shamed into it by your little brother, or to escape from a loan shark's goons - the water slide goes down, regardless.

Adventures have a shape, a topology. It can be a line. It can be a branching tree. It can be a web of multiply connected nodes, and so on. This topology does not have to be physical. An adventure (say, a mystery) can take place all in a single room, but the topology is of information. Clue A -> Clue B -> Clue C -> Proof D.

Reference is made to places/rooms being able to be visited only in order. I live in a house where that is largely true, but that doesn't mean every day of my life in my house is the same!

With respect, if your daily home life resembled a D&D adventure, I don't think you'd have time to write so copiously. I am not sure your daily life is a suitable analogy.

Because different things happen, occasionally different people are in one or the other room, etc.

This is why I say that the geography ISN'T the focus. The adventure isn't just a set of locations. If you have a linear adventure in which the PCs go through five linear rooms, and kill a dragon in the sixth, if they go to that location the next day, the dragon's going to be dead. So, clearly the next day isn't the same adventure, even if it is the same location.

It seemed to me that two different groups could play the little 6 room dungeon and have different experiences, depending on choices made, whether or not they have a Halfling who sneaks ahead, etc.

Yep. If you use a linear adventure with a group of all fighters, the resulting narrative will be different from doing it with all bards.

This is part of why linear adventures are just fine for many folks - they are interested in a lot of the small events and interactions, and may not care if the big picture isn't something they can change.

So it might be the case that we could keep "the adventure" largely intact but change the instructions, and now it wouldn't be linear anymore.

Sure. And, if you are given a dungeon with five rooms connected in a line, you can add rooms, connect them differently, and they aren't in a line any more. Or, you can take an adventure that isn't linear, and crop stuff out, and make it linear. That GMs can edit and revise things isn't exactly a revelation.

This brings me back to the "cannot". Who imposes the cannot?

It seems like the cannot is what entails the linearity, rather than vice versa. But where does this "cannot" come from?

Yeah, this reads a lot like you are trying to lead us to a kind of gotcha conclusion. I'll note that there's a couple of things that impose linearity - one is, as you might surmise, the GM.

The other is practical reality. Linear adventures are serviceable for many, and simple to run. The time and effort to create or edit a non-linear adventure may simply not be available.

As an example, we can consider, say, 3E, and imagine a middling-high level adventure. What is provided is linear, and is constructed to provide the desired rise and fall of tension, and part of that tension is tactical combat challenges.

But, in a 3E adventuring day, order can matter a great deal - meeting the BBEG early and late in the adventure can be different tactical challenges, and rewriting high-level tactical challenges in 3E is NOT EASY. Many folks can't do that on the fly and expect to get similarly favorable results.

I doubt anyone in this thread could define it in a way that "Viktor T. Hothe" (a guy who posts some very good physics posts of this sort on Quora) would not spit at (well, actually he would politely correct you, but...).

Just so you know, I'm a physicist. Doubts should be interrogated, not relied upon.

 

[pemerton]

The latter—the GM coming up with and playing the npcs is not railroading, in my usage

Agreed. As long as there is no intention in either the design or play to direct player behavior.

Campbell, I think that's a very big proviso!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I got nothin' when it comes to making up terms.

But, to add even more to the fun, there's two levels of these dependencies; the presence of one of which will make an adventure linear while the other will not.

The first type, the one that to some degree forces linearity, is when something Must Happen in an earlier scene in order that a later one can be accessed and-or played. A bland-and-boring example might be the trope where the PCs must find a key in one area in order to get through an otherwise-unopenable door in another; or when a scene with the butler must take place or else there is no possible way the PCs can safely access the mistress of the house with whom they need to speak. Kinda railroad-y, yes, but also quite common. These are the type of dependencies many of us either don't like at all or tolerate if used sparingly.

The second one, that doesn't force linearity, is when while all scenes are more or less equally accessible the play of some will be (in some cases greatly) affected by whether or not other scenes have already been played.

An example here might be where the PCs are trying to rescue a prisoner, did they find a stealthy way of avoiding all the guards (i.e. bypassing a variable number of scenes) en route to the prisoner, or did they throw stealth to the wind and just blow away the guards on their way in.* Put another way, the scene where they reach and rescue the prisoner is in theory going to happen at some point if the PCs are to succeed in their mission, but that scene will play very differently if it is among the first to be played during the adventure rather than among the last. Note too that this scene sequencing is almost entirely dependent on how the players/PCs choose to approach the mission.

This second type of dependency is IMO just fine, and sometimes almost falls under simple consequences: if you do A first it'll make doing B either easier or harder than if A had not been done (and might even make doing B either impossible or unnecessary).

* - georgraphy factors in here as well. If the prison is physically laid out in such a way that the PCs have no choice but to plow through lots of guards en route to the prisoner then it's going to be a linear adventure no matter what, with a pre-known number of scenes in it. But if the prison is laid out in such as way as to allow different approaches (or the PCs can bring resources to bear to allow different approaches e.g. Passwall spell, flight, etc.) then the adventure need not be linear at all and - using number of scenes as the measure - the adventure's length cannot be predicted ahead of time. Maybe they do wade in and encounter every possible scene and-or location and have 6 combat scenes then the actual rescue scene then another combat followed by a chase; or maybe there's only three scenes to the whole thing - stealthing in, rescuing the prisoner, and stealthing out again.

So, the interesting observation here then is that resource systems have a big impact on which type of adventures a given system is going to handle well.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

All that said- when I use the phrase, "re-inventing the wheel," I want to stress that I don't mean that there is nothing new that comes out. I think it should be obvious that the games of today are different than those of the 70s and 80s and 90s. I try to keep reiterating that vital work gets done from these movements that react to what is around them. But, just like other areas (computer games, for example). It's about how the hobbyist community doesn't recall that these debates already occurred. It's like seeing someone post something on enworld, and not realize that it's been done before. Except ... for fifty years. However, I do agree with you that the debate gets re-contextualized when the debate occurs at different times. It's just that in most fields, the people that are re-contextualizing the debate are aware of the prior debates. I mean ... imagine having a PhD candidate in English say, "Hey, I have a new idea no one has ever had before. Imagine if ... we didn't worry about the author's intention? I know! Totally new, right?" It's not that the debate can't be re-contextualized, so much as it's helpful to know that the debate already occurred.

Anyway, appreciate the response.

Exactly, but there seems to be a lack of understanding as to exactly HOW DIFFERENT the state of thought on RPGs is today than it was in 1974 (or '84, '94, etc.). I don't make a claim about my experience to be some sort of jerk who claims to know more than all the other nerds. What I'm saying is, having been there in 1974 and all those years in between, and ACTUALLY PARTICIPATED in those discussions, and actively played many of the games involved and tinkered with them, and seen what we ACTUALLY DID LEARN from them, the notion that we're just repeating ourselves endlessly is patently absurd. I'm sure Torner et al. THINK they have discovered some great truth there, but personally I think they have cherry-picked, interpreted things in a way that serves their purpose, etc. This is a problem with all research of this kind in the 'social sciences' or general academia, there's really no way to do what is now common in hard science, where BEFORE YOU COLLECT DATA you form a hypothesis and you state exactly how you will interpret the data and which outcomes will produce which conclusions. Time and time again experience has proven that all other approaches are essentially just testing biases.

So, I would not dismiss Evan Torner entirely out of hand. I would just say that it doesn't seem to be part of his agenda to actually see the huge gains in terms of effectiveness of analytical methods, which has completely revolutionized the views of game designers to the point where the vast majority of original RPG output today is both highly original and was pervasively influenced by those methods and the thinking behind them. If it was just "more of the same", then why the revolution in RPG design? I mean, Blades in the Dark would literally have been impossible to conceive of as an RPG in 1990. Not the most talented RPG designers and forward thinking members of the community yet grasped the conceptual framework that was necessary to have in mind in order to design that game. That's not repeating yourself!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd say if the GM is playing to an assumed an outcome or expecting players to act in accordance with a goal set by the GM then it's still a railroad or at least "nudging" which is a nice way of saying railroad.

If they play it straight then it's not. I just think assumed outcomes tend to lean towards nudging in that direction.

I think 'railroad' is a pretty slippery concept and there are many degrees of 'railroading', and I prefer to use the term in this form, as a verb. I think part of the problem is that a LOT of what goes on in classic 'Trad' play (ala 2e or 5e seemingly preferred paradigm) is effectively the same techniques that are used in hard railroading, but generally softer in effect, and potentially leading to much more open-ended play. So it becomes extremely hard to draw any sort of line because what most of us would do if we run, say, a 5e campaign using published material, would use techniques that are called out as 'railroading' pretty often. Yet we would probably not feel that the overall tenor of play we were seeing had the feeling of being 'a railroad' in any overall sense.

Speaking for myself, when playing in a game of this type, and that reasonably fairly describes at least some of my 5e play, I don't expect something else. I know what it is, and when I, for example, make a decision about what my character is going to do next, I make that decision with the apparent overall structure of the adventure in mind and where it is likely 'wanting' us to go. I see this with players too, and in fact its a hard thing to overcome when you run Story Now for people that have played WotC D&D for the past 20 years.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Just so you know, I'm a physicist. Doubts should be interrogated, not relied upon.

Sure, my comment was only about the nature of terminology and how it simply isn't always possible to say things in a 'plain way', and 'plain words' often don't convey what we need to convey. I mean, using the word 'energy' to talk about the energy efficiency of my house is one thing, we all understand the meaning at a level, and in a way, sufficient to have that discussion. In the context of a discussion about how the laws of thermodynamics apply to the Universe as a whole, that common understanding of the term 'energy' is virtually useless. Heck, it isn't even much use in a discussion of garden variety classical thermodynamics!