The Nature of Railroading

[Quertus]

So, I decided to take the hit to my Sanity, and get caught up on this thread.

@NichG

Thank you for making the consolidated list of the 4 definitions is railroading being used in this thread. Are we still at 4?

Anyway, I'm glad you "like" / find nonzero value in my definition. If "Quertus-railroading" becomes a Playgroundism, well, it's funny to think that, of all things, a form of railroading will be named after me.

I'll have to think about what matches my definition, but not the others.

@AMFV

You've said a lot in this thread. Honest question - has any of it been about the nature of railroading? If someone were trying to understand what railroading was, is there any of what you've said that you think it would benefit them to read? I know you've been addressing a lot of side topics, and I want to make sure that I haven't missed something from you related to the main topic.

@Sith Lord convention

No. Just no.

@Max_Killjoy

I suspect you and I would dislike the same games. Almost everything you describe as something you dislike, I agree (usually with a similar "why" as well).

One curiosity is that "deceit" seems a big factor for both of us. I consider myself quite honest (almost compulsively so), and could easily manage being an Aies Sedai (in fact, I enjoyed playing one). But, by your definitions, through lies of omission, I could be considered quite dishonest.

Later (in another post, perhaps even another day), I am going to present a… puzzle, a… grey area in my dislike of quantum data. Although I hope that it generates discussion / that multiple people respond, I am especially curious - given how close our sentiment on this topic is - how you will respond.


Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are the guy introducing the game to 7 year olds, correct (kudos on that btw, I think that this is a great hobby and can do a lot for younger players)?

You may be thinking of me - I have taught (and continue to teach) multiple 7-year-olds to play 3e. There are others who have discussed teaching young children to play, too, that you may be remembering. Or you may even be conflating all those stories into one Mythic Playgrounder.


You can take the general principles & run with them to create a vast array of different player-role-dynamics, which are a far cry from the usual model of "all players play equal characters in group & the group collectively serves as the viewpoint character".

I agree wholeheartedly. "Thor and the Sentient Potted Plant(TM)" (plus the whole party of "normal" characters) have long known this truth. Thank you for expressing it in a more… conventional manner.

[Florian]

@Quertus:

Let me guess: Unless you do a phenomenal amount of prep work or you have been steadily adding detail to a long-running game world, you'll continuously have to either wing it and add details on the fly (mostly by, say, already having a library of maps, NPC and such), or you have to find a way to stall it and buy enough time for the needed prep time? The effect would be, that while you want your world to appear all natural and not centered around the player characters, in essence, it still is. As in, while you had the North Wood and the Iron Trail up to the Iron Mountains on the map, maybe along with one or the other thorps, the whole details had to be inserted because deus vult.

[PhoenixPhyre]

@Quertus:

Let me guess: Unless you do a phenomenal amount of prep work or you have been steadily adding detail to a long-running game world, you'll continuously have to either wing it and add details on the fly (mostly by, say, already having a library of maps, NPC and such), or you have to find a way to stall it and buy enough time for the needed prep time? The effect would be, that while you want your world to appear all natural and not centered around the player characters, in essence, it still is. As in, while you had the North Wood and the Iron Trail up to the Iron Mountains on the map, maybe along with one or the other thorps, the whole details had to be inserted because deus vult.

Even with a long-running game world (mine is now in year 4+ of 2-3 groups per year), I still have to both wing it and stall for time. A world is a huge place, even when you're talking about 1/3 of one of the smaller continents (the main play area for my games so far). The high-level details are pretty fixed, as are the most major players. But lots of things aren't fixed until they come out at the table[1]. I'm constantly refining and rebuilding portions that players haven't touched yet. I still have to build the micro-stuff (at the encounter/session level) in the days before each session. Otherwise I'd have to railroad so that they're always in "known" territory each time. Even still, with all that planning, I have to ad lib about 2/3 of what actually happens (conversations especially) during a session.

[Max_Killjoy]

@NichG

Thank you for making the consolidated list of the 4 definitions is railroading being used in this thread. Are we still at 4?

Anyway, I'm glad you "like" / find nonzero value in my definition. If "Quertus-railroading" becomes a Playgroundism, well, it's funny to think that, of all things, a form of railroading will be named after me.

I'll have to think about what matches my definition, but not the others.


Consider that almost anything that's been described as "Orwellian" would cause in Mr Orwell himself a reaction somewhere between intellectual disgust and visceral outrage. In having a form of railroading named after you, you could join that rarefied company. :smallwink:

[Willie the Duck]

Consider that almost anything that's been described as "Orwellian" would cause in Mr Orwell himself a reaction somewhere between intellectual disgust and visceral outrage. In having a form of railroading named after you, you could join that rarefied company. :smallwink:

I'm sure Erwin Schrödinger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger#Legacy) would have a rather ambivalent opinion of his legacy. :smallbiggrin:

[Quertus]

@Quertus:

Let me guess: Unless you do a phenomenal amount of prep work or you have been steadily adding detail to a long-running game world, you'll continuously have to either wing it and add details on the fly (mostly by, say, already having a library of maps, NPC and such), or you have to find a way to stall it and buy enough time for the needed prep time? The effect would be, that while you want your world to appear all natural and not centered around the player characters, in essence, it still is. As in, while you had the North Wood and the Iron Trail up to the Iron Mountains on the map, maybe along with one or the other thorps, the whole details had to be inserted because deus vult.


Even with a long-running game world (mine is now in year 4+ of 2-3 groups per year), I still have to both wing it and stall for time. A world is a huge place, even when you're talking about 1/3 of one of the smaller continents (the main play area for my games so far). The high-level details are pretty fixed, as are the most major players. But lots of things aren't fixed until they come out at the table[1]. I'm constantly refining and rebuilding portions that players haven't touched yet. I still have to build the micro-stuff (at the encounter/session level) in the days before each session. Otherwise I'd have to railroad so that they're always in "known" territory each time. Even still, with all that planning, I have to ad lib about 2/3 of what actually happens (conversations especially) during a session.

First, I want to be clear, I don't consider this particularly relevant to railroading. But, sure, we'll see if anything comes of it.

So, I was introduced to D&D… well, that's hard say, but I recognized what it was around 1980-1981. I didn't run my first sandbox campaign until 1995-1996. That's 15 years of spending my every waking moment world-building*. Yes, sometimes, I multitask that with holding a conversation, or writing code, or whatever. But world-building is my… first? last? most commonly utilized line of defense against Ennui.

Ideally, at the end of every session, I ask what the party is doing, and make sure I'm familiar with all the relevant details - and, yes, generate the relevant details that haven't been created yet. Where "relevant" is "what the party will care about". And, yes, they will doubtless care about more than what I've explicitly generated.

So, say that the party goes to visit the mayor, and I mention that he has several paintings. They ask for details. I ask for some checks. I describe how the main room is dominated by a large portrait of a woman with a bittersweet smile (spot - the painting is new. the wear & discoloration on the wall indicates that there used to be an even larger painting in that spot; local - this painting was done by a local artist local/appraise - of reasonable talent, but this is probably not his best work); the other paintings are smaller, largely focused on wildlife and natural scenery (IRL, I would give more specific details) (spot / sense motive - all were done by different artists; spot - one painting (of a humming bird) is old, but has a new frame; religion - one painting (think Bambi) has symbolism of an obscure nature religion history/local - believed to have died out centuries ago; arcana - a third painting (of a babbling brook) has a clear symbol making it part of a set - the full set is said to ward off evil; spot/sense motive - the atmosphere is generally "peaceful", the sole exception (a bear roaring) is an "aggressive" painting, local / autohypnosis - which was made by the same artist as the bear on its hind legs in (previous location)).

As I never refer to my notes for these details, my players often comment how great I am at coming up with stuff on the fly - and even weaving it into the campaign/story. Thing is, even if I *hadn't* generated those specific details (which I probably have if the party has cared about art before, or if I cared about these specifics when detailing the mayor) I already know all the underlying causes of *who* the mayor is, and *why* the paintings are there.

-----

"Conversations" are always ad-lib, as is all role-playing. If you're just reading a script, that's acting, not role-playing. I want to know *who* they are talking to, and that person's underlying *why(s)*. If they grab a random goblin, do I have to come up with stuff on the fly, or "quantum ogre" the one "random goblin personality and background" I have prepared? Yes, it's fair to say that that's true. I aim to know the general goblin *why* well enough to ad-lib any extra goblins equally *or*, better yet, to have one goblin "story", and roll randomly for which goblin they happen to get. So that, if they talk to multiple goblins, the goblins seem different in *character*, not in *level of detail*. So, Fletch caught a big worm, biggest he's ever seen, then a bird swooped down & took it. Fletch gathered up these goblins to help him catch it. This one? He doesn't believe Fletch, but, as keeper of the biggest worm, he brought his knives to make sure he holds the title. That one? She's just here to get away from her wife. A third? He wants to eat the bird. He's glad Fletch is dead - Fletch stole his egg. So, if you talk to some random goblin, they'll tell you (or *not* tell you) their part in the "goblin band story".

* Technically not all on the same world

[Quertus]

So, on the acceptability of changing game state.

Let's say you've got a villain. Conceptually, he's got a gas mask. His mini has a gas mask, every picture of him ever shows him wearing a gas mask. But there's no gas mask on his character sheet. Worse, the PCs used, eh, "detect dead animal" (darn militant vegans), and got a negative result. Since gas masks are made of leather, they have good reason to believe that he has no gas mask. Thus, the Chess Master chose now to attack. Which you didn't find out / realize all this until a few rounds in, after the villain had revealed many of his secrets, which, if you roll back time, you know the Metagamer will use.

What do you consider the "right" answer in this no-win situation? And is it railroading?

[Segev]

So, on the acceptability of changing game state.

Let's say you've got a villain. Conceptually, he's got a gas mask. His mini has a gas mask, every picture of him ever shows him wearing a gas mask. But there's no gas mask on his character sheet. Worse, the PCs used, eh, "detect dead animal" (darn militant vegans), and got a negative result. Since gas masks are made of leather, they have good reason to believe that he has no gas mask. Thus, the Chess Master chose now to attack. Which you didn't find out / realize all this until a few rounds in, after the villain had revealed many of his secrets, which, if you roll back time, you know the Metagamer will use.

What do you consider the "right" answer in this no-win situation? And is it railroading?

The "detect dead animal" thing is very contrived; if the GM gave a negative result on that, the GM didn't think he had a gas mask, either. Or the GM didn't realize the gas mask would ping. In which case, the GM wasn't planning on him having one at this point, and either the images are quite wrong, or the GM had a plan for him not to have it on him.

If the GM thought he had a gas mask, the GM would run as if he did until somebody pointed out it was missing on his stat page. Given that all art, figurines, and anything the players encountered described the villain as having a gas mask, it's not retconning to correct the error that left it off his sheet. It is retconning to add it after the players took steps to confirm he was without it, and planned around that, however.

[Max_Killjoy]

So, on the acceptability of changing game state.

Let's say you've got a villain. Conceptually, he's got a gas mask. His mini has a gas mask, every picture of him ever shows him wearing a gas mask. But there's no gas mask on his character sheet. Worse, the PCs used, eh, "detect dead animal" (darn militant vegans), and got a negative result. Since gas masks are made of leather, they have good reason to believe that he has no gas mask. Thus, the Chess Master chose now to attack. Which you didn't find out / realize all this until a few rounds in, after the villain had revealed many of his secrets, which, if you roll back time, you know the Metagamer will use.

What do you consider the "right" answer in this no-win situation? And is it railroading?

If the GM honestly thought the NPC has a gas mask based on the art and mini, then the NPC had a gas mask.

If the GM didn't think the NPC had a gas mask, then they borked up the encounter by not having the gas attack apply to the NPC.

And since when are all gas masks made of leather?



The "detect dead animal" thing is very contrived; if the GM gave a negative result on that, the GM didn't think he had a gas mask, either. Or the GM didn't realize the gas mask would ping. In which case, the GM wasn't planning on him having one at this point, and either the images are quite wrong, or the GM had a plan for him not to have it on him.

If the GM thought he had a gas mask, the GM would run as if he did until somebody pointed out it was missing on his stat page. Given that all art, figurines, and anything the players encountered described the villain as having a gas mask, it's not retconning to correct the error that left it off his sheet. It is retconning to add it after the players took steps to confirm he was without it, and planned around that, however.

Why are the players looking at the NPC's "stat page" in the first place?

[Segev]

If the GM honestly thought the NPC has a gas mask based on the art and mini, then the NPC had a gas mask.

If the GM didn't think the NPC had a gas mask, then they borked up the encounter by not having the gas attack apply to the NPC.

And since when are all gas masks made of leather?This is a more succinct way of putting what I was saying.


Why are the players looking at the NPC's "stat page" in the first place?I'm not sure how that's relevant to my post; I didn't think they were.

[Gallowglass]

First, I want to be clear, I don't consider this particularly relevant to railroading. But, sure, we'll see if anything comes of it.

So, I was introduced to D&D… well, that's hard say, but I recognized what it was around 1980-1981. I didn't run my first sandbox campaign until 1995-1996. That's 15 years of spending my every waking moment world-building*. Yes, sometimes, I multitask that with holding a conversation, or writing code, or whatever. But world-building is my… first? last? most commonly utilized line of defense against Ennui.

Ideally, at the end of every session, I ask what the party is doing, and make sure I'm familiar with all the relevant details - and, yes, generate the relevant details that haven't been created yet. Where "relevant" is "what the party will care about". And, yes, they will doubtless care about more than what I've explicitly generated.

So, say that the party goes to visit the mayor, and I mention that he has several paintings. They ask for details. I ask for some checks. I describe how the main room is dominated by a large portrait of a woman with a bittersweet smile (spot - the painting is new. the wear & discoloration on the wall indicates that there used to be an even larger painting in that spot; local - this painting was done by a local artist local/appraise - of reasonable talent, but this is probably not his best work); the other paintings are smaller, largely focused on wildlife and natural scenery (IRL, I would give more specific details) (spot / sense motive - all were done by different artists; spot - one painting (of a humming bird) is old, but has a new frame; religion - one painting (think Bambi) has symbolism of an obscure nature religion history/local - believed to have died out centuries ago; arcana - a third painting (of a babbling brook) has a clear symbol making it part of a set - the full set is said to ward off evil; spot/sense motive - the atmosphere is generally "peaceful", the sole exception (a bear roaring) is an "aggressive" painting, local / autohypnosis - which was made by the same artist as the bear on its hind legs in (previous location)).

As I never refer to my notes for these details, my players often comment how great I am at coming up with stuff on the fly - and even weaving it into the campaign/story. Thing is, even if I *hadn't* generated those specific details (which I probably have if the party has cared about art before, or if I cared about these specifics when detailing the mayor) I already know all the underlying causes of *who* the mayor is, and *why* the paintings are there.

-----

"Conversations" are always ad-lib, as is all role-playing. If you're just reading a script, that's acting, not role-playing. I want to know *who* they are talking to, and that person's underlying *why(s)*. If they grab a random goblin, do I have to come up with stuff on the fly, or "quantum ogre" the one "random goblin personality and background" I have prepared? Yes, it's fair to say that that's true. I aim to know the general goblin *why* well enough to ad-lib any extra goblins equally *or*, better yet, to have one goblin "story", and roll randomly for which goblin they happen to get. So that, if they talk to multiple goblins, the goblins seem different in *character*, not in *level of detail*. So, Fletch caught a big worm, biggest he's ever seen, then a bird swooped down & took it. Fletch gathered up these goblins to help him catch it. This one? He doesn't believe Fletch, but, as keeper of the biggest worm, he brought his knives to make sure he holds the title. That one? She's just here to get away from her wife. A third? He wants to eat the bird. He's glad Fletch is dead - Fletch stole his egg. So, if you talk to some random goblin, they'll tell you (or *not* tell you) their part in the "goblin band story".

* Technically not all on the same world



So, for the sake of conversation, I will say that the bulk of my problem with this thread comes from your seeming attitude, and the resultant attitude of others, that any "winging it" or world redesign on the fly is "bad DMing". Not whether or not we should call it "railroading" but that it makes any DM who does it inferior to your preferred DMing which is having every tiny detail prepared and ready to go so you never have to "wing it" or world redesign.

Maybe that's not what you are implying, only what I am inferring, but it seems pervasive at this point. "I, Quertus, am a good DM because I never have to "wing it" or world redesign and you, other people, are bad DMs because you do so."

So, to this I would add two more points:

1> I hope you are self-cognizant enough to realize that 999 out of 1000 DMs do not have the time or energy to put the effort into their game world as you have. That the rest of us do not have 20 years of material and spend the bulk of our free-time world building. That your methodology is the exception, not the rule. And we all have players who enjoy our games and seem to have as good a time as your players do in your games. Despite the fact that we have to integrate new and spontaneous things into our games in response to player choices that were unexpected and unplanned for. Frankly, if the players decide, out of the blue, to go find an ironsmith, that its not an inherently worse experience for us to say "okay, well I have one from a few games ago that I can give a new name to and slot in here" vs "there are seven ironsmiths within a 60 mile radius, here are all their names and locations, their specialities where appropriate, and the nearest inn to them in case you need to stay a while for the ironsmith to shoe your horses." Its just not. Our players are having as much fun as your players. *shrug*

2> There is an unconscious layer behind your games that I don't think you are aware of. To find it in your example I would point out that, the only reason the players asked about the paintings in the first place is because you told them there were paintings and made an overt allusion to them that they caught on and thought "oh they must be important and part of the story". In a real and full universe, your players have walked into dozens' of rooms and offices before this which likely had paintings (because those are common) that you didn't mention, because you didn't have details planned for them, so they didn't ask about them. You are leading the horse to water by describing, to the players, the components you want them to interact with. And I'm quite certain that you put emphasis without necessarily realizing it on the components you most want them to interact with that they pick up. When you say "As you enter the office of the mayor, you notice lush appointments, fine furniture, a hearty oaken desk well worn with age, but bright and freshly lacquered, and a number of elaborate paintings lining the walls. Front and center is a massive portrait of a noble lady." You are leading them to pay attention to the painting and ask about them so you can weave them into the story.

Now imagine that your players instead said "I'm going to go over to the liquor cabinet and see what vintages of scotch, the mayor has on stock because I have some ranks in profession: distilling and I want to see if I can gauge anything about his character from what he has." You would check your notes and say "funny, I don't have a liquor cabinet listed, so there must not be one." despite that ANY mayor of ANY city, so richly appointed, would have a liquor cabinet. So you would be left with either saying "no cabinet, sorry." Whereas, I would think "oh, I didn't know he had ranks in that. That's an interesting way to perceive the world. Let's see... what information could I impart through his clever interaction that would make this worthwhile. Well the overall story is about how the Mayor is in league with the pirates of the cinnamon isles to leak them the plans of the trading consortium's secret routes so.... "As you inspect the cabinet, you note several fine vintages and stock that indicates the mayor is a robust collector, a man of rich tastes. In fact you notice several obvious "gift" bottles that must've been given to him by emissaries from foreign cultures. Your eyes specifically light on a bottle of 30 year old scotch from the cinnamon isles which you are surprised to see given the trade embargo between the city and the isles from the recent spate of piracy. But before you can inspect it closer, the door opens and the mayor breezes in..." Or something like that. Using the story element that the player inserted, as a way to communicate something I may have intended them to get some other way. Now that's a clumsy example, but its an example.

Regardless, I just want to say that I think you are probably an awesome DM and I would probably enjoy your game quite a lot. But I am never going to think "I'm an inferior DM because I don't spent ever waking moment slaving to build details into the world that may or may not ever be used." And will continue to take umbrage at the inferred insult to the other 999 of us.

[Max_Killjoy]

This is a more succinct way of putting what I was saying.

I'm not sure how that's relevant to my post; I didn't think they were.

"If the GM thought he had a gas mask, the GM would run as if he did until somebody pointed out it was missing on his stat page" -- to me that seemed to imply that the players were looking at the NPC's character sheet.

[OldTrees1]

What do you consider the "right" answer in this no-win situation? And is it railroading?

Others are nitpicking parts of the example, so I will bolster the example before responding.

BASE CASE:
There is an established fact.
The PCs know of that fact.
The PCs use that knowledge to try to establish another fact.
The DM is mistaken and thus gives the incorrect information.
The PCs make a decision based on that incorrect information.
The DM realises the mistake.
SOLUTION:
A) Correct the incorrect information by making it correct
Perfectly consistent worlds are a myth. Some of us strive for high internal consistency but there will always be some inconsistencies if one examines the world with a fine toothed comb an electron microscope. So there are some times when the incorrect information can be logically consistent enough with the established facts to allow things to progress as they had. This has the added benefit of preserving immersion, but the added difficulty of figuring out how to make it consistent with the PCs' decision, and it is not always possible.
B) Correct the incorrect information by rolling back to when that information was delivered
Rolling back can undo a lot of gameplay and will essentially require communication OOC between the players and the DM. The drawbacks can be mitigated if the DM asks about what would have gone differently. This can allow some extrapolation from the rollback point rather than doing a complete rollback.

EXTENDED CASE (Same as the base case except):
The DM reveals some secrets before realizing the mistake
One of the Players will not be able to rollback their character learning that information.
SOLUTION:
This is generally a problem player trait. Metagaming when it negatively impacts the game is a negative trait. So ask them OOC to not do that. There are more nuanced instances that cannot be summed up this way (which is why I slightly broaden the example) however those are best handled on a case by case basis.

Summary: You can either press onwards or roll back. Either works but there are advantages / disadvantages to each one.

[Florian]

So, on the acceptability of changing game state.

Let's say you've got a villain. Conceptually, he's got a gas mask. His mini has a gas mask, every picture of him ever shows him wearing a gas mask. But there's no gas mask on his character sheet. Worse, the PCs used, eh, "detect dead animal" (darn militant vegans), and got a negative result. Since gas masks are made of leather, they have good reason to believe that he has no gas mask. Thus, the Chess Master chose now to attack. Which you didn't find out / realize all this until a few rounds in, after the villain had revealed many of his secrets, which, if you roll back time, you know the Metagamer will use.

What do you consider the "right" answer in this no-win situation? And is it railroading?

I don´t see what the actual question here is....

As long as such details as concept, mini, picture are all in your head and not established facts in the game world that the player ought to know beforehand and check with in-game tools, nothing happens, the guy simply doesn't have a gas mask.

In contrast, once you have established the fact that the guy is perpetually wearing his gas mask and established that as a fact in the in-game universe, this situation places the burden of breaking immersion a bit on the shoulders of the players to directly ask the GM if they interpreted the situation correctly. IF you should slip up on that point, then roll with it because you have established facts. If not, correct the situation.

[Segev]

"If the GM thought he had a gas mask, the GM would run as if he did until somebody pointed out it was missing on his stat page" -- to me that seemed to imply that the players were looking at the NPC's character sheet.

Ah, I see. I more meant "until the GM had reason to realize it was missing." Colloquially, I was assuming somebody pointed it out to him, since he'd missed it, but that's not really necessary.

The question seemed to be whether adding it to the sheet after it had been left off, but the guy had been introduced as wearing one, was ++ungood.


The main thrust of my answer to the seeming question is that there shouldn't be a situation where the GM gives them information indicating that the guy lacks a gas mask if the GM thinks he's wearing one. And, if the GM thinks he's wearing one, he'll run him as if he has one, regardless of what's on the stat page. If he's been running him that way, and later realizes that it is not on his stat page, adding it is the opposite of railroading and more correcting a typo on the stat page.

[Max_Killjoy]

2> There is an unconscious layer behind your games that I don't think you are aware of. To find it in your example I would point out that, the only reason the players asked about the paintings in the first place is because you told them there were paintings and made an overt allusion to them that they caught on and thought "oh they must be important and part of the story". In a real and full universe, your players have walked into dozens' of rooms and offices before this which likely had paintings (because those are common) that you didn't mention, because you didn't have details planned for them, so they didn't ask about them. You are leading the horse to water by describing, to the players, the components you want them to interact with. And I'm quite certain that you put emphasis without necessarily realizing it on the components you most want them to interact with that they pick up. When you say "As you enter the office of the mayor, you notice lush appointments, fine furniture, a hearty oaken desk well worn with age, but bright and freshly lacquered, and a number of elaborate paintings lining the walls. Front and center is a massive portrait of a noble lady." You are leading them to pay attention to the painting and ask about them so you can weave them into the story.


As a GM (or writer) I would like to be able to add details to a room simply for the sake of establishing the atmosphere and rounding out the room that the players (or readers) are imagining... without every detail I add being seen as the most important clue that ever clued a clue.

Chekhov didn't say that if you put a gun on the mantle, you have to shoot it by the end of the play... he said that if someone fires a gun in act 3, you have to have shown it on the mantle before that. (Paraphrasing)




Now imagine that your players instead said "I'm going to go over to the liquor cabinet and see what vintages of scotch, the mayor has on stock because I have some ranks in profession: distilling and I want to see if I can gauge anything about his character from what he has." You would check your notes and say "funny, I don't have a liquor cabinet listed, so there must not be one." despite that ANY mayor of ANY city, so richly appointed, would have a liquor cabinet. So you would be left with either saying "no cabinet, sorry." Whereas, I would think "oh, I didn't know he had ranks in that. That's an interesting way to perceive the world. Let's see... what information could I impart through his clever interaction that would make this worthwhile. Well the overall story is about how the Mayor is in league with the pirates of the cinnamon isles to leak them the plans of the trading consortium's secret routes so.... "As you inspect the cabinet, you note several fine vintages and stock that indicates the mayor is a robust collector, a man of rich tastes. In fact you notice several obvious "gift" bottles that must've been given to him by emissaries from foreign cultures. Your eyes specifically light on a bottle of 30 year old scotch from the cinnamon isles which you are surprised to see given the trade embargo between the city and the isles from the recent spate of piracy. But before you can inspect it closer, the door opens and the mayor breezes in..." Or something like that. Using the story element that the player inserted, as a way to communicate something I may have intended them to get some other way. Now that's a clumsy example, but its an example.


If the players approach it as "of course every mayor has a liqueur cabinet", then the absence of one might also tell them something about the mayor.

[Max_Killjoy]

Ah, I see. I more meant "until the GM had reason to realize it was missing." Colloquially, I was assuming somebody pointed it out to him, since he'd missed it, but that's not really necessary.

The question seemed to be whether adding it to the sheet after it had been left off, but the guy had been introduced as wearing one, was ++ungood.


The main thrust of my answer to the seeming question is that there shouldn't be a situation where the GM gives them information indicating that the guy lacks a gas mask if the GM thinks he's wearing one. And, if the GM thinks he's wearing one, he'll run him as if he has one, regardless of what's on the stat page. If he's been running him that way, and later realizes that it is not on his stat page, adding it is the opposite of railroading and more correcting a typo on the stat page.


Got it.

And I agree, if you've been running the NPC as if they have a gas mask, then jot a note on the character sheet, and keep doing so -- least-damaging way to correct the situation. It's not railroading.

(But then, I view the fiction layer as the reality, and the rules as the map of that territory... when the map says there's a bridge, and you're standing there and there's just a vast chasm with no way to cross, which do you take as fact, and which as wrong? Though the way someone, Florian I think, recently used the phrase "rules as a map" makes me wonder if some past confusion comes from different posters using that phrase differently.)

[kyoryu]

Chekhov didn't say that if you put a gun on the mantle, you have to shoot it by the end of the play... he said that if someone fires a gun in act 3, you have to have shown it on the mantle before that. (Paraphrasing)

Actually he did say you have to fire it.

The actual conversation was with a playwright that wanted to put in a speech that the playwright was fond of, but was utterly unnecessary to the plot. The gun metaphor was his reply.

It’s also about plays and their information economy, which is much tighter than what one would expect in a novel or an RPG.

[Gallowglass]

As a GM (or writer) I would like to be able to add details to a room simply for the sake of establishing the atmosphere and rounding out the room that the players (or readers) are imagining... without every detail I add being seen as the most important clue that ever clued a clue.

Chekhov didn't say that if you put a gun on the mantle, you have to shoot it by the end of the play... he said that if someone fires a gun in act 3, you have to have shown it on the mantle before that. (Paraphrasing)




If the players approach it as "of course every mayor has a liqueur cabinet", then the absence of one might also tell them something about the mayor.

*sigh*

Both of these miss the point of my post entirely, I can only assume on purpose.

Of course you can describe as much detail as you want without it having to be "the most important clue ever." The point of my post is that -perhaps- Quertus unconsciously "railroads" his players to pay attention to the things he wants them to pay attention to: the things he, personally, wants them to pay more attention to than the rest of the surroundings. After all, the paintings, it turned out in quertus' example -were- important and each contained a hook or plot-relevant quirk. He didn't just include them as flavor.

And, yes, perhaps the absence does. However then you are either a> The mayor is a teetotaler and the DM designed that on purpose and actually thought ahead of time to leave out the liquor cabinet, in which case my example is irrelevant and you have to take it for granted that no example will ever be perfect, so fill in the blank with any element that the DM did NOT account for, or b> you on-the-fly decide to turn the mayor into a teetotaler and make that a new character quirk or build off of that, which constitutes "winging it" and on-the-fly world building.

A lot of the players I've played with, I fear, would suffer paralysis from the sheer bloat of information in Quertus' world. If confronted with every one of the hooks and plot devices he provided from examining the portraits, they would want to explore each one in detail and quickly become overwhelmed by how they could possibly follow up on each of them but not wanting to let any of them go. Some of them would be able to parse out the "most important" bits for whatever goal they found most paramount, but a lot of them would be sorely taxed.

[Florian]

Chekhov didn't say that if you put a gun on the mantle, you have to shoot it by the end of the play... he said that if someone fires a gun in act 3, you have to have shown it on the mantle before that. (Paraphrasing)

Chekov more or less said: Don't include a gun if you don't fire it at some point.

That's a very clear statement about the flow of information and retention capacity of the viewer in any play/movie/show.

It´s basically the total opposite from what you were writing: If description, mood and theme of any scene you envision doesn't add anything to the game, skip it.

That's like playing a murder mystery and mentioning hobos, fully well knowing that those hobos have nothing to do with it. Only thing is wasting screen time. Cold as well have said: "You talk to the hobos, no-one knew anything, on with the investigation".

[Segev]

Chekov more or less said: Don't include a gun if you don't fire it at some point.

That's a very clear statement about the flow of information and retention capacity of the viewer in any play/movie/show.

It´s basically the total opposite from what you were writing: If description, mood and theme of any scene you envision doesn't add anything to the game, skip it.

That's like playing a murder mystery and mentioning hobos, fully well knowing that those hobos have nothing to do with it. Only thing is wasting screen time. Cold as well have said: "You talk to the hobos, no-one knew anything, on with the investigation".

I agree overall, however I should point out that "description to set mood" is actually adding something important to most games. Mood-setting is HARD and takes constant effort to maintain in a tabletop RPG.

[Gallowglass]

I agree overall, however I should point out that "description to set mood" is actually adding something important to most games. Mood-setting is HARD and takes constant effort to maintain in a tabletop RPG.

I agree with this. There is nothing wrong with description for the purpose of setting mood.

Why have "a dungeon corridor that is 5' by 60' with dim light along the length of it" when you can have "a clammy, cold hall of old stone, a foul slime seeming to ooze from between the ancient bricks, barely wide enough for two to stand abreast, that reaches off into the distant blackness, only a few guttering torches every few paces cutting through the gloom."

Sure, you risk the game bogging down as the PCs try to figure out if the oozing slime is important that you casually put in as a mere descriptive element" but as long as they continue to have fun while doing it. *shrug*


But it is a powerful tool in the DM toolset to concentrate the minds of the Players on elements that you most want them to focus on through description. Maybe that slime is oozing through the bricks from the ancient aquaduct that is behind the walls, the same thing that makes is to cold here, and I want them to focus on that so they are not suprised by the trap down the hall that collapses the brickwork and floods the tunnel. So I throw that description in there specifically to draw their attention to it.

And maybe that large ornate painting of the beautiful woman is just a painting. And maybe its a clue that the mayor has recently killed off his old wife and replaced her with a new, younger model, the first clue to the murder that could lead to the mayor's downfall if the PCs pursue it.

[Xuc Xac]

"As you inspect the cabinet, you note several fine vintages and stock that indicates the mayor is a robust collector, a man of rich tastes. In fact you notice several obvious "gift" bottles that must've been given to him by emissaries from foreign cultures. Your eyes specifically light on a bottle of 30 year old scotch from the cinnamon isles which you are surprised to see given the trade embargo between the city and the isles from the recent spate of piracy.

Where in Scotland are the cinnamon isles located? Discovering that the mayor in this D&D world is engaging in trade with Scotland is indeed a shocking revelation, like a bard in the Forgotten Realms quoting Shakespeare.

[Gallowglass]

Where in Scotland are the cinnamon isles located? Discovering that the mayor in this D&D world is engaging in trade with Scotland is indeed a shocking revelation, like a bard in the Forgotten Realms quoting Shakespeare.

Around the back and between two hills down the dark hole you find there.

[Max_Killjoy]

Chekov more or less said: Don't include a gun if you don't fire it at some point.


I've seen several writers assert that it was the opposite of the common understanding, but perhaps they're taking their own license. I don't personally read Russian (used know a few words and how to pronounce Cyrillic written Russian...) so I won't claim to know definitively.




That's a very clear statement about the flow of information and retention capacity of the viewer in any play/movie/show.


I see that advice ( "Chekhov's Gun" ) so grossly over-applied by some writers (and GMs) that they end up telegraphing everything. If every detail is exactly as important as the attention paid to it by the work (or game) would indicate, then everything becomes transparent.




It´s basically the total opposite from what you were writing: If description, mood and theme of any scene you envision doesn't add anything to the game, skip it.

That's like playing a murder mystery and mentioning hobos, fully well knowing that those hobos have nothing to do with it. Only thing is wasting screen time. Cold as well have said: "You talk to the hobos, no-one knew anything, on with the investigation".


But the fact that there are hobos around does give the players or readers information about the location, maybe even the culture/society.

And it's not always up to me, as the GM, which scenes will be "skipped" or not, the players have a large say in that.

[Max_Killjoy]

*sigh*

Both of these miss the point of my post entirely, I can only assume on purpose.


Um... not really? :smalleek: (Not on purpose.)




Of course you can describe as much detail as you want without it having to be "the most important clue ever." The point of my post is that -perhaps- Quertus unconsciously "railroads" his players to pay attention to the things he wants them to pay attention to: the things he, personally, wants them to pay more attention to than the rest of the surroundings. After all, the paintings, it turned out in quertus' example -were- important and each contained a hook or plot-relevant quirk. He didn't just include them as flavor.

And, yes, perhaps the absence does. However then you are either a> The mayor is a teetotaler and the DM designed that on purpose and actually thought ahead of time to leave out the liquor cabinet, in which case my example is irrelevant and you have to take it for granted that no example will ever be perfect, so fill in the blank with any element that the DM did NOT account for, or b> you on-the-fly decide to turn the mayor into a teetotaler and make that a new character quirk or build off of that, which constitutes "winging it" and on-the-fly world building.

A lot of the players I've played with, I fear, would suffer paralysis from the sheer bloat of information in Quertus' world. If confronted with every one of the hooks and plot devices he provided from examining the portraits, they would want to explore each one in detail and quickly become overwhelmed by how they could possibly follow up on each of them but not wanting to let any of them go. Some of them would be able to parse out the "most important" bits for whatever goal they found most paramount, but a lot of them would be sorely taxed.


I might have missed some of the context of your post in the exchange with Quertus.


But I long ago gave up on any notion that I could control how my players react to anything.

[Quertus]

@Gallowglass

0a) I doubt you'll ever find any instances of me claiming to be a "good GM". That is purely your inference, the accuracy of which is… debatable, but decidedly not my intent to state.

0b) "redesigning on the fly is bad GMing", however, is certainly something I'll cop to intending to state. Or, at the very least, "the things that led you to that point are failures - you should look to fix that (rather than enshrine it as a 'technique')".

0c) I, Quertus, am a GM who hates having to wing it. Not that I particularly enjoy GMing in the first place, but I enjoy it even less when I constantly have to wing everything. I'm talking purely about a matter of taste and enjoyment when I bring up myself in this context.

0d) that said, I have more than my fair share of GM horror stories from GMs who thought that they could "just wing it", who produced incoherent messes. And, yes, that includes myself as GM.

1) of course. I was simply stating my experience & my bias. Now we're all clear on that. (Although "names" are things that don't usually get filled in until the last minute, so a surprise inquiry for blacksmiths would not see me with prepared names (unless a previous party encountered one or more blacksmiths, then those would have names))

2a) paintings are common IRL; they aren't as common in most of my worlds. So, maybe it is somewhat leading, but not in the way you think. That is, I'll describe the paintings that exist equally; I did not give extra weight (by mentioning their existence) to these particular paintings. (Note that I mentioned one of the previous paintings in my descriptions, from which you certainly could have inferred that I had mentioned and described paintings previously in the campaign)

2b) I don't "want" the players to interact with the paintings. I would like the PCs to interact with the world, and, if they've shown interest in X, I will endeavour to include X in my descriptions.

2c) "interacting with the paintings" is just one of numerous methods for the PCs to divine the "first principles", the *why* they exist. If a new group of PCs came through the world a parallel reality copy of the world, they could learn similar things by examining lawn care, evaluating the help, talking to the neighbors, looting everything, directly from the mayor, or even by being Quertus (combination "taking pictures of everything" and magical senses). Each of these techniques would produce different data, skewed differently as well, and, thus, likely lead to different stories.

2d) "the liquor cabinet" is an excellent example, for many reasons. First, it involved the player contradicting "my" / the description you have of the office, or at least assuming that they could add to it. I find that bad form. Asking, even as leading of, "but *everyone* in his position has this" way is fine. In fact, it would give the players more clues, as, when they look for it, they can see from the wear on the carpet/floor where it, until very recently, *used to be*. Also, it's exactly something I've unexpectedly had to deal with (not with this particular mayor, granted). So, cool choice.

2e) from 2c&d, above, I think that we're generally in agreement regarding information being divinable via multiple routes, and 2a-c, you have simply gotten a mistaken impression of how important interacting with the paintings is to me. The difference between our positions, as I understand it, is that I generate all content from first principles, which means that different routes can have different results, whereas you care about the end results first, and attempt to back-generate the data to bring about those results.

Closing remarks: I'm glad you think you would enjoy my world. I've had mixed results. I don't ask that GMs slave away at unneeded details (and I don't either; rather, I am a slave to Ennui, and I gotta do something).

Perhaps the easiest way to explain it is with a parallel to role-playing.

A shopkeep asked, "what do you know about a customer when they ask, 'how much is this?'?". I was the only one at the gaming table to give the correct answer. Many gamers believe that they can create a consistent character starting from actions first - but how can they, when they don't even know what those actions say about their characters?

It's the same thing with world-building.

If you start with "first principles", with the underlying *why*, and build from there, you are going to have a much easier time creating something consistent, that can withstand both my and Mr. "so what does he have to drink"'s scrutiny.

Even if the GM has no comprehension of actual human psychology, I require them to have consistent, divinable "x causes Y", no matter how irrational it may be IRL, that I can follow and use to divine "first principles" from descriptions / described NPC behavior.

When you just randomly throw stuff together, it produces an incoherent mess.

* My usage the phrase "First Principles" is entirely novel, and may bear no resemblance to the actual phrase.

[Quarian Rex]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are the guy introducing the game to 7 year olds, correct (kudos on that btw, I think that this is a great hobby and can do a lot for younger players)?

You may be thinking of me - I have taught (and continue to teach) multiple 7-year-olds to play 3e. There are others who have discussed teaching young children to play, too, that you may be remembering. Or you may even be conflating all those stories into one Mythic Playgrounder.

I was a relative latecomer to the thread initially. Someone (most likely now you) mentioned it earlier and I seemed to have entwined the various threads of argument. I was then (and am now) unwilling to reread 20+ pages resolve the mystery. Just remember that it was not meant as any kind of slight. Just a possible explanation of AMFV's seemingly odd position. I would imagine that playing with such young players would result in a much more directed form of play, and I would believe that would be an obvious buy-in for any other players included in the game, much as playing a board game with 7 year olds would be more of an exercise in fostering interest and maintaining attention than competitive gameplay or appraoching the game on other terms that you normally would.

What have your experiences been?




The "detect dead animal" thing is very contrived

Agreed, in many more ways than one. If such a spell actually existed then that spell would be a limiter in this sort of thing (as is the case for most divinations). The spell detects dead animals. Does it actually detect things made from dead animals? Not necessarily. If it does and such a spell was actually a part of the campaign then the stock response from the DM every time it is cast on someone is 'obviously'. From the leather on their clothes to the meat in their bellies such a spell is more useless than it initially appears. Even when using such a contrivance to force a railroading dilemma it is usually found that no such dilemma exists.




So, for the sake of conversation, I will say that the bulk of my problem with this thread comes from your seeming attitude, and the resultant attitude of others, that any "winging it" or world redesign on the fly is "bad DMing". Not whether or not we should call it "railroading" but that it makes any DM who does it inferior to your preferred DMing which is having every tiny detail prepared and ready to go so you never have to "wing it" or world redesign.

I haven't been getting that from the push-back. Filling in holes with natural detail as you need is a normal part of DMing and I don't think anyone is really trying to say otherwise (although things can get into the weeds as railroading starts getting conflated with direction and such).

I think that Koo Rehtorb's definitions...


Linear plot: A game where most points are predetermined. PCs shall proceed through points A to B to C while experiencing events X, Y and Z. Common in modules or GMs who set out to tell a specific story.

Railroad: Like a linear plot, but the players do not wish to proceed through a linear plot and are forced to do so by the GM anyway. Every time they try to divert from the linear plot they are intentionally thwarted with the express intention of putting the game back on the rails.

Illusionism: Like a railroad, but the GM tries to pretend this isn't happening.

... are most relevant. Railroading and illusionism are drawing the ire but things start getting into the weeds when railroading/illusionism is defended by drawing false parallels between them and linear plots/just general DMing. Drawing the players attention to the fact that there is some cool stuff over the mountain is very different than ensuring that any choice they make results in them going over the mountain. Similarly, deciding that after a grueling encounter that would normally have ended in a TPK that the BBEG wants them kidnapped for an impromptu monologue is one thing. Deciding that there will be a BBEG monologue where the characters are powerless and are delivered there on a silver platter by an unstoppable force that has no further effect on the plot is something completely different. Though the end result is essentially the same, the first is an acceptable consequence of all that has happened so far, while the second leaves a bad taste in the mouths of most playersand opens plotholes that can lessen/remove the impact of future events.

[Quertus]

Wow, I missed a lot while making that last reply.

Also, I think my gas mask example… wasn't as good as I intended.


Others are nitpicking parts of the example, so I will bolster the example before responding.

BASE CASE:
There is an established fact.
The PCs know of that fact.
The PCs use that knowledge to try to establish another fact.
The DM is mistaken and thus gives the incorrect information.
The PCs make a decision based on that incorrect information.
The DM realises the mistake.
SOLUTION:
A) Correct the incorrect information by making it correct
Perfectly consistent worlds are a myth. Some of us strive for high internal consistency but there will always be some inconsistencies if one examines the world with a fine toothed comb an electron microscope. So there are some times when the incorrect information can be logically consistent enough with the established facts to allow things to progress as they had. This has the added benefit of preserving immersion, but the added difficulty of figuring out how to make it consistent with the PCs' decision, and it is not always possible.
B) Correct the incorrect information by rolling back to when that information was delivered
Rolling back can undo a lot of gameplay and will essentially require communication OOC between the players and the DM. The drawbacks can be mitigated if the DM asks about what would have gone differently. This can allow some extrapolation from the rollback point rather than doing a complete rollback.

EXTENDED CASE (Same as the base case except):
The DM reveals some secrets before realizing the mistake
One of the Players will not be able to rollback their character learning that information.
SOLUTION:
This is generally a problem player trait. Metagaming when it negatively impacts the game is a negative trait. So ask them OOC to not do that. There are more nuanced instances that cannot be summed up this way (which is why I slightly broaden the example) however those are best handled on a case by case basis.

Summary: You can either press onwards or roll back. Either works but there are advantages / disadvantages to each one.

Seems like you have the right of it.

I think that, rather than trying to make an example that had the nuisances I want, I should just focus on learning to simplify my perception.

That said, I still learn from how others perceive my examples, even when my examples aren't up to snuff.


If the players approach it as "of course every mayor has a liqueur cabinet", then the absence of one might also tell them something about the mayor.


Of course you can describe as much detail as you want without it having to be "the most important clue ever." The point of my post is that -perhaps- Quertus unconsciously "railroads" his players to pay attention to the things he wants them to pay attention to: the things he, personally, wants them to pay more attention to than the rest of the surroundings. After all, the paintings, it turned out in quertus' example -were- important and each contained a hook or plot-relevant quirk. He didn't just include them as flavor.

And, yes, perhaps the absence does. However then you are either a> The mayor is a teetotaler and the DM designed that on purpose and actually thought ahead of time to leave out the liquor cabinet, in which case my example is irrelevant and you have to take it for granted that no example will ever be perfect, so fill in the blank with any element that the DM did NOT account for, or b> you on-the-fly decide to turn the mayor into a teetotaler and make that a new character quirk or build off of that, which constitutes "winging it" and on-the-fly world building.

A lot of the players I've played with, I fear, would suffer paralysis from the sheer bloat of information in Quertus' world. If confronted with every one of the hooks and plot devices he provided from examining the portraits, they would want to explore each one in detail and quickly become overwhelmed by how they could possibly follow up on each of them but not wanting to let any of them go. Some of them would be able to parse out the "most important" bits for whatever goal they found most paramount, but a lot of them would be sorely taxed.

Well… first off, in my sandboxes, there is no "plot". Or, rather, there are dozens of plots, and the PCs should do *something*, whether it's related to one of those or not. As one of my players puts it, "everything's a red herring".

Groups that "get" my style often have extended, "here's what we know, what do we want to do/investigate first" discussions. And different characters with different motives & goals will drive the party in different directions.

Curiously, the biggest problem I have isn't players with decision paralysis, it's players who look at my world and see zero options. Short of building rails, I really don't know how to work with entire parties of players who don't ask questions. It's one of several failings I have as a GM.

Oh, very important thing about my style - if you convince me (which often means "if you convince the group") that the data doesn't make sense ("but everyone in his position should have x"), I will change game facts, right then, to match "reality". This ties into the alternative, where the players ask, "but he should have x", and I respond, "huh, I agree, it seems like he should, doesn't it?". Then they know that the game's afoot. In the case in question, even if I had needed convincing, it would have been, "OK, but… this guy still doesn't have one (spot to notice that, until recently, he did)".

[Quertus]

I was a relative latecomer to the thread initially. Someone (most likely now you) mentioned it earlier and I seemed to have entwined the various threads of argument. I was then (and am now) unwilling to reread 20+ pages resolve the mystery. Just remember that it was not meant as any kind of slight. Just a possible explanation of AMFV's seemingly odd position. I would imagine that playing with such young players would result in a much more directed form of play, and I would believe that would be an obvious buy-in for any other players included in the game, much as playing a board game with 7 year olds would be more of an exercise in fostering interest and maintaining attention than competitive gameplay or appraoching the game on other terms that you normally would.

What have your experiences been?

No slight taken.

My experiences with playing RPGs with 7-year-olds? Depends on the players.

Some 7-year-olds, I agree, need a very… clear path to follow. Others? They're planning two or three whole campaigns while I'm still trying to explain the rules of the game.

Board games etc, what can I say, I'm a ****. Everyone knows that, if you beat me, you came by your victory honest.

[Max_Killjoy]

I haven't been getting that from the push-back. Filling in holes with natural detail as you need is a normal part of DMing and I don't think anyone is really trying to say otherwise (although things can get into the weeds as railroading starts getting conflated with direction and such).

I think that Koo Rehtorb's definitions...

... are most relevant. Railroading and illusionism are drawing the ire but things start getting into the weeds when railroading/illusionism is defended by drawing false parallels between them and linear plots/just general DMing.


I think this point can hardly be reiterated strongly enough.

I'd add that from two extremes, there's an effort to conflate the GM making any sort of decision or taking any sort of action with "railroading", and withholding any sort of information from the players as "illusionism". One extreme does it to normalize railroading and illusionism, the other does it to paint absolutely normal GMing as bad because it's supposedly "just like railroading and lllusionism".




Drawing the players attention to the fact that there is some cool stuff over the mountain is very different than ensuring that any choice they make results in them going over the mountain. Similarly, deciding that after a grueling encounter that would normally have ended in a TPK that the BBEG wants them kidnapped for an impromptu monologue is one thing. Deciding that there will be a BBEG monologue where the characters are powerless and are delivered there on a silver platter by an unstoppable force that has no further effect on the plot is something completely different. Though the end result is essentially the same, the first is an acceptable consequence of all that has happened so far, while the second leaves a bad taste in the mouths of most players and opens plotholes that can lessen/remove the impact of future events.


Agreed -- motive, intent, and underlying process matter.

Sadly, whenever topics like this come up, there's a certain element of "if the result is the same, then there's no difference" and "if they players can't tell, then it doesn't matter" in some of the response.

[Quertus]

I Sadly, whenever topics like this come up, there's a certain element of "if the result is the same, then there's no difference" and "if they players can't tell, then it doesn't matter" in some of the response.

This is why I so liked the thread title, "the nature of railroading".

The "nature of murder" has nothing to do with whether the cops catch you, or whether anyone misses the deceased, or even whether they would have died anyway.

Despite my obvious opinions on the matter, I feel that my definition of "changing game physics or facts to cause or prevent an outcome" is neutral.

[Florian]

I've seen several writers assert that it was the opposite of the common understanding, but perhaps they're taking their own license. I don't personally read Russian (used know a few words and how to pronounce Cyrillic written Russian...) so I won't claim to know definitively.

I see that advice ( "Chekhov's Gun" ) so grossly over-applied by some writers (and GMs) that they end up telegraphing everything. If every detail is exactly as important as the attention paid to it by the work (or game) would indicate, then everything becomes transparent.

But the fact that there are hobos around does give the players or readers information about the location, maybe even the culture/society.

And it's not always up to me, as the GM, which scenes will be "skipped" or not, the players have a large say in that.

It´s a bit context sensitive.

Characters like Hercules Poirot or Alex Verus come across as brilliant detectives/diviners because at one point, they start to act on information that is withheld from the audience. You know, that's those small scenes when the character announces something like "I've just got to make some calls", which is then blended in the background.

The opposite to that is by handing the audience some pieces of information first, but without added context, then return to these pieces of information at a later point. Lucky # Slevin is a brilliant example for this, by showing a string of seemingly unrelated murders right at the start and going back to them right at the finish, causing that sudden spark of understanding in the audience.

The main difference is that the audience will never by able to solve any Hercules Poirot case because they lack a critical piece of information, while the audience of L#7 could have pieces the puzzle together, if they had the ability to dig deeper into the initial murder scenes.

I context of our hobby and this particular discussion, I see some possible applications of Chekov´s Gun (sticking with the murder mystery for emphasis):

- Prepare the whole "set" and "cast" in advance, then check and double-check the whole flow of information
a) The dots must be connected, at best in multiple ways with multiple angles.
b) Avoid empty connections that will lead nowhere.

- Create a "spine" for the information flow. That doesn't mean creating a plot, but arranging all the pieces in such a way that the central dots have a clear connection and the outlier dots are arranged in such a way that they will lead back to the central dots.

Point being that including the hobos or aunties diner can serve a purpose for the setting, try to avoid pointing to them in context of the murder mystery when this would lead to empty connections. Establish that they are there, but don't mention that the victim was connected to it in any way (so you don't have to railroad them back when they are stuck on those two red herrings).


I agree overall, however I should point out that "description to set mood" is actually adding something important to most games. Mood-setting is HARD and takes constant effort to maintain in a tabletop RPG.

Let me illustrate the point I was trying to make with an example of a major error I made. I set it as a setting fact that the city the game was centered in was in deadly fear of fire. Every block had to host watchtowers and the peasantry were forcefully trained into firefighting brigades. Over the course of the campaign, whole quarters of the city burned down and had to be rebuild. I wanted to flex my descriptive skills a bit and decided to have one of the murder cases start with the victim being from the watchtower night watch, you know, to establish how they do it (signal flags), go into the hardship of the job a bit (freezing cold, sweltering heat, loneliness, only a chamberpot..) and to have the opportunity to describe the city from above a bit, as they had up to the point only a street-level description.

That nearly backfired on me. For a while, my players were convinced that this whole case was being about targeting firefighters or the setup for major arson and it took a while until they dropped that idea.

In hindsight, I should have the one to spot and report the murder victim being the guy up on the watchtower and they would have had to climb up there to interrogate him, because it was collectively understood that they can´t leave their post. Would have been the same effect in mood-building, but wouldn't have created the same mental link between the victim, watchtowers and firefighters.

[ExplodingRat]

As long as there's multiple ways for them to overcome the obstacles (which there almost certainly is, even if you think otherwise) then it's perfectly fine as is. Your players just seem to whine a good bit.

[Frozen_Feet]

Chekhov's gun in positive form ("if put a gun a table in the first act, someone ought to fire it in the third act.") is not a working principle for designing games with multiple outcomes or probabilistic elements.

However, the negative and reverse formulations do work.

Negative: "do not put a gun on the table if no-one ought to shoot anyone." Interpreted: don't put elements in the game that you do not want players to interact with.

Reverse: "if someone ought to shoot someone at the end, put the gun on the table at the beginning." Interpreted: if you want players to interact with an element, make the presence and use of that element obvious.

If a GM follows the negative and reverse formulations with some decree of consistency, players can then invoke the positive formulation to gain hints of what they can do. So, for example, if a player observers the GM describing a loaded gun, they can deduce that (say) stealing the gun and shooting its owner is possible.

[Florian]

Chekhov's gun in positive form ("if put a gun a table in the first act, someone ought to fire it in the third act.") is not a working principle for designing games with multiple outcomes or probabilistic elements.

I don´t entirely agree (no surprise there, right?).

My campaign featured a murder case with two entirely unrelated victims and motifs for their death, but the same murderer.

1) A ronin was murdered for supplying a Maho-Tsukai with victims for blood magic rituals and then blackmailing him.
2) A samurai-ko was murdered for witnessing said Maho-Tsukai have a meeting with his cabal and planning a false flag action to force two major factions into a war.

That established two facts for the in-game reality: Homeless people were kidnapped and sacrificed in a steady rhythm and there was a set point for the false flag operation to happen if not interacted with.

So, Act 1 - establish facts, locations, NPC and such, Act 2 - the actual investigation, Act 3 - resolution and update of the in-game reality.

Act 1 featured two guns:
1) The ronin possessed a rather vast amount of koku (money), was known for blackmail and was also known to "work" late in the night each 3rd and 6th day of the week, looking distressed the next day.
2) The samurai-ko kept a pillow book with the last entry more or less being "I'm afraid of and for my lord. What he plans is an unforgivable sin, I fear that I have to inform the Daimyo", as well as being known to recently started discussions about the Code of Bushido, especially on the topics of Duty and Loyalty.

During Act 2, the cocking and loading of the guns could be noticed, if you know what you look for. Every 3rd day, someone would disappear, verifiable when you know what you look for, at the 4th, a tortured body could be found in a certain wood, again, if you knew what to look for. It really mattered in hind-sight, the confirmation and the after action reports, tho, creating a strong sense of verisimilitude based on "if we only had known / if we had understood that earlier"...

Edit: I hope that it´s also clear what I previously meant with a "spine", establishing right from the outset that these murders were because of blackmail and duty.

[Talakeal]

Chekhov didn't say that if you put a gun on the mantle, you have to shoot it by the end of the play... he said that if someone fires a gun in act 3, you have to have shown it on the mantle before that.

That would make a lot more sense, but afaict he actually did say you must fire it.

I have always found it weird that this famous bit of advice reads as a nonsensical argument against set dressing that nobody actually follows.

[Talakeal]

Negative: "do not put a gun on the table if no-one ought to shoot anyone." Interpreted: don't put elements in the game that you do not want players to interact with.

At what point do you draw the line here?

If, for example, I am running The Hobbit, and I mention that the treetops of Mirkwood are home to numerous pirple butterflies, are you saying I shouldn't be surprised / frustrated if Bilbo decides to give up the quest for the Lonely Mountain in favor of butterfly collecting?

[PhoenixPhyre]

That would make a lot more sense, but afaict he actually did say you must fire it.

I have always found it weird that this famous bit of advice reads as a nonsensical argument against set dressing that nobody actually follows.

He was specifically talking about short stories. Where every word counts, where you don't have time or space for false leads. Chekov's style, in particular, was very terse and dense. So for him, that works. Others are more baroque with their descriptions.

But people take it as a "rule for writing" more generally. Which it was never intended to be.

Oh, and from what I can find, he said the same thing in different ways on different occasions. So there isn't a "canonical" version.

[Frozen_Feet]

At what point do you draw the line here?

If, for example, I am running The Hobbit, and I mention that the treetops of Mirkwood are home to numerous pirple butterflies, are you saying I shouldn't be surprised / frustrated if Bilbo decides to give up the quest for the Lonely Mountain in favor of butterfly collecting?

The line is drawn based on expected return of interaction. For butterflies, this is "characters admire butterflies for a minute, maybe catch one, then move on".

Talking about emotional reactions on their own is useless. You could be surprised or frustrated by any silly thing the players do, there are no "shoulds" there. The "shoulds" are in what to do about it and your own emotions aren't all that helpful there either.

In your example, Bilbo going bugcatching is not reliant on simply there being butterflies, because there already are several bigger guns pointed at Bilbo's head. There's all the dwarves. There's Gandalf's expectations. There is a dragon and alleged mountain full of treasure. It requires willing ignorance or outright stupidity to abandon all that in favor of butterflies. It's perfectly proper of a GM, in that case, to point out that "going bugcatching will likely lead to failure of your quest" and ask "are you sure this is worth your time?" If the player answers affirmatively, Bilbo's participation in the game can just end.

To bring examples closer to a literal gun again: if there's a gun at the table, the expected return is for someone to pick it up and shoot something with it. If a player instead declares "my character takes the gun and goes to a shooting range", it's proper for the GM to say "the shooting range is an hour's drive away" and ask "you are effectively recusing your character from rest of the session, are you sure?" If the player answers affirmatively, their character is recused and they are reduced to a spectator unless enough time passes for their character to come back.

A GM is not obligated to waste time on interactions that go way out of bounds. They can be ignored or fastforwarded. Or, put differently: a GM's willingness to waste time on a thing ought to be a sign that the interaction is okay.

Example from my game: I had a flock of bats as a potential random encounter. My players got excited and decided to catch some of the bats. Not what their characters were there to do (their mission was to find a dwarven magic ring), but okay. Then, they decided to try taming some of them. Still not what they were there to do, but okay. Eventually, they stuffed the bats in a bag and the bats suffocated.

There was no apparent meaning to any of this, until the characters ran afoul of swarming giant centipedes and a monitor lizard. At this point, they remembered the (now dead) bats and used them as bait to lure those monsters away, creating an escape route.

This is an example of how an apparent diversion with no explicit, preplanned meaning can create its own purpose. In retrospect, it neatly follows positive formulation of Chekhov's gun, even though in reality it only followed the negative version.

[Florian]

That would make a lot more sense, but afaict he actually did say you must fire it.

I have always found it weird that this famous bit of advice reads as a nonsensical argument against set dressing that nobody actually follows.

AFAIC, Chekov was an author and novelist. What it was meant to say is: "Don't include anything that is not necessary" and was mainly geared towards writing stories / creating plots. When talking about linear plots, that also makes it into sorta-kinda foreshadowing, as someone aware of it can also anticipate that nothing was included in the story without a reason.

Set dressing is an entirely different thing, tho. In theater, the set consists of actors, stage and background. You can use dressing to enhance the performance, but it can also detract from the performance when overdoing it.


At what point do you draw the line here?

If, for example, I am running The Hobbit, and I mention that the treetops of Mirkwood are home to numerous pirple butterflies, are you saying I shouldn't be surprised / frustrated if Bilbo decides to give up the quest for the Lonely Mountain in favor of butterfly collecting?

Read my above example about the watchtower.

Thing with your example is, you wanted to do your players a favor and create a mood piece to enrich their immersion / theater of the mind. The rest will depend a bit on what exact point of the sandbox-linear plot-spectrum your game is set. If it´s really just a mood piece in a very linear game, you can always say "Bilbo has fun collecting some butterflies, then Gandalf whacks him with his staff for being a foolish hobbit". More towards the sandbox end, the mood piece becomes an actual information and you shouldn't be surprised when someone picks up on that and wants to seriously engage with it.

[Willie the Duck]

Characters like Hercules Poirot or Alex Verus come across as brilliant detectives/diviners because at one point, they start to act on information that is withheld from the audience. You know, that's those small scenes when the character announces something like "I've just got to make some calls", which is then blended in the background.

The opposite to that is by handing the audience some pieces of information first, but without added context, then return to these pieces of information at a later point. Lucky # Slevin is a brilliant example for this, by showing a string of seemingly unrelated murders right at the start and going back to them right at the finish, causing that sudden spark of understanding in the audience.

The main difference is that the audience will never by able to solve any Hercules Poirot case because they lack a critical piece of information, while the audience of L#7 could have pieces the puzzle together, if they had the ability to dig deeper into the initial murder scenes.

Are you sure this is the case for Poirot? I distinctly remember one of the David Suchet Poirots* where Hastings took Poirot to a murder mystery play and Poirot was upset afterwards that the playwright did exactly that (had the in-play-detective solve the case using information not made available to the audience). Unless this was a dig by the series producer at the source novels, this seems like an odd thing to include.
*So yes, this could be invented for the series, rather than canonical to the novels.


AFAIC, Chekov was an author and novelist. What it was meant to say is: "Don't include anything that is not necessary" and was mainly geared towards writing stories / creating plots. When talking about linear plots, that also makes it into sorta-kinda foreshadowing, as someone aware of it can also anticipate that nothing was included in the story without a reason.

I think, to expand on this, stories and novels are supposed to be teleological -- the author knows what is going to happen. Yes, sometimes they will re-write during the writing process and maybe realize that a gunshot makes more sense than a knife fight in the third act and goes back and makes sure there is a gun to be shot present somewhere previously or the like, but at the time of publishing you only have one specific story told and that's kind of the point.

[Florian]

Are you sure this is the case for Poirot? I distinctly remember one of the David Suchet Poirots* where Hastings took Poirot to a murder mystery play and Poirot was upset afterwards that the playwright did exactly that (had the in-play-detective solve the case using information not made available to the audience). Unless this was a dig by the series producer at the source novels, this seems like an odd thing to include.
*So yes, this could be invented for the series, rather than canonical to the novels.

I think, to expand on this, stories and novels are supposed to be teleological -- the author knows what is going to happen. Yes, sometimes they will re-write during the writing process and maybe realize that a gunshot makes more sense than a knife fight in the third act and goes back and makes sure there is a gun to be shot present somewhere previously or the like, but at the time of publishing you only have one specific story told and that's kind of the point.

Haven't seen this particular TV series, but this is a really heavy-handed dig at the original Agatha Christy novels. For goods examples, grab a bottle of red wine and the old Ustinov movies Murder on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. Still enjoyable classics and you will exactly know what I mean. Christy is basically the inventor of a lot of End Twist tropes....

As for your other point, there also minimalist / reductionist elements to it. Not to sound rude, but it´s quite noticeable in new and inexperienced authors (or GMs) that they have great scenes in mind and also want to include them, because they sound like fun to them, but will add nothing to the story itself.

[Morgaln]

Haven't seen this particular TV series, but this is a really heavy-handed dig at the original Agatha Christy novels. For goods examples, grab a bottle of red wine and the old Ustinov movies Murder on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. Still enjoyable classics and you will exactly know what I mean. Christy is basically the inventor of a lot of End Twist tropes....

As for your other point, there also minimalist / reductionist elements to it. Not to sound rude, but it´s quite noticeable in new and inexperienced authors (or GMs) that they have great scenes in mind and also want to include them, because they sound like fun to them, but will add nothing to the story itself.

There's even a 1976 movie that specifically spoofs this (among other common murder mystery tropes of the early 20th century), called "Murder by Death". Look it up, it's worth a watch.

[Max_Killjoy]

Haven't seen this particular TV series, but this is a really heavy-handed dig at the original Agatha Christy novels. For goods examples, grab a bottle of red wine and the old Ustinov movies Murder on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. Still enjoyable classics and you will exactly know what I mean. Christy is basically the inventor of a lot of End Twist tropes....

As for your other point, there also minimalist / reductionist elements to it. Not to sound rude, but it´s quite noticeable in new and inexperienced authors (or GMs) that they have great scenes in mind and also want to include them, because they sound like fun to them, but will add nothing to the story itself.

There's also, however, the fact that "what adds to the story" is also quite subjective. Minimalist and reductionist approaches are styles, not objective standards.

[GloatingSwine]

Haven't seen this particular TV series, but this is a really heavy-handed dig at the original Agatha Christy novels. For goods examples, grab a bottle of red wine and the old Ustinov movies Murder on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. Still enjoyable classics and you will exactly know what I mean. Christy is basically the inventor of a lot of End Twist tropes....


Agatha Christie almost always gave you all the information you need to figure out the murder in advance.

She was also very good at hiding it by playing on the assumptions readers would make.

Conan Doyle is your man for detective stories that hinge on evidence not presented to the reader, because Watson didn't notice it and he's the narrator.

[Florian]

There's also, however, the fact that "what adds to the story" is also quite subjective. Minimalist and reductionist approaches are styles, not objective standards.

I sense a misunderstanding coming up....

To move away from this particular tangent and back more towards the original topic, you have an interesting game world and insert (no matter at what point) a closed but plausible scenario, you can tell a story / have an interesting story emerge out of it.

Point being, when I insert the "Three Jade Figures" geisha house into the red light district, then naturally, it has geisha, cooks, waitresses, bouncers and customers beyond the single NPC I wanted to be in that location and the location really being the windrow dressing around it. Ignore it, go ahead and go into it, engage with anyone one your leisure, as normal. Maybe a brawl breaks out between a group of drunken samurai because their respective group leaders called dips on being the first to test a new geisha.

All part of the internal logic we´re here for. What is not is me wanting to insert a cool swashbuckler style scene with wuxia amongst the rafters because I wanted to tell that.

[Gallowglass]

Agatha Christie almost always gave you all the information you need to figure out the murder in advance.

She was also very good at hiding it by playing on the assumptions readers would make.

Conan Doyle is your man for detective stories that hinge on evidence not presented to the reader, because Watson didn't notice it and he's the narrator.

To lend some credence to the original point, Agatha Christie -almost- always gave you, the reader-- enough information for you to make a good guess as to the murderer, but the character (Poirot, Marple, etc.) almost always received some --confirmation-- that was hidden to the reader until the parlor reveal at the end. And that often took the form of some call the character received out-of-earshot.

[Quertus]

As for your other point, there also minimalist / reductionist elements to it. Not to sound rude, but it´s quite noticeable in new and inexperienced authors (or GMs) that they have great scenes in mind and also want to include them, because they sound like fun to them, but will add nothing to the story itself.


There's also, however, the fact that "what adds to the story" is also quite subjective. Minimalist and reductionist approaches are styles, not objective standards.


I sense a misunderstanding coming up....

To move away from this particular tangent and back more towards the original topic, you have an interesting game world and insert (no matter at what point) a closed but plausible scenario, you can tell a story / have an interesting story emerge out of it.

Point being, when I insert the "Three Jade Figures" geisha house into the red light district, then naturally, it has geisha, cooks, waitresses, bouncers and customers beyond the single NPC I wanted to be in that location and the location really being the windrow dressing around it. Ignore it, go ahead and go into it, engage with anyone one your leisure, as normal. Maybe a brawl breaks out between a group of drunken samurai because their respective group leaders called dips on being the first to test a new geisha.

All part of the internal logic we´re here for. What is not is me wanting to insert a cool swashbuckler style scene with wuxia amongst the rafters because I wanted to tell that.

OK, I'll grant "incoherence" and noob GM can be related, but what does it have to do with minimalist / reductionist elements?

[Morgaln]

To lend some credence to the original point, Agatha Christie -almost- always gave you, the reader-- enough information for you to make a good guess as to the murderer, but the character (Poirot, Marple, etc.) almost always received some --confirmation-- that was hidden to the reader until the parlor reveal at the end. And that often took the form of some call the character received out-of-earshot.

In addition, the why of the murder (aka the motive) often was a complete mystery, until the detective would suddenly pull out some hitherto unmentioned previous relationship between murderer and victim on the last few pages.

[Segev]

As much as I enjoy the topic of "fair play" mysteries vs. Sherlock Holmes mysteries, this isn't really the thread for them, is it?

I suppose it could be related to railroading, in the sense that Sherlock Holmes as a PC is railroaded because the GM just gives him the answers, and then expects him to narrate it to the rest of the party, and Sherlock Holmes as an NPC is the quintessential party-as-passive-audience form of railroading since the only contribution their abilities make is determining whether they get to be around when Sherlock solves the mystery.

[Florian]

As much as I enjoy the topic of "fair play" mysteries vs. Sherlock Holmes mysteries, this isn't really the thread for them, is it?

Yeah, that got a bit derailed....

Ok, more seriously, I think these kinds of mysteries are a good basic example to engage with the original topic.
We have got our four cases that we identified so far, from linear plot (this is how you solve the mystery), to bias design (here I intentionally include a mystery), to that Q-thingy (woe me when I intentionally include a mystery) to agency removal (keep inside the mystery).

But they are also great to look at the GM tools that are not railroading, but that can be perceived as railroading by players, from causality chains, to timelines, to domino effects and such.

[Willie the Duck]

As for your other point, there also minimalist / reductionist elements to it. Not to sound rude, but it´s quite noticeable in new and inexperienced authors (or GMs) that they have great scenes in mind and also want to include them, because they sound like fun to them, but will add nothing to the story itself.

Who do you think you are being rude to/how is this rude? Rude in that you responded with an orthogonal thought? I guess it doesn't really touch on my point, but that's okay. I was expanding on your point. This is a collaborative discussion, not a competition. 'sallgood, 'sallright.


Agatha Christie almost always gave you all the information you need to figure out the murder in advance.

She was also very good at hiding it by playing on the assumptions readers would make.

Conan Doyle is your man for detective stories that hinge on evidence not presented to the reader, because Watson didn't notice it and he's the narrator.

I think there's also a case to be made that the standard that the author was in some way required to give the audience all the pieces to do it themselves was not an established universal truism at that point.

[Florian]

Who do you think you are being rude to/how is this rude? Rude in that you responded with an orthogonal thought? I guess it doesn't really touch on my point, but that's okay. I was expanding on your point. This is a collaborative discussion, not a competition. 'sallgood, 'sallright.

This is a public discussion and boards tend to have many more lurkers than active participants, especially on the deeper kind of topic. The me being rude point was not directed towards you, but to the folks reading this and feeling hurt by my assessment.

[Quertus]

I think these kinds of mysteries are a good basic example to engage with the original topic.
We have got our four cases that we identified so far, from linear plot (this is how you solve the mystery), to bias design (here I intentionally include a mystery), to that Q-thingy (woe me when I intentionally include a mystery)

We're still talking about, "railroading is when the GM changes game physics or facts to cause or prevent an outcome", right?

If so, then… I'm not seeing the problem. Say the PCs guess correctly that the butcher is a werewolf, and look to wrap things up in half a session, skipping dozens of scenes & NPCs that the GM had planned. If the GM changes things (it wasn't actually the butcher after all) to prevent an outcome (the players solve the mystery "too fast") or to cause an outcome (the murderer gets caught when it's their turn on guard duty (because this ties into the planned end scene, or the transition to the next adventure), then it's my definition of railroading.

[Talakeal]

We're still talking about, "railroading is when the GM changes game physics or facts to cause or prevent an outcome", right?

If so, then… I'm not seeing the problem. Say the PCs guess correctly that the butcher is a werewolf, and look to wrap things up in half a session, skipping dozens of scenes & NPCs that the GM had planned. If the GM changes things (it wasn't actually the butcher after all) to prevent an outcome (the players solve the mystery "too fast") or to cause an outcome (the murderer gets caught when it's their turn on guard duty (because this ties into the planned end scene, or the transition to the next adventure), then it's my definition of railroading.

In my mind that is just cheating. Or perhaps "narrative fudging," if you want to be charitable.

Railroading would be, imo, if the DM kept coming up with excuses for why the butcher couldn't be confronted until all of those scenes had played out.

[Max_Killjoy]

We're still talking about, "railroading is when the GM changes game physics or facts to cause or prevent an outcome", right?

If so, then… I'm not seeing the problem. Say the PCs guess correctly that the butcher is a werewolf, and look to wrap things up in half a session, skipping dozens of scenes & NPCs that the GM had planned. If the GM changes things (it wasn't actually the butcher after all) to prevent an outcome (the players solve the mystery "too fast") or to cause an outcome (the murderer gets caught when it's their turn on guard duty (because this ties into the planned end scene, or the transition to the next adventure), then it's my definition of railroading.


In my mind that is just cheating. Or perhaps "narrative fudging," if you want to be charitable.

Railroading would be, imo, if the DM kept coming up with excuses for why the butcher couldn't be confronted until all of those scenes had played out.

I'd say either changing it so that the butcher isn't the werewolf, OR coming up with excuses to prevent the confrontation, would both be railroading... which is a form of cheating.

[Florian]

I'd say either changing it so that the butcher isn't the werewolf, OR coming up with excuses to prevent the confrontation, would both be railroading... which is a form of cheating.

Man, stop calling it that. Something you should have taken away from this discussion is that it sometimes can be part of the agreed upon game, but not in the sense that we usually use "buy in" to describe entering into a linear story.

[Max_Killjoy]

Man, stop calling it that. Something you should have taken away from this discussion is that it sometimes can be part of the agreed upon game, but not in the sense that we usually use "buy in" to describe entering into a linear story.

I'm not calling linear story with player buy-in cheating.

I'm calling railroading cheating... which it is.




Let me clear up some terminology here. This is how I use the terms. I think these are generally the standard definition of the terms. And I think they are how the terms should be used.

Linear plot: A game where most points are predetermined. PCs shall proceed through points A to B to C while experiencing events X, Y and Z. Common in modules or GMs who set out to tell a specific story.

Railroad: Like a linear plot, but the players do not wish to proceed through a linear plot and are forced to do so by the GM anyway. Every time they try to divert from the linear plot they are intentionally thwarted with the express intention of putting the game back on the rails.

Illusionism: Like a railroad, but the GM tries to pretend this isn't happening.

A linear plot can be "okay". It seems like a horribly boring way to play to me, but I guess some players just want to be fed a story and some GMs don't feel comfortable unless everything is planned out in advance. This is "fine", so long as everyone's on board with it. A railroad, on the other hand, is an inherently bad thing. Some or all of the players do not want to sit back and be guided along a pre-planned story, but are being forced by one person to do so against their wishes. This is a ****ty dysfunctional game that people may put up with anyway because they either don't know any better, or they have no other options. Illusionism is even worse, because you're taking the coercion of a railroad and adding straight up ****ing lying to people out of game about what's happening. At least with a railroad people can say "Hey this isn't working for me. Give us real choices or I'm gone". With illusionism you're specifically trying to keep people in the game under false pretenses because you're afraid of what they'd do if they found out the truth.



I haven't been getting that from the push-back. Filling in holes with natural detail as you need is a normal part of DMing and I don't think anyone is really trying to say otherwise (although things can get into the weeds as railroading starts getting conflated with direction and such).

I think that Koo Rehtorb's definitions...

... are most relevant. Railroading and illusionism are drawing the ire but things start getting into the weeds when railroading/illusionism is defended by drawing false parallels between them and linear plots/just general DMing. Drawing the players attention to the fact that there is some cool stuff over the mountain is very different than ensuring that any choice they make results in them going over the mountain. Similarly, deciding that after a grueling encounter that would normally have ended in a TPK that the BBEG wants them kidnapped for an impromptu monologue is one thing. Deciding that there will be a BBEG monologue where the characters are powerless and are delivered there on a silver platter by an unstoppable force that has no further effect on the plot is something completely different. Though the end result is essentially the same, the first is an acceptable consequence of all that has happened so far, while the second leaves a bad taste in the mouths of most playersand opens plotholes that can lessen/remove the impact of future events.


Bold added for emphasis.

[Talakeal]

I'd say either changing it so that the butcher isn't the werewolf, OR coming up with excuses to prevent the confrontation, would both be railroading... which is a form of cheating.

You've lost me.

How is creating a scenario where there is only one possible outcome neccesarily cheating?

[Max_Killjoy]

You've lost me.

How is creating a scenario where there is only one possible outcome necessarily cheating?


In one, the GM didn't create a scenario with only one possible outcome. The GM created a scenario where the butcher is a werewolf, the PCs have figured it out sooner than the GM expected, and the GM is throwing complications and contrivances at the PCs in order to slow them down and keep them from dealing with the butcher "too soon".

In the other, the GM didn't create a scenario with only one possible outcome. The GM created a scenario... and then changed it when the PCs figured it out sooner than the GM expected.

(And that's setting aside the question of whether a scenario with one possible outcome is a good idea to begin with, which is an entirely different discussion.)


The GM might have WANTED one particular outcome, or THOUGHT that there was only one possible outcome, but that wasn't the case, and he's retroactively blocking, voiding, or invalidating the PCs' actions to force that outcome.

[Talakeal]

In one, the GM didn't create a scenario with only one possible outcome. The GM created a scenario where the butcher is a werewolf, the PCs have figured it out sooner than the GM expected, and the GM is throwing complications and contrivances at the PCs in order to slow them down and keep them from dealing with the butcher "too soon".

In the other, the GM didn't create a scenario with only one possible outcome. The GM created a scenario... and then changed it when the PCs figured it out sooner than the GM expected.

(And that's setting aside the question of whether a scenario with one possible outcome is a good idea to begin with, which is an entirely different discussion.)


The GM might have WANTED one particular outcome, or THOUGHT that there was only one possible outcome, but that wasn't the case, and he's retroactively blocking, voiding, or invalidating the PCs' actions to force that outcome.

So do you consider any form of improvisation to be cheating then?

Like if the PCs ask if there is a silversmith in town, and the DM hadn't planned on it, but then decides its reasonable and so makes one on the spot?

[jjordan]

In one, the GM didn't create a scenario with only one possible outcome. The GM created a scenario where the butcher is a werewolf, the PCs have figured it out sooner than the GM expected, and the GM is throwing complications and contrivances at the PCs in order to slow them down and keep them from dealing with the butcher "too soon".

In the other, the GM didn't create a scenario with only one possible outcome. The GM created a scenario... and then changed it when the PCs figured it out sooner than the GM expected.

(And that's setting aside the question of whether a scenario with one possible outcome is a good idea to begin with, which is an entirely different discussion.)


The GM might have WANTED one particular outcome, or THOUGHT that there was only one possible outcome, but that wasn't the case, and he's retroactively blocking, voiding, or invalidating the PCs' actions to force that outcome.I like some of the implications I perceive in this response.

Make a scenario and let the players play the scenario. If they win early, yay them. If they miss the clues that lead to the crucial treasure, too bad. If they die because they made bad choices or the rolls went poorly, then that's what happens. You can nudge things to keep the game going (The watch, alerted by the fireballs exploding in the middle of their city, burst into the room. "Curses," the villain shrieks and flees as the resolute soldiers charge at her. Left alone, standing over your bleeding bodies, they take a long long around at the chaos that once was the most opulent temple in the Empire. "Should we maybe try to help these folks?" one asks.) Or you can let things end. ("Since we've got time left on this session we'll roll new characters and start fresh next time.")

[Max_Killjoy]

So do you consider any form of improvisation to be cheating then?

Like if the PCs ask if there is a silversmith in town, and the DM hadn't planned on it, but then decides its reasonable and so makes one on the spot?


No, I do not consider improvising cheating. Why on earth do people keep mistaking what I'm arguing against for "improvising"? There is no way to actually read what I'm writing and mistake it for an argument against improvisation. In fact, one of the "rules (https://www.pantheater.com/rules-of-improv.html)" of improv theater and comedy is that you don't void or contradict what's already there, you build on it.

Adding details which build on existing details, filling in holes as the PCs exploring, and improvising, have NOTHING to do with railroading -- which is very often done via retroactively altering details or avoiding "natural" outcomes of events to deceive players, stifle player agency, void PC actions, etc.

Seriously, how does "don't retroactively change things to get your own way" keep being read as "never add anything new or improvise anything"?

[Thinker]

No, I do not consider improvising cheating. Why on earth do people keep mistaking what I'm arguing against for "improvising"? There is no way to actually read what I'm writing and mistake it for an argument against improvisation. In fact, one of the "rules (https://www.pantheater.com/rules-of-improv.html)" of improv theater and comedy is that you don't void or contradict what's already there, you build on it.

Adding details which build on existing details, filling in holes as the PCs exploring, and improvising, have NOTHING to do with railroading -- which is very often done via retroactively altering details or avoiding "natural" outcomes of events to deceive players, stifle player agency, void PC actions, etc.

Seriously, how does "don't retroactively change things to get your own way" keep being read as "never add anything new or improvise anything"?

If I may, I'd like to build on this a little bit to address Talakeal's example.


So do you consider any form of improvisation to be cheating then?

Like if the PCs ask if there is a silversmith in town, and the DM hadn't planned on it, but then decides its reasonable and so makes one on the spot?

The key part above is "decides its reasonable". Deciding based on the game world that there would be a good chance for a silversmith to be available in the players' location is fine. It has to make sense for the world as the GM and the players understand it.

If we extend the rules of improv, we could say "Yes, and... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes%2C_and...)", and build upon the answer, like, "Yes there is a silversmith and he needs someone to pick up his shipment of silver from downriver. By the same token, we could say "No, but, you could probably find someone selling a silver dagger" or "No, but you remember the caravan you passed a few days ago had some silver they were shipping."

[Max_Killjoy]

If I may, I'd like to build on this a little bit to address Talakeal's example.



The key part above is "decides its reasonable". Deciding based on the game world that there would be a good chance for a silversmith to be available in the players' location is fine. It has to make sense for the world as the GM and the players understand it.

If we extend the rules of improv, we could say "Yes, and... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes%2C_and...)", and build upon the answer, like, "Yes there is a silversmith and he needs someone to pick up his shipment of silver from downriver. By the same token, we could say "No, but, you could probably find someone selling a silver dagger" or "No, but you remember the caravan you passed a few days ago had some silver they were shipping."


Exactly.

I don't know, maybe the confusion is that if I didn't say there was a silversmith in the town before, or didn't think there was one before or have it written down, then adding one is "changing things retroactively"? And that's where the confusion comes from?

[Thinker]

Exactly.

I don't know, maybe the confusion is that if I didn't say there was a silversmith in the town before, or didn't think there was one before or have it written down, then adding one is "changing things retroactively"? And that's where the confusion comes from?

That might be the confusion. In both cases you are adding details to the game that didn't exist for the players before. The GM doesn't know all of the details about the entire world - it would be impractical to know everything, but the GM would probably be able to determine those things based on inferences, logic, and internal consistency. Players could probably figure out many of these details themselves. I call this Gameworld Information. The GM also has access to GM Knowledge, details that have been prepared ahead of time or events that are happening behind the scenes in some way. The players might get access to bits and pieces of this, but often won't see the whole picture. It would be easy to conflate the two since the players neither have all of the Gameworld Information nor all of the GM Knowledge.

Therefore, the GM moving a challenge around to ensure that the players encounter might be invisible to the players. One downside is that doing so may interfere with Player Knowledge that has already been established or upset the Gameworld Knowledge and make the game less consistent. If the players find out about your trickery, it can lead to a feeling of being cheated and loss of confidence in the idea that their actions actually matter.

[NichG]

No, I do not consider improvising cheating. Why on earth do people keep mistaking what I'm arguing against for "improvising"? There is no way to actually read what I'm writing and mistake it for an argument against improvisation. In fact, one of the "rules (https://www.pantheater.com/rules-of-improv.html)" of improv theater and comedy is that you don't void or contradict what's already there, you build on it.

Adding details which build on existing details, filling in holes as the PCs exploring, and improvising, have NOTHING to do with railroading -- which is very often done via retroactively altering details or avoiding "natural" outcomes of events to deceive players, stifle player agency, void PC actions, etc.

Seriously, how does "don't retroactively change things to get your own way" keep being read as "never add anything new or improvise anything"?

Because the explicit things you identify as the things you have a problem with tend to also overlap with cases that come up in improvisation. For example, one could run a game in the style where it is decided that 'there is a werewolf and it is killing people' without deciding who the werewolf is until the reveal. That kind of setup is explicitly used in some forms of improvisation. The example that immediately comes to mind is a play called Shear Madness, where the first act drops a bunch of ambiguous clues that could implicate any of the four suspects. During the intermission, the audience is asked who they think committed the murder, and the second act reveals the events that took place in such a way as to be consistent with whatever the majority opinion was.

[OldTrees1]

Because the explicit things you identify as the things you have a problem with tend to also overlap with cases that come up in improvisation.

How so? Here is the original quote if you want to point to the exact detail.


I'd say either changing it so that the butcher isn't the werewolf, OR coming up with excuses to prevent the confrontation, would both be railroading... which is a form of cheating.

The two examples listed are:
When faced with the Players attempting to confront the butcher (who happens to be the werewolf) about being a werewolf,
1) the DM retconned the butcher into not being a werewolf.
2) the DM retconned excuses to prevent the confrontation.


For example, one could run a game in the style where it is decided that 'there is a werewolf and it is killing people' without deciding who the werewolf is until the reveal. That kind of setup is explicitly used in some forms of improvisation. The example that immediately comes to mind is a play called Shear Madness, where the first act drops a bunch of ambiguous clues that could implicate any of the four suspects. During the intermission, the audience is asked who they think committed the murder, and the second act reveals the events that took place in such a way as to be consistent with whatever the majority opinion was.

To me this sounds like a completely different situation. Although what happens if the PCs try to determine and then confront the werewolf in the first act? Does the game continue to block every investigation with ambiguity? What about accidentally non ambiguous clues, does the game retcon them into being ambiguous? What if the PCs decide to test a theory, does the game determine the outcome randomly or does it determine the first N-1 guesses will be wrong until the second act?

I know you describe that as improvisation and it clearly includes a lot of improv. However I wonder how much railroading would occur to keep it "on script".

[NichG]

How so? Here is the original quote if you want to point to the exact detail.

Max's criticism focuses on changing things and on hiding those changes. When asked to clarify, he confirmed earlier in the thread that he considers it to still be dishonest if the GM changes something that the players have no way to know about (e.g. changing things self-consistently). When I asked about a GM who intentionally chose not to determine things before the moment of reveal, he maintained that he felt that was also dishonest. At that point, I pointed out that his criticism technically covered many forms of improvisational style.

To me, this reads as an implicit assumption that 'who the werewolf is' needs to be decided in advance. That's why I brought up Shear Madness, which is a play that is performed in improv style to intentionally go against that sort of assumption, in a genre (mysteries) that strongly relies on self- consistency.

To me, the inconsistency in Max's definition is that it tries to get at matters of attitude through assuming that behavior necessarily implies attitude (due to particulars of Max's personal experiences), rather than talking about attitude directly. So my counter examples are cases where the behaviors correspond to things Max criticizes, but the attitudes are opposite.

Shear Madness is a play rather than an RPG, but to run the tabletop version you would just drop the act structure and make it so that whomever the PCs confront first from the list of possible suspects is the werewolf.

[Florian]

No, I do not consider improvising cheating. Why on earth do people keep mistaking what I'm arguing against for "improvising"? There is no way to actually read what I'm writing and mistake it for an argument against improvisation. In fact, one of the "rules (https://www.pantheater.com/rules-of-improv.html)" of improv theater and comedy is that you don't void or contradict what's already there, you build on it.

Adding details which build on existing details, filling in holes as the PCs exploring, and improvising, have NOTHING to do with railroading -- which is very often done via retroactively altering details or avoiding "natural" outcomes of events to deceive players, stifle player agency, void PC actions, etc.

Seriously, how does "don't retroactively change things to get your own way" keep being read as "never add anything new or improvise anything"?

Because your stance continually reads like the polar opposite. It comes across like this: The game world has to be a finished and self-contained thing that comes with anything already included and pre-set, with locations, scenarios and NPC already set in stone. The GM has to be the neutral arbiter of and interface to this game world, the players come to your table with the set expectation that engaging with the game world as is will be their challenge / objective for playing your game and it will be a no-go for you to alter or change anything (unless that happens as a natural result).

So it is pretty bizarre when you agree on including a silversmith because a player asked about it, but would take out the cheater hammer when the GM leaves something like the identity of the werewolf undecided until the decision is needed.

[OldTrees1]

@NichG and Florian

I continue to fail to reconcile your depictions of Max_Killjoy's position with the text of Max_Killjoy's position over the last 2 pages (the werewolf retcon to foil the players). Obviously I, as a bystander, have not paid as much attention to the subthread as you have. However if Max_Killjoy says you are mistaking their position and a bystander can fail to see your inferences it might indicate some kind of miscommunication occurred. Or not.

Hope you have a good day.

[MrSandman]

Max's criticism focuses on changing things and on hiding those changes. When asked to clarify, he confirmed earlier in the thread that he considers it to still be dishonest if the GM changes something that the players have no way to know about (e.g. changing things self-consistently). When I asked about a GM who intentionally chose not to determine things before the moment of reveal, he maintained that he felt that was also dishonest. At that point, I pointed out that his criticism technically covered many forms of improvisational style.


I think that an important point in the discussion is if the GM decides to either change established facts or purposefully leave them undefined to push her own agenda and make sure everything happens when/as she thinks it should happen.

Going back to the Shear Madness analogy, there's a difference between leaving the murderer undefined to see how the game turns out and who it makes sense to be depending on how it develops and leaving the murderer undefined to make sure that the players don't catch him too quickly.

[NichG]

I think that an important point in the discussion is if the GM decides to either change established facts or purposefully leave them undefined to push her own agenda and make sure everything happens when/as she thinks it should happen.

Going back to the Shear Madness analogy, there's a difference between leaving the murderer undefined to see how the game turns out and who it makes sense to be depending on how it develops and leaving the murderer undefined to make sure that the players don't catch him too quickly.

That's the thing which these examples are intended to clarify. Is it the attitude of the GM that is being described here, or is it the actions they take that are being described?

I think the core complaint is probably really about the attitude, but it's being conflated with the action.

And even in terms of attitude, there's a difference between e.g. 'Q-railroading only happens as a consequence of the GM having a metagame agenda' and e.g. 'I don't want to play with a GM who uses their power to undermine me'.

[PhoenixPhyre]

What about this:

I run games with strict, external time limits both on session length (1.5 hours max) and campaign duration (no more than about 20 sessions, limited by the school year). I want to have the campaigns end somewhere meaningful and wrap up loose ends to some degree.

As a result, I move things around, hand-wave parts/challenges, find reasons why unchosen side paths/elements don't play a major role, push the party (in character and out) to act rather than sitting around, etc. This is entirely meta-game, but not plot driven (except where the "plot" is letting the party do stuff instead of just faff about).

Am I railroading them? I don't have a plot in mind. I build scenarios. They evolve tremendously during play, based on player actions and desires. I don't care at all about keeping things consistent with my notes (which are sparse), but I do take care to make the player experience consistent. I'll reshape the background stuff constantly to make sure that the observed reality has clear lines of cause and effect. This includes facts established in previous campaigns (because it's an ongoing living world setting). Everything not observed is in a fuzzy state until I say it at the table or the players act in that area (metaphysical or actual). Then it's locked down.

[Max_Killjoy]

Because your stance continually reads like the polar opposite. It comes across like this: The game world has to be a finished and self-contained thing that comes with anything already included and pre-set, with locations, scenarios and NPC already set in stone. The GM has to be the neutral arbiter of and interface to this game world, the players come to your table with the set expectation that engaging with the game world as is will be their challenge / objective for playing your game and it will be a no-go for you to alter or change anything (unless that happens as a natural result).

So it is pretty bizarre when you agree on including a silversmith because a player asked about it, but would take out the cheater hammer when the GM leaves something like the identity of the werewolf undecided until the decision is needed.


The GM in the example isn't leaving the identity of the werewolf undecided until "the decision is needed". That's not a style I like*, but it can be done in such a way that it's not railroading or illusionism, depending on why the GM is doing it, and depending on whether the players have bought in to a game where facts are indeterminate until the last possible moment.

The GM in the example had already decided that the butcher was the werewolf, and then either retroactively changed the facts when the players figured it out "too soon" and "ruined" the GM's preplanned setup, or dropped new contrived obstacles in their path to prevent them from confronting the butcher-werewolf sooner than was preplanned.



To me, it interferes with the feeling that of a "world that could be real", that is as if it existed before the PCs, and will go on after the PCs, and exists outside the PCs' field of awareness. Farmers are still farming somewhere even if the PCs never see it. Bakers are still baking even if bread is not once mentioned. People are falling in love and having kids and growing old. The seasons change. Those things happen with or without the PCs, the world doesn't revolve around them (unless it specifically does, campaign-specific details disclaimer, etc).

And no, that's not self-deception... "self-deception" is an utterly broken and unfair label to apply to imagination and immersion and the desire for verisimilitude. People who care about those things know that the fictional world isn't real, but they want it to feel like it could be real -- that's the whole reason they use the word "verisimilitude" rather than "realism" or "realistic".

[Segev]

The GM in the example isn't leaving the identity of the werewolf undecided until "the decision is needed". That's not a style I like*, but it can be done in such a way that it's not railroading or illusionism, depending on why the GM is doing it, and depending on whether the players have bought in to a game where facts are indeterminate until the last possible moment.

The GM in the example had already decided that the butcher was the werewolf, and then either retroactively changed the facts when the players figured it out "too soon" and "ruined" the GM's preplanned setup, or dropped new contrived obstacles in their path to prevent them from confronting the butcher-werewolf sooner than was preplanned.



To me, it interferes with the feeling that of a "world that could be real", that is as if it existed before the PCs, and will go on after the PCs, and exists outside the PCs' field of awareness. Farmers are still farming somewhere even if the PCs never see it. Bakers are still baking even if bread is not once mentioned. People are falling in love and having kids and growing old. The seasons change. Those things happen with or without the PCs, the world doesn't revolve around them (unless it specifically does, campaign-specific details disclaimer, etc).

And no, that's not self-deception... "self-deception" is an utterly broken and unfair label to apply to imagination and immersion and the desire for verisimilitude. People who care about those things know that the fictional world isn't real, but they want it to feel like it could be real -- that's the whole reason they use the word "verisimilitude" rather than "realism" or "realistic".

A fair bit of this can be determined by asking yourself this question: "If the PCs weren't involved, would events proceed in a manner that seems self-consistent and from which a third-party observer, given all the facts the DM has access to, could make logical determinations of what has come before and what will likely come after?"

I think, if you can answer that question in the affirmative, Max_Killjoy is saying he's okay with your worldbuilding and your choices. If you must answer it in the negative, Max_Killjoy sees an incomplete world that is really just a stage set where what you see is an illusion and the mechanisms you don't see only exist to prop up the illusion. It doesn't feel like a "real" world, to him.

To be more fanciful about it, if the PCs were Isekai'd into the world, along with the DM who loses all DMly powers, but remembers what he set up, are there answers to the questions that the Isekai'd party might investigate? Can the DM make logical inferences that are good predictors of what they'll actually find, or are the blank spaces so broad that they cover important details and would have had to have been retroactively filled in to accommodate later decisions?

"Well, Dave, this was your campaign world before we magically got here. Was there a silversmith in Lakehaven?" asks Jill, the party fighter.

Dave scratches his head. "You know, I never determined everything present, but it seems likely, given the size of the town and the perennial werewolf problem they have around here," he says, and he's probably - but not guaranteed to be - right, because it's a logical inference based on the setting he established.

On the other hand, when Jill is holding back bile in her throat as they overlook the set piece scene of slaughter that Dave was describing moments before they Isekai'd in here, Mike, the party wizard, asks Dave, "Okay, I know you had a whole mystery planned out, but I think the spoilers are worth saving what now are very real lives. Including our own. Who's the werewolf?"

Dave, if he's doing a job Max_Killjoy would approve of, already determined this, and had planned out the werewolf's actions so that he could determine what clues the party finds based on the party's actions, and hopefully, they'd solve the mystery. He can thus say, "Actually, it's the Baron. His very popular wife who supposedly came up from the peasantry is a natural werewolf who waited to infect him until their son was born and she could take the regency for the secured heir when the Baron was outed as a monster that needed to be put down. She was planning to play the defensive wife, then the grieving widow. Their three daughters wouldn't secure the heirship in any guaranteed fashion, which is why she was waiting for a son."

Dave, if he was playing it like an improv play where determining who the werewolf is later, would have to say, "I don't know! I was going to decide later, after you'd done some investigating and come up with theories. The theory I liked best and thought made the most sense would inform my decision, whether to go with it or to subvert it somehow." And this poses a problem, because this isn't a minor detail that can be determined with logical deduction, but instead is open to anyone to invent the "truth" going forward. The party + Dave will find that... there is no answer. The world falls apart, and is not actually more than a stage set that exists where they can see it now. Step backstage, and they don't find more world, but stage hands.

[OldTrees1]

Segev, I notice you deliberately did not include Max_Killjoy's example. Remember, Max_Killjoy has stated

The GM in the example had already decided that the butcher was the werewolf, and then either retroactively changed the facts when the players figured it out "too soon" and "ruined" the GM's preplanned setup, or dropped new contrived obstacles in their path to prevent them from confronting the butcher-werewolf sooner than was preplanned.

So mapping that similar to your other examples would have DM Dave already have decided who the werewolf was. But now that PC Dave knows the answer, the answer is retconned to some other answer to prevent the PCs from figuring it out too soon.


What about this:

I run games with strict, external time limits both on session length (1.5 hours max) and campaign duration (no more than about 20 sessions, limited by the school year). I want to have the campaigns end somewhere meaningful and wrap up loose ends to some degree.

As a result, I move things around, hand-wave parts/challenges, find reasons why unchosen side paths/elements don't play a major role, push the party (in character and out) to act rather than sitting around, etc. This is entirely meta-game, but not plot driven (except where the "plot" is letting the party do stuff instead of just faff about).

Am I railroading them? I don't have a plot in mind. I build scenarios. They evolve tremendously during play, based on player actions and desires. I don't care at all about keeping things consistent with my notes (which are sparse), but I do take care to make the player experience consistent. I'll reshape the background stuff constantly to make sure that the observed reality has clear lines of cause and effect. This includes facts established in previous campaigns (because it's an ongoing living world setting). Everything not observed is in a fuzzy state until I say it at the table or the players act in that area (metaphysical or actual). Then it's locked down.

Yes, that methodology includes some railroading. You "find reasons why unchosen side paths/elements don't play a major role" which will occasionally change a messy logical outcome into a streamlined railroaded outcome when you removed the logical consequences from the PCs' choice to not choose the unchosen side path.

However it might be a good fit for your group (you and your group can answer this better). I suspect everyone is onboard (agreeing or tolerating) the session lengths and they probably agree with the use of that kind of railroading as a means of dealing with the metagame concern of the session lengths.

[Thinker]

What about this:

I run games with strict, external time limits both on session length (1.5 hours max) and campaign duration (no more than about 20 sessions, limited by the school year). I want to have the campaigns end somewhere meaningful and wrap up loose ends to some degree.

As a result, I move things around, hand-wave parts/challenges, find reasons why unchosen side paths/elements don't play a major role, push the party (in character and out) to act rather than sitting around, etc. This is entirely meta-game, but not plot driven (except where the "plot" is letting the party do stuff instead of just faff about).

Am I railroading them? I don't have a plot in mind. I build scenarios. They evolve tremendously during play, based on player actions and desires. I don't care at all about keeping things consistent with my notes (which are sparse), but I do take care to make the player experience consistent. I'll reshape the background stuff constantly to make sure that the observed reality has clear lines of cause and effect. This includes facts established in previous campaigns (because it's an ongoing living world setting). Everything not observed is in a fuzzy state until I say it at the table or the players act in that area (metaphysical or actual). Then it's locked down.

I like this because it is a real-world example of constraints that you face on a regular basis, rather than the hypotheticals that are so commonly tossed around. In your case, I think that the most important thing is that you're not invalidating the players' choices. Secondary to that, you might be making the world feel less consistent, but it is a compromise based on your constraints. I do think there is some railroading going on here, but it seems to be benign and, if your players are having fun, that matters most.

[Willie the Duck]

Segev, I notice you deliberately did not include Max_Killjoy's example. Remember, Max_Killjoy has stated

So mapping that similar to your other examples would have DM Dave already have decided who the werewolf was. But now that PC Dave knows the answer, the answer is retconned to some other answer to prevent the PCs from figuring it out too soon.

Yes, in Segev's example, the butcher becomes the Baron.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yes, that methodology includes some railroading. You "find reasons why unchosen side paths/elements don't play a major role" which will occasionally change a messy logical outcome into a streamlined railroaded outcome when you removed the logical consequences from the PCs' choice to not choose the unchosen side path.

However it might be a good fit for your group (you and your group can answer this better). I suspect everyone is onboard (agreeing or tolerating) the session lengths and they probably agree with the use of that kind of railroading as a means of dealing with the metagame concern of the session lengths.

The thing with the "unchosen side paths" isn't about removing the logical consequences, it's about fading them out of view. The consequences still exist, but the players come off the board before they might have if the players had stayed with that path.

For example, I had a multi-sided situation with mercenaries, fanatics, and an orc tribe, plus a battlefield full of interesting things. The fanatics had hired the mercenaries and made an alliance with the orc tribe and were at the battlefield to dig up preserved weapons and armor to equip themselves before going and fighting their enemies, the royalist faction. The party decided to take actions to break the orcs (who were only there by convenience) away from the fanatics, but otherwise more or less ignored the fanatics and their goals, focusing on the battlefield and the creatures "imprisoned" there. So I had the fanatics finish up/get spooked by the undead unleashed by people (ie PCs) meddling with the containment of the battlefield and decide that their current preparation was enough and so leave for their real goal. This let them fade out of view quickly. Breaking the orcs free will affect the outcome of the fanatics' battle--they'll lose by even more than they would have and the Royalists will have a better hand.

If the players had decided to stay with them or thwart them, they'd have shifted to be the main goal and the battlefield would have muddled along or evolved without them. By the time this fork happened, certain events were set in motion regardless.

And the constraints are inherent in the setup--it's an after-school club at a high school. I'm pushing it to be able to do 1.5 hours, as parents often want to pick their kids up before then. And I lose a lot of sessions (often unpredictably) due to people being absent. So I have to adapt timing on the fly.


I like this because it is a real-world example of constraints that you face on a regular basis, rather than the hypotheticals that are so commonly tossed around. In your case, I think that the most important thing is that you're not invalidating the players' choices. Secondary to that, you might be making the world feel less consistent, but it is a compromise based on your constraints. I do think there is some railroading going on here, but it seems to be benign and, if your players are having fun, that matters most.

I try to be open to letting them have an impact on the world. I think the high-faluting discourse about railroading in the abstract makes some of the more important constraints and considerations get lost. IMX, most people want some combination of
a) thrilling events
b) a sense that their actions mattered, even if only at the margins
c) trust that they're not being lied to
d) a narrative (in the "set of events that happened") that makes some kind of sense, even if only in retrospect.
e) a group of highlight moments--times they shone, funny/amazing things that happened, in-jokes, etc.

They'll lash out when these are violated. A and E are easy--"it's boring". B/C/D bring charges of "railroading", when mostly that means "I'm not having fun in a way that's not easy to define", with partial meanings of "I feel like I'm only a spectator" or "this plot seems contrived to keep us down". Going beyond this realization that accusations of railroading aren't always meant in a technical way and are mostly just statements that someone isn't having as much fun as they'd like and more investigation is needed is mostly pointless IMO.

[OldTrees1]

Yes, in Segev's example, the butcher becomes the Baron.

Which of Segev's examples deals with the DM retconning the werewolf from being person A to being person B in response and to negate the PCs confronting the werewolf(person A) "too soon"? If either of them deals with that then I am as blind as a bat.

At this point I am starting to feel really bad for Max_Killjoy. It is almost like they are typing in invisible ink.


The thing with the "unchosen side paths" isn't about removing the logical consequences, it's about fading them out of view. The consequences still exist, but the players come off the board before they might have if the players had stayed with that path.

For example, I had a multi-sided situation with mercenaries, fanatics, and an orc tribe, plus a battlefield full of interesting things. The fanatics had hired the mercenaries and made an alliance with the orc tribe and were at the battlefield to dig up preserved weapons and armor to equip themselves before going and fighting their enemies, the royalist faction. The party decided to take actions to break the orcs (who were only there by convenience) away from the fanatics, but otherwise more or less ignored the fanatics and their goals, focusing on the battlefield and the creatures "imprisoned" there. So I had the fanatics finish up/get spooked by the undead unleashed by people (ie PCs) meddling with the containment of the battlefield and decide that their current preparation was enough and so leave for their real goal. This let them fade out of view quickly. Breaking the orcs free will affect the outcome of the fanatics' battle--they'll lose by even more than they would have and the Royalists will have a better hand.

If the players had decided to stay with them or thwart them, they'd have shifted to be the main goal and the battlefield would have muddled along or evolved without them. By the time this fork happened, certain events were set in motion regardless.

And the constraints are inherent in the setup--it's an after-school club at a high school. I'm pushing it to be able to do 1.5 hours, as parents often want to pick their kids up before then. And I lose a lot of sessions (often unpredictably) due to people being absent. So I have to adapt timing on the fly.

1) Yeah those constraints are part of the social contract for your group. This is why I separate out the value judgement (sounds like a good fit for your group) from the question about definitions (does X contain railroading).
2) If the logical consequences exist, and are not changed, but the camera is not on them, then it is not railroading. Being efficient in your descriptions given the time pressure is not railroading.

[Willie the Duck]

Which of Segev's examples deals with the DM retconning the werewolf from being person A to being person B in response and to negate the PCs confronting the werewolf(person A) "too soon"? If either of them deals with that then I am as blind as a bat.

How is that supposed to work in the framework of the DM getting pulled into the game world and losing DM ability? I really don't know what you are looking for.


At this point I am starting to feel really bad for Max_Killjoy. It is almost like they are typing in invisible ink.

I some ways yes, in some ways no. There have been no few people here with Very Strong Opinions (TM) who have both been at times treated unfairly but also been the chief architect of people being inclined to view their statements with the least amount of benefit of the doubt.

[Koo Rehtorb]

It's threads like these that make me think maybe railroading breaks some people's brains to the point where they're unable to conceivable of a game that isn't railroaded or how it could possibly even function at all. Truly, D&D does give people brain damage.

[Segev]

Segev, I notice you deliberately did not include Max_Killjoy's example. Remember, Max_Killjoy has stated

So mapping that similar to your other examples would have DM Dave already have decided who the werewolf was. But now that PC Dave knows the answer, the answer is retconned to some other answer to prevent the PCs from figuring it out too soon.No, I wasn't addressing the retcon angle at all. I thought Max_Killjoy expressed himself quite clearly on that, and hadn't realized it was still under discusison.

The two things I was addressing was the difference between the DM already knowing the answer and the DM refusing to come up with the answer until later.

Heck, what I was writing with "Dave" being in the world wasn't Dave being a PC at all. Dave is the former DM; now the world has no DM and is a living, breathing world that Dave (and friends) are stuck in. I was suggesting that it would fall apart quickly in the absence of the DM having established important details prior to losing his DMly status, while it would trundle along nicely if he'd filled in the important details (like who the werewolf is).

I was further saying that I believe, if I understand him correctly, Max_Killjoy is expressing a preference for a world that could keep on running, or at least be logically extrapolated as probably running, without the need for a DM to make up out of whole cloth new information on established details.

In other words, I was trying to demonstrate the difference between "sure, there's probably a silversmith in Lakehaven" and "er, um, the werewolf turns out to be whoever looks most interesting to me after they've spent 3 sessions investigating and theorizing!"

[Max_Killjoy]

I was further saying that I believe, if I understand him correctly, Max_Killjoy is expressing a preference for a world that could keep on running, or at least be logically extrapolated as probably running, without the need for a DM to make up out of whole cloth new information on established details.


Close enough, yes. Enough of the world has to exist, and robustly enough, with consistency and coherence and internal causality, that any new or enhanced detail that becomes necessary can be extrapolated from what exists, or be certain to not contradict what exists.

Even where the detail is not there, it needs to feel as if it will be there when one looks.




In other words, I was trying to demonstrate the difference between "sure, there's probably a silversmith in Lakehaven" and "er, um, the werewolf turns out to be whoever looks most interesting to me after they've spent 3 sessions investigating and theorizing!"


And what a difference it is.

I don't know how you even begin to leave clues when you don't know who's leaving them, or why, or where. When you're leaving details you already know you're going to need in a state of flux, then when you finally answer them you have a retroactive continuity that needs to be established without violating anything that the players already know, and hopefully without causing a whole cascade of changes and new resulting facts that you have to keep straight in your head / notes and hope you don't mix up when presenting things to the players.

[NichG]

IMO at least, it's somewhat like playing Go, in that if you in advance read out a sequence of moves or see a potential attack somewhere on the board that you want to make later on, often you end up in a lot more trouble than if from every board state, you build your plans completely fresh without any sort of attachment to possible lines of play you saw before. Basically, you don't play the game by committing to a plan and then playing it out; you play the game by being responsive to opportunities as they emerge. Similarly, you place a bunch of things in the world which could interact or not, and when something happens such that the world would make more sense if they had been related than if not, you commit to it and keep going. You're playing moves in the spaces that are created naturally through play - in some sense, even as the GM, you're playing the game with the players so that you yourself can discover who the werewolf was. Rather than planning it, you discover it by playing out the scenario.

A less flattering comparison would be that its just the same as how humans look up at the stars and can form any number of constellations from them.

Or in the language of Segev's example, it would correspond to a Isekai-Dave who said 'I don't know who the werewolf is right now, but the moment we interact with any of the suspects I'll be able to tell if it's them'.

[PhoenixPhyre]

IMO at least, it's somewhat like playing Go, in that if you in advance read out a sequence of moves or see a potential attack somewhere on the board that you want to make later on, often you end up in a lot more trouble than if from every board state, you build your plans completely fresh without any sort of attachment to possible lines of play you saw before. Basically, you don't play the game by committing to a plan and then playing it out; you play the game by being responsive to opportunities as they emerge. Similarly, you place a bunch of things in the world which could interact or not, and when something happens such that the world would make more sense if they had been related than if not, you commit to it and keep going. You're playing moves in the spaces that are created naturally through play - in some sense, even as the GM, you're playing the game with the players so that you yourself can discover who the werewolf was. Rather than planning it, you discover it by playing out the scenario.

A less flattering comparison would be that its just the same as how humans look up at the stars and can form any number of constellations from them.

Or in the language of Segev's example, it would correspond to a Isekai-Dave who said 'I don't know who the werewolf is right now, but the moment we interact with any of the suspects I'll be able to tell if it's them'.

I'm very much an "in the moment" rather than a "pre-planned" DM. Because each time I pre-plan very much at all, one (or several) of a few things happens.
1. The players take a hard left at Albuquerque and never come back. So I wasted all that planning.
2. The unfolding events make me realize that I missed something big by being overly-focused on something and so my planning makes less sense than the impromptu efforts.
3. I inevitably end up adding some layer of description that pushes things down new, unforseen paths.

Consistency with my planning is not something I value. In-play consistency is important.

So I don't lay hints. I don't set up grand mysteries. There are only people and places and the almighty (until the players get involved) status quo ante. I set up my situations so that they're tightly balanced piles of dominoes, houses of cards writ large. Any interaction with any piece is going to make the whole thing evolve rapidly in response in unpredictable (ex ante anyway) ways. I don't care how the pieces fall out, I care that they do. The only wrong player action is no action. I'd rather them get moving and do something than sit there and plan the perfect action. Heists are not my thing. I want them to move and have to react to the changing situation (and make the situation react to them), not sit there and "solve the mystery" in one fell swoop. Because there is no mystery. I'll flat out tell them all the important details.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm very much an "in the moment" rather than a "pre-planned" DM. Because each time I pre-plan very much at all, one (or several) of a few things happens.
1. The players take a hard left at Albuquerque and never come back. So I wasted all that planning.
2. The unfolding events make me realize that I missed something big by being overly-focused on something and so my planning makes less sense than the impromptu efforts.
3. I inevitably end up adding some layer of description that pushes things down new, unforseen paths.

Consistency with my planning is not something I value. In-play consistency is important.

So I don't lay hints. I don't set up grand mysteries. There are only people and places and the almighty (until the players get involved) status quo ante. I set up my situations so that they're tightly balanced piles of dominoes, houses of cards writ large. Any interaction with any piece is going to make the whole thing evolve rapidly in response in unpredictable (ex ante anyway) ways. I don't care how the pieces fall out, I care that they do. The only wrong player action is no action. I'd rather them get moving and do something than sit there and plan the perfect action. Heists are not my thing. I want them to move and have to react to the changing situation (and make the situation react to them), not sit there and "solve the mystery" in one fell swoop. Because there is no mystery. I'll flat out tell them all the important details.

Whereas I have to at least build the framework, the skeleton, something to go on and fit things to... or I just make a mess when I have to create on the fly; I end up contradicting myself, or causing unforeseen troublesome downstream implications and effects.

[Florian]

Whereas I have to at least build the framework, the skeleton, something to go on and fit things to... or I just make a mess when I have to create on the fly; I end up contradicting myself, or causing unforeseen troublesome downstream implications and effects.

Running into the extrapolation problem?

[Max_Killjoy]

Running into the extrapolation problem?

Depends on what you mean by that.

[OldTrees1]

No, I wasn't addressing the retcon angle at all. I thought Max_Killjoy expressed himself quite clearly on that, and hadn't realized it was still under discussion.

That makes sense. You understood what their statement about "X is railroading" was about and thus replied to the lesser topic of preference. Thank you for explaining. I understand and can follow your post.


I was further saying that I believe, if I understand him correctly, Max_Killjoy is expressing a preference for a world that could keep on running, or at least be logically extrapolated as probably running, without the need for a DM to make up out of whole cloth new information on established details.

In other words, I was trying to demonstrate the difference between "sure, there's probably a silversmith in Lakehaven" and "er, um, the werewolf turns out to be whoever looks most interesting to me after they've spent 3 sessions investigating and theorizing!"

You definitely succeeded at demonstrating that difference. I have frequently used the word "derive" as a synonym for "extrapolate" and I can see your two examples mapping well to extrapolating new content vs non extrapolating.


Running into the extrapolation problem?

Which problem?

I know that even with a preference for extrapolation, adding content after the initial setup will always risk being less consistent than content created at the initial setup. Extrapolating is a tool for helping minimize that effect (other tools can exist) but it is not perfect.

Or was there another problem?


I some ways yes, in some ways no. There have been no few people here with Very Strong Opinions (TM) who have both been at times treated unfairly but also been the chief architect of people being inclined to view their statements with the least amount of benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, that is usually a factor.

PS on the other half of your post: Segev explained what I misunderstood about their post.


It's threads like these that make me think maybe railroading breaks some people's brains to the point where they're unable to conceivable of a game that isn't railroaded or how it could possibly even function at all. Truly, D&D does give people brain damage.

I have always theorized it was the page count doing the brain damage.

[RedWarlock]

I understand Max's position, and I can see where and how he has problem with the other side, but I have to say, I'm on entirely the other end of the spectrum. I run FAR better when I improvise on the fly. I can't really sit and plot in a white room for very long, but when I'm at the table, with the players in front of me, working from base circumstances, I come up with FAR better ideas.

(Even when writing straight fiction, I work best when I can creatively bounce ideas off other people. I have a creative property I'm working on, a webcomic/animated project, and when I'm working on concepts or characters, I usually hit on a new idea for a challenge in the process of describing and explaining those concepts/characters to a new person.)

I can juggle details just fine (and I usually take notes of details I establish for the players) but my sessions rarely have a solution or an end-goal in sight when I first sit down to the table. It's one reason why I prefer to DM D&D at home, because I have.. literally thousands.. of minis, and all my shelf of gamebooks and monster manuals, which I know maybe 1/3 by heart, and the other 2/3rds I know how to find in a quick reference search. (It's also why my preferred style of game night has a dinner break in the middle, so I can double check some details in the 5 minutes after we finish eating as we settle back into the game.)

I also do the "establish some vague details, and see where the players go" method. (Right now, the main game I'm running is The Dresden Files RPG, which is Fate-based.) In a couple weeks, I'm going to be taking over the DM's chair for another group of players at someone else's house, and I'm going to have to pack up what I need and bring only the books and minis I think I might need. I may need more tote bins than the one toolbox I usually bring...

[Pleh]

I understand Max's position, and I can see where and how he has problem with the other side, but I have to say, I'm on entirely the other end of the spectrum. I run FAR better when I improvise on the fly. I can't really sit and plot in a white room for very long, but when I'm at the table, with the players in front of me, working from base circumstances, I come up with FAR better ideas.

(Even when writing straight fiction, I work best when I can creatively bounce ideas off other people. I have a creative property I'm working on, a webcomic/animated project, and when I'm working on concepts or characters, I usually hit on a new idea for a challenge in the process of describing and explaining those concepts/characters to a new person.)

I can juggle details just fine (and I usually take notes of details I establish for the players) but my sessions rarely have a solution or an end-goal in sight when I first sit down to the table. It's one reason why I prefer to DM D&D at home, because I have.. literally thousands.. of minis, and all my shelf of gamebooks and monster manuals, which I know maybe 1/3 by heart, and the other 2/3rds I know how to find in a quick reference search. (It's also why my preferred style of game night has a dinner break in the middle, so I can double check some details in the 5 minutes after we finish eating as we settle back into the game.)

I also do the "establish some vague details, and see where the players go" method. (Right now, the main game I'm running is The Dresden Files RPG, which is Fate-based.) In a couple weeks, I'm going to be taking over the DM's chair for another group of players at someone else's house, and I'm going to have to pack up what I need and bring only the books and minis I think I might need. I may need more tote bins than the one toolbox I usually bring...

I'm not sure this is actually the opposite of what Max exhorts DMs to do.

My understanding is that Max exhorts consistency of world building that is based on neutral logic that players can get behind and manipulate fairly,

as opposed to an ad hoc setting the DM manipulates whimsically to create the experience they want for the table (regardless any concept of consistency or logic).

It sounds like you create logically consistent worlds, but it's easiest for you to do so responsively after given a prompt from another person.

Laying down a set in stone setting structure ahead of time is a great tool for reference to keep things self consistent, but approaching the problem with spontenaity isn't necessarily wrong.

[Max_Killjoy]

My understanding is that Max exhorts consistency of world building that is based on neutral logic that players can get behind and manipulate fairly,

as opposed to an ad hoc setting the DM manipulates whimsically to create the experience they want for the table (regardless any concept of consistency or logic).


That's a fair assessment.

As a player, I want to know that the ground isn't going to shift under my feet. The latter type of setting feels like taking steps forward into the dark, with only faith that there will be floor under my foot each time... and I don't do faith (or even understand faith, at all).

(I'm not even claiming that ad hoc cannot have consistency or logic, only that it is more prone to lacking those things.)

[Segev]

That's a fair assessment.

As a player, I want to know that the ground isn't going to shift under my feet. The latter type of setting feels like taking steps forward into the dark, with only faith that there will be floor under my foot each time... and I don't do faith (or even understand faith, at all).

(I'm not even claiming that ad hoc cannot have consistency or logic, only that it is more prone to lacking those things.)

Brief aside: "Faith is looking only one way before crossing a one-way street."

Equally seriously, but even more visceral, I think: Have you ever flipped a light switch, and the light not come on? That sense of surprise, momentary that it might be, that it didn't work is evidence of your faith that flipping light switches causes lights to come on. Yes, you know there are exceptions and even why it doesn't happen sometimes. But your expectation that it will work is so ingrained that you don't wonder about it at all under most circumstances: you just believe that it will turn on the lights when you flip it.

That's what faith is.

In the context we usually use it, it seems nebulous because the people putting their faith in a religion, deity, or cause are making assertions that are less easily tested. But true faith means they believe and expect what they believe in as firmly as you expect lights to come on when you flip the switch.

In D&D, the fact that clerics expect their prayers to let them make gestures and intone words that alter reality is why it works: faith is power in D&D. (Some religions argue it is IRL, as well, but I'm not discussing that positively or negatively, here.)

In terms of playing as a player, there is a certain amount of faith you have to place in your DM, that he's got a consistent world (or is able to make one on the fly), and that he's not lying to you about what's going on with the game. That faith being betrayed is what sours people on railroading so much, I think. This is also why buy-in to linear plots which have rails to keep you on the plot's line are not a problem: players didn't place faith in the setting and DM not to railroad them; instead, they acknowledge that the game has to go down certain paths, and even cooperate to help it get there. Because they bought into those paths at the beginning.

Nobody feels railroaded when the bus keeps going to Florida when everybody agreed they were going to Disney World.

[Max_Killjoy]

Brief aside: "Faith is looking only one way before crossing a one-way street."

Equally seriously, but even more visceral, I think: Have you ever flipped a light switch, and the light not come on? That sense of surprise, momentary that it might be, that it didn't work is evidence of your faith that flipping light switches causes lights to come on. Yes, you know there are exceptions and even why it doesn't happen sometimes. But your expectation that it will work is so ingrained that you don't wonder about it at all under most circumstances: you just believe that it will turn on the lights when you flip it.

That's what faith is.

In the context we usually use it, it seems nebulous because the people putting their faith in a religion, deity, or cause are making assertions that are less easily tested. But true faith means they believe and expect what they believe in as firmly as you expect lights to come on when you flip the switch.


And that's not how my brain works. I look both ways when crossing a one-way street, and if a light doesn't turn on, my reaction is an "of course" of mixed exasperation and resignation, and then the process of figuring out exactly which of the possible causes has occurred.




In D&D, the fact that clerics expect their prayers to let them make gestures and intone words that alter reality is why it works: faith is power in D&D. (Some religions argue it is IRL, as well, but I'm not discussing that positively or negatively, here.)

In terms of playing as a player, there is a certain amount of faith you have to place in your DM, that he's got a consistent world (or is able to make one on the fly), and that he's not lying to you about what's going on with the game. That faith being betrayed is what sours people on railroading so much, I think. This is also why buy-in to linear plots which have rails to keep you on the plot's line are not a problem: players didn't place faith in the setting and DM not to railroad them; instead, they acknowledge that the game has to go down certain paths, and even cooperate to help it get there. Because they bought into those paths at the beginning.


That is not, as I understand it, faith. It's empirical trust, which is earned over time, and can also be squandered... a new GM is a source of uncertainty and trepidation for me, but then again, so is any new interaction with a person I don't know anything about yet and who hasn't earned any empirical trust yet.

[Segev]

And that's not how my brain works. I look both ways when crossing a one-way street, and if a light doesn't turn on, my reaction is an "of course" of mixed exasperation and resignation, and then the process of figuring out exactly which of the possible causes has occurred. Well, you don't have faith that people will follow the law on the roads; that's probably wise.

Do you honestly expect every light switch not to work so much that it in no way surprises you? Do you expect it so much that it surprises you when they do? Do you have a conscious or subconscious trepidation, wondering whether it will work this time or not, every time?

I contend that the "of course" is an expression of thwarted trust, because you're cynical enough to be mad at yourself for having expected better, even slightly and even briefly.


That is not, as I understand it, faith. It's empirical trust, which is earned over time, and can also be squandered... a new GM is a source of uncertainty and trepidation for me, but then again, so is any new interaction with a person I don't know anything about yet and who hasn't earned any empirical trust yet.
Faith is hope for things not seen, which are true.

Empirical trust qualifies. Or do you think that faith can't be shaken or even lost with sufficient evidence that it's not properly placed? Is the only religion any given person ever really had faith in the last religion they belonged to? Or can they have had faith in one, lost it, and sought another?Edit: This is rapidly going far off-topic, so we should probably continue this in PMs if you really want to, or let it drop here.

[Quarian Rex]

Have you ever flipped a light switch, and the light not come on? That sense of surprise, momentary that it might be, that it didn't work is evidence of your faith that flipping light switches causes lights to come on. Yes, you know there are exceptions and even why it doesn't happen sometimes. But your expectation that it will work is so ingrained that you don't wonder about it at all under most circumstances: you just believe that it will turn on the lights when you flip it.

That's what faith is.

In the context we usually use it, it seems nebulous because the people putting their faith in a religion, deity, or cause are making assertions that are less easily tested. But true faith means they believe and expect what they believe in as firmly as you expect lights to come on when you flip the switch.


I think that you're playing pretty fast and loose with the concept of faith here. Faith in the casual sense is just a synonym for empirical trust as Max mentioned and has nothing to do with with 'Faith' in the spiritual context. You aren't surprised that the light didn't come on because your trust in the greater principle of 'light' has been shaken, but because of innumerable, repeatable, experiences have forced you to expect otherwise, and trust that expectation.

Religious faith is the exact opposite. It is based around maintaining a framework (mental, social, etc.) that allows you to hold something to be true for which you have no evidence, and no actual experience of it's truth. Moreover, this is advertised as a feature, not a bug. The ability to maintain something to be absolutely true despite a complete and utter lack of empirical evidence is the core virtue of religious faith. Most believers of a scholarly bent (or at least those more inclined to think deep and hard on the basis of their beliefs) go so far as to say that proof of the more supernatural religious elements would actually defeat faith altogether, since it would just be trust in your senses and not faith in a higher power.

In a D&D context the religious systems there would be almost completely unrecognizable to the modern faithful. No faith would be needed. Whatever spiritual power the gods may gain from worship is almost completely transactional, and every disease cured, goblin bite healed, and undead raised up or put down is repeatable, verifiable proof that gods exist as a power unto themselves, and bowing to their strange demands for ritual is a small price to pay for such power to be used on your behalf. Worship a god as they demand and actual, tangible power is granted in return. Wash and repeat. Religions in D&D bear more in common with engineers utilizing the science of the day than with more modern institutions trying to make sense of the senseless.

Faith is a tricky thing to discuss because in our world it had to develop without any external support, cannibalizing itself inside its own echo-chamber until it becomes the tangled Gordian Knot that we have today. D&D-land never had to get past the point of 'a god demands this of you, a god grants you power for your sacrifice'. A more primitive and less nuanced approach but one that is empirically correct in that context. That can be a very, very, interesting difference.

[Max_Killjoy]

We're headed off topic in multiple directions here, so I'm going to wrap up as follows, and then drop these tangents.




Well, you don't have faith that people will follow the law on the roads; that's probably wise.

Do you honestly expect every light switch not to work so much that it in no way surprises you? Do you expect it so much that it surprises you when they do? Do you have a conscious or subconscious trepidation, wondering whether it will work this time or not, every time?

I contend that the "of course" is an expression of thwarted trust, because you're cynical enough to be mad at yourself for having expected better, even slightly and even briefly.


Faith is hope for things not seen, which are true.

Empirical trust qualifies. Or do you think that faith can't be shaken or even lost with sufficient evidence that it's not properly placed? Is the only religion any given person ever really had faith in the last religion they belonged to? Or can they have had faith in one, lost it, and sought another?

Edit: This is rapidly going far off-topic, so we should probably continue this in PMs if you really want to, or let it drop here.


Empirical trust (for lack of a better term) is not "hope for things unseen". It's a conclusion based on long-term evidence.




I think that you're playing pretty fast and loose with the concept of faith here. Faith in the casual sense is just a synonym for empirical trust as Max mentioned and has nothing to do with with 'Faith' in the spiritual context. You aren't surprised that the light didn't come on because your trust in the greater principle of 'light' has been shaken, but because of innumerable, repeatable, experiences have forced you to expect otherwise, and trust that expectation.


Even as faith is used in the casual sense, I'd say it's not the same as empirical trust. I'm not surprised that the light didn't come on, any more than I'm surprised if it did come on. The light will probably come on, because other lights are on and I paid my bill and so on -- but the bulb may have burned out, something else may have gone wrong, so maybe it won't.

I don't do faith.

And let's end the aside/tangent there.

~~~~

Anyway, back to before the tangent... I stated the following.

That's a fair assessment.

As a player, I want to know that the ground isn't going to shift under my feet. The latter type of setting feels like taking steps forward into the dark, with only faith that there will be floor under my foot each time... and I don't do faith (or even understand faith, at all).

(I'm not even claiming that ad hoc cannot have consistency or logic, only that it is more prone to lacking those things.)


Any comments or thoughts on that issue some gamers have with "ad hoc" / "no myth" setting?

[Segev]

Anyway, back to before the tangent... I stated the following.

That's a fair assessment.

As a player, I want to know that the ground isn't going to shift under my feet. The latter type of setting feels like taking steps forward into the dark, with only faith that there will be floor under my foot each time... and I don't do faith (or even understand faith, at all).

(I'm not even claiming that ad hoc cannot have consistency or logic, only that it is more prone to lacking those things.)


Any comments or thoughts on that issue some gamers have with "ad hoc" / "no myth" setting?

I'm afraid I'm not sure what a "no myth" setting is.

I, in general, agree that knowing the metaphorical ground isn't going to shift under my proverbial feet when I try to make any sort of judgment about the setting and the world based on what I know of it, however, is a good thing.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm afraid I'm not sure what a "no myth" setting is.


"No myth" -- the idea that if it hasn't been made known to the rest of the table, it doesn't exist and isn't "real".

(There's also a lot of froof about "genre expectations" and "maximizing cool per unit time" associated with it.)

https://inky.org/rpg/no-myth.html

It's basically advocating treating the "fictional world" of the setting in exactly the way that runs a massive risk of ruining for me.




I, in general, agree that knowing the metaphorical ground isn't going to shift under my proverbial feet when I try to make any sort of judgment about the setting and the world based on what I know of it, however, is a good thing.


Exactly -- if anything you're not looking at can change, then there's nothing against which to make judgements about which actions to take or how likely they are to fail/succeed.


If anyone is familiar with the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who, that's how the "ad hoc / no myth" settings feel to me... as soon as you stop looking, they move.

[Florian]

@Max:

Weeping Angels is a classic example of how it looks when you try to include supernatural reality with grounded reality and still make them mesh in a coherent way. It pulls the rugs from under your feet first, but once you get the logic behind it, in retrospect anything that happened there is quiet real and understandable.

That's one third of the point I was trying to make earlier: You set up your game world in such a way that something like the Weeping Angels are not a thing, entirely, never at all, then you things break when you chose to include them, naturally.

The second third is announcing and introducing things that are outside direct player control and don't conform to their ideas of how the setting works. That could be my example of a power struggle on a level that is invisible to the player characters, that could be the inclusion of some Love-craft like hyperreality or some kind of eldritch lore that defies the general rules of the game world.

The last third is to be aware of your own ability to improv/ad-hoc as a GM and compare that with your ability to prep. It takes a bit of experience to bring those two in line and generally work on the level of the lower of those two to make them mesh.

[OldTrees1]

@Max:

Weeping Angels is a classic example of how it looks when you try to include supernatural reality with grounded reality and still make them mesh in a coherent way. It pulls the rugs from under your feet first, but once you get the logic behind it, in retrospect anything that happened there is quiet real and understandable.

I believe you missed the analogy Max was making. Max was not talking about the Rules the Weeping Angels followed. Max was talking about what if the Rules acted like Weeping Angels. Aka if the Player did not watch the rules, the rules would change.

[Max_Killjoy]

I believe you missed the analogy Max was making. Max was not talking about the Rules the Weeping Angels followed. Max was talking about what if the Rules acted like Weeping Angels. Aka if the Player did not watch the rules, the rules would change.

The rules, or the setting/world.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The rules, or the setting/world.

If the world is changing when you don't watch it, you're doing No-Myth wrong. The whole point is that everything you've ever seen stays fixed (or evolves from a fixed baseline based on normal rules). That even extends to the 2nd-order causes of causes.

I don't use that design exactly, but I do iterative design. I'll design the highest-level overview, including fundamental laws, plus a few intermediate people, places, and conditions. But the details aren't planned in advance more than a few sessions out.

Things I know:
Between campaigns: state of the world at a high level. Major conflicts and personalities. Fundamental laws and principles of the world.
Before Session 0: A "starting position" for the upcoming campaign--a 1-2 sentence description of the major themes as well as a location in the world and probably significant antagonist types (fiends, undead, humanoids, etc).
After Session 0, but before session 1: A first location, possibly with a rough map and an overview of the major movers and shakers/factions. This should foreshadow the major conflict sources I have in mind, but vaguely.
Each session after that: Progressive refinement. Details (other than planned encounters) ad-libbed for the most part. At this point, what I say can have lasting effects, but I do my best to be consistent.

[Max_Killjoy]

If the world is changing when you don't watch it, you're doing No-Myth wrong. The whole point is that everything you've ever seen stays fixed (or evolves from a fixed baseline based on normal rules). That even extends to the 2nd-order causes of causes.


First, it's not only "no myth", but also the even more fluid "as long as the player's don't notice any change is fair game" that was promoted earlier in the thread, and other approaches that treat the setting in similar manners.

Second, for those of us who get a lot of our RPG enjoyment out of solving mysteries and such, a mystery where the answer is unknown even to the GM ruins things, and is the definition of illusionism -- with the illusion being that we're solving the mystery or uncovering the plot or whatever. We're not, because there is no answer, there is no plot. Instead, we're just poking around at an indistinct mush until we've satisfied the GM's idea of "enough" of whatever... enough effort, enough cool, enough time, enough "good story"... And I think this ties into one reason why some of us get itchy at the intrusion of "story"... we're not there to "tell the story" or "create the story" of our characters solving the mystery, we're there to solve the mystery.

[PhoenixPhyre]

First, it's not only "no myth", but also the even more fluid "as long as the player's don't notice any change is fair game" that was promoted earlier in the thread, and other approaches that treat the setting in similar manners.

Second, for those of us who get a lot of our RPG enjoyment out of solving mysteries and such, a mystery where the answer is unknown even to the GM ruins things, and is the definition of illusionism -- with the illusion being that we're solving the mystery or uncovering the plot or whatever. We're not, because there is no answer, there is no plot. Instead, we're just poking around at an indistinct mush until we've satisfied the GM's idea of "enough" of whatever... enough effort, enough cool, enough time, enough "good story"... And I think this ties into one reason why some of us get itchy at the intrusion of "story"... we're not there to "tell the story" or "create the story" of our characters solving the mystery, we're there to solve the mystery.

I guess I'm the opposite. Mysteries by themselves are not important to me. I care about discovery. Discovering what's going on, even if no one knew that was the case from the get go. Discovering situations I hadn't thought of before. Solutions to problems I didn't even know existed.

I had a group do that to me just Friday. They had encountered (and fled from) an ice fey mourning her lost love and blaming, well, every living thing for his death. They had just ignored her (she was contained at the time unless someone went looking for her) after that. They finished the main scenario (recovering the souls of a pair of dragons, one gold and one dracolich) and had brought them back to life/unlife. As that was happening, all the remaining local threats broke free of the their containment (since the prisons for the souls were powering/powered by the containment system) and started threatening the dragons. They could bring one creature back to life. I had thought they were going to use that on the dracolich, because he didn't want to be that way in the first place. Instead, they chose to bring back the fey's lover, mollifying her and neutralizing that threat. As solutions go, it fit the whole campaign and the events as they had unfolded way better than what I had assumed they'd do. They then proceeded to ask the dragons for a boon/reward--their help in stopping two groups of rebels (groups they had interacted with but had moved off-camera and I had figured they had forgotten/didn't care about them). Again, a much better unfolding of events than I had had planned.

And this isn't the only time my players have figured out what should be going on better than I had. And that's what I love most. When they take my world and do something I hand't considered with it. When they make it something new and unforseen. Edit: and this happens more effectively when I leave a lot of the details fuzzy until it's right in front of all of us. That way I can discover it as well and I'm not locked into one path.

[Xuc Xac]

I guess I'm the opposite. Mysteries by themselves are not important to me. I care about discovery. Discovering what's going on, even if no one knew that was the case from the get go. Discovering situations I hadn't thought of before. Solutions to problems I didn't even know existed.

I had a group do that to me just Friday. They had encountered (and fled from) an ice fey mourning her lost love and blaming, well, every living thing for his death. They had just ignored her (she was contained at the time unless someone went looking for her) after that. They finished the main scenario (recovering the souls of a pair of dragons, one gold and one dracolich) and had brought them back to life/unlife. As that was happening, all the remaining local threats broke free of the their containment (since the prisons for the souls were powering/powered by the containment system) and started threatening the dragons. They could bring one creature back to life. I had thought they were going to use that on the dracolich, because he didn't want to be that way in the first place. Instead, they chose to bring back the fey's lover, mollifying her and neutralizing that threat. As solutions go, it fit the whole campaign and the events as they had unfolded way better than what I had assumed they'd do. They then proceeded to ask the dragons for a boon/reward--their help in stopping two groups of rebels (groups they had interacted with but had moved off-camera and I had figured they had forgotten/didn't care about them). Again, a much better unfolding of events than I had had planned.

And this isn't the only time my players have figured out what should be going on better than I had. And that's what I love most. When they take my world and do something I hand't considered with it. When they make it something new and unforseen. Edit: and this happens more effectively when I leave a lot of the details fuzzy until it's right in front of all of us. That way I can discover it as well and I'm not locked into one path.

The players interacted with the elements you had previously established. They didn't do what you expected but you didn't change the world to force them to do what you expected or to allow their "wrong" answers to be right.

You gave them the power to bring one creature back to life and they used it to bring back one of the dead characters you had introduced. No problem.

The complaints about leaving things undefined are more like if the PCs theorized that maybe the dracolich killed the ice fey's lover and you said "Uh... Yeah. Good 'guess', guys. That's totally what happened. *crosses out question mark in notes that say 'killed by ?' and scribbles in 'dracolich'*"

[Florian]

The rules, or the setting/world.

Let me make an acid test with you:

I´m sticking to the L5R example that I´ve been using throughout this discussion. I started with the basic idea for a campaign I wanted to offer: L5R 4th, characters as Emerald Magistrates, city as sandbox, murder of the week format, slow progression based on the seasons. I also thought about what kinds of core conflicts (the drama parts) I wanted to include as the driving force for character development - not in the D&D sense of XP and powering up, but what could make their personality grow or change. Then I made some thought about what kinds of story could emerge by including certain elements, or certain elements in a specific way.

Prep phase I:
- Google old maps of japanese, chinese and korean cities, copy&paste parts of them together until I get the city that I want to use. Google some photos and drawing to have some visual aids, as not to explain every thing in detail when simply showing a pic of an inn, samurai villa, torii and such would speed things up.
- Search Wikipedia for historic and fictional persons and events that I can use as inspiration for creating the history of the city and the NPCs running around there.
- Place NPC on the map, create an R-Map of how the factions and NPC are connected, draft a short and ruff timeline of how things would turn out if no outside (ex: player) interaction would happen.
- Create the first 5 murder mysteries in advance, basic cast and locations, clues and motivations, create "internal" R-map for the particular murder mystery, but leaving the "external" R-Map of the case open, because the actual state of the game world is unknown to me at this point.
- Create the "mood" and "tool" elements in advance and anchor them to the in-game reality. I wanted a tool to wipe the slate clean, so in with the watchtowers, firefighters and such, so that it is already established that whole city quarters can burn down. I was aiming towards the hidden Maho cult posing as a shintao sect being a big thing, so in with religious festivals, monks carrying heavy bells, chanting, small shrines and beggar monks being all over the place, as are the weird edicts and such. I also wanted to be able to fool around with the Lying Darkness, but without really making it into a "thing", as the timeline was some 6 years before the start of the Scorpion Coup. So I created 3 "meta sets" that I intended to throw in at a point, but totally unconnected to the ongoing murder mysteries and drama.

Session Zero:
- Of six people showing interest in this campaign, only 4 showed up, the others copped out. The players accepted the campaign outline, we had some discussion about how the drama elements should impact gameplay, then they created their four characters by the rules. Afterwards we talked about how their characters ended up as magistrates and how they personally feel about it. As they were totally new to L5R, we ended up the session by playing the example adventure, but agreed on this being only a test run and completely unconnected to the campaign.

Prep Phase II:
- So I now had a list of stuff that I needed to include into the game world. The players had chosen advantages and disadvantages, as well as backstories for their characters, that are directly expressed in the in-game reality like being married and having children, having a rivalry going on, or being destined to something.
- I opted to treat each character the same as the above-mention Lying Darkness thing, so I created a "meta set" of persons, events and locations that would be tied to what the players "paid for" in advance and expected to be part of the game, again creation "internal" R-Maps and timelines, while leaving the "external" R-Maps open to adjust to the development.
(I had to do all these steps all over again when a fifth player joined the campaign later on)

GM techniques & considerations:
- I was well aware of the problems with the particular format I chose, with the playing field being limited by the city walls. So I opted for four things:
1) The player characters are new arrivals to the city and are starting day one at their job/post.
2) Place a lot of things that will have to do with the murder mystery cases outside the city, but foreshadow their existence, like the big shintao temple, summer villas of high-ranking samurai along the nearby hills and such.
3) Work with a "street level view". Description of the map in relation to the characters POV, not placing the map on the table.
4) "Low resolution descriptions". I always described a location as a whole, in sweeping terms that more describe the mood and overall perception of the characters instead of going into the details. Not like "As you walk down Fisherman street to adoki market, you pass a sushi stand, a fish selling booth...", but rather a more Lonely Planet style.
- Weeping Angels I: I literally did those with the Lying Darkness stuff. Once you don't look, they change.
- Weeping Angels II: The integrations of the various "sets" and "meta sets". I could only do that once their time has come and had to adapt their "external" R-Map to the actual state of the game world, not the default state set at the beginning of the campaign.

The acid test is this:
- The game is character-centric and based around the concept of having "drama". The whole setup is geared towards integrating both of those focus aspects back into a coherent and understandable world which evolves "naturally" around its own internal principles.
- The "sets" and "meta sets" are pure bias design, but their possibility to happen in the first place is anchored deep into the in-game reality and once they happen, they will stay part of the in-game reality and become a regular fixture of it.

Example for this: For the first murder case, I established that the blackmailing ronin was in love with a geisha, with both of them wanting to run away together and establish a new existence in anonymity. The young geisha was down, heart-broken and desperate when the players encountered her, so their characters used some favors and got her in the Scorpion Spy Network. (The ronin wanted to buy her contract, that was later done by the Scorpion, who trained her in a ronin class whose name I don't remember right now)

For a later case, I needed an insider as co-villain with a understandable motif for why they did it and to force a little bit of conflict how to handle this. I designed the original setup with no particular person in mind, thinking that it would be a good point to re-use an already established NPC and the way the thing with the geisha developed was a perfect fit for this, so she became the co-villain here.

Edit: My players were totally pleased how the thing with the geisha turned out. They thought that they had created this particular villain by their own actions, but stayed consistent with how their characters acted before. So they stripped her of all belongings, power and privilege she hard garnered up to that point, handed her a tanto and left with saying "If you have any honor, you know what to do".

Edit 2: A small anecdote from that particular campaign. Players aware of railroading tend to flex their power from time to time and check whether they are on rails or not. It was quite amusing when I introduced a sleazy, disrespectful merchant as an NPC connected to the case and the Player of a Hiruma Scout decided for executing that NPC on the spot for being so disrespectful towards his betters. Well, said and done. The player was then extremely upset about me forcing his character into this action, I blankly stated that I didn´t , it was his choice to play the foul temper of his character, the player mulled that over and accused me of not preventing him from having his character kill one of the main witnesses to this case. I told him that this is not that kind of story, bro.

[Max_Killjoy]

I guess I'm the opposite. Mysteries by themselves are not important to me. I care about discovery. Discovering what's going on, even if no one knew that was the case from the get go. Discovering situations I hadn't thought of before. Solutions to problems I didn't even know existed.

I had a group do that to me just Friday. They had encountered (and fled from) an ice fey mourning her lost love and blaming, well, every living thing for his death. They had just ignored her (she was contained at the time unless someone went looking for her) after that. They finished the main scenario (recovering the souls of a pair of dragons, one gold and one dracolich) and had brought them back to life/unlife. As that was happening, all the remaining local threats broke free of the their containment (since the prisons for the souls were powering/powered by the containment system) and started threatening the dragons. They could bring one creature back to life. I had thought they were going to use that on the dracolich, because he didn't want to be that way in the first place. Instead, they chose to bring back the fey's lover, mollifying her and neutralizing that threat. As solutions go, it fit the whole campaign and the events as they had unfolded way better than what I had assumed they'd do. They then proceeded to ask the dragons for a boon/reward--their help in stopping two groups of rebels (groups they had interacted with but had moved off-camera and I had figured they had forgotten/didn't care about them). Again, a much better unfolding of events than I had had planned.

And this isn't the only time my players have figured out what should be going on better than I had. And that's what I love most. When they take my world and do something I hand't considered with it. When they make it something new and unforseen. Edit: and this happens more effectively when I leave a lot of the details fuzzy until it's right in front of all of us. That way I can discover it as well and I'm not locked into one path.

What you describe from the Friday session is just normal player agency / PC freedom of choice and movement.

None of it involved a GM with uncertain or retroactively changing facts. "What I expect the players to do" is not a setting element or fact.

[OldTrees1]

@Florian

Does R-Map means Relationship Map?

You created internal R-Maps for the murder mysteries. When do you determine who the murderer and victim are? Max has been worried about DMs that only know those facts after the PCs are engaging the mystery after the murder actually happened and/or DMs that alter those facts based upon how the PCs engage with the mystery after the murder actually happened.

Good forward thinking with regards to the city fires and Maho cult. You have set it up so those details will be consistent with the city setting you created. This does mean the players could engage with those details before your preparation for them is complete. I could see a PC trying to improve the fire code around where they are staying, or another PC having an interest in looking for religious cults. Or the players could miss the details and only realize their importance in hindsight.

I do not know the definition of "meta sets". You mentioned it includes persons, events, and locations and that it involved creating some internal R-Maps. It sounds like it is related to plots/adventures/modules/etc and you have prepared the internal details but not exactly how it gets introduced into the campaign (the external R-Map as you called it).

From looking up the Lying Darkness, it seems to be some kind of supernatural entity that has some kind of consistent rules that the PCs will be initially ignorant of. Sounds interesting and does not sound like the "No-Myth" thing Max dislikes.

You have not decided exactly how each of those sets / meta sets get introduced into the campaign. I think Max would be okay with this. It does not sound like Max's weeping angel analogy to me. However Max would have to answer that. Personally I prefer establishing the external R-Map as soon as possible just in case the PCs discover it / engage with it before I expected or never discover it / engage with it. However I fully understand that ideal is not completely possible with the finite prep time we GMs have.

I forget, what was "pure bias" again? I don't have that term memorized and could not find it with ctrl+F when searching the last several pages. (Might be a technical problem with my browser)

All in all, I could enjoy playing in that campaign. I have preferences that don't fit your style / structure, so it would not be ideal for me. However I can see that your players enjoy it and why your players enjoy it.

[Quertus]

First, it's not only "no myth", but also the even more fluid "as long as the player's don't notice any change is fair game" that was promoted earlier in the thread, and other approaches that treat the setting in similar manners.

Second, for those of us who get a lot of our RPG enjoyment out of solving mysteries and such, a mystery where the answer is unknown even to the GM ruins things, and is the definition of illusionism -- with the illusion being that we're solving the mystery or uncovering the plot or whatever. We're not, because there is no answer, there is no plot. Instead, we're just poking around at an indistinct mush until we've satisfied the GM's idea of "enough" of whatever... enough effort, enough cool, enough time, enough "good story"... And I think this ties into one reason why some of us get itchy at the intrusion of "story"... we're not there to "tell the story" or "create the story" of our characters solving the mystery, we're there to solve the mystery.


I guess I'm the opposite. Mysteries by themselves are not important to me. I care about discovery. Discovering what's going on, even if no one knew that was the case from the get go. Discovering situations I hadn't thought of before. Solutions to problems I didn't even know existed.

I had a group do that to me just Friday. They had encountered (and fled from) an ice fey mourning her lost love and blaming, well, every living thing for his death. They had just ignored her (she was contained at the time unless someone went looking for her) after that. They finished the main scenario (recovering the souls of a pair of dragons, one gold and one dracolich) and had brought them back to life/unlife. As that was happening, all the remaining local threats broke free of the their containment (since the prisons for the souls were powering/powered by the containment system) and started threatening the dragons. They could bring one creature back to life. I had thought they were going to use that on the dracolich, because he didn't want to be that way in the first place. Instead, they chose to bring back the fey's lover, mollifying her and neutralizing that threat. As solutions go, it fit the whole campaign and the events as they had unfolded way better than what I had assumed they'd do. They then proceeded to ask the dragons for a boon/reward--their help in stopping two groups of rebels (groups they had interacted with but had moved off-camera and I had figured they had forgotten/didn't care about them). Again, a much better unfolding of events than I had had planned.

And this isn't the only time my players have figured out what should be going on better than I had. And that's what I love most. When they take my world and do something I hand't considered with it. When they make it something new and unforseen. Edit: and this happens more effectively when I leave a lot of the details fuzzy until it's right in front of all of us. That way I can discover it as well and I'm not locked into one path.


The players interacted with the elements you had previously established. They didn't do what you expected but you didn't change the world to force them to do what you expected or to allow their "wrong" answers to be right.

You gave them the power to bring one creature back to life and they used it to bring back one of the dead characters you had introduced. No problem.

The complaints about leaving things undefined are more like if the PCs theorized that maybe the dracolich killed the ice fey's lover and you said "Uh... Yeah. Good 'guess', guys. That's totally what happened. *crosses out question mark in notes that say 'killed by ?' and scribbles in 'dracolich'*"


What you describe from the Friday session is just normal player agency / PC freedom of choice and movement.

None of it involved a GM with uncertain or retroactively changing facts. "What I expect the players to do" is not a setting element or fact.

Agreed.

When the GM has already written the story, but then those unpredictable PCs do something off-script is when you get your classic case of railroading. Just making the (past/present) facts, and leaving the future open to follow player actions and game physics, is not railroading.

[Pleh]

Agreed.

When the GM has already written the story, but then those unpredictable PCs do something off-script is when you get your classic case of railroading. Just making the (past/present) facts, and leaving the future open to follow player actions and game physics, is not railroading.

The confusion is understandable. A lot of people note that the tracks moved and they conclude that railroading occurred. In reality, true railroading only occurs when the players are shackled to a particular narrative or outcome.

It's not the DM's ability to change the course of the game nor their exercise of that ability that causes Railroading. It's the other Players inability to do so that causes Railroading.

And Illusionism is just where the Players are not only prohibited from changing the course of the game, but also denied the knowledge that they are.

[Max_Killjoy]

The confusion is understandable. A lot of people note that the tracks moved and they conclude that railroading occurred. In reality, true railroading only occurs when the players are shackled to a particular narrative or outcome.

It's not the DM's ability to change the course of the game nor their exercise of that ability that causes Railroading. It's the other Players inability to do so that causes Railroading.

And Illusionism is just where the Players are not only prohibited from changing the course of the game, but also denied the knowledge that they are.

If the players can change the course of the game (as they are supposed to be able to), then are there even tracks to begin with?

[Florian]

If the players can change the course of the game (as they are supposed to be able to), then are there even tracks to begin with?

Ok, that was what I meant with the extrapolation trap. In a sense, there are. If you don't deal with a static game world, once things have been set into motion and things have gained a momentum of their own, there will be tracks.

You have a basic situation/conflict and map out what happens of the characters don't interfere, then you map out what happens if the interfere. You have extrapolated both outcomes and things start proceeding from that point onwards. Not a big deal when your game world functions on a high zoom level, but something that can have its own "pull" when you engage it on a "low zoom level".

[Pleh]

If the players can change the course of the game (as they are supposed to be able to), then are there even tracks to begin with?

In the sense that there exists an underlying narrative causality dictated (see the definition: "read aloud") by the DM, yes.

The framework used to direct the story was still present. It wasn't used to direct the other players.

But this is getting back to our previous discussions that every series of events constitutes a story, even if some are deliberately constructed while others let the chips fall and describe the result.

In effect, the players say, "we do X," but it doesn't actually happen until the DM makes a call, because the DM has to evaluate the successfulness of their intended actions. The game doesn't actually move forward until the DM evaluates the success of the player input.

Using their authority to confirm the actions of the Players is still "laying down tracks." It's just serving to take the players where they want to go rather than funneling them to an unrelated predetermined location.

[Max_Killjoy]

Ok, that was what I meant with the extrapolation trap. In a sense, there are. If you don't deal with a static game world, once things have been set into motion and things have gained a momentum of their own, there will be tracks.

You have a basic situation/conflict and map out what happens of the characters don't interfere, then you map out what happens if the interfere. You have extrapolated both outcomes and things start proceeding from that point onwards. Not a big deal when your game world functions on a high zoom level, but something that can have its own "pull" when you engage it on a "low zoom level".


I don't map out what will happen if the PCs interfere, only what NPCs know, what they plan to do, and so on.

Predicting other people's decisions and behavior is already a crapshoot, even before the fact that in an RPG they're people playing other people.



In the sense that there exists an underlying narrative causality dictated (see the definition: "read aloud") by the DM, yes.

The framework used to direct the story was still present. It wasn't used to direct the other players.

But this is getting back to our previous discussions that every series of events constitutes a story, even if some are deliberately constructed while others let the chips fall and describe the result.

In effect, the players say, "we do X," but it doesn't actually happen until the DM makes a call, because the DM has to evaluate the successfulness of their intended actions. The game doesn't actually move forward until the DM evaluates the success of the player input.

Using their authority to confirm the actions of the Players is still "laying down tracks." It's just serving to take the players where they want to go rather than funneling them to an unrelated predetermined location.


It only looks like "tracks" if you're focused on "what part of the story is now told" vs "what part of the story is still unknown" -- if you don't give a fig about "story" in the first place, then there are not "tracks" involved here at all.

[Pleh]

It only looks like "tracks" if you're focused on "what part of the story is now told" vs "what part of the story is still unknown" -- if you don't give a fig about "story" in the first place, then there are not "tracks" involved here at all.

You missed my point. A train doesn't roll too well without tracks, instead the wheels just cut into the ground and anchor the train to its current spot.

The train *does not move* until the DM interprets player choices into consequences. Nothing has actually occurred and the train goes nowhere.

The game doesn't happen without the DM determining what happens in the game. I don't care if there's a story or not. By the rules, nothing happens until it is declared and the DM has final say. The DM enabling the players' decisions is like putting tracks down before the train and that is not an optional function of the game or DM's role.

Nitpick the metaphor however you like, but the similarity to tracks doesn't dusappear just because you don't look at it that way. The fact that it can be looked at differently doesn't mean it no longer looks like tracks.

[kyoryu]

But this is getting back to our previous discussions that every series of events constitutes a story, even if some are deliberately constructed while others let the chips fall and describe the result.

... and we get back to my other least-favorite RPG argument - "every series of events is a story, therefore RPGs are about story".

Giving the argument an assumption of good faith, it makes the term "about story" (or, in this case, railroading) meaningless, as if everything is <x>, then <x> is merely a statement about the human condition or some such thing. Given that we generally acknowledge games as "railroading" and "not railroading", then even if you accept the argument at face value and assume it is made in good faith, then all you're doing is necessitating the invention of a new term that can be used for the things that previously were called "story" and "not story" or "railroading" and "not railroading", respectively.

95% of the time I see this argument, it is not used in good faith, and is basically used in this form:

A: "<x> is awesome!"
B: "I do not care for <x>"
A: "Well, by this wide definition, everything is <x>".
B: "That seems like a stretch, but okay?"
A: "And therefore, <x> in the narrow definition is good."

To be clear, I am not accusing you of using the argument in bad faith. I am explaining my vehement reaction to the argument, due to the number of times it is used in bad faith.

-------------------------
(end response to Pleh)

What's interesting to me is that we seem to generally agree on a number of concepts, and are mostly arguing terminology and which of these concepts should map to which word, etc. I don't find a lot of value in this exercise, personally, compared to identifying the concepts in the first place. (Those of you that may have seen my "interaction types" and argued they should be given labels? This is why I've avoided it)

Specifically, we've seen concepts around:

A) A game that is a series of predtermined scenes/states/encounters, where the players have little or not ability to determine what they do
B) Techniques used to enforce A
C) An A-style game that is done while the GM pretends it is not, in fact, an A-style game
D) An A-style game that is done with the knowledge of the players
E) A number of techniques that a GM may use to subvert player choice and agency
F) The importance of having a consistent world so that players may know what is going on
G) The feeling that a GM improvising too much can subvert a feeling of consistency in the world
H) GMs wanting things

(probably a number of others I've missed as well)

[Max_Killjoy]

You missed my point. A train doesn't roll too well without tracks, instead the wheels just cut into the ground and anchor the train to its current spot.

The train *does not move* until the DM interprets player choices into consequences. Nothing has actually occurred and the train goes nowhere.

The game doesn't happen without the DM determining what happens in the game. I don't care if there's a story or not. By the rules, nothing happens until it is declared and the DM has final say. The DM enabling the players' decisions is like putting tracks down before the train and that is not an optional function of the game or DM's role.

Nitpick the metaphor however you like, but the similarity to tracks doesn't dusappear just because you don't look at it that way. The fact that it can be looked at differently doesn't mean it no longer looks like tracks.

No, I got your point... it's just wrong.

You're mistaking the immutability of the past for "rails"
You're mistaking the GM making decisions in the back and forth with players also making decisions, for "railroading".
You're mistaking the GM's agreed-upon role at the gaming table for "power" / "authority".
You're mistaking the traditional role of the GM as a universal truth for all RPG systems.

[Max_Killjoy]

... and we get back to my other least-favorite RPG argument - "every series of events is a story, therefore RPGs are about story".

Giving the argument an assumption of good faith, it makes the term "about story" (or, in this case, railroading) meaningless, as if everything is <x>, then <x> is merely a statement about the human condition or some such thing. Given that we generally acknowledge games as "railroading" and "not railroading", then even if you accept the argument at face value and assume it is made in good faith, then all you're doing is necessitating the invention of a new term that can be used for the things that previously were called "story" and "not story" or "railroading" and "not railroading", respectively.

95% of the time I see this argument, it is not used in good faith, and is basically used in this form:

A: "<x> is awesome!"
B: "I do not care for <x>"
A: "Well, by this wide definition, everything is <x>".
B: "That seems like a stretch, but okay?"
A: "And therefore, <x> in the narrow definition is good."

To be clear, I am not accusing you of using the argument in bad faith. I am explaining my vehement reaction to the argument, due to the number of times it is used in bad faith.

-------------------------
(end response to Pleh)


Or the variation,

A: "All RPGs are <x>."
B: "I do not care for <x> or play based on <x>."
A: "Well, by this wide definition, everything is <x>."
B: "That seems like a stretch, but okay?"
A: "And therefore, anything that makes <x> good makes an RPG good, and RPG rules and GMing processes and playing advice should all be built based on promoting <x>."




What's interesting to me is that we seem to generally agree on a number of concepts, and are mostly arguing terminology and which of these concepts should map to which word, etc. I don't find a lot of value in this exercise, personally, compared to identifying the concepts in the first place. (Those of you that may have seen my "interaction types" and argued they should be given labels? This is why I've avoided it)

Specifically, we've seen concepts around:

A) A game that is a series of predtermined scenes/states/encounters, where the players have little or not ability to determine what they do
B) Techniques used to enforce A
C) An A-style game that is done while the GM pretends it is not, in fact, an A-style game
D) An A-style game that is done with the knowledge of the players
E) A number of techniques that a GM may use to subvert player choice and agency
F) The importance of having a consistent world so that players may know what is going on
G) The feeling that a GM improvising too much can subvert a feeling of consistency in the world
H) GMs wanting things

(probably a number of others I've missed as well)


That's what I'd rather concentrate on, but as you note, the definitions seem to get in the way, to the point where I can say "this", and several people will read it as a vehement statement of "not!this".

[Talakeal]

So I talked to my player the other day, and it turned out that I was completely misreading the situation in the OP.

Basically, the giant in question needed some sort of ranged attack, and so when I was designing it I decided that rather than the giants normal rock hurling ability I would give him the ability to cast Gust of Wind as an SLA as I thought it was thematic for the sort of "fairy tale ogre" that I was going for, and I described the giant as having huge nose, the source of his magical breath.

So during the fight one of the players cast a gaseous form spell to avoid being grappled, and then when the giant used his SLA to blow the guy off the bridge he decided that I had just decided to pull a breath attack out of my behind because he had outsmarted my encounter by taking a gaseous form, and that is where the idea of railroading comes from.


This reminds me of one of my gaming horror stories from several years back, when the players wanted to ride some captured griffons, and I explained to them that griffons need special training to carry riders. The players (and the forum posters when I told the story online) all assumed that I was just making stuff up to deny the players flight, even though the rule stating such was clearly printed in the rule book and there was no fudging or rulings of any sort on my part.



No, I do not consider improvising cheating. Why on earth do people keep mistaking what I'm arguing against for "improvising"? There is no way to actually read what I'm writing and mistake it for an argument against improvisation. In fact, one of the "rules (https://www.pantheater.com/rules-of-improv.html)" of improv theater and comedy is that you don't void or contradict what's already there, you build on it.

Adding details which build on existing details, filling in holes as the PCs exploring, and improvising, have NOTHING to do with railroading -- which is very often done via retroactively altering details or avoiding "natural" outcomes of events to deceive players, stifle player agency, void PC actions, etc.

Seriously, how does "don't retroactively change things to get your own way" keep being read as "never add anything new or improvise anything"?

Sorry for the late reply.

I genuinely don't understand exactly what you are saying is cheating here. I agree that overly linear scenarios and DM improving are both generally* bad DMing practices, but neither of them are cheating. You seem to agree, but when combined they somehow become cheating.

Or maybe not. Maybe you consider ret-conning to be cheating even if the DM hasn't actually specified anything? Like sort of a soft quantum ogre? Or is it that you consider meta-gaming cheating and consider the DM deciding on their NPC's actions based on what is best for the game / story rather than cold logic to be metagaming?

Genuinely confused here. And I am not trying to argue with you, I legit want to understand your point of view as you are usually a very smart and logical poster who I agree with more often than not.


*Emphasis on generally. I am well aware that some DMs do their best work under these conditions and some players genuinely prefer them.

[EGplay]

You missed my point. A train doesn't roll too well without tracks, instead the wheels just cut into the ground and anchor the train to its current spot.

The train *does not move* until the DM interprets player choices into consequences. Nothing has actually occurred and the train goes nowhere.

The game doesn't happen without the DM determining what happens in the game. I don't care if there's a story or not. By the rules, nothing happens until it is declared and the DM has final say. The DM enabling the players' decisions is like putting tracks down before the train and that is not an optional function of the game or DM's role.

Nitpick the metaphor however you like, but the similarity to tracks doesn't dusappear just because you don't look at it that way. The fact that it can be looked at differently doesn't mean it no longer looks like tracks.

The game doesn't need to be a "train" and run on tracks; it can be an "off-road vehicle" and leave tracks behind but needing none before it.

Tracks do not need to be rails.
The DM enabling the players' decisions can be the vehicle responding to the driver, as well as the terrain it moves through.

[MrSandman]

Sorry for the late reply.

I genuinely don't understand exactly what you are saying is cheating here. I agree that overly linear scenarios and DM improving are both generally* bad DMing practices, but neither of them are cheating. You seem to agree, but when combined they somehow become cheating.

Or maybe not. Maybe you consider ret-conning to be cheating even if the DM hasn't actually specified anything? Like sort of a soft quantum ogre? Or is it that you consider meta-gaming cheating and consider the DM deciding on their NPC's actions based on what is best for the game / story rather than cold logic to be metagaming?

Genuinely confused here. And I am not trying to argue with you, I legit want to understand your point of view as you are usually a very smart and logical poster who I agree with more often than not.


*Emphasis on generally. I am well aware that some DMs do their best work under these conditions and some players genuinely prefer them.

As far as I understand, it basically boils down to these two things:

1) A GM who changes a decided fact in the game to have the story go her way, regardless of whether the players are aware of it or not. E.gr. The werewolf was John. The players figured it too quickly, so now the werewolf is Laura.

2) A GM who leaves facts undefined with the express purpose of having the story go her way. E.gr. The werewolf is some undefined person. Deciding who it is will be put off until the players have investigated enough.


As a personal note, as a player I'd feel annoyed by either of these scenarios as well.

[Talakeal]

As far as I understand, it basically boils down to these two things:

1) A GM who changes a decided fact in the game to have the story go her way, regardless of whether the players are aware of it or not. E.gr. The werewolf was John. The players figured it too quickly, so now the werewolf is Laura.

2) A GM who leaves facts undefined with the express purpose of having the story go her way. E.gr. The werewolf is some undefined person. Deciding who it is will be put off until the players have investigated enough.


As a personal note, as a player I'd feel annoyed by either of these scenarios as well.

I must have misread him then, I thought he was complaining about having the werewolf decide to leave town to buy time when the PCs were unraveling the mystery too quickly.

[PhoenixPhyre]

As far as I understand, it basically boils down to these two things:

1) A GM who changes a decided fact in the game to have the story go her way, regardless of whether the players are aware of it or not. E.gr. The werewolf was John. The players figured it too quickly, so now the werewolf is Laura.

2) A GM who leaves facts undefined with the express purpose of having the story go her way. E.gr. The werewolf is some undefined person. Deciding who it is will be put off until the players have investigated enough.


As a personal note, as a player I'd feel annoyed by either of these scenarios as well.

How would you feel about these alternative indefinite werewolf scenarios?

1*) The GM originally decided the werewolf was John. But the facts as established during play mean that John is a poorer candidate for werewolf status than Jane, his wife, and it's more likely that Jane was framing John. Thus, the GM changes the "real" werewolf to Jane without telling the players (changing the notes but keeping the in-play facts consistent).

2*) The GM is uncertain at the beginning as to the true identity of the werewolf, so he leaves it indeterminate. As they investigate and the DM plays each scene naturally, it becomes clear that the werewolf must have been John all along.

The point is to separate the action (leaving the identity uncertain/changing the identity) from the rationale. If 1* and 2* are less troublesome, then the real issue is with the GM taking action for the purpose of forcing an outcome. Any action would cause the same issue, even if it's planned in advance, as long as the goal is to foreclose all non-desired outcomes.

[Max_Killjoy]

How would you feel about these alternative indefinite werewolf scenarios?

1*) The GM originally decided the werewolf was John. But the facts as established during play mean that John is a poorer candidate for werewolf status than Jane, his wife, and it's more likely that Jane was framing John. Thus, the GM changes the "real" werewolf to Jane without telling the players (changing the notes but keeping the in-play facts consistent).

2*) The GM is uncertain at the beginning as to the true identity of the werewolf, so he leaves it indeterminate. As they investigate and the DM plays each scene naturally, it becomes clear that the werewolf must have been John all along.

The point is to separate the action (leaving the identity uncertain/changing the identity) from the rationale. If 1* and 2* are less troublesome, then the real issue is with the GM taking action for the purpose of forcing an outcome. Any action would cause the same issue, even if it's planned in advance, as long as the goal is to foreclose all non-desired outcomes.

I find either of those irksome, and contrary to my enjoyment of a campaign, but not inherently bad. I would rather be figuring out who the werewolf has been all along, than influencing who it might turn out to be.

Whereas the GM who is trying to force an outcome -- railroading -- is inherently bad.

[Max_Killjoy]

As far as I understand, it basically boils down to these two things:

1) A GM who changes a decided fact in the game to have the story go her way, regardless of whether the players are aware of it or not. E.gr. The werewolf was John. The players figured it too quickly, so now the werewolf is Laura.

2) A GM who leaves facts undefined with the express purpose of having the story go her way. E.gr. The werewolf is some undefined person. Deciding who it is will be put off until the players have investigated enough.

As a personal note, as a player I'd feel annoyed by either of these scenarios as well.


That would be the two big ones that have come up using the werewolf example, yes.




I must have misread him then, I thought he was complaining about having the werewolf decide to leave town to buy time when the PCs were unraveling the mystery too quickly.


Depends on why it happens. Does the werewolf learn they're closing in and try to evade them, or does the GM decide it's "too soon" and just have the werewolf leave town "because"?

[Talakeal]

Depends on why it happens. Does the werewolf learn they're closing in and try to evade them, or does the GM decide it's "too soon" and just have the werewolf leave town "because"?

The latter.

[Florian]

@Max:

You have your typical evil wizard guy with some ambitions, the means to do it and a plan how to do it, so he will do it.

Get up, have some nice breakfast > go to town, kidnap someone > ritual sacrifice that someone > have a pizza and a glas of red wine at fav restaurant > go to sleep (repeat this block 13 times) > summon succubus > have the succubus charm the king, become the power behind the throne.

In this example, evil wizard guy will work like "on rails" unless interacted with, because what we wants to do takes some time and time is linear. Question is more what happens when interacted with, do you truly set the whole scenario on one track or do you change track according to the new input to the scenario based on the kind of interruption?

@kyoryu:

Let´s rephrase it then: Any series of events will create a history. Time being linear, this is also a story.

A linear setup will more or less by default create the history of itself, just by progressing thru the linear setup. When you, say, play a campaign of Giantslayer, at the end of the campaign, Giantslayer has been told.

Ok, this is a bit where "bias design" comes into it. Even a GM with a very neutral sandbox game will include things to do in his sandbox. A game world with nothing going on, no interesting features, nothing to explore, no conflicts to take part in doesn't make for an interesting game. Even a basic setup of "Kingdom A and Kingdom B are going to war soon. Both intend to invade (smaller) Kingdom C to capture their iron mines to do so" is already a conflict in the making and will create history. That is, unless your sandbox is so static that things don't move on their own.

@Talakeal:

Ok, then we´re back at "removal of agency / negation of choices". Your player assumed that he knows how giants work, your choice to change how that giant works was telegraphed (big nose), but not telegraphed very well, it seems. So yes, that could be misinterpreted as you wanting to negate a player choice outright.

Basically:
1) Be up front that you will not stick to the Monster Manual (or whatever you use).
2) or: Keep your player on their toes by changing foes regularly, like 1 in 4 goblins having some variant power
3) or: Telegraph harder, like, say, include the equivalent of a "cut scene", having your players witness the giant blowing a pegasus out of the sky using his gust of wind or something, or describing the trees and scrubs on the way to the giant as being heavily wind-blasted and so on.

[Quertus]

You have a basic situation/conflict and map out what happens of the characters don't interfere, then you map out what happens if the interfere.

When my character burns down the town / drops a nuke on it, and events simply play out along the "characters interfere" script? That's what I call railroading.

As others have said, you can't - and probably shouldn't (or shouldn't, and probably can't?) - know how the characters might interfere.


The latter.

That, by my sentiment / definition, would be railroading. To prevent an outcome ("too soon"), the GM changes things ("werewolf leaves town").

[Talakeal]

That, by my sentiment / definition, would be railroading. To prevent an outcome ("too soon"), the GM changes things ("werewolf leaves town").

Maybe. Maybe not.

But I am not trying to get at what Max thinks railroading is, but why he thinks the situation is out and out cheating on the part of the DM.

[Florian]

When my character burns down the town / drops a nuke on it, and events simply play out along the "characters interfere" script? That's what I call railroading.

As others have said, you can't - and probably shouldn't (or shouldn't, and probably can't?) - know how the characters might interfere.

The prospect of playing a game set in a static game world is even less appealing to me than playing a scripted game.

It´s Chekovs Gun all over again: Don't include anything, if that thing doesn't have a meaning to the game. As in, don't include two kingdoms on the brink of war unless there is going to be a war at some point. History in the making.

Question rather is, what could be the branching points for actions to have enough meaning so that they can change the course of history?

[Talakeal]

It´s Chekovs Gun all over again: Don't include anything, if that thing doesn't have a meaning to the game. As in, don't include two kingdoms on the brink of war unless there is going to be a war at some point. History in the making.

That sort of game sounds incredibly dreary.

[Max_Killjoy]

The latter.


Then yeah, railroading.

And I consider railroading cheating (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cheating) on the part of the GM.

[Talakeal]

Then yeah, railroading.

And I consider railroading cheating (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cheating) on the part of the GM.

Well then, my hat is off to you. At least half of my gaming horror stories are caused by me being inflexible and refusing to alter the consistency of the setting for the player's enjoyment, and it appears you take it a lot further than I do. If you can pull it off, that is truly amazing.

[MrSandman]

How would you feel about these alternative indefinite werewolf scenarios?

1*) The GM originally decided the werewolf was John. But the facts as established during play mean that John is a poorer candidate for werewolf status than Jane, his wife, and it's more likely that Jane was framing John. Thus, the GM changes the "real" werewolf to Jane without telling the players (changing the notes but keeping the in-play facts consistent).

2*) The GM is uncertain at the beginning as to the true identity of the werewolf, so he leaves it indeterminate. As they investigate and the DM plays each scene naturally, it becomes clear that the werewolf must have been John all along.

The point is to separate the action (leaving the identity uncertain/changing the identity) from the rationale. If 1* and 2* are less troublesome, then the real issue is with the GM taking action for the purpose of forcing an outcome. Any action would cause the same issue, even if it's planned in advance, as long as the goal is to foreclose all non-desired outcomes.

I wouldn't see either as railroading, but I wouldn't be thrilled about either. 1*) is something that one might do to get out of trouble and should learn from it to keep things more consistent. 2*) might be interesting to try as an experiment, but I gravitate towards the opinion that you should define important details.

Yes, I think that's what railroading is all about, it is when the GM takes action in order to enforce a particular outcome regardless of the characters' actions, just because the show must go on as predetermined. So the goal behind it is quite important.

[PhoenixPhyre]

A few questions for those that advocate hard consistency (in an attempt to better understand)--

1. At what point does it switch from OK to not OK for a DM to change his mind about a plan and make substantive changes? Before play starts at all? Before the relevant arc begins? Before the session where the change becomes material? Somewhere else?

2. What do you want the DM to do when he realizes during a session that his "plot" (status quo set of events and plans by NPCs, for example) has a major, gaping hole that would destroy immersion? This has happened while I was listening to players discuss what they thought was happening and it was obvious that due to oversights and mistakes on my part, the whole plan was actively a giant walking plot hole.

3. What do you want the DM to do when someone makes a mistake during active play? For instance, I frequently find myself overlooking key abilities that would have made a combat come out quite differently due to the press of keeping combat moving fast. Or I misread an AC and told the player that it hit when it shouldn't really have.


1. Until the fact in question has had material effect, it can be changed freely. I judge material effect
a) it being mentioned at the table
b) people relying on it for reasoning
c) facts that rely directly on it are material.

2. Quiet change of plans. If necessary, publicly announce that I had screwed up and needed to alter something I had said so that the setting, plans, and facts all made sense together.

3. If the mistake was in the players' favor or was more than a couple turns ago, it doesn't get changed. Despite the character sheet, this person didn't have those abilities. This goblin's AC was lower than the rest for whatever reason. If I catch it before the end of the turn, or if it's strongly against a player, I'll correct it as long as it doesn't require a full roll-back of events.

[Quertus]

The prospect of playing a game set in a static game world is even less appealing to me than playing a scripted game.

It´s Chekovs Gun all over again: Don't include anything, if that thing doesn't have a meaning to the game. As in, don't include two kingdoms on the brink of war unless there is going to be a war at some point. History in the making.

Question rather is, what could be the branching points for actions to have enough meaning so that they can change the course of history?

Or, to nations poised at the brink of war… and the PCs' actions prevent that war?

I agree with the idea of putting the PCs in a place & time where their actions can have significance* - if they want it to, and are successful.

* For whatever definition of "significance" matters at the particular table


Well then, my hat is off to you. At least half of my gaming horror stories are caused by me being inflexible and refusing to alter the consistency of the setting for the player's enjoyment, and it appears you take it a lot further than I do. If you can pull it off, that is truly amazing.

Talakeal, some people are good at making things that others enjoy. Some people are good at modifying things to make them better. Some lucky few are gifted at both; other poor souls have neither skill.

Know yourself.

Knowing which style(s) of game you can run successfully will go a long way towards having fewer horror stories.

Having a good "session 0", intelligently* informing your group of the style of play, and getting buy-in from your players for that style will carry you even further.

The "unintelligent*” version of that - which I advocate in general as best practices, btw - is to run a series of one-shots, for everyone to display their range, and then discuss what everyone enjoyed, what they want to do/try next, etc.

I've seen plenty of idiots make a module worst by "fixing" it, and plenty of idiots make the rules worse by "fixing" them. So, from my vast experiences, I hypothesize that very few people are actually any good at meeting things better. Jury's out on how many are good at making good things in the first place, but it seems a more common skill, based on my experience with a higher percentage of successful homebrew & whole cloth adventures.

* I can't think of a better word


A few questions for those that advocate hard consistency (in an attempt to better understand)--

That sounds like me, so I'll answer, too. EDIT: what? All this time making my post, and I *wasn't* ninja'd?!


1. At what point does it switch from OK to not OK for a DM to change his mind about a plan and make substantive changes? Before play starts at all? Before the relevant arc begins? Before the session where the change becomes material? Somewhere else?

When he does so for the wrong reasons. Just like everything else.

In a perfect world, the GM didn't have to change anything after play starts.

But, if the GM made a mistake, they should admit it, and fix it. And realize that it was a mistake. Figure out how it happened, and strive to be better.


2. What do you want the DM to do when he realizes during a session that his "plot" (status quo set of events and plans by NPCs, for example) has a major, gaping hole that would destroy immersion? This has happened while I was listening to players discuss what they thought was happening and it was obvious that due to oversights and mistakes on my part, the whole plan was actively a giant walking plot hole.

Again, depends.

I'ma say that I don't care about immersion… but, since I don't know what you mean by that word, I don't know if I care about "immersion".

But, if your world is an inconsistent mess, fix it.

Note, "he's fought Wizards before, he would clearly have a counter to that" is not an inconsistent mess that needs fixing. However, "oops, I had the Baron take that action 2 days before anyone could have known <required information>, and 3 days after he was dead"? Yeah, fix that ****. And, if there is any chance that the PCs could have noticed anything related to the changes you have to make, tell them.


3. What do you want the DM to do when someone makes a mistake during active play? For instance, I frequently find myself overlooking key abilities that would have made a combat come out quite differently due to the press of keeping combat moving fast. Or I misread an AC and told the player that it hit when it shouldn't really have.

Eh…<reads what you wrote> - eh, close enough.

Also, as above, "realize that it was a mistake. Figure out how it happened, and strive to be better. And, if there is any chance that the PCs could have noticed anything related to the changes you have to make, tell them."



1. Until the fact in question has had material effect, it can be changed freely. I judge material effect
a) it being mentioned at the table
b) people relying on it for reasoning
c) facts that rely directly on it are material.

2. Quiet change of plans. If necessary, publicly announce that I had screwed up and needed to alter something I had said so that the setting, plans, and facts all made sense together.

3. If the mistake was in the players' favor or was more than a couple turns ago, it doesn't get changed. Despite the character sheet, this person didn't have those abilities. This goblin's AC was lower than the rest for whatever reason. If I catch it before the end of the turn, or if it's strongly against a player, I'll correct it as long as it doesn't require a full roll-back of events.

[Florian]

@Talakeal:

It might look "dreary" at first glance, as there are things happening way above the pay grade of the characters, or so it does initially seem. But: The characters can make an impact, the sort and size of the impact is a little bit dictated by what kind of game you're actually running (heroic games will allow for larger-than-life impacts, political games will need the impact to be on the interpersonal level instead of heroic deeds and so on). In my experience, it only gets dreary in a combination that disallows said impact.

To pick up Quertus point of preventing said war (which is, say, about the control of some silver mines):
- Try to arrange a marriage between the prince and princess of each kingdom.
- Hire a band of mercenaries and sack the silver mines for yourself. That will confuse both kingdoms for a while and you might find yourself at war with them, but you have at least delayed the initial war.
- Goat that dragon into using the silver mines as his new lair. Congrats, no war, but also no silver.
... and so on. That also means having players that can understand and accept various levels of impact and can make the best of it. Speaking of...

No, that doesn't have to do with Max_Killjoy as a GM. You have a big problem at your table when you have conflicting expectations about what the actual game is going to be. You can be as neutral and stoic as a GM as you want to be, you will run into problems when your players expect something else from you. Max tables seem to work because he and his players are in synch about the nature of their game. Your table generates horror stories because you seem to be out of synch and things crash and burn when a conflict of interest comes up.

@Quertus:

Immersion means that you are actively trying to blend out that you are a player in a game and fully focus on your character and the game world being real. "How would Sara Landsknecht, if she were a real person, react to this situation based on her knowledge and personality?". For a not insignificant amount of people, D&D-style combat can break their immersion because the logical optimal set of actions and the personality of their characters don't mesh.
Same as pulling the emergency break, calling a time-out and talking about rules or rulings, this is what brings people "back" to the awareness that they are players in a game.

[OldTrees1]

A few questions for those that advocate hard consistency (in an attempt to better understand)--

1. At what point does it switch from OK to not OK for a DM to change his mind about a plan and make substantive changes? Before play starts at all? Before the relevant arc begins? Before the session where the change becomes material? Somewhere else?

There is a difference between liking a style, using a style, saying a style is good, and saying deviation from the style is bad. I will be speaking as a user of the style with the full understanding that there are other styles that also work are OK.

Personally, changing my mind about a plan / substantive change is a rare to non existent event (ignoring changes before session 0). I guess that is one of the benefits of using "hard consistency" (as in derived / extrapolated content) while running a sandbox. With a dynamic world, motivated PCs, and no scripted plan, there is no need for a substantive change. The events of the game can create all the changes needed without any artificial input.


2. What do you want the DM to do when he realizes during a session that his "plot" (status quo set of events and plans by NPCs, for example) has a major, gaping hole that would destroy immersion? This has happened while I was listening to players discuss what they thought was happening and it was obvious that due to oversights and mistakes on my part, the whole plan was actively a giant walking plot hole.

If you could miss it, the NPCs could miss it too. How do they try to adjust now that they see their plans do not make sense. I say plans, because the DM has kept the game state consistent. Which ones notice first? Did the PCs notice first and gain a tactical advantage? How does that play out? This is one of the benefits of derived / extrapolated content. Your campaign world knows itself better than you do and can correct your faulty conclusions.


3. What do you want the DM to do when someone makes a mistake during active play? For instance, I frequently find myself overlooking key abilities that would have made a combat come out quite differently due to the press of keeping combat moving fast. Or I misread an AC and told the player that it hit when it shouldn't really have.


Take it as a learning moment so you can improve in the future. Oversight mistakes teach us where we can improve our awareness and preparation. These mistakes become less frequent as you improve and learn your limits. This is true for every style of play. The DM is not expected to perfectly RP a Dragon, they are merely a human and thus are imperfect at the craft. They get better over time by learning.

Sometimes an example of "Oh, you should have had advantage on that attack because the NPC was reckless, roll again to see if you should have hit" will occur. However mistakes happen less often as the DM learns their limits and improved their practice.

[Florian]

To be honest, I have some problems answering the questions PP asks, as they contain certain implications.

The indicators here are the mentioning of concepts like "plan", "arc" and "plot", while the hallmarks of a sandbox are "opportunity" and "emergent".

I´m getting the feeling that PP is actually walking about illusionism.

[PhoenixPhyre]

To be honest, I have some problems answering the questions PP asks, as they contain certain implications.

The indicators here are the mentioning of concepts like "plan", "arc" and "plot", while the hallmarks of a sandbox are "opportunity" and "emergent".

I´m getting the feeling that PP is actually walking about illusionism.

Not my intent.

Plan == whatever the NPCs were trying to do and would succeed in doing if the PCs don't meddle/interfere. If they do interfere (which is likely), then those plans are going to have to change in unpredictable (or predictable, depending, but uncertain) ways.

Arc == my campaigns naturally organize themselves into smaller chunks where things are more closely related to each other. So if the main player goal is to rescue the princess, one arc may be discovering where she's held. Another might be infiltrating (or besieging, their choice) the place. Etc. These are discovered in retrospect, since I have no control over their goals. One of my recent campaigns had the following arc structure:
1. Handling the situation in Innsmouth. This led to the discovery of the Pactum Battlefield.
2. Mini-arc: getting to Pactum and finding a place there.
3. Exploring the barrows/dealing with the disturbed undead.
4. Thinking with Portals/dealing with the Reprobi/Showdown.

Each arc lasted about 5 sessions, with #2 being shorter and 3-4 being a bit longer.

Plot == the cumulative narrative so far. Looking back it looks linear, because all the branches not taken are discarded. Looking forward it's a branching and recombining tree, branching based on their decisions.

[Florian]

So you anticipated the reactions of your players and placed the pieces in such a way that it would seem to be natural to stumble across them. In short, you passively forced a plot to be emergent. Nothing against that, it´s how I work most of the time, but it´s a far cry from talking about a sandbox.

[PhoenixPhyre]

So you anticipated the reactions of your players and placed the pieces in such a way that it would seem to be natural to stumble across them. In short, you passively forced a plot to be emergent. Nothing against that, it´s how I work most of the time, but it´s a far cry from talking about a sandbox.

I has a confused.

I don't remember ever talking about a sandbox? There's a huge gulf between forced linearity and a full sandbox. Sandboxes are not good (or bad). Linear stories are not good (or bad).

I placed (with their conscious foreknowledge and approval) a situation in front of them. The only part they had to do was travel to the vicinity of Innsmouth in the first place, because that was the premise they agreed on. The rest of the arc structure is retrospective, not prospective. I can only break it down that way because it already happened. Overall, it went quite differently than any vague, inchoate expectations I had. Because I really hadn't planned much about parts #2-4 until part #1 was wrapping up. I knew there was a battlefield there, I knew there were people trying to loot it. I knew that the battlefield was also a containment device. That's about it.

If they'd have noped out after arc #1 (their mission was technically complete at that point), I'd have found something else for them to do and the world would have ended up very different indeed. If they'd have made different choices in part #2, parts #3 & #4 would have been very different if they happened at all. Part #3 could have gone a bunch of different ways, each with different consequences.

Basically, the pieces were only manufactured as they came onto the horizon/came into view. I'm happy with how the story ended up, but it wasn't the story I thought I was telling for most of it.
--------------
If I wanted to run a full sandbox (which I don't), I feel like I would have to have completely generated all the details for the entire world beforehand. Which is
a) not feasible
b) more likely to result in forced action, whether because the forces are just that strong or out of a (wrongful) desire to not see all my work go to waste, not less likely
c) much less fun.

I am an anti-dogmatist by nature as a DM. I see my job as to do whatever is necessary to ensure the fun of the table. And since each table is different, my style has to change as well. Does that mean that for some tables I'm really hard-line about consistency? If that's what they enjoy. For others I'm much more loose. For some I'm a stickler for the rules; for others not so much. I have had tables that actively told me (using words) that they wanted direction. That they wanted to follow a plot. Others wanted to overthrow the government and institute fantasy communism. :shrug: Either way, my task is to oblige while satisfying the world-based constraints.

It's a constrained optimization problem. The world imposes constraints, the ruleset imposes other constraints, the players' actions and desires impose other constraints. Even so, it does not have a unique solution, and sometimes not all the constraints can be satisfied simultaneously and something has to give. I try to give the players' actions primacy of place after the really hard constraints of the world itself. The rules can go hang if they get in the way too much and can't be reconciled.

I'm there to tell a story (weave the events into a coherent narrative), but I don't know what the story is until we tell it. I know some of the threads, but how the players react to those pre-existing threads, how the threads react to their actions--those are the real warp and weft of the cloth. I try to put my players into a situation where they will have to act and disturb a fragile status quo. And then the world reacts to them, they react to the world's reactions, and the whole thing snowballs from there.

[Pleh]

No, I got your point... it's just wrong.

You're mistaking the immutability of the past for "rails"
You're mistaking the GM making decisions in the back and forth with players also making decisions, for "railroading".
You're mistaking the GM's agreed-upon role at the gaming table for "power" / "authority".
You're mistaking the traditional role of the GM as a universal truth for all RPG systems.

It's just the way the game functions.

In baseball, when a player slides to the plate as the ball is getting there, the player is technically neither safe nor out until the umpire makes a call. The rules dictate how the umpire makes the call, but given the imperfect nature of the process, the game defaults to accepting the ruling of the umpire, even if it is technically wrong by the rules.

I'm not making any mistakes or assumptions. This is how DMing works. The game proceeds how the DM says it does.

If we want to call the game an off road vehicle, then the players are the driver and the DM plays the car and "railroading" becomes the point where the vehicles control methods stop functioning (brakes or gas don't work, steering freezes, etc).

Forget the word, "story." The DM adjucates the events that comprise the game.

Sure, there are RPGs that don't have the DM role. Do they also experience Railroading (the subject of the thread)?

My point is that Railroading is the same as an Umpire rigging the match. Railroading is a consequence of the abuse of DM authority to prescribe the results of gameplay.

[Talakeal]

@Talakeal:

It might look "dreary" at first glance, as there are things happening way above the pay grade of the characters, or so it does initially seem. But: The characters can make an impact, the sort and size of the impact is a little bit dictated by what kind of game you're actually running (heroic games will allow for larger-than-life impacts, political games will need the impact to be on the interpersonal level instead of heroic deeds and so on). In my experience, it only gets dreary in a combination that disallows said impact.d.

I don't mean dreary as in hopeless and depressing, rather I am using it to mean dull and lifeless. If you only include setting details that you expect to impact the plot it takes a lot of the flavor and wonder out of the world for me and makes it feel a lot more artificial.

For example, in my current campaign there are a lot of blank spaces on the map which I just gave an evocative name to. I dont expect them to have any relevance to the plot or for the players to go there, but they exist and are always a possibility in the future incase I get some inspiration or the players decide to interract with them.

[Florian]

It's Sure, there are RPGs that don't have the DM role. Do they also experience Railroading (the subject of the thread)?

Even harder.

[Florian]

I don't mean dreary as in hopeless and depressing, rather I am using it to mean dull and lifeless. If you only include setting details that you expect to impact the plot it takes a lot of the flavor and wonder out of the world for me and makes it feel a lot more artificial.

For example, in my current campaign there are a lot of blank spaces on the map which I just gave an evocative name to. I dont expect them to have any relevance to the plot or for the players to go there, but they exist and are always a possibility in the future incase I get some inspiration or the players decide to interract with them.

Apples and oranges. Reserving some space or already introducing some stubs to build upon later is good practice.

Being endlessly boring about details that bring nothing to the game is quite different.

[Talakeal]

Apples and oranges. Reserving some space or already introducing some stubs to build upon later is good practice.

Being endlessly boring about details that bring nothing to the game is quite different.

Yes, it is apples and oranges. Quality =\= quality.

Chekov's gun is about not having extraneous set dressing at all, it says nothing about the quality of said details.

[Max_Killjoy]

Apples and oranges. Reserving some space or already introducing some stubs to build upon later is good practice.

Being endlessly boring about details that bring nothing to the game is quite different.


How do you know for certain which details will "bring something to the game", and which won't, if you're running something that's not linear?

And then there's the fact that those details that some people think "bring nothing to the game" or "nothing to the story" are often more interesting or important to me than the details that they think are the only important details under some misbegotten version of Chekhov's gun.

Frankly there are some game products and works of fiction that I find more interesting for the setting itself than for the campaigns that might be run there, or the stories that have been told about people there and things happening there.

[Max_Killjoy]

It's just the way the game functions.

In baseball, when a player slides to the plate as the ball is getting there, the player is technically neither safe nor out until the umpire makes a call. The rules dictate how the umpire makes the call, but given the imperfect nature of the process, the game defaults to accepting the ruling of the umpire, even if it is technically wrong by the rules.

I'm not making any mistakes or assumptions. This is how DMing works. The game proceeds how the DM says it does.

If we want to call the game an off road vehicle, then the players are the driver and the DM plays the car and "railroading" becomes the point where the vehicles control methods stop functioning (brakes or gas don't work, steering freezes, etc).

Forget the word, "story." The DM adjucates the events that comprise the game.

Sure, there are RPGs that don't have the DM role. Do they also experience Railroading (the subject of the thread)?

My point is that Railroading is the same as an Umpire rigging the match. Railroading is a consequence of the abuse of DM authority to prescribe the results of gameplay.

No one is talking about or thinking of "story" at this point.

You're describing an assumed power structure, and a specific process of how GMing works, that leaves out a lot of details, and doesn't fit how ever table works -- I wouldn't game with a GM who approached the role as if they were the typical pro-sports umpire/referee lording it over the playing field.

Furthermore, and more importantly, your responses are evading the actual question -- when the PCs' decisions and actions actually matter, and shape the course of the campaign, where are the rails?

If you really mean what you've been saying, and you consider "the GM gets to make decisions" as "rails" and all GMing as "railroading", then you're just watering down "railroading" and "rails" to be meaningless... I'll leave why you'd do that to speculation, but we've seen repeatedly why posters like DU try that nonsense.

[Segev]

If the players can change the course of the game (as they are supposed to be able to), then are there even tracks to begin with?

There's a sliding scale of freedom between "singular tracks," "multiple-choice tracks," "canyons that are very hard to climb out of," "roads through difficult terrain," "roads through flat and even terrain," and "an open sandbox." And there's even a step beyond that, which Darth Ultron likes to use as a strawman, of essentially Limbo, where the loudest and most strong-willed player dictates reality.

Video games tend to be somewhere in the first two or the fourth. Tabletop RPGs hit their sweet spot in the "canyons that are hard to climb out of" to the "open sandbox."

And then there's the kind of railroad mixed with (poorly-done) illusionism that pretends to be canyons or just roads through difficult terrain, but has deliberately set up insurmountable obstacles in every direction save the chosen path, rendering what looks like particularly steep canyon walls into essentially rails, because nothing but following the rails will "work."

[Willie the Duck]

I wouldn't game with a GM who approached the role as if they were the typical pro-sports umpire/referee lording it over the playing field.

So, now we're getting to hypothetical DMs who are lording things over people. I'm going to interject here because that's where a lot of threads blow up. Regardless of opinions on the appropriateness of any kind of railroading structures is to gaming or not, someone being a genuine jerk-player or jerk-DM is a separate issue. If a DM decides they're going to 'lord it over' a game or playing field, they will do so (and presumably lose players because of it) completely independent from any railroading going on. I'm not going to call it a non-issue, because we have all met 'that guy' in gaming. But it has very little to do with the subject at hand and runs the risk of conflating the two issue/accidentally implying that all those who do not game as MK prefers are somehow the same venn circle as these people.

[Max_Killjoy]

So, now we're getting to hypothetical DMs who are lording things over people. I'm going to interject here because that's where a lot of threads blow up. Regardless of opinions on the appropriateness of any kind of railroading structures is to gaming or not, someone being a genuine jerk-player or jerk-DM is a separate issue. If a DM decides they're going to 'lord it over' a game or playing field, they will do so (and presumably lose players because of it) completely independent from any railroading going on. I'm not going to call it a non-issue, because we have all met 'that guy' in gaming. But it has very little to do with the subject at hand and runs the risk of conflating the two issue/accidentally implying that all those who do not game as MK prefers are somehow the same venn circle as these people.


When someone describes the GM as equivalent to a sports referee (see the post I was replying to for the context), that's that they're describing as far as I'm concerned. Most sports officials are way WAY too full of themselves and have a grossly exaggerated opinion of their own importance to the games.

[Max_Killjoy]

There's a sliding scale of freedom between "singular tracks," "multiple-choice tracks," "canyons that are very hard to climb out of," "roads through difficult terrain," "roads through flat and even terrain," and "an open sandbox." And there's even a step beyond that, which Darth Ultron likes to use as a strawman, of essentially Limbo, where the loudest and most strong-willed player dictates reality.

Video games tend to be somewhere in the first two or the fourth. Tabletop RPGs hit their sweet spot in the "canyons that are hard to climb out of" to the "open sandbox."

And then there's the kind of railroad mixed with (poorly-done) illusionism that pretends to be canyons or just roads through difficult terrain, but has deliberately set up insurmountable obstacles in every direction save the chosen path, rendering what looks like particularly steep canyon walls into essentially rails, because nothing but following the rails will "work."

I'd not argue against any of that, really.

But my question remains, when the players' choices and the PCs' actions actually matter and shape the present reality and future possibilities they have in front of them, in a way similar to how the choices and actions of real people affect their future choices in the real world -- where are the "rails" / "tracks"?

[Florian]

How do you know for certain which details will "bring something to the game", and which won't, if you're running something that's not linear?

And then there's the fact that those details that some people think "bring nothing to the game" or "nothing to the story" are often more interesting or important to me than the details that they think are the only important details under some misbegotten version of Chekhov's gun.

Frankly there are some game products and works of fiction that I find more interesting for the setting itself than for the campaigns that might be run there, or the stories that have been told about people there and things happening there.

I know because I've created to world?

Personally, I'm getting the impression that you've got a problem with size and scope that comes along with certain settings.

[Talakeal]

I know because I've created to world?

Personally, I'm getting the impression that you've got a problem with size and scope that comes along with certain settings.

Could you please elaborate on this? I am not sure what you are trying to say or what it has to do with knowing what settig elements the players will choose to interract with.

[Max_Killjoy]

Could you please elaborate on this? I am not sure what you are trying to say or what it has to do with knowing what settig elements the players will choose to interract with.

That was going to be my question... what does that response (Florian's) have to do with knowing what the players will choose to interact with, and where those choices will take them?

[Florian]

Well, ok. This touches on a little bit about the difference between stage and background.

Take Space Opera of any kind, be it Star Wars or MechWarrior. The setting, as in the background, is more or less normal with regular folks doing regular things as is part of the in-game reality. The setting as stage is quite different tho. Only a handful of people really matter and their actions are blown out of proportions (in contrast to regular folks).
That might be because the use of high-level abstractions or because the focus is on the symbolic value of the action.
(In Star Wars, you can have 1,2,... 300 Rogue Ones and they still can't compare to Luke killing the Emperor)

Point being that I know that Max doesn't like the separation of the setting in stage and background, but that's what happens at most regular tables and should be acknowledged as such, simply because it is an reduction in complexity.

[OldTrees1]

Well, ok. This touches on a little bit about the difference between stage and background.

Take Space Opera of any kind, be it Star Wars or MechWarrior. The setting, as in the background, is more or less normal with regular folks doing regular things as is part of the in-game reality. The setting as stage is quite different tho. Only a handful of people really matter and their actions are blown out of proportions (in contrast to regular folks).
That might be because the use of high-level abstractions or because the focus is on the symbolic value of the action.
(In Star Wars, you can have 1,2,... 300 Rogue Ones and they still can't compare to Luke killing the Emperor)

Point being that I know that Max doesn't like the separation of the setting in stage and background, but that's what happens at most regular tables and should be acknowledged as such, simply because it is an reduction in complexity.

Um. Why are you making a distinction?

In my sandbox worlds I can derive / extrapolate content to answer questions I or the players had. This seems consistent with what Max likes. In that same sandbox there are many entities and the degree of agency each entity has can differ drastically. The local blacksmith has a lot less agency that the entity "John Smith" that is playing at running a general store both of which are NPCs. So without differentiating between a "stage and background" you have a some entities that have a lot more impact than other entities.

However, how do I know if adding "John Smith" is going to add, detract, or do nothing to the game? I personally cannot answer without knowing the players. Although I can make some guesses based upon how such an entity would impact the amount of agency the PCs have in the game and what tone of game I wanted to run.

[Segev]

I'd not argue against any of that, really.

But my question remains, when the players' choices and the PCs' actions actually matter and shape the present reality and future possibilities they have in front of them, in a way similar to how the choices and actions of real people affect their future choices in the real world -- where are the "rails" / "tracks"?

Well, let's take a fairly linear game as an example. One where the players bought into the notion of playing it. The players' and their characters' choices and actions are allowed to have meaningful impact, and the DM is good enough at his job that he can roll with unusual choices to a fair degree. But, because it's linear, ultimately the players need to follow the plot to the next plot point. This isn't a big deal, because they bought into it, and probably are cooperating with the DM by actively trying to find the path to the next plot point.

But the "rails" are there in that, if they refuse to follow that path, there's not much extant behind the curtain. The DM can try to improv stuff, but he didn't make a full campaign setting with multi-order-of-magnitude-removed established facts. He's got an adventure path.

This is very benign, and usually isn't a problem, because, again, the players are complicit in staying on the path. It's like going through a haunted forest attraction that is made up for halloween: there is a marked path, and if you stay on it, you meet the ghosties and ghoulies and the haunted spook-features. If you willfully step off of it, you effectively leave the "haunted forest" and either wind up with security forcing you back onto the path, or you just wander off on your own and aren't really playing the game anymore. (Leaving aside possibility of actual other dangers, IRL.)

Does that make sense?

[Max_Killjoy]

Well, let's take a fairly linear game as an example. One where the players bought into the notion of playing it. The players' and their characters' choices and actions are allowed to have meaningful impact, and the DM is good enough at his job that he can roll with unusual choices to a fair degree. But, because it's linear, ultimately the players need to follow the plot to the next plot point. This isn't a big deal, because they bought into it, and probably are cooperating with the DM by actively trying to find the path to the next plot point.

But the "rails" are there in that, if they refuse to follow that path, there's not much extant behind the curtain. The DM can try to improv stuff, but he didn't make a full campaign setting with multi-order-of-magnitude-removed established facts. He's got an adventure path.

This is very benign, and usually isn't a problem, because, again, the players are complicit in staying on the path. It's like going through a haunted forest attraction that is made up for halloween: there is a marked path, and if you stay on it, you meet the ghosties and ghoulies and the haunted spook-features. If you willfully step off of it, you effectively leave the "haunted forest" and either wind up with security forcing you back onto the path, or you just wander off on your own and aren't really playing the game anymore. (Leaving aside possibility of actual other dangers, IRL.)

Does that make sense?

What you are describing is a game where the players evidently agreed that their choices would have tightly constrained impact before the game started, not a game where the player's choices have varied impact of potentially great depth and breadth. They've agreed to stay within a narrow path, maybe even on the rails.

So to me it's not really answering the question.

In a game where the choice space is broad and deep, and the PCs' actions set the present and define their own future choice space via interaction with the setting and other characters... where are the rails?

[Segev]

What you are describing is a game where the players evidently agreed that their choices would have tightly constrained impact before the game started, not a game where the player's choices have varied impact of potentially great depth and breadth. They've agreed to stay within a narrow path, maybe even on the rails.

So to me it's not really answering the question.

In a game where the choice space is broad and deep, and the PCs' actions set the present and define their own future choice space via interaction with the setting and other characters... where are the rails?

By definition, they're faint if extant at all. One could make a spurious argument (and Darth Ultron has) that they MUST exist because there are setting rules in place that will mean players can't just declare that their characters are now kings of the universe and that all bow to them, and rewrite the map at a whim, but few would agree with him that those constitute rails.

[awa]

isn't darth ultron banned, why keep bringing him up?

[Segev]

isn't darth ultron banned, why keep bringing him up?

1) I didn't know he was banned; I will refrain from talking about somebody who can't speak in his own defense, now.
2) Because I like to acknowledge when I'm addressing points others hold a position on. It makes it easier to reference entire discussions without having to rehash them in their entirety.

[Max_Killjoy]

By definition, they're faint if extant at all.


That's my position -- that there aren't rails.

Someone said that there are rails even in that type of campaign and style of GMing*, and I was asking, "where are these rails you keep insisting are there"?


*where the choice space is broad and deep, and the PCs' actions set the present and define their own future choice space via interaction with the setting and other characters.

[Segev]

That's position -- that there aren't rails.

Someone said that there are rails even in that type of campaign and style of GMing*, and I was asking, "where are these rails you keep insisting are there"?


*where the choice space is broad and deep, and the PCs' actions set the present and define their own future choice space via interaction with the setting and other characters.

As I don't hold the position that there are "rails," and largely agree with you, all I can do is try to articulate what is meant by that claim. Best I can figure out is that the claim is equating the limitations the simulation of the game world and setting place on the characters being "rails" because the players can't "go anywhere and do anything" when they're constrained from things that would break verisimilitude.

[Max_Killjoy]

As I don't hold the position that there are "rails," and largely agree with you, all I can do is try to articulate what is meant by that claim. Best I can figure out is that the claim is equating the limitations the simulation of the game world and setting place on the characters being "rails" because the players can't "go anywhere and do anything" when they're constrained from things that would break verisimilitude.

And my response to that claim would be that the PCs are no more "on rails" for that situation than a real person in the real world is "on rails" simply because they can't flap their arms and create enough lift to overcome gravity.

[Segev]

And my response to that claim would be that the PCs are no more "on rails" for that situation than a real person in the real world is "on rails" simply because they can't flap their arms and create enough lift to overcome gravity.

*shrug* I agree. You asked what people meant. I gave my best understanding of their position. I agree; they're not right.

[Quertus]

@Quertus:

Immersion means that you are actively trying to blend out that you are a player in a game and fully focus on your character and the game world being real. "How would Sara Landsknecht, if she were a real person, react to this situation based on her knowledge and personality?". For a not insignificant amount of people, D&D-style combat can break their immersion because the logical optimal set of actions and the personality of their characters don't mesh.
Same as pulling the emergency break, calling a time-out and talking about rules or rulings, this is what brings people "back" to the awareness that they are players in a game.

I fully agree, that sounds like the definition of - or, at least, a description of - immersion, to me.

Still holds no value to me.

I like and value role-playing: being aware that you are in a game, and focus on your character as if the game world were real. "How would Sara Landsknecht, if she were a real person, react to this situation based on her knowledge and personality?"

Or the (sadly) superior metagaming: being aware that you are in a game, and trying to focus on your character as if the game world were real, while still paying attention to out of character concerns. "How would Sara Landsknecht, if she were a real person, react to this situation based on her knowledge and personality? How will that affect the enjoyment of the group? What other options might she take that are still in character?"

I'll admit, metagaming certainly breaks something (concentration on role-playing?) that I'll call "immersion" at times.

If the logical thing for a combat-savvy character to do does not match the player's concept of the character's personality, then the player should strongly consider that they are at fault, for not making a character who "grew up" in that world. Fortunately, playing Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named, I don't have to worry about "optimal" choices, as Quertus' general tactical ineptitude frees me to just roleplay his decisions correctly. No need for lost immersion.

[kyoryu]

*shrug* I agree. You asked what people meant. I gave my best understanding of their position. I agree; they're not right.

I don't think it's a good faith argument. IOW, I don't think it's actually a position that anybody holds.

I think it's an argument that pro-railroading people make to "prove" that railroading is good and that people that don't like railroading are wrong. Even if you accept that at face value, it ignores the obvious fact that even people that are anti-railroading are perfectly fine with consistent, logical restrictions on their actions.

So, yeah, I kind of just ignore it.