Quote Originally Posted by Talakeal View Post
Is it any wonder that I am extra cautious about taking actions that feel like railroading to me? This entire post is written presupposing that I must be running a railroad, based on nothing I actually said.

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But if one path is easier, why would the players not take it? Why would they deliberately choose a sub-optimal path?

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Some approaches to problems are vastly more efficient than other approaches. If the GM simply tells the players which approach is most efficient, the players would be fools not to take that approach, rendering all other approaches moot. To me, this is railroading, as you are effectively taking all other approaches off the table.
This argument only possibly holds for scenarios that are already railroads. So yeah, what you say might be true - but only if you have a scenario with a single path of action that is clearly better than all others could possibly be, for all possible players, motivations, aesthetics, etc. Just hiding that path and making the players feel around in the dark to find it doesn't stop that from being a railroad.

If your scenario is as open-ended and diverse as you talk about later when comparing RPGs and cRPGs, you can tell the players everything about what *you* would do, and it shouldn't mean that that option is actually what they would find the best option to pursue. Because in an open-ended scenario, you cannot have thought of everything. And in a non-railroaded scenario, different viable paths will be optimal under different people's goals and aesthetics.

Like, you mention 'why would you go with the unseelie rather than the fey baron?'. Well, in a scenario where the unseelie and the fey baron both demand different prices for their aid and provide equal contribution towards the resolution of the threat, different players characters may prefer different prices. In a scenario where the Fomorians could be viably fought off by the PCs but just with a very high risk, different players may prefer the risk of consequence to the definite cost of whatever the price is. In such a diverse scenario you could readily and freely say 'if it were me, I'd tell the fey baron about the attack on Muir woods and agree to perform a future courier favor taking no more than one day and threatening not my life or those of the lives I care about - thats what I think the optimal route is' and the players could still, totally rationally, still say 'nah we go with the unseelie and poison this CEO for them in exchange for them blowing up the Fomorians'.

The players chose to talk the Seelie into helping them. In my opinion, the easiest way to do this was to make those tasked with defending Muir Woods aware of the impending attack. But the players could have come up with a better plan I didn't think of, or they could have made a worse plan work. Hell... if they hadn't flubbed their persuasion roll their initial plan of convincing the Seelie to attack the formorians "because they are there" could have yielded results despite it being, imo, a plan that was likely doomed to failure.
See, if you're saying 'the players could have come up with a better plan I didn't think of', then you're as much as saying 'even if I gave them perfect information about the scenario and my thoughts on it, the course of action I suggest might not even be the best!' So if what you say about your own scenario is true then your worry that too much information would spoil the scenario is, by your own admission, unfounded.

The most open-ended, non-railroady questions for a campaign to ask are the ones whose answer depends on the person. And if you want that to be a challenge, ask the questions where the answer will depend on the person and they haven't figured out their own answer yet. With those sorts of questions, no amount of communication from the GM can make the challenge trivial, because the GM cannot read the players minds and know what they would truly be happiest with.

If the fight is still a challenge after being told everything about the encounter and being told what the optimal tactics are as the GM sees them, then I would argue that it wouldn't be a fair challenge going in blind. And, in such a case, the optimal tactics are probably to avoid the encounter entirely!
Take a Balor from the 3.5e Monster Manual, it explicitly has a list of its standard tactics for the first four rounds of a fight. Give a group of four players a set of pre-gen Lv16 characters - Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue lets say - that are not hyper-optimized but are comfortably competent, and run them against the Balor, promising to follow the Balor's combat script and letting them see the Balor's stat block in the monster manual as well as the stat blocks of anything the Balor summons. Restrict the players to 15 minutes to familiarize themselves with their pre-gens and the Balor stat block before the encounter, and no more than 10 minutes per action during combat. Allow both sides one round to pre-buff (its in the Balor's script). It will neither be a cakewalk nor will it be unfairly impossible, nor will it be simply up to the dice.

Lv16s vs a CR 20 encounter is readily doable blind by experienced D&D players. With the Balor restricted to its script (regardless of whether its opponents know the script or not), it'll be a bit easier because the script is dumb compared to the full on teleport kiting that it should really do, but there's still a power gap there.

cRPGs are vastly different from tabletop RPGs.

First of all, they can't account for out of the box thinking. You can never kidnap the bosses family for leverage, or borrow a magic item from a friend in a neighboring kingdom, or tunnel directly into the treasure room bypassing the rest of the dungeon, or any of the countless other things you could do in a traditional RPG module with perfect information.
On the contrary, this point makes GM transparency even less of a problem, because there are far more ways for players to come up with things the GM didn't think of and beat the GM's theoretical 'optimum' path.

Giving the information to let players think about those alternatives that they couldn't if they didn't know there was a point to it is in fact great challenging gameplay. Heist games have to be structured like this to be any good - too much randomness or hidden information and you can't plan, and the heist genre is all about the elaborate plan (and about the plan going wrong, but usually due to a single point of divergence in the information that then cascades out). When you know the guard rotation and whether you can or can't pick a lock and how long it will take and all of that, the heist scenario becomes a search problem - a kind of puzzle - and the GM can happily set it up and say 'I didn't actually compute a solution for your characters, but you've got lots of abilities and you know everything I do about the situation, so figure it out yourselves'.

Second, they aren't fair fights to begin with. Tabletop RPG modules are written with the expectation of a fair challenge going in blind. RPGs aren't, because you are expected to play them over and over again until you get them right. Hardcore mode with considered to be a challenge for advanced players, not the expectation for noobies!
Aren't you basically conceding the point then, that its possible to design games that are fair and challenging despite perfect information? If cRPGs can do it, you can design TTRPG scenarios the same way, and provide the information that makes them fair.

Beyond that I'd say the particular criticism of 'you are expected to play them over and over again until you get them right' only applies to Divinity: Original Sin out of the games I mentioned. I can easily believe that a careful, average player can get through BG3 blind on Normal without ever having a TPK. I had one TPK when I was rushing something I shouldn't, and otherwise all of my save/load shenanigans were situations which would have been 'play on through' in a TTRPG - stuff where I was trying to get the best outcome or pull off some trick like winning a fight you're not supposed to be able to. Pathfinder: WotR is somewhere in the middle, but even there I think I did more save/load stuff due to the Act 2 time limit (and that out of a personal hate for invisible time limits in games) than specifically because of losing a given fight.

Third, most computer RPGs have a large degree of manual dexterity involved, which bypasses a lot of the knowledge requirements.
If you look at the *actual RPGs I listed* manual dexterity is not involved in any of them. Pathfinder WotR is turn based, BG3 is turn based, Divinity: Original Sin is turn based. Please don't make up irrelevant details when trying to argue your point.

That being said, although I am sure there are some out there, I have yet to play a computer RPG that I can't utterly trivialize after multiple playthroughs.
Try Pillars of Eternity 2 with the challenge mode that makes you cart around a kid everywhere and not let them die, and tell me that multiple playthroughs lets you 'utterly trivialize' it.

Woah, hold on. Perfect information only goes one way. It is impossible to have a game where both sides have perfect information. Best case scenario, attempting it ends up with a Princess Bride style"I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know...." loop and nobody ever actually makes a move.
We're playing chess, we each must talk aloud about how we plan to move and what responses we're considering; we must also point out anything we notice about the other player's move. Assume this is being done in good faith - yes you can refrain from saying something or talk slowly in theory, but we both agree not to do that.
We each get 3 minutes per move for this.

We have equal information about the other player's thought process and perfect information about the game state. The game also will finish within 2 hours at most.