Players characters evading direct questions

[Talakeal]

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.

So would you consider a dungeon crawl with an open floor plan and no plot what-so-ever a "railroad"?

Because if I have a map of the dungeon that includes the locations of all treasures, routes, monsters, and traps, including hidden ones, and the monsters stat blocks, I guarantee you that I can come up with a route that has a drastically higher reward to risk ratio than anyone could realistically stumble upon using only in character information.

Or hell. The players want to get into a locked room. Is this a railroad?

The GM doesn't tell them they have to get in, the players chose this goal for themselves. The GM has no plans for how they could get in; they could kick the door down, pick the lock, search for a key, teleport, turn incorporal, shrink down and crawl under the crack, try and bluff someone into letting them in, create a diversion and force the guards inside to come out, tunnel through the wall, blow the wall down, dig under the wall, etc. etc. etc.

But, if the players know that there is a key hidden under a fake rock in the garden, why would they bother with any of these things? Using the key is clearly the optimal route.

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.

Right, but failure is off the table. There is now zero possibility of actually losing.

Likewise, most players are, to put it bluntly, not invested enough in the game to actually look for some better solution when they have a nice, easy, simple, straightforward, guaranteed to work solution handed to them.

This isn't really a game, this is more just the players acting out the GMs railroad. Honestly, it's kind of an inversion of a traditional module. In a traditional module, the GM gives the players a goal and then lets them figure out how they are going to accomplish it. In this hypothetical, the PCs tell the GM their goal, and then the GM tells them how to accomplish it.

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'.

That's actually exactly what I am saying. That's a very good way to put it.

Playing with full knowledge is a lot less like a traditional adventure RPG and a lot more like planning a heist.

And, IMO, planning a heist is a puzzle, not a game.

Now, you can make it a game by adding in elements that make it difficult to execute the plan or force you to improvise in real time, for example, Teris is the quintessential "puzzle game" yet it still relies heavily on RNG and manual dexterity, but those aren't going to be present in a traditional tabletop RPG.

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.

You aren't describing an RPG scenario. You are making up your own game with a bunch of artificial rules.

Throwing a bunch of pre-gen characters at a balrog and then not giving the players sufficient time to even learn their own character's abilities, let alone the balor's, doesn't prove anything, and it certainly isn't anything comparable to a full information scenario.

I can guarantee you that if you gave me an actual sixteenth level party that exists in the world and which I am familiar and put me against a balor that is forced to follow a combat script, I am going to dribble it like a basket-ball.


Of course, that isn't really comparable to what we are actually discussing; because the key factor is the GM telling the player's what to do to win.

At which point, I don't really have to engage with the game at all to win.

If the GM shouts "Ok, next round the balrog is casting blasphemy, so make sure your cleric casts silence!" I can just respond "Ok, my cleric casts silence. What should I do next turn?" ad nauseum.

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.

Absolutely. I conceded that point three posts ago. Hell, I outright *made* that point three posts ago. Because it isn't a point I am actually defending. I have no stake in propping up a strawman.

The point I am actually making is that in the vast majority of RPG scenarios, if the GM is simply going to tell you the best way to resolve encounters, then there is no challenge, excitement, or decision making inherent in the game unless the players decide to inject it in artificially, and if they are doing that the game is more of a collaborative story-telling game than a typical RPG where you are playing a character and trying to accomplish said character's goals in character..

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.

C'mon dude, pot meet kettle and all that.

I am talking about tabletop RPG scenarios, and you are the one trying to bring computer rpg's into the mix.

I didn't realize you were suddenly redefining our argument about tabletop RPGs to be exclusively about three specific computer games I have never played and dismissing all other games are "irrelevant".

I am not "making up" anything; it is an objective fact that the majority of computer RPGs which I have played require some manual dexterity on the part of the player. Not all of them mind you, the Interplay Fallout's don't for example*, but the vast majority do. Heck, even Final Fantasy games often require you to input button combinations or play timing games for certain moves.

And finally, I am not trying to argue a point. The only reason I even brought up manual dexterity is to preemptively shoot down the argument "Well if RPGs are so easy, how come people can fail at them even if they are following a guide?", to which the answer is almost certainly either RNG or lack of manual dexterity.



*: Well, not much. It is absolutely still possible to misclick your mouse and shoot your ally in the back or drop your controller on the floor and not be able to pick it up before your turn timer ends or whatever.

Because what you just said is completely incorrect. In a sequential perfect information games with both players playing perfectly, what typically happens is a draw, rules allowing. There are no interminable loops - the first player makes the best possible opening move, the second player answers with best possible counterplay, and so it goes until a conclusion is reached. The XKCD comic about Tic-Tac-Toe comic illustrates this.

Full agreement here.

That's complete nonsense. Optimization is a practice, the presence and absence of optimal strategies something that can be concretely mathematically studied and then applied. Everything me and NichG have been saying is about practical qualities of existing, playable games - qualities you could leverage to improve your game design if you bothered to actually get your terms straight.

Again, agreed.

I am not even sure what you are trying to argue here. Are you saying that optimization is binary? You either have the mathematically optimal solution or you don't? And even if you are 99.99% efficient, you are still not "optimal" because optimal is 100% or bust?

Because an RPG module can absolutely be optimized under this definition. Set a goal. And then mathematically fine tune your strategy to achieve your goal with the minimum of risk.

NichG's analogy of planning a heist is very close to what I am getting at. Do you not agree that it is possible to optimize a heist when given full information about the scenario?