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  1. - Top - End - #1
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    Default Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    I apologize if the title is a bit confusing. It's a bit of an odd idea until I've laid the groundwork, but most of you here are probably completely familiar with the context of what I want to talk about anyway and I just needed to give a nutshell abstract of my idea.

    Also, I only mention it as specific to D&D because that's where most of my experience is. I'm perfectly happy to hear about other systems you find applicable to the subject matter, I just don't have a lot to say about those systems for myself. It's not necessarily based on any one edition of D&D mechanics, either, so that's why I've chosen the general RPG area.

    So, by including the word, "Narrative" in the title, yes, I am calling back the conversations about D&D as Collaborative Storytelling (to some extent). I've typically been Pro Collaborative Storytelling in the past, but I begin to feel my position shift to a more complex variation than the binary question of Yes or No with regards to whether D&D (and by extension, TTRPGs) are Storytelling.

    My increased experience with the games, along with hearing advice from other players, as well as stories of games that were remarkably good and bad, has started to highlight a very high potential of toxicity towards games from people trying to treat the game as Storytelling.

    Which is to say, primarily, the problem with people who are TRYING to tell a story is that they also try to have some preconceived goals of how the story needs to play out, whether this is specific events they want to build up to, or just a general theme they want all the encounters to fit within.

    There's a bit of a paradox between playing a game built on the blank canvas of imaginative creation and the random chance of dice to then be constrained to a plotline.

    Now, in the past, I feel I have defended this as not being wrong, primarily because Player Buy In excuses the constraints that otherwise could be problematic. I would say I tend to advocate that players and DMs have some plot they are pursuing, though I grant that it needs to be one they all at least somewhat agree to. Or even that players at the table can each have different plots they wish to fulfill, but that everyone needs to be okay with any of the plots pursued to be achieved. PCs shouldn't betray one another unless every player agrees that would make for a fun game, and DMs shouldn't railroad the PCs into a particular course unless the Players can at least concede the plot direction for the sake of moving the game forward.

    But I'm coming around to a different way of thinking. I know its exciting to see the pieces of a puzzle and predict how they could all fit together into this coherent narrative, but we'd need far fewer editing of the rules and rulings of the game (allowing it to flow smoother) if we stopped putting such constraints on the course of the adventure.

    More and more, I consider if my maps might actually be superior if instead of striving to mark as many details as possible, I instead strategically choose which parts of the map to leave blank to be filled in as the players interact with it.

    Likewise with the plot, which really is just the campaign map in the sense of time and events the way the map is about roadways and locations. I begin to feel my games would be superior if I was more careful to know and prepare (as a DM) only the parts of the adventure that would otherwise force me to stop the game and look something up. The monster? Set in stone so I have the statblock prepared before we sit down to play. The Plot Hook? Also set in stone, and probably vetted through the players at session zero to make sure they have characters that would even be interested in the adventure I've prepared. But beyond that, wouldn't it be far more fun to figure out what these characters do with the elements of the story if I hadn't tried to plan for the various possible endings they could find and achieve? It would also cut down on my prep time considerably if I only Set the Scene and don't worry about resolving it until we are at the table playing it out.

    Yes, all this has been talked about before here and there on the forum, but the idea started to really click into my mind as a new philosophy for playing Mad Lib when I realized it's probably superior to play our Player Characters this way as well. It isn't just DM Advice anymore, but a straight guideline for all players at the table. What if I wrote my characters only by their core motives, their basic abilities, and a functional backstory and allowed myself blank areas to learn the character as we play? You see, up to this point, I tend to start from a mental picture of a character, more or less complete, and try to play that concept faithfully. But then the game feels like it often gets in the way of playing that character. I can't access all the abilities I imagine them to have until a certain level. The dice wind up making my character comically misfitting his backstory. My character stops fitting the ongoing narrative of the adventure and retires early.

    But what if I Mad Libbed the character? He's got a structurally sound backstory, but since it isn't grounded in any particular character arc, however it comes into the campaign, I can fill in a blank and play the character that way. Instead of planning my character build several levels out, I choose each level based on what abilities my character would want to pursue based on what he felt he was missing, or what he felt was most helpful, in the adventure thus far. Play my character adapted to the game that occurs, not the game I was anticipating before session one started.

    Ultimately, I still feel there's no escaping the conclusion that there is a narrative to any TTRPG you get into (not that I'm particularly looking for this thread to reopen that debate). But maybe the narrative is better if it is adapted to the game that transpires, rather than trying to adapt the game to fit the narrative.
    Quote Originally Posted by 2D8HP View Post
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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    As someone who is vociferously against the position that "RPGs are about collaborative storytelling" ... I find this an eminently reasonable approach to blending the idea that there is some kind of plot in the campaign or backstory / development arc to a character.

    RPGs not always being about collaborative storytelling doesn't mean everything has to be a blank character canvas to start with no forethought of future events by the GM. It just means that's not the primary, or even just a significant, way RPGs are played by all folks. As a universal statement, it doesn't hold.

    Having seeds of a plot / character and going from there and experiencing what comes in the game works just fine. Having a generally resilient and adaptable structure and filling in the blanks certainly works just fine. Having a linear adventure plot or predefined character backstory and character arc is fine. As long as everyone is on the same page, the table is good to go.

    Certainly Madlibs plot and characters will make for an interesting experience. It just might not be anything like what you expected.

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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Pleh View Post
    Likewise with the plot, which really is just the campaign map in the sense of time and events the way the map is about roadways and locations. I begin to feel my games would be superior if I was more careful to know and prepare (as a DM) only the parts of the adventure that would otherwise force me to stop the game and look something up. The monster? Set in stone so I have the statblock prepared before we sit down to play. The Plot Hook? Also set in stone, and probably vetted through the players at session zero to make sure they have characters that would even be interested in the adventure I've prepared. But beyond that, wouldn't it be far more fun to figure out what these characters do with the elements of the story if I hadn't tried to plan for the various possible endings they could find and achieve? It would also cut down on my prep time considerably if I only Set the Scene and don't worry about resolving it until we are at the table playing it out.
    Yes, the campaign I ran over the summer mostly played out like that. I had spend a good amount of time on planning the scenario, but actually sitting down with the game and running it was both the easiest work I ever had as a GM, and I also feel by far the best work I've ever done.

    The best part of the campaign was the middle chapter where the players were making a stop with their ship in a port while travelling from the main land the the villain's island. What I had prepared is that there is a pirate captain in the port who also wants to go to that island to search for a treasure. He already has a map of all the hidden reefs in the area, but is still trying to get a magic horn that will give his ship safe passage past the monsters living in the reefs. Which is currently owned by a rich smuggler who doesn't want to sell it. Also, the pirate queen of the port wants the captain gone from her town while still maintaining the reputation of her port being open to everyone. She also has a navigator in her dungeon who knows the safe passage past those reefs at the island.
    When the players were asking around for information on the island, they learned that there was a navigator who has been there many times and is currently in the dungeon, and that a pirate captain is planning to sail there. That was all that I had prepared as far as story is concerned, and I completely winged it from there. And it was fantastic.
    The players killed the captain in a staged tavern brawl, which they had set up as contingency if charming him with magic didn't work. In the ensuing chaos they managed to charm one of the pirates and realized that there was map on the pirates' ship. They ran to the ship while the tavern was still full of magic smoke, where one of the players created an illusion to look like the pirate they had charmed, telling the other pirates that their captain was in a fight and needs backup. Once they were all running to the tavern, the players overwhelmed the three pirates that were left on the ship, grabbed the maps from the captain's cabin, took the chest with the pirates' treasure, and set the unmanned ship on fire. All the pirates in the tavern fight were dead, the magic smoke made it so nobody saw them killing the captain, and the pirates from the ship thought they had been called by one of their people (who was now dead) to join a bar fight that had actually happened, never having seen any of the PCs' faces. Nothing connecting them to the dead pirates, a burned ship, a trashed tavern, they got their maps, the stole the pirates' gold, and they got a favor from the pirate queen. It was amazing.
    And nothing of that was planned, and I had actually very little to do during that session other than playing three pirates in a tavern fight and answering the player's questions. It was literally just sitting back and watching the players do their shenanigans, occasionally answering questions about the environment and how NPCs react to things.

    The final part of the campaign was the assault on the stronghold of the villain, and I really didn't enjoy that part at all. All these fights against monsters and guard did bore me, and it took so much preparation to do all the floor plans, and set up encounters, put together loot for the encounters, and so on. Actually running 10 or more monsters fighting the party at once also always meant I had to juggle a lot of things at once. It really wasn't fun at all. I also like to run campaigns in unique settings inhabited by their own creatures, and that can quickly become a pain in the ass when you have to make stats for them.

    I ran that campaign in D&D 5th edition, and it made me realize that by far the best parts of the campaign were when the rules didn't really come up much or at all, and the worst parts were the ones where we were doing the tactical combat game going from room to room. That really convinced me that I don't want to run games like that anymore. 5th edition was much easier to handle than 3rd edition was in my earlier campaigns, but it still really didn't feel worth it.
    These days I am really much more interested in PtbA games, where you don't have to bother with loot for every encounter and NPCs and monsters don't have stat blocks. And where you don't have to roll dice for the NPCs, because the players make one roll to determine if one or the other or both of them get hit on a combat turn. I don't want to play math-chess anymore. I want to run adventurous stories in which we consult dice to give us a simple answer if the players make progress or face a setback.
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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Honestly, my best games and characters have been mad lib. The more I plan and try to control things, the worse it goes. The more I plan just the high-level scenarios and worldbuild and let the details of the sessions happen "in the flow," the more I stick to a basic Personality/Bond/Ideal/Flaw/Background/high-level motivation for a character and let the rest come out in play, the better the characters end up being.

    As far as stat blocks, I generally just use "close enough" ones and don't worry about trying to push the bleeding edge of challenge. I care more that they fit the situation rather than are mechanically perfect.
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    Ettin in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    Once they were all running to the tavern, the players overwhelmed the three pirates that were left on the ship, grabbed the maps from the captain's cabin, took the chest with the pirates' treasure, and set the unmanned ship on fire.
    It's not a campaign until the PCs have set fire to something, ideally the tavern they first meet in.


    I have a working theory that most DMs fall at either end of a certain spectrum, and yes, this is a major generalisation, so take it in the spirit it's offered.

    At one extreme end of the spectrum lies the DM who wants to see events play out a certain way. He has a narrative that he likes in his own mind, and he believes - rightly or wrong, often wrongly - that the people he has around the table will like that narrative too, and accordingly his campaigns are filled with DMPCs and those crutches which are commonly called plot railroads. I suspect that most new DMs start somewhere close-ish to this end, because we're confronted with a literal book full of rules and accordingly only think we can maintain control if we confine the scenarios to the rules we know or can reasonably memorise. Few and far between are the modules we run which don't have a clear direction for their plot, even if the railroads do have some straw thrown over them. But if a DM stays down that end of the spectrum, that's where the complaints of the plot railroad originate. I suspect the "Strong Narrativeist" DMs lie somewhere down here too, though they generally will have learned how to hide the railroad. But the consequence of that is the need to prepare a lot more, since a narrative can't be kept on track without at least thinking through or making contingencies for the four meat puppets who make inconvenient suggestions like just walking up to Sour Ron's lair and then casting Earthquake on the place, as opposed to pursuing Princess Pea for the magic tattoo on one of her cheeks which will unlock the secret entrance to the back passage into Ron's lair. I believe - without judgment, we are all human beings with pocks in our personalities like blocks of Swiss cheese - that railroaders are just not comfortable with allowing players the consequences of their actions. Tolkien couldn't have allowed Frodo to just say "Know what, Sam, you're a fresh mind and strong minded enough to take the Ring and do an end-run to Mount Doom while I stay here, ambush Gollum and cut his throat, Gandalf be damned." That would have derailed the narrative ... and similarly, railroading DMs can't allow the plot to go off the rails. The most extreme, I guess, see PCs attempting to get off the railroad as hurtful, or insulting: Why are you trying to break the story? I made this beautiful story for you, why can't you just enjoy it? And so the DM lashes out with rocks falling, or sudden antimagic zones out of nowhere, and all the rest. The best cure for an accusation of railroading, I think, for both DM and players, is for that DM to let the players go off the railroad ... but also let the players absorb the consequences of doing so, i.e. about four fights into their tangential slaughtering of every orc in the woods, and after a few arrivals of the DMPC telling them that the sky is starting to get dark over at Castle Greyskull, said sky opens up, the Big Bad laughs in his victory, and the world ends.

    At the other end of the spectrum are those DMs who care precisely zero about the idea of beginning, middle, and end. The RPG is just a straight wish-fulfilment exercise and a series of combat encounters, where the joy is fighting the players themselves, the RPG as competition where the DM knows he can pull a rocks fall routine, but out of pride and because he wants to demonstrate his mastery of the rules, he doesn't. But also up this end of the spectrum are the DMs who have a very solid grasp of the rules, or what their friends who play want, or those who are not only comfortable with uncertainty but also believe that because life doesn't have a narrative, neither should the RPG. This approach has holes in it as well. And the other key distinction is that this type of DM wants to be surprised and entertained by his players. The railroad DM is entertained by watching his players bring the narrative he has designed to life; the 'improvisational' DM is entertained by seeing what weird and wonderful things the players do with his premise. Indeed I suspect the 'improvisational' DM is entertained by seeing if any narrative emerges from events as the players crash against his scenarios/premises.

    Again, to be clear I think all DMs fall somewhere along this spectrum, it's not an either-or. And for myself I do think I have a mixture of both: I love to see emergent story coming out of what the players do, but at the same time I am always having to push down that voice in my head which says 'Get them back on track, idiot, they'll suffocate from too many options being given to them! Trite as it sounds, I think you need a mix of both. Or at least work out whereabouts where you fall on the spectrum and try to remember your players may or may not be comfortable with that way of looking at the RPG.

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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Pleh View Post
    Likewise with the plot, which really is just the campaign map in the sense of time and events the way the map is about roadways and locations. I begin to feel my games would be superior if I was more careful to know and prepare (as a DM) only the parts of the adventure that would otherwise force me to stop the game and look something up. The monster? Set in stone so I have the statblock prepared before we sit down to play. The Plot Hook? Also set in stone, and probably vetted through the players at session zero to make sure they have characters that would even be interested in the adventure I've prepared. But beyond that, wouldn't it be far more fun to figure out what these characters do with the elements of the story if I hadn't tried to plan for the various possible endings they could find and achieve? It would also cut down on my prep time considerably if I only Set the Scene and don't worry about resolving it until we are at the table playing it out.
    Doesn't sound different from traditional sandbox gaming.

    But what if I Mad Libbed the character? He's got a structurally sound backstory, but since it isn't grounded in any particular character arc, however it comes into the campaign, I can fill in a blank and play the character that way. Instead of planning my character build several levels out, I choose each level based on what abilities my character would want to pursue based on what he felt he was missing, or what he felt was most helpful, in the adventure thus far. Play my character adapted to the game that occurs, not the game I was anticipating before session one started.
    That gets a lot easier when you don't use a class based system (where earlier decisions define the direction a character can take later) or one that relies heavily on preconditions to take certain character options later. Before i got to D&D, planning out character development several levels ahead was a foreign concept for me. If you can just take the options that make sense for you know without crippling your character for later, the need to do so goes away by itself.

    Never did the "planning character arc" thing either.

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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    I think railroading is a simple beginner's mistake. (And some GMs just never learn better.)
    People who first start running games are commonly under a false assumption that players enjoy enjoy acting out a great story. But they don't. Players enjoy creating a great story through their choices and deeds. For players, the difference is generally very hard to see because they don't know what things in the campaigns they play are results of their own actions or had been determined by the GM. Players can't see whether the GM has prepared a stage on which something unplanned is playing out, or put together a full scene that is now executed. And the way great adventures are comonly talked about, it's "The GM made this great story." But often it really is the GM having set up a great situation.

    I put the blame on the Dungeon Master's Guides. I think it's very probable that some 70%, 80%, or even 90% of all RPG sessions being played are Dungeons & Dragons in some form. This is the standard model for what an RPG is. And the DMGs are all completely useless when it comes to explaining or giving advice on how a GM can make good stories happen. Because I believe the D&D writers don't even understand this themselves.

    D&D started as a game of expandable and replaceable characters going into dungeons to steal the treasure guarded by the monsters and traps. I would say it was really a lot like fantast board games like Hero Quest or The Sorcerer's Cave. Characters carring over experience from one dungeon to the next is a major and critical difference that makes giving the player pieces a personality worthwhile. Which I see as the origin of roleplaying.

    The problem is that D&D has always stuck to keeping this dungeon crawling board game mechanics at the core of the system. Classes, levels, initative, and the principle that PCs and enemies make the same types of turns are legacies of the tactical combat game that are considered essential to its identity, and which it has alwayd stuck with for over 45 years.

    Dave Arneson struck gold with how his campaigns allowed players to give personalities to their game pieces. Absolutely no doubt about that. And since then people have always been fascinated by the idea how roleplaying could be used for games about big fantasy epics.
    The problem is thst the original base mechanics for stealing treasures from monsters is not really conductive for this new, greatly expanded narrative goal. I think in the vast majority of cases, peoplr who have come into D&D did not get pulled in by the promise of endlessly fighting monsters and deadly traps that lead to a constant replacement of new adventurers joining the group. They come to play in response to a promise of great fantasy stories with intriguing villains and a wide range of amazing places. And they come with the understanding that such stories are made happen through the rules of D&D. If it does not happen, then the GM did something wrong. But it is possible (so we often hear, though might never have seen) and we know D&D is the way to do it. So we simply must try harder and keep practicing to get better. I've been doing that myself for over 15 years until I started considering that this might not really be the case.
    What we do is hearing stories about how people in the past made great sculptures with a chissel, and we keep trying to draw paintings with a chissel because we never heared of a brush. We might have heard that there are other tools that some people swear on, but we've already practiced painting with a chissel for so long, and we know people have made great paintings with it in the past. (Though we've never seen them outselves.) Sometimes you do get something that looks and feels really great. But it's not because of the choice of tools, but despite the choice of tools. A great GM can make a great campaign happen even with non-optimal tools. But for the average GM, having the improper tools for the job makes it much more troublesome than it's worth it. You can make it so much easier for yourself by getting tools that help you with your goal instead of fighting you.

    When my D&D 5th edition campaign approached its end, I once again went to look at the DMG, and found that the game really doesn't think of itself as a dungeon crawler, but as an epic fantasy story game. But it still only supplies the tool to play dungeon crawls. The DMG doesn't even try to explain how to use the tools for a dungeon crawl to run a great dungeon crawl. It doesn't really explain how to run epic stories either, and I think the writters don't actually know themselves. They also believe that chissels are the right tools for painting.
    And with the massive market share that D&D still enjoys because it had a big head start, this myth keeps persisting to this day. Though I really don't know how to improve this. Telling people "you're doing it wrong" or "your game is stupid" doesn't lead to a positive response. I didn't believe it for 15 years and still thought D&D could be good enough for 5 more. "Hey, look at this great game that you might like even better" also doesn't work. Usually the response is "Thanks, but I am fine. I already got D&D which is exactly what I want. The GM just needs a bit more practice."
    I think the only way I've seen that people start changing their mind is when GMs go "Damn it, I just can't get this to work! I've been trying so hard for such a long time and it never comes out as I want it. Can anyone please tell me what I could do different?" That's when people become responsive to the idea of considering other RPGs.

    It's not actually only D&D. There are some other games that draw in people because of their unique setting premise that did quite well, like Shadowrun, Vampire, Call of Cthulhu, and Legends of the Five Rings. They offer something that D&D just doesn't. But I never heared of these games being mechanically good. Shadowrun is even famous for having a hilariously awful system, but fans don't care because they like the setting.
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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    I think railroading is a simple beginner's mistake. (And some GMs just never learn better.)
    To be fair to the railroaders (and who wouldn't want to be fair): it isn't all one way. Railroading is a catch-all insult any GM has to risk or expect when he rules, as the GM can and does and must, that subsequent rolls of the dice won't result in you being able to pick the lock, the lock has been jimmied with so much it's completely broken. It's an easy epithet to throw, and impossible to defend meaningfully without literally lifting the DM's screen and showing the players the horrors at hand if they keep deciding to push the unstoppable force against the immoveable object. I concede it exists, and there are whole product lines out of TSR itself that might as well be railroads (12 Dragonlance modules, I'm looking at you), but it isn't quite the deficit of a DM's personality as some players seem to think it is.

    And yeah, some of it is down to beginners' mistakes. Which most reasonably minded people should remember and forgive, because you don't learn anywhere near as much from your successes as you do your mistakes. And unfortunately a goodly portion of DMs, getting browbeaten with this fear of being labelled A WITCH! A RAILROADER! learn something sad: that a goodly portion of the D&D player community, more than any of us should be comfortable with, is made up of people who are not as smart as they think they are, and often jerks. And who wants to spend their hours of time and effort on a bunch of jerks?

    Anyway.

    I put the blame on the Dungeon Master's Guides. I think it's very probable that some 70%, 80%, or even 90% of all RPG sessions being played are Dungeons & Dragons in some form. This is the standard model for what an RPG is. And the DMGs are all completely useless when it comes to explaining or giving advice on how a GM can make good stories happen. Because I believe the D&D writers don't even understand this themselves.

    D&D started as a game of expandable and replaceable characters going into dungeons to steal the treasure guarded by the monsters and traps. I would say it was really a lot like fantast board games like Hero Quest or The Sorcerer's Cave. Characters carring over experience from one dungeon to the next is a major and critical difference that makes giving the player pieces a personality worthwhile. Which I see as the origin of roleplaying.

    The problem is that D&D has always stuck to keeping this dungeon crawling board game mechanics at the core of the system. Classes, levels, initative, and the principle that PCs and enemies make the same types of turns are legacies of the tactical combat game that are considered essential to its identity, and which it has alwayd stuck with for over 45 years.
    I agree with everything you said in this post otherwise, but I'd just add my cynicism as follows: the book writers have a conflict of interest.

    Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. However, a man who can fish for himself no longer has to buy any fish either; he can go and land the biggest damn salmon the world has ever seen all on his own, and the fishmonger goes bankrupt shortly thereafter.

    In this example, WOTC is a fishmonger, your average DM is the poor sap who wants to try some white meat for dinner tonight. The profit motive seems to dictate that there isn't any incentive to teach DMs how to do their jobs right, because if they did do that, all those modules and setting books and expansions of rules to mass combat and so on and and so on? No sales. End of story. It's almost as if ... the guys writing the books want to keep the players feeling like demigods, and keep the DMs disempowered and reliant on a stream of WOTC-authored modules to run anything approaching good. And that's before we get into the fact that the damn modules themselves are not even designed/written/presented with the DM who has to run them in mind. Problem is, this approach seems to me to be a bit like strip-mining: you can get a lot out of the field for a short while, maybe a few years, maybe a few decades ... but eventually, as your pool of DMs who actually run the thing are given less and less direction and run more and more rubbish games, people stop playing it. Tight rule systems with one update after another, expanding the system more and more, are not the cure: see the tabletop version of Star Fleet Battles, if you can still find one around anymore. Make it hard for your DMs, and your RPG withers. It may take D&D longer for that to happen, but happen it will eventually unless the writers and owners of the product figure this out for themselves: that, like it or not, some D&D consumers are more equal than others, and the more equal ones are the DMs, because like it or not, you can run a D&D game missing one player easily, but you can't run a D&D game missing one DM quite so easily.
    Last edited by Saintheart; 2020-10-19 at 11:25 AM.

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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    If we want to argue that railroading has become meaningless as a term because people use it to complain about any situation in which the GM judges that something doesn't work, then let's call it Script Conformity instead. Because that's what the term originally meant. The sequence of scenes for the adventure and their outcomes have already been predetermined without any input from the players. If players do anything that goes off that script, the GM either tells them that they can't do it, or immediately negates what the players did through GM fiat. (Getting everything back on track.)

    It's not the fault of new GMs (and some old GMs) when they do it. But it's still a mistake. It's a misconception that arises from the way people talk about stories in roleplaying games. I am always very weary of using the word story at all when talking about campaigns and usually use the term "developing story" when talking about it. But you see it all the time that people say "We had this great campaign and the GM had this amazing story for us." It also doesn't help that we use the term RPG both for dice games with GMs and for videogames with character stats. One is a (potentially) open ended group activity, the other a completely scripted single player experience. And in many cases computer RPGs tell their stories almost entirely in cutscenes, which is actually watching a movie. Even when the player can chose dialog option, you're only choosing which variant of a cutscene you want to watch.

    When you start as a GM, these are usually your main and only references for what "story" in a campaign might be. It's not anyone's fault to believe that, but it's still wrong.
    (Of course you can still have campaigns in which the GM reads a story and you play out the many, many fight scenes in which you can't really lose because the script says you win. But that's not the experience that Roleplaying Games promise to player.)

    That thought that WotC deliberately makes inferior products as a business strategy is much more malicious than anything I would have considered.
    Not saying it's impossible, though. From what I heard their company culture is sounding a bit sketchy, but I always assumed they just don't know any better.
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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
    Doesn't sound different from traditional sandbox gaming.
    I mean, I guess so. I think the reason I never looked at it that way is Sandbox makes me think big and expansive. The Scene Being Set is campaign scale and the players are playing Witcher 3 on tabletop.

    What I was talking about in my first post was much more focused. Not setting *the whole world* as a scene, but using the same methods on a much smaller scale. The world is basically a cardboard backdrop to the tavern, where the actual sandbox is.

    It's a much smaller sandbox, and it follows the path of the adventure, rather than filling the world with sand.

    I guess more like a sand trench.

    In my mind, a True Sandbox is more than just Mad Lib narrative. Imagine a Choose Your Adventure book that also used Mad Lib blank filling. In my mind, it adds the extra layer of having filled the book with branching paths to choose from.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    The problem is that D&D has always stuck to keeping this dungeon crawling board game mechanics at the core of the system. Classes, levels, initative, and the principle that PCs and enemies make the same types of turns are legacies of the tactical combat game that are considered essential to its identity, and which it has alwayd stuck with for over 45 years.
    I actually don't have a problem with this. Pulp fiction tends to take every dramatic beat and reduce it to fantasy combat action. It's like going into an ice cream shop and complaining about all the sugar in every product they sell. To some extent, resolving dramatic tension with wargame combat kind of seems appropriate to the games I look to play.

    It reminds me that I see a lot of criticism that D&D isn't any good at anything other than combat, but I'm not sure this is a sensible criticism. It always seemed clear to me it wasn't *trying* to be anything else. Or more to the point, it actively encouraged players to fill that part in themselves.

    You draw the maps. You set up the NPC motives and political intrigue.

    It feels like critquing a blank canvas for not being a paint by numbers.
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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    I had been thinking like that for a long time. You don't really need rules for verbal sparring, or use bluff attacks against a king until he runs out of persuasion hit points. That's stuff that absolutely can be left out of the rules completely or be reduced to "make a Persuasion roll".

    My problem isn't with what D&D does not have, but with the things it does. It's not like there is a blank canvas, but a canvas that is already completely painted blue. I can draw some purple and green on it, but that's the limit of my options. Which is not a problem if I want to paint only on blue, purple, and green. But lots of people try doing things in yellow, red, and orange and get frustrated that it always turns out purple and green.

    It's not so much an issue with the old TSR games, as their classes are generally very light on class features. But it's a big problem in the WotC editions for me. In my campaigns over the years, I've been aiming to have players level up their characters about every four play sessions, and I've heard from many people that they consider this relatively slow. Now imagine you're in a campaign where characters get new cool combat abilities every three or four sessions, but there's only one fight per session on average, many of them taking place in circumstances where not all special attacks make sense or are applicable. Players end up with lots of cool sounding abilities that they have been looking forward to, and then never get an opportunity to actually use them. Some GMs might shrug it off, but I always felt compelled to brute force more fights into my 5th edition campaign so that the players can use all the new toys they are getting.

    5th edition in particular seems to be designed in a way (or at least implies that it is), that encounters become challenging on the grounds of players draining their resources over several encounters. If you make an single encounter that will properly drain on the party's resources all at once, it will hit so hard that the PCs run out of hit points long before they run out of anything else, like healing abilities, spells, and potions. If you set up encounters so that they are survivable, having only two or three of them becomes trivial. I was never able to figure out how to make the party reach its limits without having them go through six or eight encounters that are all rather unexciting in themselves. And the players in my group, who all have more experience with the game than I do, and most of which are GMs themselves, also had no suggestions in that regard, seeing it as a shortcoming that just is part of the deal when playing D&D.
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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    I think railroading is a simple beginner's mistake. (And some GMs just never learn better.)
    People who first start running games are commonly under a false assumption that players enjoy enjoy acting out a great story. But they don't. Players enjoy creating a great story through their choices and deeds. For players, the difference is generally very hard to see because they don't know what things in the campaigns they play are results of their own actions or had been determined by the GM. Players can't see whether the GM has prepared a stage on which something unplanned is playing out, or put together a full scene that is now executed. And the way great adventures are comonly talked about, it's "The GM made this great story." But often it really is the GM having set up a great situation.
    It's not a beginners mistake. A lot of experienced DMs do it intentionally. Because they think players can't see through their illusionism, and they've been sold on the idea that it's a good thing, an effective time saving and narrative device.

    But players can see it. They're not dunces. Like fudging, eventually it comes out. And then you have a train wreck.

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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
    I had been thinking like that for a long time. You don't really need rules for verbal sparring, or use bluff attacks against a king until he runs out of persuasion hit points. That's stuff that absolutely can be left out of the rules completely or be reduced to "make a Persuasion roll".
    I don't disagree, but I think there's nuances. It's the problem of the separation between the player and his character, and it's baked into the very concept of a RPG.

    Say your character has a Jump check of, I dunno, +25 or something. The party comes to a 10 foot wide ravine. If the DM required you to taking a running jump to see if you, personally, as a human being, can clear a 10 foot distance before advising you whether your use of the Jump skill succeeded or not, I doubt that DM would have a quorum of players next week (and would likely be told by the players to take a running jump himself). You're not your character.

    And yet I suspect it's pretty common for a DM to wipe out Persuasion or Bluff checks because when the player is asked what his character says to the guard, the player stutters through some sort of response -- upon which the DM says the attempt at persuading the guy has failed. The problem being that the player, who is perhaps an introverted person, has designed his character to be mathematically outgoing and charming guy - you know, everything he feels (rightly or wrongly) that he is not. This player accordingly finds his +20 to Bluff means precisely nothing. The DM - again, rightly or wrongly - conflates playacting with persuasiveness, he is perfectly fine with deeming the player to be the character, even if the character mathematically has all the indicators of his tongue having an atomic number of 47 and a Charisma score that inspires the desire to mate in every other member of his species (male or female).

    I'm not sure that there is a completely satisfactory solution to any of this. Reduce it down to a Persuasion roll, and behold the reign of the Diplomancer. Leave it out of the rules completely, and someone who wants to play a charming character that he certainly is not is also going to have a hard time being the party face.

    The Angry GM tries to get around this problem by redefining social encounters: the conversation between the player and the NPC contains the indications about whether the person can be persuaded, the player can give an indication about the type of approach he's taking - blackmail, fellow-feeling, flattery, intimidation. The DM then decides for himself whether that approach can succeed with this individual, and then calls for the appropriate roll, which just represents everything not in the actual conversation or anything else that might be affecting the success of the request. It's a neat dodge, but I'm also not quite convinced of it, although I can't quite work out why.

    The other way, of course, is the verbal combat system. I love Green Ronin's A Song of Ice and Fire Intrigue rules on this if only because they just seem to match up with the setting and its emphasis on power, deals, betrayal, reputation, and so forth ... but it's also ludicrously easy to break that system if you optimise in that direction, which is why I don't necessarily recommend it for others. And verbal combat systems ultimately are still abstracting what should feel human and more, I dunno, roleplay-y.

    To be honest, maybe just removing all Persuasion and Bluff skills from the game is the simplest. It's not a tidy or really elegant way of dealing with the problem -- sort of like scratching out the background around the Mona Lisa -- but it's one way to do it. As said, I'm actually not sure if there is an answer.

    5th edition in particular seems to be designed in a way (or at least implies that it is), that encounters become challenging on the grounds of players draining their resources over several encounters. If you make an single encounter that will properly drain on the party's resources all at once, it will hit so hard that the PCs run out of hit points long before they run out of anything else, like healing abilities, spells, and potions. If you set up encounters so that they are survivable, having only two or three of them becomes trivial. I was never able to figure out how to make the party reach its limits without having them go through six or eight encounters that are all rather unexciting in themselves. And the players in my group, who all have more experience with the game than I do, and most of which are GMs themselves, also had no suggestions in that regard, seeing it as a shortcoming that just is part of the deal when playing D&D.
    Yeah, on that one I'd say you really are fighting uphill against the system itself, because D&D at least from 3.0 on is basically built on attrition. And it's hard to throw that many combat encounters at the party without them being trivial or just plain boring. I have even tried building an autoresolve function for random encounters in 3.5/PF to try and strike a balance in that regard, but the dominant review from people seems to be that it's too lethal ... notwithstanding that I included rules saying that death can be cheated by layout of a big quantity of a player's resources.

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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Saintheart View Post
    The Angry GM tries to get around this problem by redefining social encounters: the conversation between the player and the NPC contains the indications about whether the person can be persuaded, the player can give an indication about the type of approach he's taking - blackmail, fellow-feeling, flattery, intimidation. The DM then decides for himself whether that approach can succeed with this individual, and then calls for the appropriate roll, which just represents everything not in the actual conversation or anything else that might be affecting the success of the request. It's a neat dodge, but I'm also not quite convinced of it, although I can't quite work out why.
    Honestly, that's pretty much how I do it. And it works really really well.

    I determine what the NPC's attitude is at the start (Friendly|indifferent|hostile).

    The player indicates (whether directly in exact wording or not):
    1. Intent--what does he want the other person to do (including "improve attitude"). The more specific, the better.
    2. Approach--How are they doing it. This could be exact wording, but often isn't.
    3. Any other parameters that depend on the approach (what tac are they using for a Persuasion, how much are they willing to bribe, what are they threatening with).

    This all happens in a conversation, both in and out of character. If I'm not sure what they're trying, I'll ask questions.

    Once they've talked and we've figured out what the roll really means, I decide
    a) is this doable at all. Some NPCs won't respond to certain approaches. Some prizes can't be won. Social skills aren't mind control.
    b) Is this trivial. No need for a check to buy something at the asking price. If you tell the king exactly what he wants to hear and ask him for something he's already willing to do, no roll.

    If neither of those apply, then it's a CHA (approach skill) roll. DCs as set by the DMG, based on how much risk or sacrifice is required to accomplish the requested task.

    The roll represents all the uncertain details. How much is he paying attention to you. Did you say something that, unknown to you, annoys them. Did you hit a buried landmine. etc.

    All of these things represent elements outside the PC's control--the PCs almost always do their best (almost thrown in there because sometimes they don't, but it's rare). Failure on a roll represents outside factors, because the roll itself represents the influence of chance and uncertain, unpredictable factors. It doesn't represent how much you tried, but the effects of things you can't control. If you can control everything, no need to roll.
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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    ^^^

    I don't doubt it works and I'm really glad it does. Like I said, whatever the unease I have with it, it's nothing I can put my finger on or point at as wrong. Maybe it's nothing more than that, to me, social encounters shouldn't really be this unique and separate area of the game requiring a different approach than other skill-based attempts to do stuff. But then maybe it is no different - I know Angry calls this an extension of his rule of thumb for skill checks that you first work out as precisely as you can what the player's doing and then decide whether a roll is called for at all. Still. I just can't shake the splinter in my mind about the idea.

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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Saintheart View Post
    ^^^

    I don't doubt it works and I'm really glad it does. Like I said, whatever the unease I have with it, it's nothing I can put my finger on or point at as wrong. Maybe it's nothing more than that, to me, social encounters shouldn't really be this unique and separate area of the game requiring a different approach than other skill-based attempts to do stuff. But then maybe it is no different - I know Angry calls this an extension of his rule of thumb for skill checks that you first work out as precisely as you can what the player's doing and then decide whether a roll is called for at all. Still. I just can't shake the splinter in my mind about the idea.
    It isn't different. You should be using the exact same for any check. Intent and Approach go in based on player telling you how and what they are doing, and Outcomes and Consequences come out based on GM decision and possibly a check. The possibility space of the latter depend on the former.

    Here's the article on it, and it covers social as well. He just elaborated later because of some reason folks seem to think it should be different.

    https://theangrygm.com/adjudicate-actions-like-a-boss/

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    Default Re: Theory: D&D as Mad Lib Narrative

    Quote Originally Posted by Saintheart View Post
    Say your character has a Jump check of, I dunno, +25 or something. The party comes to a 10 foot wide ravine. If the DM required you to taking a running jump to see if you, personally, as a human being, can clear a 10 foot distance before advising you whether your use of the Jump skill succeeded or not, I doubt that DM would have a quorum of players next week (and would likely be told by the players to take a running jump himself). You're not your character.

    And yet I suspect it's pretty common for a DM to wipe out Persuasion or Bluff checks because when the player is asked what his character says to the guard, the player stutters through some sort of response -- upon which the DM says the attempt at persuading the guy has failed. The problem being that the player, who is perhaps an introverted person, has designed his character to be mathematically outgoing and charming guy - you know, everything he feels (rightly or wrongly) that he is not. This player accordingly finds his +20 to Bluff means precisely nothing. The DM - again, rightly or wrongly - conflates playacting with persuasiveness, he is perfectly fine with deeming the player to be the character, even if the character mathematically has all the indicators of his tongue having an atomic number of 47 and a Charisma score that inspires the desire to mate in every other member of his species (male or female).
    That's the classic strawman/misunderstanding that always get brought up in such discussions. No one (maybe a few?) requires the player to be as charismatic as their character, by playacting it out. All that is required is for the player to provide an approach, an argument or tactic, that has a chance of succeeding. The player can just say that the character lies about [specific thing], threatens to [do something specific], try to persuade the NPC by appealing to [something specific they care about], without having to act it out. Then the GM decides if that can work or not, and if having to roll that +20 to Bluff comes in.

    There are inherent differences in the exampes of jumping and social interaction. When you say your character jumps, it is quite obvious how in the fiction they are going to try to do that, you rarely need to be more specific to get everyone on the same page. And for social interaction, playacting it out is optional, but choosing to do so may be a good way to define the approach the character is taking in the fiction, what their specific argument is and so on. It's about getting on the same page in the fiction, and the two situations have different needs of specificity and different options for how to get there.

    The alternatives if the players just want to roll for the social interaction skills without decribing an approach, is either to leave it abstract and never define what happens in the fiction, or have the GM or other players define it for them. Both are not satisfying to me personally. I want to know what happens in the fiction, and as a GM and player I want to see what the other people can bring to the table and not play the game for them.

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