Maybe it's "Authored" vs. "Emergent"

[BRC]

I'm going to repeat some definitions from the other thread that I came up with here as far as discussing scale. I can dig up the original, longer post, but in short:

Supermacro, Macro, Micro, and Supermicro

Supermacro: Details of the setting, and basic premise of the campaign (This campaign is about working for the King to find the Macguffin and stop the Demon King from Reawakening).

Macro: What we would consider the "Plot" of the campaign.

Micro: The Events and outcome of a given session.

Supermicro: The events and outcome of a specific scene.


So, if a game is "Authored" at the Macro level, that means that the PC's arrive at Ancient Ruins Island and need to recover the Tablet of Plot Advancement, because "Get the Tablet of Plot Advancement" is the next step of the authored plot.
In an Emergent Macro game, the same thing might be happening. It can be hard to nail down exactly where the line is, since big sweeping plot stuff like "Get the Macguffin" can come about pretty organically, if the GM presents a Problem to solve and a Macguffin that solves it, "The PC's go to get the Macguffin" can occur in both Emergent and Authored play.


That said, I think that part of the reason these discussions fall apart is because beyond talks of spectrums, there's a certain degree of Depth that can vary wildly.

Thinking about this quote from the OP

But fans of emergent games want different things - they want their decisions to matter. They want the game to take on a different shape than it would have if they had made other choices. They want to be able to solve the problems their own way. They want to do things that the GM didn't plan for, and they want to make that take the "story"/game in a way that the GM could not have predicted.

What does it mean for your choices to Matter.
Considering the following statements.

A) The PC's travel to Ancient Ruins Island
B) The PC's recover the Tablet of Plot Advancement
C) The PC's take the Tablet of Plot Advancement to the Gates of Doom
D) The PC's use the Tablet to perform the Rite of Sealing and close the Gates of Doom Forever.

The general impression is that if the above statements are all guaranteed to be true, then the game is Railroaded/Linear/Authored, and PC choices Don't Matter, except that if they fail, the plot stops and the game ends.


However, this clashes with a lot of people's experiences, where they are locked into a pre-written plot (Like in a Module), But they feel like they do get to make meaningful choices that matter.

This is because discussions like this rarely touch on the Depth of agency, instead focusing simply on "How many plot points are pre-written".

For example, imagine that, on Ancient Ruins Island, the PC's encounter a group of Immortal Lizardfolk who protect the Tablet. If the PC's fight their way through the Lizardfolk, they arrive at the Gates of Doom alone.

If they befriend the Lizardfolk and convince them to help, they arrive at the Gates of Doom at the head of an army of dinosaur-riding warriors.

This results in two dramatically different experiences, some might even call them different stories, based on the PC's choices and actions. In one, the final sequence at the Gates of Doom is a commando raid, as a small band of Heroes try to get in and do the Rite of Sealing before the forces of darkness know what's going on. In the other, it's a massive epic battle where victory means defeating the Forces of Darkness on the field so that the Rite can be completed.


And so when people say "I want to play a game where my choices Matter, and in an Authored Game they don't, because it's all prewritten" that clashes with other people's experience. Because for other players, a prewritten macro-level plot is kind of secondary to the rich, emergent experience going on at the Micro level. The decision to befriend the Lizardfolk is very much a meaningful choice that dramatically changes the experience of the game.


The key with my system above is that the actual Game is experienced at the Supermicro level, scene-by-scene, but discussions of railroading usually concern themselves with the Macro level, and discussions can quickly devolve into the idea that anything happening below the Macro level doesn't matter. That the actual content of the sessions is a minor detail, and so long as the major plot points are intact, you're not really exercising Agency. And so a statement like "I want my choices to Matter" still raises a lot of questions. Matter to who? To you, the player playing the game, or to somebody you're describing the game to in an elevator three months from now.


Edit:


There are a few other things that come to mind.

1) Player Driven vs PC Driven, or Choice vs Consequences.

If the Players say "We want to fight a Dragon" so the DM has a Dragon attack the town, then the Players got to control the story, but it wasn't really Emergent. Similarly, if the PC's decide to pick up some extra gold by robbing a random caravan, only to learn later that the Caravan belonged to a Dragon, and now the Dragon is attacking them, that's an "Emergent" story, but it wasn't necessarily the player's CHOICE to start a fight with a Dragon.


2) GM Created vs Pre-Written.

If the Players and PC's decide to deal with their Dragon Problem by forging a Dragonslaying Sword, and the GM responds by building a quest to get the materials, is that "Authored" or "Emergent". The PCs/Players were the impetus for forging the sword, but what they need to do to achieve that goal comes from the GM, unless there were pre-existing rules for forging a dragonslaying sword, and the relevant materials were already lying around where the PC's could get at them.

And, if you say "The PC's can only do things that the rules explicitly allow given details already provided", isn't that more limiting than letting them say "We would like to forge a dragonslaying Sword" and letting the GM work out what it takes to do that?


Edit 2) Rereading my above, it comes across as a little harsh to people who do demand macro-level emergent stories. There's nothing wrong with that.


But it's important to know what, specifically, you want, and be able to put that into words. If your definition is just "I want my choices to Matter", you're saying "Any agency at a level below this Does Not Matter", which is somewhat insulting to people who revel in the agency found at lower-levels. Tell my hypothetical party above that their choice to befriend the Lizardfolk didn't Matter simply because they left the island with the tablet.

[Composer99]

Personally, I'm inclined to say that the point of "emergent" gameplay is to play to find out what happens next, because you don't really know. (I shan't credit myself with "playing to find out what happens next" as a term of art - IIRC it's a guiding principle for PbtA games.)

Spoiler: Example

Show

You could run, say, Tyranny of Dragons in this style. Say, you set a timeline of 300 days from the start of the clock (the PCs stumble on the attack on Greenest) to when Tiamat is summoned, and then let the PCs decide things such as whether they're going to oppose the cult, fall in with it, or skedaddle ("I hear Chult is lovely this time of dragon-infested Sword Coast!") (*), or even switch from one course to another or come up with something not included in these options. How is that all going to fall out? Who knows?

All you know is that 300 days from now, Tiamat is summoned bodily to the world. You don't even know for sure if that will result in victory for her and the chromatic dragons, because you don't know what the game world state will be like then. That seems pretty emergent to me, even if there is an event in the future game state that is, strictly speaking, not an emergent consequence of gameplay up to that point.

To add to the emergent nature, you can - and if you wanted to run this campaign in this style, ought to - also add conditions to the 300-day timeline. Tiamat arrives in 300 days provided certain conditions are met, giving the PCs a chance to delay or derail the summoning. (Technically, the adventure as written does offer this sort of possibility, albeit only in a very last-minute sort of way.)

That makes things even more emergent, because even the central event on which the campaign is predicated becomes an emergent consequence of how the PCs choose to engage with the content. It is not a "this thing happens no matter what" event, it is now a pre-player-character status quo - "this thing happens unless and until the PCs meddle, and then maybe it does or maybe it doesn't, it depends on how the PC actions shake out".

(*) Personally, if I as DM proposed to run Tyranny of Dragons and the players agreed to play it, even with a more "emergent" form of gameplay - or worse yet, one or more players asked me to run it and I agreed - I'd be annoyed if the players then decided not to engage with the adventure content they agreed to play. But other DMs are more sanguine about such possibility; well and good.

Riffing off of BRC's post about scales, this "playing to find out what happens next" can happen at any scale of the game - including happening at some scales but not at others.

With that in mind, to my mind:
(1) "Authored" content, in the sense that kyoryu seems to mean the term, would be content where at some level or another you aren't playing to find out what's going to happen next because that's already been decided, using the above definition of emergent gameplay.
(2) Railroading as a name for a GMing misdemeanour (as opposed to railroading as a synonym for "linear styles of adventure") happens specifically when the GM/DM has already decided what's going to happen with respect to player action at a given scale of the game (meaning no one is going to play to find out what happens next at that scale) and the players are led to believe otherwise.
(3) Player agency in the context of emergent gameplay/authored content/railroading is specifically the players' ability to change the future state of the game at a given scale by virtue of their decisions and actions.
(4) Playing to find out what happens next allows for both prep-heavy (classic old-school hexcrawl/dungeoncrawl) and prep-light systems and GM/DM styles, because the initial conditions of a setting or campaign do not dictate what happens next once the player characters drop on it like the proverbial wrecking ball.

[kyoryu]

And why boiling it down to binaries/dichotomies doesn't work for me--there's a huge variety (not spectrum, it's neither linear nor continuous nor one-dimensional) of desires here. Each one's going to be a negotiation.

It's only one of multiple differences between games, but I do think it's an important one. For many people, it is a strong predictor of whether or not they'll enjoy the game.

Well, but they are certainly not. If a spectrum exists, there is not only a middle, there also recognized extremes. So i don't see why that would deny purely emergent games at all. Or require that someone who likes one of the extremes must also like the things in the middle because those share some aspects.

But when you tell other people that there is no spectrum, that all games are either emergent or authored with no middle ground, you are telling other people that the games they play don't really exist. Or that they don't really understand their own games and thus classify them wrong (assuming that they just don't know enough games for contrast). It is pretty much the same condescending attitude that annoys yourself and also arises all the time from adherents of roleplaying theory constructs whenever something doesn't fit. It certainly won't do you any good.

I've acknowledged that authored games can have some level of freedom.

I think a good analogy is phase transitions in water. Above freezing, but below boiling, water is a liquid. Below freezing, it is a solid. That's mostly binary - excepting water that happens to be exactly 32 degrees that contains a mixture of the two, but certainly on a molecular level it's binary.

But that doesn't mean that all water is either "hot" at just under boiling or "cold" at some ridiculous level of cold. But it does mean that at a certain point, its nature changes in a fundamental way. In other words, the temperature can be a spectrum while the state of water is not.

That also doesn't mean that all "ice" is alike or all "water" is alike. Ice can be in various forms - icicles, cubes, snow, crushed ice, ice slicks, etc. Water can be pools, droplets, spray, mist, etc.

My, how insistent you are that battle lines must be drawn between two sides. Maybe there are more than two sides in this whole thing.
As to your opening gambit, that isn't how it necessarily starts and I am not sure that making the artificial distinction, the line in the sand, is helpful given all of the baggage that has accrued to the conversation in the past two decades.

And yet I'm sitting here saying "this isn't theoretical. THere are things I can point to in games that strongly impact my enjoyment of said games, and this is one of the big ones."

I've offered some high level differences that are fairly binary - does the GM plan out specific encounters, especially in a series or slightly branching structure, or do they not? If two groups go through the same content, will they more-or-less do the same things, or will the "stories" of the game be wildly different? After a scene, is the group free to decide what the next scene is, or are they effectively limited to pre-generated choices?

I can assure you these differences are not "artificial" to me. They matter a great deal to me and my enjoyment of games. Maybe they don't to you, or maybe you don't see the differences for some reason, or maybe you've got some interest in claiming there isn't a difference for some reason. I dunno. But they are absolutely real to me (and many others, as evidenced by the number of people talking about them for decades)

(Thank you, Forge, for all that).

Ugh. If you ever think I am repeating Forge theory, you are 100% wrong. GNS is an abomination.

You may be counting the hits and ignoring the misses. Are we wandering into a no true game, or a no true gamer, position here?

Not at all. RPGs are a big hobby, with lots of different experiences in them. Nobody has had all of them - we all have things in the hobby we haven't experienced.

Story time - before I played narrative games, i was vehemently against them (coming from more of a world-sim approach). On this very forum, I claimed that they were "roll to see how awesome you are" games where victory was assured. Somebody corrected me by telling me about a game he had run where, though the players ultimately won, the cost was incredibly dear. Because of this, I went and tried a bunch of narrative games to see what they were about and how they worked.

That was a blind spot I had in my experience. I'm not saying I "wasn't a gamer" then, or am somehow "more of a gamer" now. I have a different set of experiences now, but that's it.

"Authored" games are the majority of the hobby these days, especially within D&D-like games. Suggesting that's been somebody's primary play experience isn't insulting at all, nor claiming they're less of a gamer. And I'm not even necessarily saying that's you. But one explanation for not seeing a difference between "ice" and "water" is that someone hasn't seen ice. So to them, it is just a spectrum, because they haven't encountered things on the other side of that phase transition - it's all just hot water and cold water to them. Why do I feel comfortable saying this? Because there are people that insist that you have to have a linear game with low agency to have a story. That's simply not correct (I've done it) so I can only assume that those are the only two ways they know to run games.

I've still never played a diceless game. I've never played something less procedural, like Hillfolk or other story system games. I've never played a game like Ten Candles. I have no idea how these games change the experience, and it's entirely likely I make assumptions about what RPGs are and are not that would be challenged by any of these. That also doesn't make me less of a gamer. Nor does it mean someone that's done these things is "better" or "more of a gamer" than me - undoubtedly I have experiences they don't have either.

The level of immersion that any player prefers varies with that player. I like immersion more than some of the people I play with, but I still play with them.

I'm not sure why this is relevant?

Also, I know many immersion-first players that absolutely reject games that offer "meta" narrative abilities. So even that, while subjective, is an important difference and one that can absolutely impact enjoyment of a game.

It seems to me that like the infamous railroad / sandbox dichotomy, you are attempting to make a distinction that does not necessarily exist, except at an esoteric level.

And yet I sit here and tell you it absolutely exists to me. I can absolutely point to games that are on either side of the divide, and the vast majority of games fall squarely on one side or the other.

[Dragonus45]

Railroad and sandbox are metaphors. What do we gain by replacing them with more explicit terms like authored and emergent? The meaning is the same, either way. Now we're just having a discussion over semantics.

I have found that people have started using the term Railroaded really aggressively any time I see a DM talk about having any kind of structure to a game. Having a less loaded term with less negative connotations adds space to talk about a game with structure without the negativity.

[kyoryu]

I have found that people have started using the term Railroaded really aggressively any time I see a DM talk about having any kind of structure to a game. Having a less loaded term with less negative connotations adds space to talk about a game with structure without the negativity.

Linear/authored/whatever games get a bad rap. They're super common, and lots of people like them. There's no reason for them to have a negative connotation. There's tons of things they do better than more sandbox/emergent/open games - mostly in allowing the GM to really go to town on preparing cool and unique encounters/NPCs/etc.

[Xervous]

Linear/authored/whatever games get a bad rap. They're super common, and lots of people like them. There's no reason for them to have a negative connotation. There's tons of things they do better than more sandbox/emergent/open games - mostly in allowing the GM to really go to town on preparing cool and unique encounters/NPCs/etc.

The main gripes I’ve seen here are ones I share. Tell me what you’re cooking with, some ingredients disagree with me something fierce. Caffeine isn’t bad, it just doesn’t end well for me. Same deal with certain styles and systems.

The main issue here appears to be the overlap of various definitions for a few common words.

[Thrudd]

I'm going to repeat some definitions from the other thread that I came up with here as far as discussing scale. I can dig up the original, longer post, but in short:

Supermacro, Macro, Micro, and Supermicro

Supermacro: Details of the setting, and basic premise of the campaign (This campaign is about working for the King to find the Macguffin and stop the Demon King from Reawakening).

Macro: What we would consider the "Plot" of the campaign.

Micro: The Events and outcome of a given session.

Supermicro: The events and outcome of a specific scene.


So, if a game is "Authored" at the Macro level, that means that the PC's arrive at Ancient Ruins Island and need to recover the Tablet of Plot Advancement, because "Get the Tablet of Plot Advancement" is the next step of the authored plot.
In an Emergent Macro game, the same thing might be happening. It can be hard to nail down exactly where the line is, since big sweeping plot stuff like "Get the Macguffin" can come about pretty organically, if the GM presents a Problem to solve and a Macguffin that solves it, "The PC's go to get the Macguffin" can occur in both Emergent and Authored play.


That said, I think that part of the reason these discussions fall apart is because beyond talks of spectrums, there's a certain degree of Depth that can vary wildly.

Thinking about this quote from the OP



What does it mean for your choices to Matter.
Considering the following statements.

A) The PC's travel to Ancient Ruins Island
B) The PC's recover the Tablet of Plot Advancement
C) The PC's take the Tablet of Plot Advancement to the Gates of Doom
D) The PC's use the Tablet to perform the Rite of Sealing and close the Gates of Doom Forever.

The general impression is that if the above statements are all guaranteed to be true, then the game is Railroaded/Linear/Authored, and PC choices Don't Matter, except that if they fail, the plot stops and the game ends.


However, this clashes with a lot of people's experiences, where they are locked into a pre-written plot (Like in a Module), But they feel like they do get to make meaningful choices that matter.

This is because discussions like this rarely touch on the Depth of agency, instead focusing simply on "How many plot points are pre-written".

For example, imagine that, on Ancient Ruins Island, the PC's encounter a group of Immortal Lizardfolk who protect the Tablet. If the PC's fight their way through the Lizardfolk, they arrive at the Gates of Doom alone.

If they befriend the Lizardfolk and convince them to help, they arrive at the Gates of Doom at the head of an army of dinosaur-riding warriors.

This results in two dramatically different experiences, some might even call them different stories, based on the PC's choices and actions. In one, the final sequence at the Gates of Doom is a commando raid, as a small band of Heroes try to get in and do the Rite of Sealing before the forces of darkness know what's going on. In the other, it's a massive epic battle where victory means defeating the Forces of Darkness on the field so that the Rite can be completed.


And so when people say "I want to play a game where my choices Matter, and in an Authored Game they don't, because it's all prewritten" that clashes with other people's experience. Because for other players, a prewritten macro-level plot is kind of secondary to the rich, emergent experience going on at the Micro level. The decision to befriend the Lizardfolk is very much a meaningful choice that dramatically changes the experience of the game.


The key with my system above is that the actual Game is experienced at the Supermicro level, scene-by-scene, but discussions of railroading usually concern themselves with the Macro level, and discussions can quickly devolve into the idea that anything happening below the Macro level doesn't matter. That the actual content of the sessions is a minor detail, and so long as the major plot points are intact, you're not really exercising Agency. And so a statement like "I want my choices to Matter" still raises a lot of questions. Matter to who? To you, the player playing the game, or to somebody you're describing the game to in an elevator three months from now.


Edit:


There are a few other things that come to mind.

1) Player Driven vs PC Driven, or Choice vs Consequences.

If the Players say "We want to fight a Dragon" so the DM has a Dragon attack the town, then the Players got to control the story, but it wasn't really Emergent. Similarly, if the PC's decide to pick up some extra gold by robbing a random caravan, only to learn later that the Caravan belonged to a Dragon, and now the Dragon is attacking them, that's an "Emergent" story, but it wasn't necessarily the player's CHOICE to start a fight with a Dragon.


2) GM Created vs Pre-Written.

If the Players and PC's decide to deal with their Dragon Problem by forging a Dragonslaying Sword, and the GM responds by building a quest to get the materials, is that "Authored" or "Emergent". The PCs/Players were the impetus for forging the sword, but what they need to do to achieve that goal comes from the GM, unless there were pre-existing rules for forging a dragonslaying sword, and the relevant materials were already lying around where the PC's could get at them.

And, if you say "The PC's can only do things that the rules explicitly allow given details already provided", isn't that more limiting than letting them say "We would like to forge a dragonslaying Sword" and letting the GM work out what it takes to do that?


Edit 2) Rereading my above, it comes across as a little harsh to people who do demand macro-level emergent stories. There's nothing wrong with that.


But it's important to know what, specifically, you want, and be able to put that into words. If your definition is just "I want my choices to Matter", you're saying "Any agency at a level below this Does Not Matter", which is somewhat insulting to people who revel in the agency found at lower-levels. Tell my hypothetical party above that their choice to befriend the Lizardfolk didn't Matter simply because they left the island with the tablet.

All very excellent observations, showing how this isn't so straightforward.

not addressed specifically at anyone:

I think what really prompts these discussions, apart from the desire to analyze and classify things purely for the sake of doing so, is player complaints. If someone's players are complaining, it is worthwhile to figure out why and to address their concerns, if possible. Trying to define "railroading" and "player agency", and to create other similar metrics, are really attempts to define whatever it is we think are good/acceptable and bad gaming practices, and establish a shorthand for having discussions about how to be a better GM and address player concerns. It is also useful to prompt self-reflection and really probe what it is each of us want and expect from an RPG, as players and GMs, regardless of what conclusions we reach.

An accusation of "railroading", whether justified or not, is a complaint that indicates the players are unsatisfied with some element of the game. It can only be beneficial to figure out what it is they are really complaining about, and try to address their concerns. Maybe this means explaining your philosophy and methods about how you run the game, so that they no longer expect things to be different. Maybe, if you find out everyone really dislikes aspects of how you have been running things, you try to change things up to work better for your group. Maybe there aren't a lot of complaints, but if you find that a lot of players join your group and leave shortly afterwards with no explanation, you could ask them why they left - you might find out there is something they didn't like about how you do things, and knowing that could help make you a better GM.

In any case, if nobody is complaining about anything, then there is no real issue, regardless of how you do things.
Of course, nobody can please everyone, and if you and your main group are having a good time, there's no need to change.

[BRC]

I have found that people have started using the term Railroaded really aggressively any time I see a DM talk about having any kind of structure to a game. Having a less loaded term with less negative connotations adds space to talk about a game with structure without the negativity.

The main gripes I’ve seen here are ones I share. Tell me what you’re cooking with, some ingredients disagree with me something fierce. Caffeine isn’t bad, it just doesn’t end well for me. Same deal with certain styles and systems.

The main issue here appears to be the overlap of various definitions for a few common words.

"Railroaded" is a term similar to "overcooked" or "Burnt". It has an inherently negative connotation.

If somebody says "I would like my steak Overcooked" that implies "I enjoy Bad Steaks"

Vs "I like my steak Very Well Done".


Kyoryu says "I like games where my choices Matter". From the other thread, IIRC Kyoryu specifically said they like games that would be Emergent at the Macro Level.

But by boiling that down to "I like a game where my Choices Matter" is like saying "I like a steak that has been Properly Cooked".

If you leave the statement without clarification, everybody is going to align what you said to their preconceived idea of what "Choices Matter" is, and you're unlikely to get the sort of game you want.

If you define your statement further, you've just said that anything with LESS agency than what you've described is something where your choices DON'T Matter, and the debate becomes "Do choices below the Macro level matter", or a sort of no-true-scotsman attack on people who care more about agency at the micro level.

So having clear terms that are not already used as statements of good and bad is helpful.

[KorvinStarmast]

For many people, it is a strong predictor of whether or not they'll enjoy the game.

Bias is a thing, understood.

I can assure you these differences are not "artificial" to me. They matter a great deal to me and my enjoyment of games.

You have, in this "I know I won't like this" stance, glossed over procedurally generated sequences. (I am pretty sure you'd refer to them as emergent, and I certainly do) where a lot of agency is delegated to the die roll - it's a very unstructured case of "play and find out" style that I saw a lot of when the world started out as a big blank sheet of hexes with a few hexes filled in and nobody knew what was in the other hexes, including the referee.

maybe you've got some interest in claiming there isn't a difference for some reason.

No interest whatsoever. I will say that I tire of the name calling that this discussion leads to, which is what this all amounts to.

If you ever think I am repeating Forge theory, you are 100% wrong. GNS is an abomination.

Certainly not accusing you of that, sorry if it came across that way. My attempted allusion was not so much "Forge Theory" as the ripple effects of the meta level conversation, and its tone, on game and player preferences. The Big Model was a worthy attempt at a second draft, but it too seems to have been trying to sail too close to the wind. (But let's not derail there - I did use blue text and it was an attempt at humor - yeah, I won't quit my day job).

Because there are people that insist that you have to have a linear game with low agency to have a story.

Since I am not one of them, how about you stop making the thinly veiled assertion that I am.

I've still never played a diceless game.

This one is fun and easy. What I really liked about it is that the first time we played it nobody in the room but me had any RPG experience.
I don't recall using dice in the games of Golden Sky Stories that we played, but it has tokens/game currency/points you can use or that you can pass to other players. I was never the GM for that, only a player. It has a very interesting feel to it.

Also, I know many immersion-first players that absolutely reject games that offer "meta" narrative abilities.

Bias is a thing.
But then, so is taste. Which leads me to your theme, which on further review looks like a case of arguing about taste.

So why does that lead to all of the name calling?

[Satinavian]

I've acknowledged that authored games can have some level of freedom.

I think a good analogy is phase transitions in water. Above freezing, but below boiling, water is a liquid. Below freezing, it is a solid. That's mostly binary - excepting water that happens to be exactly 32 degrees that contains a mixture of the two, but certainly on a molecular level it's binary.

But that doesn't mean that all water is either "hot" at just under boiling or "cold" at some ridiculous level of cold. But it does mean that at a certain point, its nature changes in a fundamental way. In other words, the temperature can be a spectrum while the state of water is not.

That also doesn't mean that all "ice" is alike or all "water" is alike. Ice can be in various forms - icicles, cubes, snow, crushed ice, ice slicks, etc. Water can be pools, droplets, spray, mist, etc.

Metaphors help with misunderstandings. But we don't have a misunderstanding, we have a disagreement. There is no "point" where authored become emergent.

I've offered some high level differences that are fairly binary - does the GM plan out specific encounters, especially in a series or slightly branching structure, or do they not?

Let's take for example this. You previously characterized a megadungeon as emergent. But what are most of the the rooms in that megadungeon if not planned out specific encounters ? Now they are not really in a series but certainly in a branched structure depending on the layout of the megadungeon, but that aside how are those different ?

If two groups go through the same content, will they more-or-less do the same things, or will the "stories" of the game be wildly different?

They will be wildly different in many games you characterize as "authored"

After a scene, is the group free to decide what the next scene is, or are they effectively limited to pre-generated choices?

Shouldn't "what is the next scene" come organically from "what happened in this scene" both for emergent and authored games anyway ? At least for the non-narrative games ? Or do you make the distinction whether the next scene options existed before ? But that is not true for many of the games you characterized as authored either, only for the most extreme kinds.

I can assure you these differences are not "artificial" to me. They matter a great deal to me and my enjoyment of games. Maybe they don't to you, or maybe you don't see the differences for some reason, or maybe you've got some interest in claiming there isn't a difference for some reason. I dunno. But they are absolutely real to me (and many others, as evidenced by the number of people talking about them for decades)

Korvin didn't say the differences are artificial. Those are certainly real. The argument was that your line in the sand where authored ends and emergent begins was artificial and i agree with him though i would have instead called it arbitrary.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Korvin didn't say the differences are artificial. Those are certainly real. The argument was that your line in the sand where authored ends and emergent begins was artificial and i agree with him though i would have instead called it arbitrary.

And I'd further say that in my experience any line would be arbitrary and miss a lot of things. Putting the whole related issue into one of two bins isn't going to work smoothly no matter how you define those two bins. Because it's a multidimensional, dense problem space.

[NichG]

If we want an actual phase transition style theory for this stuff so we could actually experiment on whether it's continuous or discrete...

Have a pool of GMs each run campaigns for N players, for T sessions. Make a set of anonymized campaign summaries of fixed length describing the state of the entire campaign as of end of session. As T, N both go to infinity, calculate the mutual information between which set of players was playing and the summaries divided by the entropy of the distribution of summaries, for each GM. If the distribution of mutual information ratios becomes more bimodal as T increases, you've got distinct phases.

Arguments why it would - campaigns where the 'supermacro' structure is fixed would have to spend more of the bottleneck provided by the fixed length describing details that will not depend on the players. Whereas a single decision in session 1 could take an 'emergent' campaign in directions that become preserved - one group decides to become merchants, one group decides to open a restaurant, one group conquers a village and builds it into an empire, etc.

Arguments why it wouldn't - it's possible to have campaigns where the number of bits of supermacro control available are intentionally portioned out in a balanced way between participants at the table e.g. using some metacurrency, so that kind of thing could also happen organically. A GM could also author things using their knowledge of the individuals at the table, which could let them end up anywhere in the distribution.

Note however that ultimately this is intended as an empirical rather than theoretical standard. That is, we could always artificially construct a unimodal distribution of these ratios, but what actually happens naturally among tables just playing the game?

I would probably bet on something like this being a transition with a critical point rather a first order transition - something more like liquid-gas rather than solid-liquid. So in that sense, I'd expect some range of GM parameters (for example people running shared storytelling, GMless, etc kinds of things) beyond which the distinction breaks down, but another range within which the distinction is clean. I'm not sure what the equivalent of thermodynamic variables controlling the transition would be. I would bet against 'no transition at all' though.

[KorvinStarmast]

If we want an actual phase transition style theory for this stuff so we could actually experiment on whether it's continuous or discrete... {snip the details}

While I appreciate your appeal to the scientific method (*applause!* +many!) that looks a lot like work and not much like play, and thus of dubious merit as regards doing a fun thing in one's leisure time.

[NichG]

While I appreciate your appeal to the scientific method (*applause!* +many!) that looks a lot like work and not much like play, and thus of dubious merit as regards doing a fun thing in one's leisure time.

It's also useful as a touch-point to avoid descending into 'yeah but it doesn't feel to me like it should be distinct, what about X example?' - if you were to put X through that protocol you could argue 'okay yes, X does belong to the class of asymptotically emergent games' or 'no, X doesn't, because as T->infinity, this thing will happen...'

For me, this resolves all of the arguments of the form 'sure, in the end the campaign is about defeating the demon lord in squad-based combat, but the party could decide to save the lizard village or burn it to the ground on the way to that end, so that's emergent right?', because if you're holding a specific end-point fixed and extend the campaign, all of those things that the party did will become a smaller and smaller portion of the material that has to be included in the summary for the overall story to make sense. It also brings in a way of thinking about what precisely it means to have a dichotomous system in a mushy reality - when a physicist talks about something being ice, they don't mean e.g. 'every single atom is in the place the global crystal structure would suggest it should be', they mean that the correlation lengthscale of those crystal parameters becomes infinite (or as big as the sample) - e.g. on average, atoms are influenced by the same orientation of the crystal cell everywhere in the sample even if locally you could have pockets or fluctuations away from orientational order.

The existence of bits of liquid-like behavior in solid phases or bits of solid-like behavior in liquid phases doesn't actually exclude the collective behavior of the material in the infinite limit from being definitively either liquid or solid, because as you go to that infinite limit the fluctuations matter less and less compared to the average. So likewise, a game that operates under the premise 'in the end, there is no planned plot, just what the PCs do' could have local scripted excursions and designed plotlines, but if the imprint of that act of scripting on the overall sequence of events becomes weaker and weaker as the campaign becomes longer, then the campaign as a whole may be described better by 'emergent' than by 'its a mix'.

Whether its useful to talk about infinite limits is another discussion entirely...

[Easy e]

#3: The GM has a definite plot in mind, with a beginning, certain milestones, and a pre-defined ending. However, the game is run in a very improv style, and between those fixed points almost anything can happen. The GM uses subtle railroading / quantum ogres to make all the infinite possible paths converge on those fixed points, but does almost no actual "authoring" of material - the entire campaign notes fit on a single page.

This is pretty much every game I GM, and I have no idea how to describe it or how it fits into these endless rings of railroading vs. sandbox.

[KorvinStarmast]

This is pretty much every game I GM, and I have no idea how to describe it or how it fits into these endless rings of railroading vs. sandbox.

It doesn't need to fit into any of that.

[Stonehead]

As I like to describe it, the world does some things as a consequence of player actions and decisions, and the world does some things despite player actions and decisions.

I wouldn't say that exactly. Ignoring player actions and decisions is just bad DMing, not a style of game. I'd say it's a matter of how much initiative the world can take, independently of the players. When Joe Necromancer tries to take over the country, and stopping him takes up the entire campaign, I think that'd fall under "authored", but it says nothing about how much agency the players have.

This tends to be my experience when it comes to games that I actually enjoy. Usually there's something major happening in the world that you can antagonize or roll with as you'd like, though the DM probably has come up with a few ideas down the most likely routes. It seems that the definitions used in the OP's comments indicate that this is emergent gameplay, as this counts as a "world set up before hand with things going on" more so than a set story path.

So, provided the ending and middling bits are not set in stone (as in, the players role in the world), then the larger story beats planned by the GM become more "huge existing piece of material" as in icefractal's second example than "definite plot in mind, with some gaps in between" as in icefractal's third example.

This is why the binary explanation doesn't make sense to me, because it kind of implies that whether a game is "authored" or "emergent" entirely depends on whether or not the DM predicts and preps for the actions the players end up taking. Because again, 90% of the game was pretty standard "follow the plot hooks the DM prepares" stuff. Had the players decided to take down the invaders instead of evacuating, the game would have been "authored". Maybe that's fine, but it seems really weird to me.

It also feels like there's a lot of erasure of more emergent styles, or at least dismissal of the preference for them. "Well, if that's emergent, then this qualifies too." A lot of the "spectrum" arguments feel like this to me - I'm sitting there saying "no, that's not the thing I want" and I'm getting back "yeah, it kind of is." or "well your definition of linear is impossible, no games are like that" (when I've absolutely played a lot of games like that - nearly every adventure path, nearly every organized play group, and a lot of "regular" games. Or "haha, here's an element that proves that everything is really authored, so your preference doesn't exist! May as well just admit you enjoy authored stuff."

I think the heart of the issue may be how the thread was worded. Maybe I read the OP wrong, but to me, it sounded like you were saying "Here's a way to classify the two different types of games there are", and not "Here are the types of games I enjoy". The second point is a claim that can't really have counter arguments, but the first one definitely can. The arguments weren't "You actually like this kind of game", it's "The classification system doesn't seem to handle these types of games". Or at least, that's what my argument was supposed to be. Sorry if it didn't come across that way.

To me, the "strict dichotomy" argument sounds like trying to separate all games into "Literally zero player agency in the overarching game" and "Any amount of player agency that isn't zero". It works as a way to classify games I guess, but it doesn't seem very useful to me. Games with very little (but still some) emergent aspects seem closer to fully authored games than they do to fully emergent games.

I'm not trying to say that you should like adventure paths, I'm trying to say that there's a lot of space between adventure paths and full open-world sandboxes.

[Easy e]

There's a conversation pattern happening in these that annoys me, and I'm not sure what causes it.

To me, a lot of this sounds like this:

Non-linear-gamers: "Hey, I really prefer games like this, and not like this. I've played both."
Others: "What you're saying isn't real. See, linear games do that too!"
NLG: "Uh, no, they don't. That's totally not my experience, and I don't like the thing you're talking about."
Others: "There's no difference, really."

... with some people going "well if I hide it it doesn't count" as a side dish.

Funny, as I read these discussions I see people who do not like the core assumption of GM based TTRPGs. That GM run TTRPGs are run on GM fiat by design.

They have fallen for the the Illusion of Choice so hard, that they think that games with a GM are somehow controlled by player choice, RNG, Story tropes, Rules, charts, etc. They are not. The GM is the only ones with power to shape the game.

Some GM based TTRPGs make the hand of GM Fiat more visible than others, while others try to obscure it or reign it in mechanically. However, the core of all of these games is still the GM making choices about things, including how much to let the players make choices.

I can only speculate that this deep seated desire to reduce GM Fiat as the primary design of GM based TTRPGs is because:

1. They had bad GMs that made the GM Fiat feel heavy and constricting on the game)

OR

2. They had really good GMs who made the GM Fiat feel weightless and invisible on the game


To me the distinction is not Railroad vs Sandbox, Authored or Emergent; it is how heavy the hand of the GM should be during game play. That is a spectrum and not easy to gauge, unless you are playing at the table with the group, and is subject to guess and check feedback loops.

[Quertus]

@NichG - are you actually trying to give people something testable and definitive, so they don’t have to argue pointlessly any more? C’mon, nobody’s gonna want that!

"Railroaded" is a term similar to "overcooked" or "Burnt". It has an inherently negative connotation.

If somebody says "I would like my steak Overcooked" that implies "I enjoy Bad Steaks"

Vs "I like my steak Very Well Done".


Kyoryu says "I like games where my choices Matter". From the other thread, IIRC Kyoryu specifically said they like games that would be Emergent at the Macro Level.

But by boiling that down to "I like a game where my Choices Matter" is like saying "I like a steak that has been Properly Cooked".

If you leave the statement without clarification, everybody is going to align what you said to their preconceived idea of what "Choices Matter" is, and you're unlikely to get the sort of game you want.

If you define your statement further, you've just said that anything with LESS agency than what you've described is something where your choices DON'T Matter, and the debate becomes "Do choices below the Macro level matter", or a sort of no-true-scotsman attack on people who care more about agency at the micro level.

So having clear terms that are not already used as statements of good and bad is helpful.

I think that this is the best / easiest to understand explanation in this thread. Kudos!

I must say, though, that I’m liable to be guilty of saying “I like games where my choices matter”, without qualification, because I mean matter at all layers. My choice of character changing the outcome(s) of the game is the first battle line in the war for player agency.

This is pretty much every game I GM, and I have no idea how to describe it or how it fits into these endless rings of railroading vs. sandbox.

Sigh. “Linear” vs “Sandbox”; “Railroading” is something else entirely.

When Joe Necromancer tries to take over the country, and stopping him takes up the entire campaign, I think that'd fall under "authored", but it says nothing about how much agency the players have.

“Authored” at the macro level.

[Easy e]

Sigh. “Linear” vs “Sandbox”; “Railroading” is something else entirely.

Great. I am unsure how the style of game IceFractal described below fits into the linear vs sandbox dichotomy then.

This one:

#3: The GM has a definite plot in mind, with a beginning, certain milestones, and a pre-defined ending. However, the game is run in a very improv style, and between those fixed points almost anything can happen. The GM uses subtle railroading / quantum ogres to make all the infinite possible paths converge on those fixed points, but does almost no actual "authoring" of material - the entire campaign notes fit on a single page.

Edit: Or authored vs emergent for that matter......

[BRC]

Great. I am unsure how the style of game IceFractal described below fits into the linear vs sandbox dichotomy then.

This one:

Within the Dichotomy, that game is Linear.

In my system, that would be Authored at the Supermacro and Macro levels, emergent below that.

Edit: to explain

A "Sandbox" game is one that I would call Emergent at all levels. The GM creates the setting, but beyond "Go seek adventure within this world" there is no overarching campaign concept (Emergent at the Supermacro Level).
There CAN be events in motion, but none that would compel the PC's to focus the campaign around interacting with them.

[KorvinStarmast]

I wouldn't say that exactly. Ignoring player actions and decisions is just bad DMing, not a style of game.

You clearly misunderstood what I was getting across there. The world is much bigger than the players.

Where the players are making choices and engaging with the world a variety of things happen that are related to what the players are doing.

A few hundred miles away, or one plane over, there's a skirmish between two forces on a shared border that happens despite what the players are doing - whose result is a die roll which then has an outcome which may or may not impact the players in the near term, but which has potential to present its result to them for a new situation X, Y, or Z in the medium to longer term ... or, they never go that way and it just happens off screen when their choices take them elsewhere.
It happened despite the players because the world keeps existing regardless of whether or not the players live or die, succeed or fail, retire or keep adventuring.
Yes, that is a play style, one I've seen and used since I first started playing RPGs.
You calling it "bad DMing" is simply wrong.

[Tanarii]

This is pretty much every game I GM, and I have no idea how to describe it or how it fits into these endless rings of railroading vs. sandbox.

If the DM negates player agency to make sure they get to those things, it's railroading.
If the DM hides the negation of agency by presenting an illusionary choice, it's illusionism and railroading.
If the DM hides the negation of agency by presenting an illusionary choice between three different woods, but in reality specifically the first wood travelled to will have an Ogre encounter and the second will have the macguffin, it's a quantum ogre and illusionism and railroading.

That's what the terms railroading, illusionism and quantum ogre actually means.

[Satinavian]

Funny, as I read these discussions I see people who do not like the core assumption of GM based TTRPGs. That GM run TTRPGs are run on GM fiat by design.

Maybe you should play a game without GM for a while to challange your "core assumptions"

They have fallen for the the Illusion of Choice so hard, that they think that games with a GM are somehow controlled by player choice, RNG, Story tropes, Rules, charts, etc. They are not. The GM is the only ones with power to shape the game.

That is common, but not universal, even if GMs exist. System and table rules can restrict GM powers a lot.

Some GM based TTRPGs make the hand of GM Fiat more visible than others, while others try to obscure it or reign it in mechanically. However, the core of all of these games is still the GM making choices about things, including how much to let the players make choices.

I can only speculate that this deep seated desire to reduce GM Fiat as the primary design of GM based TTRPGs is because:

1. They had bad GMs that made the GM Fiat feel heavy and constricting on the game)

OR

2. They had really good GMs who made the GM Fiat feel weightless and invisible on the game

Except that most of the people you argue with are GMs as well. And those tend to know whether their players have real choices or not and if they as GMs operate under restrictions.

@ Tanarii

Good explaination.

[Telok]

They have fallen for the the Illusion of Choice so hard, that they think that games with a GM are somehow controlled by player choice, RNG, Story tropes, Rules, charts, etc. They are not. The GM is the only ones with power to shape the game.

Wait a sec, so an exchange like this:

Dm:"Ok, thats the current stuff mostly wrapped up. What do you lot want to do next?"
Pcs:"We want to go find a person who can make a thing and get them to make some stuff for us."
Dm:"Hmm. Ok, there are people around like that. We'll wrap up here tonight and I'll randomly generate some people, leads, etc., for next time."

That's the DM being the only one shaping the game?

[NichG]

It's generally unhelpful to let category words fall into a 'good style vs bad style' dichotomy, since then people are going to be more concerned with making sure that their style doesn't get defined away as being part of the 'bad ones' by the community. So in something like 'authored vs emergent', care should be taken not to view 'authored' as meaning 'bad', or it'll end up in the same place as any 'good word vs bad word' definition war.

Saying e.g. 'my preferred style of game is authored at the super-macro, emergent at the macro, and authored again at the micro' or 'give me authored at all levels' or 'give me emergent at all levels' should be seen as both a legitimate taste to play in and to run.

And I think you can even extend the principle of emergent vs authored to GM-less games if you read them in the sense of whether things that happen are influenced more by pre-decision or by decision in the heat of the moment. Something like Microscope has explicit warnings not to take decisions to committee or pre-plan or pre-discuss them; presumably the mirror universe version of Microscope where you negotiate everything out before formally having each person author their scene/etc would be a highly Authored experience, even though it'd still be GM-less.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It's generally unhelpful to let category words fall into a 'good style vs bad style' dichotomy, since then people are going to be more concerned with making sure that their style doesn't get defined away as being part of the 'bad ones' by the community. So in something like 'authored vs emergent', care should be taken not to view 'authored' as meaning 'bad', or it'll end up in the same place as any 'good word vs bad word' definition war.

Saying e.g. 'my preferred style of game is authored at the super-macro, emergent at the macro, and authored again at the micro' or 'give me authored at all levels' or 'give me emergent at all levels' should be seen as both a legitimate taste to play in and to run.

I completely agree with this. Dichotomies naturally trend toward "good vs bad", even if that's really only "things I personally like vs things I personally dislike". The idea of authored vs emergent at different scopes (and the definitions of those can flex depending on the exact scope we're looking at) is useful, within reason, as a model and as a means of enabling discourse. With the understanding that it, like all other models of subjective things, is not an intrinsic property but simply a lossy model, to be used where it provides value. But using it as a purely dichotomous definition where authored at any scope means not emergent at all (but not vice versa--authored is "stronger" in that sense in that dichotomy model) doesn't seem to provide value for me.

There's also the question of timing of authorship.

Consider two campaign styles.

1. The DM (or module writer) plans out all the major scenes at T = 0. They know all the major story beats, where it will start and where it will end. This is obviously authored at several scopes (Supermacro and macro certainly, with the others depending on the details).
2. The DM plans for the course of an arc. They know what major bombs will be thrown, and have a pretty good idea of what will happen (because they know their players and how they'll react to the bombs, as well as what they've said they want to do) over the next few sessions. And may even have a rough idea of the Supermacro scale--based on where they are right now and what they've done, there are {set of discrete next arcs, known at the "main goal" level} that are reasonable. But at the end of each session, plans for the future are revisited (with more attention to the nearer ones) based on the events of the previous session. Effectively iterative planning.

In #1, the course is basically set from T = 0. Even if there's some frothing at the micro and super-micro scale, the macro+ is set. In #2 looking back, it may look like the campaign was like #1. Everything (if done well) falls into place along a few coherent threads. But at any time, the future is still indeterminate. And what you do now affects the "window function" that determines what next things are possible. There's no known end state except possibly (and only tentatively) for this current arc. Here, you can have each and every scene be authored in advance (authored micro) but the macro and supermacro are completely emergent. Because the macro and supermacro depend on the outcomes of the micro level. As long as there are multiple possible outcomes for each scene and the DM is willing to accept ones he didn't expect or plan for explicitly.

The first is a top-down authoring. The supermacro determines macro which determines micro which (possibly) determines supermicro. The second is "middle outward, Just in Time" "authoring". The micro is chosen immediately before it begins, as a function (a biased one) of the past events. And the macro ends up looking authored based on the accumulated micro. And the supermacro appears out of that.

[NichG]

I completely agree with this. Dichotomies naturally trend toward "good vs bad", even if that's really only "things I personally like vs things I personally dislike". The idea of authored vs emergent at different scopes (and the definitions of those can flex depending on the exact scope we're looking at) is useful, within reason, as a model and as a means of enabling discourse. With the understanding that it, like all other models of subjective things, is not an intrinsic property but simply a lossy model, to be used where it provides value. But using it as a purely dichotomous definition where authored at any scope means not emergent at all (but not vice versa--authored is "stronger" in that sense in that dichotomy model) doesn't seem to provide value for me.

There's also the question of timing of authorship.

Consider two campaign styles.

1. The DM (or module writer) plans out all the major scenes at T = 0. They know all the major story beats, where it will start and where it will end. This is obviously authored at several scopes (Supermacro and macro certainly, with the others depending on the details).
2. The DM plans for the course of an arc. They know what major bombs will be thrown, and have a pretty good idea of what will happen (because they know their players and how they'll react to the bombs, as well as what they've said they want to do) over the next few sessions. And may even have a rough idea of the Supermacro scale--based on where they are right now and what they've done, there are {set of discrete next arcs, known at the "main goal" level} that are reasonable. But at the end of each session, plans for the future are revisited (with more attention to the nearer ones) based on the events of the previous session. Effectively iterative planning.

In #1, the course is basically set from T = 0. Even if there's some frothing at the micro and super-micro scale, the macro+ is set. In #2 looking back, it may look like the campaign was like #1. Everything (if done well) falls into place along a few coherent threads. But at any time, the future is still indeterminate. And what you do now affects the "window function" that determines what next things are possible. There's no known end state except possibly (and only tentatively) for this current arc. Here, you can have each and every scene be authored in advance (authored micro) but the macro and supermacro are completely emergent. Because the macro and supermacro depend on the outcomes of the micro level. As long as there are multiple possible outcomes for each scene and the DM is willing to accept ones he didn't expect or plan for explicitly.

The first is a top-down authoring. The supermacro determines macro which determines micro which (possibly) determines supermicro. The second is "middle outward, Just in Time" "authoring". The micro is chosen immediately before it begins, as a function (a biased one) of the past events. And the macro ends up looking authored based on the accumulated micro. And the supermacro appears out of that.

Yeah, though I think there is actually an empirical question buried in all of this rather than just a semantics one, which is whether or not there's an innate tendency for the influence of authorship or the influence of emergence to grow towards an extreme as one extends the campaign because of the way that iterative planning behaves. There's a sort of butterfly effect argument for one end of that existing - small amounts of emergence can ultimately lead to large deviations, if everything follows from the previous thing and generally stuff is interdependent (high-interaction regime). There's also a sort of zeitgeist of the alternate being true, that e.g. when people do speculative fiction or even just fanfiction, there's some river of history built out of larger scale realities that individual actions can't budge even through the lever of time.

So the empirical question is the degree to which these views or beliefs manifest in the action sorts of variabilities that exist when people run games? Does the distribution of impacts of particular player choices on the setting fall into a bimodal distribution across games people run, and is that just reflecting an underlying distribution of meta-beliefs about the nature of consequence, or does it arise from the actual mechanics of 'iterative planning'? Both? Neither?

That's I guess the thing that makes this interesting to me beyond the railroad/linear/sandbox/etc distinctions - feels like there's more potential for something here than just a way to badwrongfun at people.

[Lord Raziere]

There's also a sort of zeitgeist of the alternate being true, that e.g. when people do speculative fiction or even just fanfiction, there's some river of history built out of larger scale realities that individual actions can't budge even through the lever of time.

I mean, depending on work, that could just be laziness.

if your a sci-fi author writing something in the vein of the Foundation novels, sure thats the intention. if your one of the many naruto fan fictions that make a change to naruto but some reason still does land of waves arc, its probably just laziness.

[Lucas Yew]

Supermacro: Details of the setting, and basic premise of the campaign (This campaign is about working for the King to find the Macguffin and stop the Demon King from Reawakening).

Macro: What we would consider the "Plot" of the campaign.

Micro: The Events and outcome of a given session.

Supermicro: The events and outcome of a specific scene.

If the DM negates player agency to make sure they get to those things, it's railroading.
If the DM hides the negation of agency by presenting an illusionary choice, it's illusionism and railroading.
If the DM hides the negation of agency by presenting an illusionary choice between three different woods, but in reality specifically the first wood travelled to will have an Ogre encounter and the second will have the macguffin, it's a quantum ogre and illusionism and railroading.

That's what the terms railroading, illusionism and quantum ogre actually means.

Gathering some good-felt classifications intrathread...