Quote from: John MorrowI started to do the same last night, including a quote from Jack M. Bickham's The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How To Aovid Them) that goes so far as to say, "The more planning you do before starting to write, the better."  And, yes, I know most authors shy away from such absolute statements.

In the case of the stories I wrote to sell, well -- in the first case, the idea for the story is the plan, since it was a short short; in the second case I knew the end before I started, and the difficulty wasn't so much figuring out what should happen as figuring out how to write events in a fashion that seemed to hang together.

In the case of the verse narrative, I planned in a fair amount of detail.  Only thing is, the plans turned out to be radically wrong.  Then the revised plans also turned out to be radically wrong.  Screwing up big time in metered verse is a major pain. Doing it twice ... :eek:

The thing about RPGs is that the authors are the intended audience, and creating the story is also watching it.  So I want to avoid conscious manipulation of the story in progress, because the act of guaranteeing as a creator that events will take a particular shape is simultaneously the act of destroying my own ability as a member of the audience to believe that anything was really at risk.  And that is why both heavy preplanning and conscious manipulation -- motivated GMing, as ewilen is calling it -- is contraindicated.  And that is why my setups involve conflicts whose development and resolution I cannot expect, with neutral GMing, either to predict or to control.

Quote from: RPGPunditThe fundamental question is this: If a player does something or wants to do something, or the dice (through combat or through random rolls) result in something where your vision of "the story" would end up being fucked up, do you accept what has happened, or do you alter the results or frame the situation in such a way to keep it "on track" with what your vision of "the story" is?

If you do the latter, then you have a conflict between story vs. game. And, incidentally, you are probably doing a sort of railroading.

If you do not, then you aren't really actively "creating story" at all, you are just playing the game, and any story that gets created is purely a "byproduct", and not a "goal".

RPGPundit

I'd let the "story" go, let the guy 'ruin it'--it is by having the possibility of a "bad story" that, I think "good story" is valueable to me. That said, it's not a situation that arises all that often and, just like I'm okay with TPK's in games where it's a far, far better experience if the party survives, I think that the possibility of the TPK improves the experience of the survival situation.

-Marco

But then, at the end of the day, where the buck stops for you is in the game, not the story.

RPGPundit

Quote from: KeranWhat if the specific result I want is "What would really happen if I dropped this conflicted character into this situation"?

Is that really a desire for a story or something else?

Quote from: KeranThe stories I create that I find least satisfactory are the ones where, for one reason or another, I have failed to portray the characters or the setting in the manner that I think is true to them.

Well, a good story is a combination of different considerations, and that's certainly one of them.  But the way most writers deal with that problem is to adjust the character to fit the plot the same way they'd adjust the plot to fit the character.  While I know you said you've rejected the Threefold, but I think your concerns for character fidelity is very similar to what Immersive players are looking for.

As for stories being drained force because of implausibility, I agree.  But I think that it doesn't necessarily take something like over-the-top action to create the problem for me.  One can notice the hands of a writer making a story happen in certain ways, sometimes even if the writer is trying to be subtle about it.  A lot of it has to do with thinks like making sure that every rifle on the mantle eventually gets used and that everything gets tied up by the end.  That's my concern with a GM and players applying story quality techniques to role-playing games.  I think they can create the sort of implausibility for me that you are talking about as draining the force from a story.

Some fiction can and does escape from the conventions of good stories, to one degree or another.  Japanese Dramas went through a phase in the mid-1990s where many had bittersweet or even entirely depressing endings (e.g., Asunaro Hakusho, Sugao no Mama de, and Kono yo no Hate, for example) and even some comedies (e.g., Jaja Uma Narashi) had subplots about, for example, a kid dying from cancer.  

I found those shows incredibly refreshing, not because they could be dark or depressing but because they were unpredictable and actually surprising.  They didn't follow the traditional American formulas for stories (though they certainly had some of their own).  My wife and I would cringe when an upset character ran toward a busy street because in those dark dramas, there was often no absolute script immunity for any character and they could very well run into the street and get run over.  In fact, in one of the dramas mentioned above, the main point-of-view character dies before the last episode and in another, one character winds up heavily brain damaged.  

The second Votoms series is in many ways similar.  It's true to character and true to setting, but when it was over, the person I watched it with (who did running translations for me) and I both sort of looked at each other and said, "Yeah, that's how it had to turn out but maybe it would have been better if we hadn't watched that."  And that's exactly why more stories like that aren't made.

(If you are curious, I know that you can at least find Asunaro Hakusho on torrents with subtitle files because it's so highly regarded -- it's bittersweet rather than wrist-slitting, "Jesus, Grandpa, what did you show me this thing for?" depressing.)

Quote from: KeranYou've omitted a possibility.

I can set up in a fashion that often, but not invariably, produces results I enjoy as stories, and play it out naturally from there.  You may think the result is a bad story -- and it will be, at least in the sense that it will be very first draftish, since we don't often revise in this medium.  But I may find that the very real risk that the characters will fail -- or that the problem I pose will turn out not to have any solution at all -- is worth its weight in platinum: it's real suspense, not the sleight-of-pen that an author has to perform to try to keep a reader bothering to turn the pages in a genre in which the characters aren't allowed to crack up irrevocably.

I absolutely agree, and that's exactly the sort of game that I enjoy.  But I don't think that's what a lot of GMs and players have in mind when they set out to create good stories.  Why?  Because you seem quite willing to accept the risk of failure and so am I.  But once a good story result becomes the primary concern and the objective is to guarantee that the game is a good story, there comes a point where the GM and players need to make a choice between failure and a good story and by choosing the good story, all of that real suspense that you are talking about and I fully agree with you about evaporates, just as it does in action movies where you know the hero won't die.  As I've said elsewhere, the problem comes from GMs and players trying to make the game play like a good story, and being willing to force a good story to happen at the expense of other concerns.  

If you are willing to let the story fail to be a good story, then story is not your primary concern.  Something else is.  Despite what you've said, I think it sounds a lot like or really is GDS Simulationism.  It sounds a lot like putting plausibility and fidelity of character and setting above telling a good story.

Where I think the GDS fails (and where I think the GNS fails to a different degree) is that many players who want the game to play out naturally and plausibly are willing to tolerate dramatic story-like set-ups designed to make it very likely that the results of the game will be story-like, even without it being forced to be story-like.  One can often get story-like results from a GDS Simulationist game simply by creating characters with questions or conflict that they want to resolve.  That point really doesn't have a place in the GDS.  Where I think the GNS Narrativist games go too far and also carry the story-like manipulation into the game resolution, itself, by using mechanics that deal in story quality and story control.  

Quote from: KeranThat's why part of setup is constructing situations in which I'm not likely to have to do things like that.  I have a character who's undead, and I want to see how he copes with that, so the magic in his setting is not capable of returning him to life.  Having him returned to life would make me miss what makes him interesting.  Having him wanting to return to life, and having someone in the setting able and willing to do so, but having him prevented by some half-baked obstacle that probably doesn't really make sense wouldn't be any too satisfying either.

That's fine, but there are many ways that the character can cope with being undead that are simply not interesting stories.  This goes back to the point I made earlier about Othello and Hamlet and matching character to story.  How Hamlet or Othello would cope with each other's situations is not nearly as interesting as how they coped with their own situations.  

Also, there are reasons why apparently half-baked obstacles could produce a superior story to simply making the magic unable to return the character to life.  Having the possibility (or even false possibility) of being returned to life could make a very dramatic difference in the way in which a character copes with being undead, including denial and refusal to accept their fate.  Such a story could, for example, be written as an allegory for someone dying of cancer who believes they can be cured, even if they personally can't.  Closing the possibility of a return to life to force your character into a very narrow selection of options also close off certain ways of exploring how the character copes with their fate.

Quote from: KeranSure.  But you're talking to someone whose major characters have sometimes reacted in a fashion in which, OOCly, I would greatly have preferred that they had not reacted.  And I let them do it.  The reason I let them do it is that they were true reactions, and there is no action as undesirable in a story as rendering a main character a hollow shell by falsifying their reactions.

I've been known to play badly, to misplay a character by mistake; but the Prime Directive is never, ever, ever intentionally to utter a falsehood about any character or the setting.

When I create things, I try to create things that are interesting, and that will fit together in particular ways; but once they're "really" there, they're sacrosanct.  If I know how the NPC should react based on their nature, that's what's going to happen.

And to me it seems like that means that you have a higher priority than story, and I'm sorry but it also still sounds an awful lot like GDS Simulationism.

It's the same thing that drives Immersive players to have their characters do things that ruin the game for people with different priorities.  It's making fidelity and plausibility primary.  And while it can produce a good story, it can also conflict with what's necessary to create a good story (which could involve, for example, revision of the character to make them follow a more desirable path).  

On rec.games.frp.advocacy, Mary Kuhner described how to do planning and revision to control the quality of games played with Immersive characters being played true to character.  I've also revised gone back and revised a game-destroying even in a game I was playing in by figuring out why the scene went wrong and gently nudging my characters perception of what was happening to change the choices they made.  So I would argue that there are ways to remain true to character and scene and get the character to make different choices, though it may be easier for some characters than others (e.g., a character that relies on intuition can be manipulated by manipulating their gut feelings while a character that follows set processes might be difficult if not impossible to manipulate).

Quote from: KeranI have found that managing to play through to the point where at least one of the significant conflicts on the table is resolved makes for a satisfactory plot, at least in my eyes.

If you are given the choice between being true to character and setting or manipulating play to make sure that at least one significant conflict gets resolved, which do you choose?  I should also point out that "satisfactory" isn't necessarily good.

Quote from: KeranIndeed.  And in practice, I've been playing with another rgf.advocate, and we discovered that our typical language tends to be somewhat misleading: I flatly refuse to admit that a good story is necessarily false to the characters and the setting and have always hedged enough to sound significantly dramatist, and his descriptions of his style have always sounded more simulationist.  In practice it works out the other way around: my campaigns are simmy as hell and his have a heck of a lot more conscious production of plot tension, etc.

I think you sound almost entirely Simulationist.  You want a dramatic story-rich set-up and would like a story, but your primary value during the action seems to be fidelity to setting and character.  The GDS deals with in-play priorities, not set-up, so I don't see the conflict.  

As for a good story being false to character and/or setting, that's not necessarily true.  But the reason why it often can and does become an either-or choice is that natural real world life does not automatically produce good stories, even when the situation is rich with story possibilities.  As such, telling good stories ideally means selecting a limited subset of what's true to setting and character that overlaps with creating a good story.  The ideal is the union of good story and fidelity to character and setting.  Two points about that.

First, any subset of the possibilities inherent in a character or setting can feel artificial if you notice things are bounded and limited.  Thus where real life has effectively unlimited possibilities, life in a good story has limited possibilities.  And noticing that the characters live conveniently falls within the bounds of good story can feel inherently artificial because real life is not so tidy.

Second, the way authors generally harmonize story with character and setting is that during the process of writing and revision, they change the characters and setting to harmonize them with the needs of a good story.  This is not a luxury that a GM or players usually have in a role-playing game.  I have played revised scenes before, usually to correct a misunderstanding but at least once to correct a game-destroying sequence of events from happening.

Quote from: Keran... Do I?

Well, broadly, given what I think you probably mean: you're thinking of fitting the character into a particular campaign, right?  And there are certainly characters whose natural reactions will wreck particular campaigns -- I retired one before he even got into play once, when I realized what his probable reaction to the other characters would be, given what he knew and the way one of them was behaving.  There are characters whose natural reactions will wreck particular stories, or particular sorts of stories.

No.  I mean exactly what I asked, in the broad sense that I asked it.  Can the natural actions of the character produce a story (in the most general sense) that's not good?  If there can be good stories and bad stories, it follows that some sequences of events will make a good story and others will make a bad story.  Is it possible that the natural actions of a character can produce a story that's just not good by the standards of, say, good fiction?  I suspect, for example, that you don't even try to play certain sorts of characters because they will inevitably be boring.  Is there a point at which a character seems like they should produce an interesting story but, when played out with fidelity to setting and character, are also boring?

Quote from: KeranWhat there probably aren't is very many characters about whom no story can satisfactorily be told.  Most people have conflicts they either resolve, or decisively fail to resolve.

Not all conflicts and not all resolutions are good stories, nor are they even satisfactory stories, by many standards.   For example, the way a character resolves a conflict may simply be boring.  Can't you imagine, for example, that some of the ways your character might cope with being undead might simply be boring as a story?  Or maybe during the first few scenes, the flow of events and being true to character leads to a character that destroys himself or rolls up into a catatonic ball that he refuses to leave.  OK.  The character has resolved their situation but is it a good story?  

Maybe you are simply better at anticipating how characters will turn out than I am.  Heck, I had one character start acting crazy after what I, as the player, thought would be a fairly mundane wipe of part of their memory to evade police truth detection.  It turned out that the wiped out bits of memory were incredibly important to the character's relationship with a PC and NPC and I didn't even understand that until I psychoanalyzed the character to understand why they went all paranoid on me.

Quote from: KeranDisclaimer: I don't write for publication often because I hate the business end of writing, but I have sold stories to minor markets, and there are a few of characters I wrote purely for commercial purposes.  And they're not "real."  They're written the way they are purely to produce an effect.  Some of them are shadows of "real" characters who're hanging around in my head, and whom I may write or play some day.  This isn't my usual approach, though, and I don't like writing this way well enough to keep it up, even though I succeeded at it, I suppose.  Aside from these cases ...

I tend to consider writing for the enjoyment of writing to be a very different thing than writing for publication or others.  And I think that if we start talking about "good stories" and "bad stories", broad appeal comes into play.  While it doesn't naturally follow that "good stories" are directly tied to "commercial success", I think you can learn some things about what most people think are good or bad in stories from looking at the mainstream and commercial successes.

Quote from: KeranIf I'm bored with the way the character copes with conflict, I'm not going to finish the story.  So far I haven't had that happen, though -- boredom tends to be a sign of mis-structuring the story so that what was interesting about the character in the first place isn't what I end up writing about.  Aside from that, mostly I think that presenting a conflict in an interesting manner is a matter of skill.

Well, writing about something different than what first interested you in the character is entirely possible if you just make it up as you go and let the characters run wild.  While writing, not finishing the story is always an option.  Revision is also an option.  But how does that translate into a role-playing game?  Depending on intwined your character is with other characters in the game, it can be very disruptive if you just stop running that character.

Quote from: KeranIf I think the reader is likely to be bored with the way the character addresses an interesting conflict, it means there's a fault in my presentation that I should try to fix.

Sometimes, putting lipstick on a pig is not going to change the fact that you are presenting a pig.  There are plenty of things that can make the way a character addresses an interesting conflict uninteresting.  For example, suppose your character addresses the conflict in the most predictable way possible?  "Yeah, I saw that coming on page 4."  Can you revise page 4 to make it less obvious?  If you are writing a story?  Yes.  If you are playing a role-playing game, can you revise what happened during the first session to make how your character is going to make a choice in the last setting more interesting?  Probably not.

Quote from: KeranI don't adjust the character or the built-in conflict in any way to fit the plot, because the point is to tell the story of the character I'm interested in, not to relate a particular plot.

Step back a step from the idea of adjusting the character to fit a particular plot.

What I'm talking about is that you've created a good character and given them a conflict that you think will be interesting to explore and anticipate will produce a good story, no matter how it turns out.  You set up the initial conditions and then start writing, keeping everything true to setting and character.  During the course of that writing, you realize that the way the character is going to deal with the situation looks an awful lot of like a cliche that you've seen in dozens of movies, something you hadn't anticipated.  So you've got your character, your conflict, your setting, and a resolution that's cliched and not very insightful or interesting because you've seen something similar dozens of times before.  So what do you change?  Or do you just start writing something entirely different?

Quote from: KeranI think this series of questions just told me something that may be important to why I'm not satisfied with it.

Well, I'm happy I was able to help.

Quote from: KeranI care passionately, which is why I'm still working on it seven years later.  Some individual scenes are very good, even excellent, but the overall structure is not good.  Which I mean to fix if it takes me the rest of my life.   (Which it may.)

Have other people read the story?  Do they feel the same way about it that you do?  I'm asking because some of your comments seem like maybe you are too close to your own story to see it's merits and flaws objectively.  Maybe things that seem hollow to you won't seem hollow to a reader who doesn't know how it will end?

Quote from: KeranMost of them, except intentional plot manipulation, don't have to change what happens away from natural development, though.

They don't have to, no.   But like I said, it's still a filter.  Even if the natural development neatly passes through the filter without any alteration, it can still look like something that passed through a good story filter, even if nothing was changed.  

For example, if I have a 1 inch mesh sieve and pour a bag of stones into the sieve and all of them pass through the mess, it's possible that it was just a random selection of natural stones that all just happen to fit through the mesh but it's going to make me wonder if the bag of stones was specially selected so that it contained only stones that would fit through the mesh.  So even if it was a random natural occurrence, it's going to look like something that's artificial.

Quote from: RPGPunditBut then, at the end of the day, where the buck stops for you is in the game, not the story.

RPGPundit

Well, no--not necessiarily. If I'm not gettin' any story-action out of the game, I may stop the game too. Same as if I was watching a movie that wasn't doing it for me. Same as if I had a really dismal TPK and lost the urge to make new characters and hit the dungeon again ("Man, can we, um, play something else now? Like maybe Champions?").

Story--the content of play that is meaningful to me--is an important aspect of play. If the structure is absolutely non-story-like (nothing ever gets resolved, people spend a lot of time shopping for no really key reason, conflicts get bypassed or dropped) I think my attention will flag (note: a string of really cool combats could counter-act this, of course ... but let's say I'm playing a traveller game without any cool combats and the merchanting isn't doing it for me ...).

So it's kind of an equally highly held goal, I think,

-Marco

Quote from: MarcoWell, I guess I fundamentally disagree about what a "railroad" is. I do see Dogs as "limited in scope" but I do not see it as a *railroad* (that is, I understand the complaint and find it valid for what it is--Dogs is not a game where you would do much but play Dogs--but I would not use the term railroad to describe it).

It's not simply that you must play Dogs.  You are given a town with a particular problem that you have to deal with.  There is only one adventure there to be had.  Don't deal with it?  No game.

Contrast that with the street level supers game that I've played where the GM ran the city as having all sorts of interesting things going on that the players might choose to deal with and the players could pick what they wanted to pursue.

Quote from: Marco1. The player (let's say, in a dungeon or spy game) comes to the table knowing there will be a mission and they will go to solve it. If the player is complicit and understands this correctly then it isn't dysfunctional (IMO, a key point of railroading). In any event, there is agreement and I think that distinguishes it from being something "the GM is doing."

It's still something the GM is doing.  The player is simply agreeing to it.  I don' tagree that a key point of railroading is "dysfunction".  They key feature of a railroad is a track that you can't leave.  Think about what the word literally means and why it's used to describe what the GM is doing.

Many people have enjoyed Ken Rolson's adventure.  When doing some playtests for him years ago, he described his scenarios as "greased rail adventures".  That's a railroad where you don't even get to decide to stop and go.  You just react.  That the players buy into it and even enjoy it doesn't change the fact that there is a rail there.

Quote from: Marco2. If I ran a super-spy game and the player made a spy and then refused to go on the mission, I would tend to stop the game and talk with them: what went wrong? Was the mission 'bad?' Were they expecting something radically different--where was the misscommunication?

That the player willingly buys a ticket and boards the train does not mean it's not a railroad.  Yes, *gasp*, railroaded games can even be fun.  

The alternative is to give the players a selection of missions to choose from or a mission that's the equivalent of a multifaceted dungeon with multiple ways to explore it.  But any scenario where the characters are within a command structure that gives them orders limits players choices via GM control.

Quote from: Marco3. I haven't read the dungeon map thread (although I'll look) but I would say that if we consider a dungeon, where the PCs set the pace and where the solutions to the various areas are their own to invent (and reasonably adjudicated by the GM) then the term loses some meaning.

If a standard dungeon is a railroad then I'm not sure I see a difference between "railroading" and "GMing."

Have you ever GMed a game where the characters are free to explore or ignore any number of interesting things going on in the setting without any orders, commands, or ticking clocks to push them into the adventures?  In that street level supers game, we never did find out what was behind the vault break-ins because we never got around to dealing with that.  We researched what was going on in the city and chose what we wanted to deal with.  There are sorts of details in the D&D game that I'm playing in that we never got to fully explore, either, because our interests took us elsewhere.

The way to tell if you are on a railroad or not is to count the tracks and to find out if you can leave them or not.  If there is one track and you can't leave it, then get your ticket ready for the conductor.  You are on a railroad.

Quote from: MarcoBut we can use the term to mean whatever we like. I'm fine with having the GM throw situation at me. I'm not fine if the GM mandates how it'll turn out. I'm not fine if the GM ensures that situation A will *always* lead to situation B--but if the adventure (the context) has me going down a river where B is further down than A, and I don't leave the river, say, and go on foot, that seems pretty fair to me.

I'm not using the term to mean whatever we like.  I'm using the term to mean "stuck on tracks", which is what makes a railroad a railroad.  That's not a problem unless you consider railroading inherently bad.  I don't.  As you pointed out, players can willfully buy tickets for the train.  But it's still a train.

Quote from: MarcoSo we can call that river railroading (or an adventure where the PCs climb a mountain, say)--but then we need another term to describe the GM seizing control of the PCs actions or nullifying their decisions (i.e. the PCs decide, weirdly, to go down the river, back the way they came and *still* run into the next situation even though it was wasn't there when they came that way).

I call that "bad GMing".  

Or perhaps, "bad railroading".  

I think that assuming that railroading is inherently bad hides the point that the same GMing technique can be good if the players want it and go along with it and bad if they don't.  For example, if the players want to play space merchants, the GM can make them all employees of a corporation that tells them where to go next.  That can be a good game if the players buy into being employees of a corporation but a bad game that feels railroaded in the bad way if the players wanted to play freelance merchants deciding their own fate.

In other words, the thing that makes it bad isn't the thing that makes it a railroad (a track that you can't leave) but the fact that the players haven't purchased a ticket to be on the train.

Quote from: -E.It's a good point and I agree with it -- once someone (players can do it also) starts trying to guarantee a given result, it's going to damage the experience for me.

I think that's one of the most fundamental splits in role-playing style -- those who are interested in the process and those who are interested in the results.  You can tell them apart based on what they complain about how they complain about it.

Quote from: -E.1) Railroading has pretty bad connotations. I dislike any definition where someone could say, "I was railroaded -- it was nice."

That's because players who enjoy it don't call it railroading.  They call it "good GMing".  Have you ever seen one of those posts where the GM complains that his players won't do anything unless he leads them through the adventure?  The players who wait for the GM to tell them what to do next?  Those are the players who enjoy railroading.  They might call it something else that sounds more positive, but it's the same thing.

Quote from: -E.2) I don't think you can "look back" (or forward) and "see the tracks." You can't really know if a game is a railroad unless you're stopped from trying to do something you "ought" to be able to do.

You can see the tracks if you have no option ther than what the GM wants you do do.

In my D&D 3.5 game, I ran a series of adventures based on the A "Slaver" series of old AD&D modules (I completely reworked the dungeons and encounters but used the modules as inspiration and an idea mine).  The transition from the A3 to A4 module is a railroad.  The PCs get defeated (they can't win), stripped of everything but a loin cloth, and thrown into a dungeon.

I wanted to run that scenario but I knew that such a railroad wouldn't sit well with most of my players.  So I did two things.  

First, I create a trap that the PCs really couldn't escape and figured out how to accout for how ever single character might weasel their way out of the trap (the look on the druid player's face when they slapped the chainmail vest on him was priceless).  Yes, I justified the unavoidable capture in a setting-logical way, but it was ultimately just as much of a railroad as just saying, by fiat as they do in the module, "The bad guys defeat you."  

Second, I hoped the players would do a Divination, which they did.  The Divination told them that they'd be captured but "Don't despair".  Why?  Because I also knew that an NPC travelling with them had a way to escape that the bad guys wouldn't know about.  So the players bought into the idea of being captured and didn't flip out when they were captured.

So I created a convoluted legitimate trap and got the players to buy into going along with it to replace what was, in the original module, "You are captured by the bad guys,"  (The Hackmaster version has a hilarious little note about how to deal with players who complain about being railroaded at that point) but it's the exact same thing.  It's a railroad, whether by GM fiat or contorting a world-based reason for it to happen.  I justified it.  I got player buy-in.  But it didn't change the nature of what happened.  

Quote from: -E.Your example of characters who are forced to go into a cave rather than flying over it -- that *could* be a railroad. In an RPG game, if the GM told me, "You try flying, but you take... (roll roll)... 8 points of damage and return home, wiser for it." I'd consider that a textbook railroad.

What if the GM says, "You try flying.  You run into a main force of the Fire Nation army.  They start firing at you... (roll roll)... 8 points of damage."  "Can we fly over..." (roll roll) "6 more points of damage..."  "What about going South... (roll roll) "7 more points of damange..." and so on?  Does the GM have to say, "You return home, wiser for it," to be a railroad?

Quote from: -E.But let's look at another case -- lthere's a classic example from Lord of the Rings, that' I'm going to crib: Frodo (a PC in this case) says, "The hell with this quest crap. I know Gandalf has giant eagles. We ride one over Mt. Doom. I drop the ring in. We're back in the Shire by late afternoon."

The GM considers: "Well, there's the all-seeing eye; if you're up in the sky -- without cover -- the odds of you being seen are *much* higher than if you carry the ring above ground. And the Nazgul fly on these worm/dragon things... your odds of making a High-Altitude approach without being detected are low... say, one in fifty. If you *are* detected, Nazgul fly faster than Giant Eagles... your odds of not-being intercepted are very low, indeed."

Is *that* a railroad?

Did the GM introduce the eye, the Nazgul, and so on to make sure there was only one viable way to get to Mt. Doom?  If so, I really think it is.  If it's got one track and you can't reasonably leave it, it's a train, in my opinion, not a car or SUV.

Quote from: -E.Harder to say; I don't think so. It's more of a gray area. I think it's *reasonable* for the GM to set up a situation where a PC's approach might not work...

Absolutely.  That's not the issue.  The issue is whether the GM has set up a situation where only one approach will work or only one approach is a rational choice.  In fact, Tolkien probably added those elements for exactly that reason.  If they flew to Mt. Doom on giant eagles without opposition, it would have been a really short and boring story.  Thus Tolkien needed to force his characters down the interesting tracks he laid out for them.

Quote from: -E.For me, it would be a matter of what I expect from the world. Presumably Sauron, Gandalf and Elron are all pretty smart guys who are knowledgeable of their own capabilities and their enemies.

It's *unlikely* that they would overlook an easy, low-risk way of destroying the Ring of Power. As a player in a LoTR game, I wouldn't consider it unreasonable if the GM ruled that the Eagle approach was near-unto-suicide.

Correct.  Just because it's a railroad does not mean it's bad.  After all, I take a train to work.  I'm railroaded along the tracks but the train goes where I want it to go.

Quote from: -E.All of this is YMMV -- and a *lot* of it would depend on the "vibe" I got from the GM. If I got a "You're wrecking my beautiful story" vibe no amount of solid explanation would convince me that it wasn't a railroad... but absent that vibe calls like the one I described above strike me as completely fair and evidence of a free, not-railroaded game.

In other words, the same railroad might be bad to one person but perfectly reasonable to the other.  It's not what the GM is doing that changes but how the players perceive it that matters.

Quote from: MarcoI think that the process of railroading in traditional RPGs centers around the GM acting, intentionally, to remove player agency for meta-game reasons. that is, the PC does/is trying to do something and the GM either stops it or warps the world so as to nullify it--for reasons that do not have to do with "internal cause" (what would 'most likely' happen).

Why does it make a difference how the GM intentionally acts to remove player agency for meta-game reasons?  Why does it matter of the GM removes player agency via "internal cause" or "external cause"?  The GM can, after all, manipulate what's "most likely to happen" when they set up the scenario.

Consider, the GM sets up the LotR scenario.  The players need to drop the Ring into Mt. Doom.  The GM creates a bunch of set-piece encounters that they want the players to have to deal with and has this great GMPC named Gollum that he wants to have tag along with the PCs for a while and be there when they get to Mt. Doom for that final set piece where he falls into the fire.

The GM thinks about all the ways the players might quickly complete the quest and evade all of the set-piece encounters so one-by-one, the GM closes off options.  Eagles?  Nazgul.  Walking in?  Orc armies.  Etc.  The GM leaves a single viable way into Mordor and up to Mt. Doom and makes sure that the GM's GMPC is an integral part of sneaking in so they have to take that characteralong.  

The GM has planned and left one viable track for the PCs to complete the quest.  How is that any less of a railroad that coming up with on-the-fly details to limit the players' choices?  Either way, it's removing player agency for meta-game reasons.

Quote from: MarcoIn cases like these, I tend to think that even though 'drama' (or maybe 'story') is the meta-game concern, it is likely not railroading if the convention of the game would be reasonably seen to include any kind of cinematic license (which I think many, many games do).

Isn't the core issue of railroading the limiting of player options, not how it's justified or whether the GM thinks they are doing it for good reasons like drama?

Quote from: John MorrowI'm not using the term to mean whatever we like.  I'm using the term to mean "stuck on tracks", which is what makes a railroad a railroad.  That's not a problem unless you consider railroading inherently bad.  I don't.  As you pointed out, players can willfully buy tickets for the train.  But it's still a train.

Okay--well, that's what you're using the term to mean. I came to it from another place (the term for pushing a person to sign a document or otherwise coerce them).

This is in the dictionary:
Railroaded
# Informal.
   1. To rush or push (something) through quickly in order to prevent careful consideration and possible criticism or obstruction: railroad a special-interest bill through Congress.
   2. To convict (an accused person) without a fair trial or on trumped-up charges.

I mean, you can use it to mean a linear physical structure (a river) that the PCs explore--but as far as I can tell in the common language, the term railroaded meaning anything other than to transfer by freight (i.e. literally) has to do with force and coercion (much as I have always seen it used in RPGs).

I wouldn't say there's a one-true-meaning for gaming, necessiarily (no term in my dictionary applies to RPGs) but certainly my experience with it has been different from yours.

I have also played wide-open games, yes. They're fine--no problems there. I tend to prefer a tighter focus these days due to playing shorter games with specific situations in mind (since my time to game is more limited and I want to try more things).

-Marco

Quote from: John MorrowIsn't the core issue of railroading the limiting of player options, not how it's justified or whether the GM thinks they are doing it for good reasons like drama?

I dunno--feels like there's some kind of game here and I like you so I don't just want to spar.

It seems that just about anything a GM does will limit some options in some way. It seems that there are some conflicting decision-making models (along the GDS lines, probably but maybe others).

If I, as a GM, am sticking to what I think 'ought' to happen, I, as an observer would not consider that railroading (but, again, my definition is different from yours, alas). If the GM is just punching up the drama but not rushing the characters to a specific conclusion (i.e. forcing by hook or crook that Gollum be there to bite Frodo's finger off) then I probably wouldn't consider that railroading for most groups (although a hard-core GDS-Sim group might have problems with the GM enhancing the drama at will).

But mainly, since to me, railroading means a coercive and essentially unfair use of force by the GM (the person in the position to railroad in the sense of the definition I quoted) then if the player agrees that the GM's actions are fair and just, it isn't railroading.

Since there's room for disagreement about what the term means, I'll just say that what concerns me is "bad railroading" since I consider spy-games where the PCs are sent on missions are okay by me.

-Marco

Quote from: RPGPunditBut then, at the end of the day, where the buck stops for you is in the game, not the story.

RPGPundit

That is, I think, where Marco and I differ. He really likes his story. I like stuffing my games with possibilities for conflict - personal, societal, and combat - that the PCs can interact with in any way they want, and let the PCs create the story as they go, but I don't care about the story itself. All I care about is that the game rocks and the players have fun. Usually, this formula tends to produce some kick ass story, but as a byproduct. If it doesn't, and the game still rocks, I don't even blink.

It's when there are deliberate story-making mechanics that I falter. I can't handle them.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceThat is, I think, where Marco and I differ. He really likes his story. I like stuffing my games with possibilities for conflict - personal, societal, and combat - that the PCs can interact with in any way they want, and let the PCs create the story as they go, but I don't care about the story itself. All I care about is that the game rocks and the players have fun. Usually, this formula tends to produce some kick ass story, but as a byproduct. If it doesn't, and the game still rocks, I don't even blink.

It's when there are deliberate story-making mechanics that I falter. I can't handle them.

-clash

Well, for what its worth, stuff like your "La Famiglia Amalfi" are what I consider to be story promoting gaming. I also think that many of the things that would make the "story suck" would make the game "suck" (although probably not all of them). Things like:

1. The players all drift around aimlessly, can't make up their minds about anything, go through the motions on several fronts but don't really engage with any of the situation.

2. Conflicts don't play to the characters in any way--like political stuff when we all made ass kicking characters or ass kicking stuff when we all made poltiical characters.

3. The conflicts just drop off and dry up, even if the PCs are interested in them and pursuing them (there's a bunch of really cool stuff going on that I'm interested in--but time after time, I can't get traction with any of it because the GM keeps starting other stuff and pulling back on anything I'm interested in).

Needless to say, these, and more would indicate a serious disconnect between the GM and players--something I rarely see. It's also true that moderate amounts of these (some plot-threads dry up, but others are resolved ... or there's an ass-kicking components *and* political ones) are fine by me.

Finally, as you noted, it usually works out that way. That's my observation as well--and I think given that, it isn't hard to see some of the benefit of constructing situation in the way you do.

-Marco

Quote from: John MorrowI think that's one of the most fundamental splits in role-playing style -- those who are interested in the process and those who are interested in the results.  You can tell them apart based on what they complain about how they complain about it...

1) I'm still not happy with any definition of "railroading" that's "good" -- that people are happy with -- to the extent that these things have meaning, railroading to me means being forced to take a certain path against one's will.

This is just a matter of terminology; not a substantial issue, but IME most people define railroading as a bad thing.

I would call a game with constraints that everyone was happy with something else (possibly a "game with constraints.")

2) If I read you correctly you're distinguishing "railroading" based on the GM's intent.

If the GM created the All Seeing Eye to force play down one path, it's a railroad. If he didn't, it's not.

I think that's reasonable, and I agree with that -- and it brings in the element of player-GM trust.

If I trust my GM not to railroad (I can't know *for sure*), then an Apocolypse Now scenario is fine. I know I'm allowed to abandon the mission. I know I'm allowed to pay mercenaries to come with me. I know I'm allowed to call in the air strike without ever meeting Kurtz.

None of those things might happen, but I know that the GM's not committed ot preventing them.

Further: If I try something and it *doesn't* work I know that my failure was an honest call on the GM's part -- not part of some covert story-based agenda.

I think trust is a key issue here.

But I'm curious:

Do you distinguish between a railroad where the GM only allows one option ("going down the tracks") and a railroad (or maybe something else) where the GM disallows options, but leaves more than one open.

Example: The GM allows Frodo and the Fellowship to do whatever they want with the Ring, but neutralizes any set of actions that would end the game "too quickly" -- for example the Giant Eagle manuver, I referenced above.

To me, neutralizing a PC's actions for the purpose of story (or any other agenda) is not so good. I'd even call it a "railroad"

I'm not sure your definition (with it's strict adherence to the train-on-tracks metaphor) covers that.

Does it? To me both behaviors (forcing one option, or ruling out anti-climatic options, but not being wedded to a single option) are the result of the same intent -- the desire to have a good story or something; both damage the game.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: MarcoWell, for what its worth, stuff like your "La Famiglia Amalfi" are what I consider to be story promoting gaming. I also think that many of the things that would make the "story suck" would make the game "suck" (although probably not all of them). Things like:

1. The players all drift around aimlessly, can't make up their minds about anything, go through the motions on several fronts but don't really engage with any of the situation.

2. Conflicts don't play to the characters in any way--like political stuff when we all made ass kicking characters or ass kicking stuff when we all made poltiical characters.

3. The conflicts just drop off and dry up, even if the PCs are interested in them and pursuing them (there's a bunch of really cool stuff going on that I'm interested in--but time after time, I can't get traction with any of it because the GM keeps starting other stuff and pulling back on anything I'm interested in).

Needless to say, these, and more would indicate a serious disconnect between the GM and players--something I rarely see. It's also true that moderate amounts of these (some plot-threads dry up, but others are resolved ... or there's an ass-kicking components *and* political ones) are fine by me.

Finally, as you noted, it usually works out that way. That's my observation as well--and I think given that, it isn't hard to see some of the benefit of constructing situation in the way you do.

-Marco

In our case, we've both enjoyed playing and running for each other - as well as each enjoying other's games - so we are working on a basis of agreement already. The differences are a matter of emphasis, not of substance. Your methods of creating story exist either on a character - not player - level or are done between/before sessions. Either way, they at worst don't interfere with the gaming, or at best enhance it. Hell, like I said, I use some of them myself as a GM. There is no problem there.
 
What sets off my story alarm bells is phrases like "It would be so much cooler if instead of what just happened..." or "I don't want my character to die fighting a mook..." and the like. Imposing artificial structure onto the game to make for a "better" narrative makes my blood run cold.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceIt's when there are deliberate story-making mechanics that I falter. I can't handle them.

I like my story-making mechanics to be part and parcel of the regular stuff.

I loathe "plot chips" and the like.

I adore escalation and fallout in DitV.

That way, I can play the game and simply trust that it will create story, rather than focusing on "making story happen".