Yeah, the mechanics of most RPGs that use a GM are such that if the GM wants to railroad, for whatever reason, they can. (4e and Spycraft are 2 exceptions, because of their GM budget system).

Although story is one reason GMs railroad, my experience is there are other reasons. A lot of times it was just "this is what I have prepared tonight. So you are going to experience it" or "I have more stuff prepared, you can't end the adventure now". Neither of those are story reasons. But yes, railroading sucks. (And is actually anti-story most of the time, as I mentioned above.)

Quote from: JDCorley;499443Although story is one reason GMs railroad, my experience is there are other reasons. A lot of times it was just "this is what I have prepared tonight. So you are going to experience it" or "I have more stuff prepared, you can't end the adventure now". Neither of those are story reasons. But yes, railroading sucks. (And is actually anti-story most of the time, as I mentioned above.)

Sure. But what I am talking about is how much of the Ravenloft stuff I was reading at the time basically said "railroad and ignore the rules" so you can tell a story. I still think Ravenloft was putting out some of the best stuff I've ever read (the Van Richten line remains my favorite and continues to serve as a source of inspiration for me). But I noticed the more the Ravenloft designers tried to ape Vampire (and mind you this is my impression as a Ravenloft GM who didn't read the Vampire books, so it is just that: an impression) the more I disliked what they were doing. This isn't because I hate Vampire (like I said I played it and had a blast), I just think the design philosophy of Vampire was a bad fit for Ravenloft (on a number of levels) and the storyteller thing (as I understood it) wasn't my cup of tea.

Quote from: Rincewind1;499244I'd say that the very fact of actual conflict in this case means that both side lost.

No, they lost. In a big way. They went from being the ideological vanguard of gaming in the 90s and the 2nd biggest (and possibly at certain peak moments the biggest) RPG company around, to being a nonentity today.

They were taken out on two fronts: 3e helped all the regular gamers realize that all this story-artist stuff was pretentious crap, while the ultrapretentious went on to create the Forge and steal away their hardcore would-be elitists with something that promised to be even more "elite" and a whole new and better way to look down on other gamers while pretending that your games made you special.

RPGPundit

Quote from: JDCorley;499433We are talking about games where one person gets to say what a character says, thinks, feels and does (things amazingly important to stories), and another person gets to say what happens as a result (another thing amazingly important to stories). You are aware that those two things can create really powerful stories, right?  That there is no need for anything further in the rules to create stories? Surely you are.

And here you intentionally pretend to be ignorant again, as if you don't know what I'm talking about, as if this isnt' a debate that's happened a thousand times before here and elsewhere in the gaming world.  
Look, bitch, if you want to be banned from here, that kind of coy "I'm going to pretend to be dumb to wast the other guy's time so he has to explain everything I already know but don't want to have to admit to" shit is the best way to get me to do it.

QuoteNo, the rules of normal ole RPGs can and historically have been used by people interested in story in RPGs since almost the beginning, because of those two rules: I get to say what my character says and does and the GM gets to say what happens as a result.

And what you say, and what happens, both are utterly bound by the EMULATION OF THE WORLD. The system, the mechanics of RPGs are set up not to create the best LITERARY result, but the best EMULATIVE result.

QuoteNope, the rules support the creation of story, if that's what you want to do. Especially the GM and what the GM is supposed to do in the game, as I mentioned!

Bullshit. The PC decides that he wants to pop a cap in the town's mayor who was crucial to the "story" the GM was going to tell, right out of nowhere.
The GM wants to make an intricate story about a prophecy told by three witches, and the PC just decides to kill them right off the bat.
The young farmboy is clearly literarily meant to rise to a great destiny... and then gets  killed when an Orc hits him for 8 points of damage two turns later.

The second you bring "STORY" into the mix as a goal and not just a side-effect, you have to decide whether its more important that the orc do 8 points of damage or that your farm boy live because its better for the story. So suddenly, the emulation of the world doesn't matter anymore. When that happens, nothing about the setting matters anymore. The players choices don't matter anymore. In the end, all that you might as well be doing is getting together with NO game and creating a story collaboratively like some writing exercises do.

To suggest that RPGs are made to create story is like saying the main goal of going fishing is to "create story". Yes, lots of time, some kind of story gets told... its usually of no literary worth, and its the kind of story that everyone who wasn't there gets bored out of their mind hearing.

QuoteInteresting, please tell me more about how Star Wars' setting is not a good setting for stories. Or did Star Wars d6 make some kind of change to the setting that you feel makes it not a good setting for stories?

By setting, I mean emulation of genre. Of course, you being a Forge Swine want to keep pretending that's not central to the RPG experience. IT IS AND ALWAYS WAS AND EVERYTHING IN THE MECHANIC OF THE RPG IS SET UP TO DO IT.  So go fuck yourself.

QuoteHmmm, I seem to remember there being characters in most of the vampire stories I've read?  Maybe I should double check.

Player agency ruins the GM's ability to be a "storycrafter".  GM-authority ruins the power of players to do so. Which is why White Wolf games always turn Players into powerless cheerleaders meant only to serve as the audience for the GM's brilliance, while Forge games always turn the GM into a castrated monopoly banker with no power to stop the most diva-esque or manipulative player from dominating the whole exercise to create the story he wants.

QuoteInteresting that you feel it doesn't matter what a game tells the GM to do. I think the GM is an important part of both games and what they're told to do is highly relevant. It matters a lot what a GM does in a game!  A GM that is catering to the interests of a group who wants a good story out of a RPG campaign ought do very different things from a GM in a group with different interests.

A GM who has a group that thinks they want to "make a story" should be telling them you can't actually do that with an RPG.

QuoteDo you think that the GM role is overrated in some way? There's a lot of recent games that have drastically altered or eliminated the GM role, maybe you would like those if you think what the GM does, thinks and prioritizes isn't relevant.

Fuck you. I'm done with this. You're banned.

RPGPundit

Quote from: JDCorley;499436This has always existed in module play. Dragonlance actually was the worst offender in this regard, and those modules predated Vampire by years. I will always remember one paragraph that was: "The party will go right at the fork. If the party goes left, punish them with increasingly dangerous monsters suddenly attacking until they go right or they are all dead."  

Vampire's early modules were also like this.  They were dungeon crawls, too!

I have a ton of early Champions modules, "Deathstroke" from 1983, 8 full years before Vampire 1ed, is about a supervillain stealing some mysterious radioactive isotopes, then using them to threaten the world.  The first part of the scenario is about the theft and the PCs trying to find out about it and stop it.  The module literally says "Regardless of what happens, those isotopes will be stolen."  Because if the PCs beat Deathstroke's plan in the first part of the module, what about the second part, huh? Terrible.

But not due to Vampire.

The difference is that before Vampire, we called that "Bad module-writing".  After Vampire, they called it "the way you SHOULD run your games because you're an artisté".  That is to say, while Vampire didn't invent this type of writing or style of play, they were the first ones to actively ENCOURAGE it as the height of how rpgs should be run.

RPGPundit

Quote from: JDCorley;499433We are talking about games where one person gets to say what a character says, thinks, feels and does (things amazingly important to stories), and another person gets to say what happens as a result (another thing amazingly important to stories). You are aware that those two things can create really powerful stories, right?  That there is no need for anything further in the rules to create stories?

You're banging your head against a wall of irrational prejudice. Just look at his response to the fact that a lot of people over at storygames are talking about D&D. It can't possibly be because they enjoy D&D and there's a lot of overlap between it and other games they like. No, they must be talking about a game they hate and participating in a conspiracy to subvert and destroy TRUE RPGs. Pundit is Bismarck fighting teh warz on the side of truth and justice and all that is good and right. Don't expect him to be swayed by rationall argument and facts.

JD's banned?

Quote from: RPGPundit;499456The difference is that before Vampire, we called that "Bad module-writing".  After Vampire, they called it "the way you SHOULD run your games because you're an artisté".  That is to say, while Vampire didn't invent this type of writing or style of play, they were the first ones to actively ENCOURAGE it as the height of how rpgs should be run.

RPGPundit

Wrong. Dragonlance, as JD quoted, came quite a few years before that, and was all about reproducing the novels on the game table.

But by now I should know that, like any delusional schizo, you're impervious to logic; so feel free to keep tilting at that particular windmill.

Also, I see you've banned JD. This was even lamer than your banning of Seanchai.

Quote from: The Butcher;499509Wrong. Dragonlance, as JD quoted, came quite a few years before that, and was all about reproducing the novels on the game table.

This is true. And it was lauded as one of the greatest modules of all time prior to Vampire's appearance, at least in some of the crowds I knew at the time. Also, some Cthulhu adventures are actually guilty of similar thinking. The whole story thing was with the hobby from the start, the issue being that it picked up steam until it radically affected RPG design by the end of the 80s, which basically made Vampire's bed for the 90s, and later, by reaction, the Forge's in the 2000's.

Quote from: The Butcher;499509Wrong. Dragonlance, as JD quoted, came quite a few years before that, and was all about reproducing the novels on the game table.

Dragonlance did do that yes, and was criticized for it.  What it certainly didn't do was suggest you were a sophsiticated "artistic" person for playing tasslehof.

QuoteAlso, I see you've banned JD. This was even lamer than your banning of Seanchai.

He brought nothing to this forum, all but admitted he was trying to subvert it to Storgame revisionist history, and was engaging in thread-derailing "intentional obtuseness" of the kind that seems weasely over on rpg.net, but here is nothing short of direct cowardice.  If he really had no counterarguments, then he could at least have actually had the balls to say "I think you're a poopyhead and I don't like your ideas". But no. He had to pretend that he'd never heard of shit before when in fact he had been arguing about said shit not two threads ago; we don't need that kind of fuckwit mentality in our trolls here.   I prefer a more sophisticated type of troll, like yourself.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;499525He brought nothing to this forum, all but admitted he was trying to subvert it to Storgame revisionist history, and was engaging in thread-derailing "intentional obtuseness" of the kind that seems weasely over on rpg.net, but here is nothing short of direct cowardice.  If he really had no counterarguments, then he could at least have actually had the balls to say "I think you're a poopyhead and I don't like your ideas". But no. He had to pretend that he'd never heard of shit before when in fact he had been arguing about said shit not two threads ago; we don't need that kind of fuckwit mentality in our trolls here.   I prefer a more sophisticated type of troll, like yourself.

RPGPundit

You call him a coward when you reply to a post of his after you ban him. Brought nothing to the forum? You mean like the gold fuckers like B.T. bring to this forum. Even if you think JD is an unsophisticated troll, at least he was talking about gaming.

Edit: And the "cowardice" as you have defined it is now a reason for banning? And does this only apply to gaming related talk ?

Regards,
David R

I suspect that bans will become more frequent and more arbitrary in the year to come.

If you ban JD, then you must seriously consider banning Darwinism and TheCasualOblivion, who are blatantly "disrupting the site" by your definition. The latter just argues for the sake of shit stirring and never ever has a point, while the former is so far up the crazy Forge-4e virtual asshole I can hear the rectal echo from where I'm sitting when reading his verbal diarrhea.

Quote from: Benoist;499608If you ban JD, then you must seriously consider banning Darwinism and TheCasualOblivion, who are blatantly "disrupting the site" by your definition. The latter just argues for the sake of shit stirring and never ever has a point, while the former is so far up the crazy Forge-4e virtual asshole I can hear the rectal echo from where I'm sitting when reading his verbal diarrhea.

I can't even remember a single post for either of them. If you want to make a serious argument for moderation, then please send me links that explain where and how they've been disruptive.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;499613I can't even remember a single post for either of them. If you want to make a serious argument for moderation, then please send me links that explain where and how they've been disruptive.

RPGPundit

I don't know if I want to. I hate the guts of these guys and I really do think they are only here to disrupt the site, but on the other hand, I didn't agree with the banning of Seanchai earlier, and I'm not sure I agree with JD's now, though I did warn him in my capacity of random OP poster here about this (publicly, in another thread, I think that's the start of the one about the Ghost of D&D's Future).

Check the "slamming of 4e has already started" current flamewar. You'll see what I mean.