[D&D 4E] Basic Understanding Of Roleplaying This Character
Big J Money:
I am glad I waited to read Callan's post before replying, which says what I was thinking a little better. Yes, the players had a choice (although insignificant, I would say) of whether to enter the Tomb, but it was purely binary. Enter Tomb?==Yes means optional scripted encounter with a possible reward at the end. Enter Tomb?==No means no optional encounter. So I think the answer you are looking for is "no". The real question to me now is, do I really want this kind of play. And I'm frustrated that a D&D product has put me in the position of having to ask myself this question after we have alread started playing. However, I consider the railroad discussion the tertiary discussion (but will take the next step anyway) and I will focus on responding to what I was really trying to get at in my OP.
CLARIFICATION
Quote from: gsoylent on December 02, 2008, 12:45:00 AM
To me, it sounds like it was just a poorly written scenario.
In hindsight, it was a very poorly written encounter, and it could be that the entire product is poorly written as well. For Ron's interest, I'm talking about "Keep On The Shadowfell", the adventure that came out the month before D&D 4E was released. This encounter was a very, very poorly example of D&D 4E's "skill challenge" rules whereby players are presented with some kind of non-combat adventuring challenge and roll dice to determine if they succeed or not. By the rules the DM predetermines a few skills that can be used to make progress against the challenge, but the system additionally calls for players to be creative and offer their own suggestions for actions they wish their characters to take and make rolls appropriate to that. This encounter was set up only with predetermined rolls and offered no further information. So hopefully now if I continue to use premade adventures, my bullshit detector is trained and I will be aware. Ultimately, I think even the Skill Challenge rules as presented in the 4E material are woefully inadequate for satisfying play (in my experience, so far) and I briefly mention a possible solution, below.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 02, 2008, 04:58:36 AM
Fact: if you wanted the ghost befriend the characters and give them information, then have it befriend them and give them information as long as they aren't so stupid as to attack it outright. Don't make it contingent upon what a player will ("is supposed to" or "should obviously") do, and don't put in risks, like a possible fight with the ghost, that you as GM aren't willing to take.
I may misunderstand you here, but the possible fight with the ghost was not a risk I was not willing to take. It was the intended reward for failure of the (admittedly lame) diplomacy encounter with the ghost.
BACK TO MY ORIGINAL PROBLEM
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 02, 2008, 04:58:36 AM
Here's another point: in-fiction justifications or debate about any of this are not valid. What the ghost would or must do. (a) What the character would or should do. The player's talk about "his character" is one symptom of this common error. We're really talking about the people, you, him, and the others. (b) The question is whether you are able to fulfill the role of GM (DM in this case) without expectations of how the characters must react in order for play to proceed.
Here is what I see from where I am: Issue (a) is what I was originally asking about. I'm not sure the railroading discussion is relevant to this item or not, but it is the warning light that goes off for me whenever this player expresses displeasure with the rest of the group. A better example may be an earlier session when the players came upon a burial sight for a dragon. At first, the players had the notion that the cult leader they were after was excavating the grave to raise an undead dragon. The players' characters went along with that notion. At first they were so concerned they considered taking take time away from the urgent (main adventure) quest to discover some way to stop this believed raising of the dragon from taking place. [Aside: As the DM I had no preference whether they did this or not.] Then one of the players realized that this was an illogical concern because if they succeeded at destroying the evil personality in question (the main quest) then he wouldn't be around to raise the dragon. Why worry about researching rituals to prevent the raising of a dragon when you can just kill the necromancer who (only maybe) wishes to do so? Well, the player I have mentioned decided that it made sense for his character to be afraid someone was going to raise the dragon anyway. When it was explained to him by the other players that the only known person to be powerful enough to do it was the very evil cult leader they were going to confront, his reply was that maybe even less powerful more common mages could do such a thing. He than said that, he personally didn't believe this, but that his character did. Since the other players seemed confused enough to require further explanation, he explained that his character is a soldier and doesn't understand magic. Another player who is playing a soldier (who added "Hm, my character also doesn't understand magic") explained that that was illogical because it would mean that undead dragons would be a common sight, which they are not. Of course the first player stuck to his guns that it was 'realistic' for his character to be believing this and that everyone else should be able to see why this was 'plausible' and accept it for that reason.
The reason this is an issue for our group is only because it's an issue for him and I don't like to see him get so frustrated. The group tends to ignore this stuff when plays by it, which upsets him because he sees his input being rejected simply by being ignored. Another way to describe it would be that he seems to come from the position that he is the only person who can understand his character and that's what makes him right. It's not because the rules give him the authority to be in control over his character, it's because he knows who this imaginary character is and what it is thinking. Like I said in my original post, this might seem like a silly thing for me to think, but this is the impression I get about this one recurring situation in our group.
I don't think issue (b) is a problem with me as far as fiction-justification is concerned. I don't prepare things to turn out a certain way because my imagined fiction carries some special importance to me. Actually, it's quite the contrary. It's easier to say, "This encounter would be super cool, and I think it would be fun and engaging if the rules went like this:" and then I just throw it at the players, letting them tackle it as-is, employing their own creativity to create color and dialogue around the situation.
THE SUBJECT OF RAILROADING
(If this is so tertiary as to not warrant continued discussion, feel free to ignore it. Actually, I'm not even sure if this is an acceptable continuance of the AP report or not, so I'd rather someone just tell me if this is useful discussion or not.)
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 02, 2008, 04:58:36 AM
You basically played the scenario in your head before play, and decided that it would be successful only if specific things happened. And by specific things, you meant that a given player would have his character behave and say particular things. Furthermore, although in the fiction the characters are being presented with a choice and some possible danger, in reality you had no intention whatsoever of this encounter going in any direction except for this particular way.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 02, 2008, 04:58:36 AM
And you even decided beforehand which character would respond in a particular way.
That's called railroading. I recognize it because I did it for years and years.
Okay, so it's called correctly. Let's admit that the particular example I gave was a horrible piece of railroading garbage. However, I'd still like to ask the question, "Is railroading really always bad; can it not be considered a legitimate technique" because the way the encounters are designed in the published adventure still follow a basic railroad format. Okay, here's my mental pitch for railroad play: the players get to play the heroic protagonists in a story with the crucial parts predetermined. They will face challenges and battles that allow them to make creative and tactical decisions regarding use of their heroic abilities. Of course, ignore the fact that I did a horrendous job running the Ghostly Lord encounter almost as it was written.
[Note: I'm in the process of designing a major homebrew revision of the skill challenge system that is more straight-forwardly presented to the players and which encourages and actually requires creative player input about their characters. In fact, one of the things I'm trying to judge right now in its design is "am I asking for too much player input" with the concern that players who come along willingly for a railroad ride wish to be only so responsible for table contributions.]
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 02, 2008, 04:58:36 AM
[...] I also must call out the vast majority of published adventures, particularly those which followed upon the publication of D&D3.0, as being the most unplayable railroading trash in role-playing history. By unplayable I do not mean cliched or not to my taste. I mean literally unplayable. No one wants their characters to be played by a GM. No one wants to have to play "guess what I'm thinking" in order for their characters to survive or merely to get to an important point.
So I have to ask, are you sure? "Guess what I'm thinking" is a game. I fondly remember playing "Eye Spy" as a kid. Is the use of railroading to establish hard plot and situation boundaries a roleplaying game breaker? I'm posing this question now in all seriousness because I will be at a crossroads soon where the published adventure ends and I must make a decision to radically change our play-style or stick with it. The players so far have seemed to enjoy themselves. I will definitely be bringing up the issue of the published adventure and railroading in general to their attention for feedback. Although I hesitate to use the word "railroad" because that could elicit negative responses even if there is disparity between us over the meaning.
Finally, I'd like to apologize that I happened to choose such a bad example to start the discussion. In hindsight it's embarrassing I went with that encounter as written as if I was satisfying some kind of 4E product purity goddess.
Thank you,
-- John M.
greyorm:
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Ultimately, I think even the Skill Challenge rules as presented in the 4E material are woefully inadequate for satisfying play
According to the gaming blogs I read, this issue of the skill challenge rules not achieving the desired objective for their design has been noted by the 4E design team and apparently fixed via publication of an article in Dragon magazine (but don't quote me on that). Here's more information on skill challenge issues as well as a link to the fixes implemented by the design team (down at the bottom).
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hey John, I think there has been a lot of bad experience with a lot of vain GMs who blame their players for not playing “right” on this forum, so the default reaction is “the GM is wrong”. Also, your first example sounded like the player was actually making perfect sense given the fictional context, which is why people drew that conclusion.
None of us was there so we can’t tell, but I’ll say this: I once knew a player who had this notion of “good roleplaying”. He would say things like, “you have to separate player knowledge and character knowledge”, or, “I’m just playing my character”. He would maintain this even if it was painfully obvious that everybody at the table was annoyed. “I’m just playing my character” was the excuse he was hinding behind to not take responsibility for annoying everybody. “La la la, I’m not listening to you.” Of course, he had made that character in the first place an he had decided what this character was like.
What added to the problem was that player’s poor judgement. He did not have a good grasp on the established in-game situation. He frequently misinterpreted situations and consequences, where everybody else were slapping their foreheads. He misjudged simple physical conditions, he misjudged people’s reactions to his character, and he misjudged meta game stuff like what was a hint and what wasn’t, what was a consequential choice and what wasn’t. He had these stupid one-dimensional notions of “what the game world was like”, and, without reflection, he applied them in the most non-sensical ways as I wouldn’t have believed had I not seen it.
Needless to say, I am not playing with that player any more. But it was an impressive lesson in how much can go wrong, and how poor a single person’s judgement can be. I don’t know what the case is with your player, probably the truth is somewhere in between.
- Frank
NN:
I think the nub is this:
"Of course the first player stuck to his guns that it was 'realistic' for his character to be believing this and that everyone else should be able to see why this was 'plausible' and accept it for that reason".
Heres the thing: Was he just insisting on his characters right to be a dolt, or was he insistent that everyone else accepted his characters doltish plan?
Ron Edwards:
Hey John,
Apologize? No way, don't do that. This is a really good topic. I see now exactly how your example brought in different issues from your intended topic.
To stay with that other issue, briefly, I'm thinking ... well, first, we developed a term here a while ago called Force, meaning when anyone reaches over the table, verbally and mentally speaking, to play someone else's character. Railroading is a term for Force being employed by tacit expectation, by deception, or by bullying - basically without full permission.
You're absolutely right that Force in and of itself is not a bad thing, particularly when everyone buys into it and "the story" is acknowledged to be one person's job. We ended up calling this application of Force Participationist play, as opposed to Illusionist in which the GM tries to hide the Force he or she is relying on. There are a number of threads here about how to make Participationist play successful; Illusionist play is more generally perceived to be unsuccessful in the long run.
Anyway, that said, it's up to you whether to pursue the railroading issue here, which is perfectly OK by the rules of the site, and I can provide some serious linkage to useful discussions. Also, I want to stress that I'm not calling you on being a Damned Railroader or anything else accusatory. My take is that you got temporarily bait-and-switched by the publication, and are thoughtful enough to want to figure out how it happened and how not to find yourself there again. I call that responsible.
Let's focus on the guy in your group, then. As I wrote above, one issue is that dissatisfaction with play is only being addressed in terms of "my character," meaning that this fictional construct who is entirely under the control of a real person is supposed to be referenced as if he, the character were real. There is some integrity to this notion, in that the player's art (or contribution, or shared-imagining) should be given respect by everyone else ... but unfortunately, the notion can become distorted into what Forge-speak calls My Guy Syndrome.
My Guy Syndrome is pretty recognizable - it doesn't matter what the fundamental disconnect is between one player and everyone else, but whatever it may be, it's practically constant during play such that the fun-level is bottoming out. Typically the character either attacks ferociously and randomly ("The merchant smiles and says ..." [interrupting] "I kill him!!") or refuses to do anything ("I say nothing." "OK, what do you do?" "Nothing."). The person always justifies himself by saying "My guy would do it that way." What's happening here is that the fiction is being blamed for being lousy fiction (and here I don't mean "story" but rather the basic imagined medium of play), which is circular logic. If the other members of the group get sucked into that pit of false logic, then they'll wrangle endlessly about what the character "would or would not" do - a hopeless task, because the character does not exist.
Quote
... he seems to come from the position that he is the only person who can understand his character and that's what makes him right. It's not because the rules give him the authority to be in control over his character, it's because he knows who this imaginary character is and what it is thinking. Like I said in my original post, this might seem like a silly thing for me to think, but this is the impression I get about this one recurring situation in our group.
I don't know where this player and your group fall into the spectrum between respect-my-fiction-in-our-fiction at one end vs. My Guy Syndrome at the other. I am certain, however, that trying to address the issue by continuing to reference the character isn't going to work well. When the group experiences dissonance of this kind, I think it's pretty much given that someone must say, "Look, I'm not talking about your character, I'm talking to you and about what you do." And, I hope, "About all of us together" rather than "you vs. the rest of us," but that's a matter for each group to cope with.
Regarding "guess what I'm thinking," that's a good question and yes, very relevant for published-adventure design. Clearly uncertainty, and the tension between prep and actual play, can be excellent things. However, I suggest that it all works as a good thing when everyone knows (a) that we're doing it and (b) about what. Eye Spy works mainly because I know I'm guessing about what you're able to see right now, and we also both know who is the guesser and who is the guessee. The problematic situation I'm talking about is when none of that is certain.
Best, Ron
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