Quote from: Justin Alexander;919611It's not a matter of "bad-wrong-fun". It's that railroading takes you nowhere but more railroading. It's not a stepping stone to player-driven narratives or open-ended scenarios. It's a cul-de-sac. Have all the fun you want in the cul-de-sac, but it's not going to magically transform into a highway.

Did grove insist it was anything else? If so, I missed that part.

Quote from: Omega;919651uh... Savage Worlds DOES suck... just sayin... :cool:

LMAO

Quote from: cranebump;919652Did grove insist it was anything else? If so, I missed that part.

You haven't and I didnt.

Quote from: cranebump;919652Did grove insist it was anything else? If so, I missed that part.

Tenbones did. rgrove0172 replied to that with a question. I answered his question. He's apparently really upset because my answer is different than his. This is because he's a crazed, hypocritical egotist.

If you click the little double-arrow icon next to quoted text you can go to the message it was quoted from. It's not difficult to click your way up this conversational branch and see the context.

With that being said...

Quote from: rgrove0172;919633

QuoteIt's not a matter of "bad-wrong-fun". It's that railroading takes you nowhere but more railroading. It's not a stepping stone to player-driven narratives or open-ended scenarios. It's a cul-de-sac. Have all the fun you want in the cul-de-sac, but it's not going to magically transform into a highway.

And this is Gods Honest Truth because, well YOU SAY IT IS of course! You guys amaze me.

Quote from: rgrove0172;919658You haven't and I didnt.

If you aren't actually disagreeing with what I said, why are you so upset about me saying it?

In any case: Roleplaying games are, inherently, an interactive medium. Railroading is, inherently, antithetical to interactivity. It is literally defined as negating the interactive input of other players at the table. So, yes, it is fundamentally incapable of taking full advantage of the interactive medium of the roleplaying game because it is fundamentally set up to fight against the medium instead of using the medium. It is, furthermore, not going to teach you anything about using the full interactive scope of the medium because the linear, pre-planned content of the railroad teaches you nothing about how to prep or run interactive material. As I've said: It's a dead end. No reason you can't have fun in that dead end, but it remains a dead end.

Which is all shit I've said to you before, despite your bizarre, bullshit claim that I've never posted a supporting argument for these claims.

Now it's your turn: You've asserted that the only way to achieve detailed, dramatic, and well-prepared stories in a roleplaying game is to railroad. Would you care to actually support that ridiculous assertion? Or do you just want to reveal yourself to be a raging hypocrite again?

Quote from: Justin Alexander;919661Tenbones did. rgrove0172 replied to that with a question. I answered his question. He's apparently really upset because my answer is different than his. This is because he's a crazed, hypocritical egotist.

If you click the little double-arrow icon next to quoted text you can go to the message it was quoted from. It's not difficult to click your way up this conversational branch and see the context.

With that being said...





If you aren't actually disagreeing with what I said, why are you so upset about me saying it?

In any case: Roleplaying games are, inherently, an interactive medium. Railroading is, inherently, antithetical to interactivity. It is literally defined as negating the interactive input of other players at the table. So, yes, it is fundamentally incapable of taking full advantage of the interactive medium of the roleplaying game because it is fundamentally set up to fight against the medium instead of using the medium. It is, furthermore, not going to teach you anything about using the full interactive scope of the medium because the linear, pre-planned content of the railroad teaches you nothing about how to prep or run interactive material. As I've said: It's a dead end. No reason you can't have fun in that dead end, but it remains a dead end.

Which is all shit I've said to you before, despite your bizarre, bullshit claim that I've never posted a supporting argument for these claims.

Now it's your turn: You've asserted that the only way to achieve detailed, dramatic, and well-prepared stories in a roleplaying game is to railroad. Would you care to actually support that ridiculous assertion? Or do you just want to reveal yourself to be a raging hypocrite again?

Well first off I never asserted any such thing, only that I choose to achieve those ends using my own approach. You may and probably do manage it differently. In my experience the methods preached by so many here don't achieve the same thing but Im not saying they cant.

As to Roleplaying being an inherently interactive medium I tentatively agree (I play solo a great deal and there is no interactivity there yet it is undoubtedly a roleplaying game which has been discussed in another thread) but in no way is my approach antithetical. My players are absolutely involved to the fullest at every juncture, every turn and in every moment of the game.

I will also have to say that even if one accepts the concept of Railroading as negative, its not an all or nothing phenomena. There are various degrees of GM interference if you will, and GMs that accept these styles fall anywhere along the line... and in most cases deviate from game to game, session to session. That being said it is entirely possible for a heavy railroader to use the style as a safety net or crutch as they become more comfortable with the GM role and slowly lesson its impact over time. I went through something very much like that over 20 years ago before settling on a style that I felt worked for me in the long term. Therefore railroading is Absolutely a good tool for teaching and can easily lead to a better understanding of the interactive medium you are toting. Dead end = not

Quote from: rgrove0172;919550Well it should be understood though that I do allow players to fail or even die. I probably would intervene to prohibit some meaningless death like fumbling a roll as you approach a helicopter or something but my players understand and appreciate that part of the drama we are creating involves risk. They know I may step in and help once in a while for the good of the group but they cant count on it.

Why are you rolling to see if they fall to their deaths or not, if you're just going to veto the dice if they fail?

What you've done is remove the reality of the danger from the situation.

I think you were right at a very broad level in your long post above when you said that our priorities are very different, but not in the details, at least not for me. In this example, the point is I value playing a game that lets me experience an imagined situation as if it were really the case, to see how it plays out, to be faced with actual decisions and risks, to experience the situation we're talking about. If there's a deadly gap to jump to a helicopter, I want to have a real choice about whether to take the risk, based on how strong my character is, how strong and how dextrous a jumper he/she is, how much equipment I chose to carry on my body, including whether I choose to drop any heavy things before jumping, whether it's raining, how fast the copter is drifting, etc etc. I strongly do not want to have that undermined by wondering if the GM is just gonna fudge the dice. It defeats the whole purpose.

Quote from: Skarg;919818Why are you rolling to see if they fall to their deaths or not, if you're just going to veto the dice if they fail?

If you don't want PCs to have a risk of failure in a given situation, don't roll the dice.

If you don't want PCs to have a risk of death in a given situation, don't tell them there's a risk of death if they fail.


If you get in the habit of changing die rolls to whatever you want, why bother with the illusion of rolling? It's just a waste of time at that point.

Yes.

And, if I as the GM (or the NPC helicopter pilot) want to avoid the risk of death, the helicopter can fly nearer the building, or land properly.

And, if I as the player (or an NPC friend of the player) want to reduce the risk of death, I can do one of any number of things besides jump off a building hoping to grab an aircraft. Those choices, and getting actual risks and consequences from them, are what I play for.

If what I want is drama, I can and do jump and risk it. I and my players often do choose such things because the risk is real and therefore entertaining, and if we make such a jump, or fail, the result is much more dramatic because it is a real risk. If there is a fudged jump, to me that undermines the drama/risk/excitement/story-worthiness of the event, because it's a fake risk that wasn't really taken. I know the real story is "I pretended to risk my life" or "I was willing to risk death, but the GM robbed me of the actual glory by faking the roll, so it really wasn't a risk".

If a GM thinks the drama is all in the fake risk of the jump he thought of, that doesn't necessarily even make sense, that's missing out on the chance for other "dramatic" possibilities, such as a tactical/clever defense (and/or negotiation) at the roof entrance in order to let the helicopter land properly. Or any number of other options. The point for me though is that the situation described match the game situation, so I can make rational and meaningful decisions about them, and enjoy having the game be about the situation, and not be about generating a story that meets some dramatic criteria.

One of the most vivid memories from playing in one of my friend's first campaign, by the way, was early on, when we were escaping from a place by making a very long climb while under attack. We got down to two of us left and were about to make it out, when the second-to-last-surviving party member crit failed a climbing roll and fell to her death. Her falling scream was haunting. I experienced that as one of the tensest and dramatic and memorable gaming experiences I've had, and it was just a basic climbing roll where the GM played it by the dice. (It also hammered home the importance of good accurate rules to get the risks right.) If I were playing by a "narrative" GM I'd not have sweated it or remembered it except maybe as an annoying example, because there would be no real risk and no real situation to face except the GM's storytelling judgments.

Quote from: rgrove0172;919633And this is Gods Honest Truth because, well YOU SAY IT IS of course! You guys amaze me.

If I started a thread claiming that oh.. Savage Worlds sucks, I can prove it by claiming over and over and over again just how much I hate it. You guys would hang me... but that's exactly what some of you are doing. If it wasn't so aggravating it would be funny.

Time and pressure turns dinosaurs into birds (and other things). I'm not sure why this is aggravating? Seriously. I do think it's funny, only because you keep saying this stuff as if it even matters? Go play! Frolic in the Garden of Eden. Avoid the snakes and if you choose not to, for Dagon's sake, don't listen to their LIIEEES.

Quote from: rgrove0172;919693Well first off I never asserted any such thing...

/snip

If you look closely - Justin Alexander said exactly that.

Quote from: rgrove0172;919693In my experience the methods preached by so many here don't achieve the same thing but Im not saying they cant.

To which my response is simple - the use of any "method" or "system" or "tool" is dependent entirely upon how it is used, and by "who" uses it and whom it is used on. That alone is a large set of variables to work with. The issue one should take a sober look at is the number of people falling into these various categories and what their general success level is and total the sum as a "fun" factor.

So all things being equal -
1) I'm not going to disparage anyone for being a shitty GM without me having played in their games. So I'm going to assume we're *ALL* WTFAWESOME GM's here. So everyone gets a trophy and a pass.

2) That leaves me with how these methods are used. I have ample anecdotal and second-hand evidence of the ins-and-outs of their use. I find railroading to be inferior. Others whose opinions equally subjective have come to similar conclusions. Often after many years of using this and other methods to gauge their results. After literally hundreds if not thousands of discussions on Usenet, face-to-face, during game-design jam-sessions, with literally hundreds of players from many walks of life - I'm reasonably certain within a very narrow margin-for-error that most GM's that have gone through this process with extended numbers of people will come to the same conclusion: Railroading should be as light as possible and be made as invisible as possible or not even exist, for optimum results *in general*.

3) Player experience matters, but players can only get experience by likewise being subjected to different methods. Since my claim is that most new GM's start running campaigns as railroady-affairs of varying degrees the natural implication is that players likewise start playing in these kinds of games and therefore it matters on how a given method is used. Methods condition players to into forms of accepted play like in any game. That is precisely the reason I gravitated towards sandbox-style play because it gives players AND GM's the most freedom. But that freedom of play comes with a price as it demands more skill from the GM to pull it off. That skill only comes from experience. Therefore you have to evolve and learn those skills. That takes time and effort. Hence my observation.

Quote from: rgrove0172;919693As to Roleplaying being an inherently interactive medium I tentatively agree (I play solo a great deal and there is no interactivity there yet it is undoubtedly a roleplaying game which has been discussed in another thread) but in no way is my approach antithetical. My players are absolutely involved to the fullest at every juncture, every turn and in every moment of the game.

Do you think your proclivity to do this has no impact on how you think others *should* by GM fiat play your games? As you say yourself, it is an act of roleplaying with oneself without interactivity, if i take that for face-value is what I call "storytime".

Quote from: rgrove0172;919693That being said it is entirely possible for a heavy railroader to use the style as a safety net or crutch as they become more comfortable with the GM role and slowly lesson its impact over time.

Except you just admitted to the phenomenon which is ultimately my only claim. Show me a GM that *ISN'T* comfortable in the GM role and I'll be willing to bet you that is a GM that isn't what I would consider a *good* GM by my standards. I could be wrong, but I'm sure they're pretty rare. The way you become comfortable in the GM role is how? Go on, say it with me... "By doing it over and over and getting experience at it." just like anything else...

Quote from: rgrove0172;919693I went through something very much like that over 20 years ago before settling on a style that I felt worked for me in the long term. Therefore railroading is Absolutely a good tool for teaching and can easily lead to a better understanding of the interactive medium you are toting. Dead end = not

therefore I Absolutely say: "great! Game onward!" I have no faith you understand what we're talking about... 49-pages later. But it passes the time while I'm running my data-extractions.

Quote from: tenbones;919864Except you just admitted to the phenomenon which is ultimately my only claim. Show me a GM that *ISN'T* comfortable in the GM role and I'll be willing to bet you that is a GM that isn't what I would consider a *good* GM by my standards. I could be wrong, but I'm sure they're pretty rare. The way you become comfortable in the GM role is how? Go on, say it with me... "By doing it over and over and getting experience at it." just like anything else...

Id disagree here. From experience its the DM that questions themselves that tend to be the better DM. The confident ones have an odd tendency to end up revealed to be alot of bluster and not as much skill as they claimed. So to me its the DM that does not question themselves that I find suspicious. But probably a thread for another day.

Meh I think we're splitting hairs on this here. I am extremely comfortable as a GM and I question myself non-stop in terms of what works best.

"Not being comfortable" to me is that moment as a GM when you start not liking what the players are doing and in you inability due to whatever reason - be it lack of skill, understanding of the rules, understanding of whatever, fall back to the Railroad out of sheer habit rather than judicious intent.

Quote from: tenbones;919896Meh I think we're splitting hairs on this here.

This couldn't possibly be true!