Players characters evading direct questions

[Batcathat]

But if one path is easier, why would the players not take it? Why would they deliberately choose a sub-optimal path?

For example, if I tell them where the switch to disable the trap is, why would the players attempt a risky or potentially failure prone way to bypass or disarm it even if it is possible?
If I tell the players there are trolls in room 3a and a troll-bane sword in room 4c, why would they ever try and defeat the trolls without grabbing the sword first?
If you tell them there is a treasure hidden behind the bookshelf, why would the players ever avoid picking it up?

Sure, in very specific situations there may be an optimal choice, but in many situations there isn't. Let's say that the party needs to enter the castle of their enemy. They could fight the guards, trick the guards, sneak past the guards and probably a dozen other options, depending on the specifics, and frequently none of them is the obviously easiest path and it comes down to player style, party makeup or whatever (and in my experience, that can even make players knowingly choose a sub-optimal path. If player A likes sneaking and player B likes fighting, they're pretty likely to argue in favor of sneaking and fighting respectively even if neither is the easiest path for the situation at hand).

In any case, my point is that if there is only one option then it's a railroad whether the players know it or not and if there are fifteen different options (of roughly equal value, so not fourteen detours and one correct path), then it's not a railroad even if the players know their options.

[Talakeal]

Or, third option, there are math problems that are too hard for you or your players to solve optimally, math problems which can be used to make a roleplaying game.

You seem to be stuck on the literal definition of the word optimization. Optimization cannot exist in reality. Much like "perfection" or "infinite" it is a concept, not something that actually exists. That doesn't mean that people don't use it all the time in day to day speech. Hell, there are entire RPG boards dedicated to "optimization". Wouldn't your time be better spent arguing with them than with me?

But again, this is a purely semantic argument. If you prefer, substitute "the path which they perceive to have the highest ratio of reward to risk" rather than "optimal path".

Here is an example of how it's done for Tic-tac-toe.[/URL] You won't find one for Chess, because one cannot, in practice, be calculated.

If you need the opposing player to reveal what they are doing beforehand in a perfect information games, that's an admission that you cannot actually process all the information in the game to acquire optimal strategy.

Really, it would seem to me you don't know the difference and cannot distinguish between a game having perfect information and a gamemaster handing out a solution. I say the former, you think of the latter - with various corollaries, such as you not realizing that game master might not know the optimal solution to their own game, or that players might be able to win with sub-optimal strategies because the game master is playing sub-optimally without realizing it.

Ok then, why bring it up if it is clearly unrelated to the topic at hand?

The suggestion was that I tell them what the NPCs do and do not know and what information will get them to react in the way the players want them to.

Would it have been appropriate for me to respond "Well, the players already understand the rules of Changeling, therefore they already have perfect information about the scenario and could not possibly benefit from more information!".

No, we don't know that. You are suffering from a failure of imagination: you are thinking of a module that is ONLY difficult because of hidden information, and becomes trivially soluble with perfect information. You are then using that to conclude that perfect information would make any module trivial. That doesn't fly. The design space for modules, or game scenarios really, is open-ended. You said perfect information makes a game into a math problem, but forgot that math problems range from "can be understood and solved by 1st grader" to "makes professional mathematicians cry".



These all posit a comparison between the same scenario played with and without perfect information. All of these claims fail in the same way: the answers aren't, and cannot be, actually known without specifying a scenario. They also all illustrate that you fail to understand the argument:

Taking less damage, finding more treasure, having easier fights or solving more mysteries, none of these are "optimal". "Optimal" refers to the most favorable, or the set of most favorable, strategies. A perfectly informed strategy can have all kinds of improvements over a less-informed strategy and still fail to be optimal. Because, you see, even knowing all those things, one still has to crunch the path for obtaining those treasures, meaning Travelling Salesman Problem says hello again. How much time - real time - do you actually hand your players to plot an algorithm and calculate permutations?



This is just baseless supposition on your part. You don't know how a hidden information versus perfect information variants of the same scenario play without analyzing specific scenarios. You also cannot say anything useful this way about scenarios made to be played with perfect information from the get-go. Sure, they might play differently... in what way exactly? Again, the design space is open-ended. Such games can be anything.

For a concrete example, you can actually go play Fog-of-war Chess and compare your experience to playing normal Chess. Does the experience differ? Yes. Are there strategies that are decent in the former but weak or pointless in the latter? Definitely. Are they so radically different that a player who enjoys one, would not be able to play and enjoy the other? No, not really.

Yes, of course you can come up with some hypothetical game / scenario where all of the normal assumptions don't apply. I admitted as much in the post you are responding to.

Who cares? What does that have to do with the discussion at hand?

Why bring up increasingly inane hypotheticals that have nothing to do with RPGs that actually exist?

Heck, you accuse me of spherical cows, but at this point you're argument hinges on non-Euclidian hyper-cows.

I think if this was an issue at my table I'd probably think about radically simplifying and not including cant and language in ways that can cause confusion. When I've seen games devolve into people staring at their phones it's often because something is happening deep in the weeds that someone (or multiple someones) just doesn't care about.

I envy you.

Most of the people I know have their phone at more or less 24/7 regardless of the activity.

So... in character, have you given them a reason to not trust the seelie as a group? Out of character, have they been taught that the GM's running of the world isn't trustworthy? Because clearly there's something incentivizing this behavior.

Not really. Although the pookha in their party teaches that lesson pretty well.

Talakeal, historically, places too much emphasis on the "Challenge" aesthetic, to the extent that he isn't having fun unless his players think his game is too hard. So it's not surprising to be able to evaluate a statement as, "modules are too easy".

While that is technically true, it is misleading as it is putting the cart before the horse.

I find games with no realistic possibility of failure or requirement to put thought into it to be boring and not really "games". Generally, adventures I design have about a 5% failure rate, with individual encounters havng about a .5% failure rate. Note that these are not TPKs... TPKs are all but unheard of at my table.

The problem is that my players (mostly Bob) have self-esteem issues so that they blame their failures on someone else (either the GM or the module or another player) because the idea that their actions (or even the dice) contributed to the failure is inconceivable. Combine that with a miserly attitude where they (again mostly Bob) refuse to use consumables and insist on stripping every list bit of treasure and XP from the adventure (including what is clearly optional side content) and it creates issues.

Note however, this is not something unique to my table. I have absolutely seen this same behavior from them at other tables, and I have absolutely seen them complain that modules are too hard (and sometimes I agree, see my multiple rants about Delta Green modules with absolutely impossible to guess victory conditions).

[Batcathat]

I thought of an example that's not a perfect match, but might be helpful.

Talakeal, have you ever replayed an open-world computer game (like Skyrim or Fallout or something along those lines) or even just played it for the first time while consulting a walkthrough or a wiki? And if so, do you think that knowing the ins and outs of the game meant it suddenly became entirely linear and rail-roady?

EDIT: Nevermind, I noticed that comparison has already been brought up. Still, I think it's a valid point.

[NichG]

Is it any wonder that I am extra cautious about taking actions that feel like railroading to me? This entire post is written presupposing that I must be running a railroad, based on nothing I actually said.

...

But if one path is easier, why would the players not take it? Why would they deliberately choose a sub-optimal path?

...

Some approaches to problems are vastly more efficient than other approaches. If the GM simply tells the players which approach is most efficient, the players would be fools not to take that approach, rendering all other approaches moot. To me, this is railroading, as you are effectively taking all other approaches off the table.

This argument only possibly holds for scenarios that are already railroads. So yeah, what you say might be true - but only if you have a scenario with a single path of action that is clearly better than all others could possibly be, for all possible players, motivations, aesthetics, etc. Just hiding that path and making the players feel around in the dark to find it doesn't stop that from being a railroad.

If your scenario is as open-ended and diverse as you talk about later when comparing RPGs and cRPGs, you can tell the players everything about what *you* would do, and it shouldn't mean that that option is actually what they would find the best option to pursue. Because in an open-ended scenario, you cannot have thought of everything. And in a non-railroaded scenario, different viable paths will be optimal under different people's goals and aesthetics.

Like, you mention 'why would you go with the unseelie rather than the fey baron?'. Well, in a scenario where the unseelie and the fey baron both demand different prices for their aid and provide equal contribution towards the resolution of the threat, different players characters may prefer different prices. In a scenario where the Fomorians could be viably fought off by the PCs but just with a very high risk, different players may prefer the risk of consequence to the definite cost of whatever the price is. In such a diverse scenario you could readily and freely say 'if it were me, I'd tell the fey baron about the attack on Muir woods and agree to perform a future courier favor taking no more than one day and threatening not my life or those of the lives I care about - thats what I think the optimal route is' and the players could still, totally rationally, still say 'nah we go with the unseelie and poison this CEO for them in exchange for them blowing up the Fomorians'.

The players chose to talk the Seelie into helping them. In my opinion, the easiest way to do this was to make those tasked with defending Muir Woods aware of the impending attack. But the players could have come up with a better plan I didn't think of, or they could have made a worse plan work. Hell... if they hadn't flubbed their persuasion roll their initial plan of convincing the Seelie to attack the formorians "because they are there" could have yielded results despite it being, imo, a plan that was likely doomed to failure.

See, if you're saying 'the players could have come up with a better plan I didn't think of', then you're as much as saying 'even if I gave them perfect information about the scenario and my thoughts on it, the course of action I suggest might not even be the best!' So if what you say about your own scenario is true then your worry that too much information would spoil the scenario is, by your own admission, unfounded.

The most open-ended, non-railroady questions for a campaign to ask are the ones whose answer depends on the person. And if you want that to be a challenge, ask the questions where the answer will depend on the person and they haven't figured out their own answer yet. With those sorts of questions, no amount of communication from the GM can make the challenge trivial, because the GM cannot read the players minds and know what they would truly be happiest with.

If the fight is still a challenge after being told everything about the encounter and being told what the optimal tactics are as the GM sees them, then I would argue that it wouldn't be a fair challenge going in blind. And, in such a case, the optimal tactics are probably to avoid the encounter entirely!

Take a Balor from the 3.5e Monster Manual, it explicitly has a list of its standard tactics for the first four rounds of a fight. Give a group of four players a set of pre-gen Lv16 characters - Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue lets say - that are not hyper-optimized but are comfortably competent, and run them against the Balor, promising to follow the Balor's combat script and letting them see the Balor's stat block in the monster manual as well as the stat blocks of anything the Balor summons. Restrict the players to 15 minutes to familiarize themselves with their pre-gens and the Balor stat block before the encounter, and no more than 10 minutes per action during combat. Allow both sides one round to pre-buff (its in the Balor's script). It will neither be a cakewalk nor will it be unfairly impossible, nor will it be simply up to the dice.

Lv16s vs a CR 20 encounter is readily doable blind by experienced D&D players. With the Balor restricted to its script (regardless of whether its opponents know the script or not), it'll be a bit easier because the script is dumb compared to the full on teleport kiting that it should really do, but there's still a power gap there.

cRPGs are vastly different from tabletop RPGs.

First of all, they can't account for out of the box thinking. You can never kidnap the bosses family for leverage, or borrow a magic item from a friend in a neighboring kingdom, or tunnel directly into the treasure room bypassing the rest of the dungeon, or any of the countless other things you could do in a traditional RPG module with perfect information.

On the contrary, this point makes GM transparency even less of a problem, because there are far more ways for players to come up with things the GM didn't think of and beat the GM's theoretical 'optimum' path.

Giving the information to let players think about those alternatives that they couldn't if they didn't know there was a point to it is in fact great challenging gameplay. Heist games have to be structured like this to be any good - too much randomness or hidden information and you can't plan, and the heist genre is all about the elaborate plan (and about the plan going wrong, but usually due to a single point of divergence in the information that then cascades out). When you know the guard rotation and whether you can or can't pick a lock and how long it will take and all of that, the heist scenario becomes a search problem - a kind of puzzle - and the GM can happily set it up and say 'I didn't actually compute a solution for your characters, but you've got lots of abilities and you know everything I do about the situation, so figure it out yourselves'.

Second, they aren't fair fights to begin with. Tabletop RPG modules are written with the expectation of a fair challenge going in blind. RPGs aren't, because you are expected to play them over and over again until you get them right. Hardcore mode with considered to be a challenge for advanced players, not the expectation for noobies!

Aren't you basically conceding the point then, that its possible to design games that are fair and challenging despite perfect information? If cRPGs can do it, you can design TTRPG scenarios the same way, and provide the information that makes them fair.

Beyond that I'd say the particular criticism of 'you are expected to play them over and over again until you get them right' only applies to Divinity: Original Sin out of the games I mentioned. I can easily believe that a careful, average player can get through BG3 blind on Normal without ever having a TPK. I had one TPK when I was rushing something I shouldn't, and otherwise all of my save/load shenanigans were situations which would have been 'play on through' in a TTRPG - stuff where I was trying to get the best outcome or pull off some trick like winning a fight you're not supposed to be able to. Pathfinder: WotR is somewhere in the middle, but even there I think I did more save/load stuff due to the Act 2 time limit (and that out of a personal hate for invisible time limits in games) than specifically because of losing a given fight.

Third, most computer RPGs have a large degree of manual dexterity involved, which bypasses a lot of the knowledge requirements.

If you look at the *actual RPGs I listed* manual dexterity is not involved in any of them. Pathfinder WotR is turn based, BG3 is turn based, Divinity: Original Sin is turn based. Please don't make up irrelevant details when trying to argue your point.

That being said, although I am sure there are some out there, I have yet to play a computer RPG that I can't utterly trivialize after multiple playthroughs.

Try Pillars of Eternity 2 with the challenge mode that makes you cart around a kid everywhere and not let them die, and tell me that multiple playthroughs lets you 'utterly trivialize' it.

Woah, hold on. Perfect information only goes one way. It is impossible to have a game where both sides have perfect information. Best case scenario, attempting it ends up with a Princess Bride style"I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know...." loop and nobody ever actually makes a move.

We're playing chess, we each must talk aloud about how we plan to move and what responses we're considering; we must also point out anything we notice about the other player's move. Assume this is being done in good faith - yes you can refrain from saying something or talk slowly in theory, but we both agree not to do that.
We each get 3 minutes per move for this.

We have equal information about the other player's thought process and perfect information about the game state. The game also will finish within 2 hours at most.

[Vahnavoi]

Woah, hold on. Perfect information only goes one way. It is impossible to have a game where both sides have perfect information. Best case scenario, attempting it ends up with a Princess Bride style"I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know...." loop and nobody ever actually makes a move.

The applicable part from Princess Bride is "you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

Because what you just said is completely incorrect. In a sequential perfect information games with both players playing perfectly, what typically happens is a draw, rules allowing. There are no interminable loops - the first player makes the best possible opening move, the second player answers with best possible counterplay, and so it goes until a conclusion is reached. The XKCD comic about Tic-Tac-Toe comic illustrates this.

You continue making bizarre assertions here:

You seem to be stuck on the literal definition of the word optimization. Optimization cannot exist in reality. Much like "perfection" or "infinite" it is a concept, not something that actually exists. That doesn't mean that people don't use it all the time in day to day speech. Hell, there are entire RPG boards dedicated to "optimization". Wouldn't your time be better spent arguing with them than with me?

That's complete nonsense. Optimization is a practice, the presence and absence of optimal strategies something that can be concretely mathematically studied and then applied. Everything me and NichG have been saying is about practical qualities of existing, playable games - qualities you could leverage to improve your game design if you bothered to actually get your terms straight.

It's a long way to get you to understand the simple idea that you can give way more information to your players than you think, without it having all the negative ramifications you imagine.

[Talakeal]

This argument only possibly holds for scenarios that are already railroads. So yeah, what you say might be true - but only if you have a scenario with a single path of action that is clearly better than all others could possibly be, for all possible players, motivations, aesthetics, etc. Just hiding that path and making the players feel around in the dark to find it doesn't stop that from being a railroad.

So would you consider a dungeon crawl with an open floor plan and no plot what-so-ever a "railroad"?

Because if I have a map of the dungeon that includes the locations of all treasures, routes, monsters, and traps, including hidden ones, and the monsters stat blocks, I guarantee you that I can come up with a route that has a drastically higher reward to risk ratio than anyone could realistically stumble upon using only in character information.

Or hell. The players want to get into a locked room. Is this a railroad?

The GM doesn't tell them they have to get in, the players chose this goal for themselves. The GM has no plans for how they could get in; they could kick the door down, pick the lock, search for a key, teleport, turn incorporal, shrink down and crawl under the crack, try and bluff someone into letting them in, create a diversion and force the guards inside to come out, tunnel through the wall, blow the wall down, dig under the wall, etc. etc. etc.

But, if the players know that there is a key hidden under a fake rock in the garden, why would they bother with any of these things? Using the key is clearly the optimal route.

See, if you're saying 'the players could have come up with a better plan I didn't think of', then you're as much as saying 'even if I gave them perfect information about the scenario and my thoughts on it, the course of action I suggest might not even be the best!' So if what you say about your own scenario is true then your worry that too much information would spoil the scenario is, by your own admission, unfounded.

Right, but failure is off the table. There is now zero possibility of actually losing.

Likewise, most players are, to put it bluntly, not invested enough in the game to actually look for some better solution when they have a nice, easy, simple, straightforward, guaranteed to work solution handed to them.

This isn't really a game, this is more just the players acting out the GMs railroad. Honestly, it's kind of an inversion of a traditional module. In a traditional module, the GM gives the players a goal and then lets them figure out how they are going to accomplish it. In this hypothetical, the PCs tell the GM their goal, and then the GM tells them how to accomplish it.

Giving the information to let players think about those alternatives that they couldn't if they didn't know there was a point to it is in fact great challenging gameplay. Heist games have to be structured like this to be any good - too much randomness or hidden information and you can't plan, and the heist genre is all about the elaborate plan (and about the plan going wrong, but usually due to a single point of divergence in the information that then cascades out). When you know the guard rotation and whether you can or can't pick a lock and how long it will take and all of that, the heist scenario becomes a search problem - a kind of puzzle - and the GM can happily set it up and say 'I didn't actually compute a solution for your characters, but you've got lots of abilities and you know everything I do about the situation, so figure it out yourselves'.

That's actually exactly what I am saying. That's a very good way to put it.

Playing with full knowledge is a lot less like a traditional adventure RPG and a lot more like planning a heist.

And, IMO, planning a heist is a puzzle, not a game.

Now, you can make it a game by adding in elements that make it difficult to execute the plan or force you to improvise in real time, for example, Teris is the quintessential "puzzle game" yet it still relies heavily on RNG and manual dexterity, but those aren't going to be present in a traditional tabletop RPG.

Take a Balor from the 3.5e Monster Manual, it explicitly has a list of its standard tactics for the first four rounds of a fight. Give a group of four players a set of pre-gen Lv16 characters - Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue lets say - that are not hyper-optimized but are comfortably competent, and run them against the Balor, promising to follow the Balor's combat script and letting them see the Balor's stat block in the monster manual as well as the stat blocks of anything the Balor summons. Restrict the players to 15 minutes to familiarize themselves with their pre-gens and the Balor stat block before the encounter, and no more than 10 minutes per action during combat. Allow both sides one round to pre-buff (its in the Balor's script). It will neither be a cakewalk nor will it be unfairly impossible, nor will it be simply up to the dice.

Lv16s vs a CR 20 encounter is readily doable blind by experienced D&D players. With the Balor restricted to its script (regardless of whether its opponents know the script or not), it'll be a bit easier because the script is dumb compared to the full-on teleport kiting that it should really do, but there's still a power gap there.

You aren't describing an RPG scenario. You are making up your own game with a bunch of artificial rules.

Throwing a bunch of pre-gen characters at a balrog and then not giving the players sufficient time to even learn their own character's abilities, let alone the balor's, doesn't prove anything, and it certainly isn't anything comparable to a full information scenario.

I can guarantee you that if you gave me an actual sixteenth level party that exists in the world and which I am familiar and put me against a balor that is forced to follow a combat script, I am going to dribble it like a basket-ball.


Of course, that isn't really comparable to what we are actually discussing; because the key factor is the GM telling the player's what to do to win.

At which point, I don't really have to engage with the game at all to win.

If the GM shouts "Ok, next round the balrog is casting blasphemy, so make sure your cleric casts silence!" I can just respond "Ok, my cleric casts silence. What should I do next turn?" ad nauseum.

Aren't you basically conceding the point then, that its possible to design games that are fair and challenging despite perfect information? If cRPGs can do it, you can design TTRPG scenarios the same way, and provide the information that makes them fair.

Absolutely. I conceded that point three posts ago. Hell, I outright *made* that point three posts ago. Because it isn't a point I am actually defending. I have no stake in propping up a strawman.

The point I am actually making is that in the vast majority of RPG scenarios, if the GM is simply going to tell you the best way to resolve encounters, then there is no challenge, excitement, or decision making inherent in the game unless the players decide to inject it in artificially, and if they are doing that the game is more of a collaborative story-telling game than a typical RPG where you are playing a character and trying to accomplish said character's goals in character..

If you look at the *actual RPGs I listed* manual dexterity is not involved in any of them. Pathfinder WotR is turn based, BG3 is turn based, Divinity: Original Sin is turn based. Please don't make up irrelevant details when trying to argue your point.

C'mon dude, pot meet kettle and all that.

I am talking about tabletop RPG scenarios, and you are the one trying to bring computer rpg's into the mix.

I didn't realize you were suddenly redefining our argument about tabletop RPGs to be exclusively about three specific computer games I have never played and dismissing all other games are "irrelevant".

I am not "making up" anything; it is an objective fact that the majority of computer RPGs which I have played require some manual dexterity on the part of the player. Not all of them mind you, the Interplay Fallout's don't for example*, but the vast majority do. Heck, even Final Fantasy games often require you to input button combinations or play timing games for certain moves.

And finally, I am not trying to argue a point. The only reason I even brought up manual dexterity is to preemptively shoot down the argument "Well if RPGs are so easy, how come people can fail at them even if they are following a guide?", to which the answer is almost certainly either RNG or lack of manual dexterity.



*: Well, not much. It is absolutely still possible to misclick your mouse and shoot your ally in the back or drop your controller on the floor and not be able to pick it up before your turn timer ends or whatever.

Because what you just said is completely incorrect. In a sequential perfect information games with both players playing perfectly, what typically happens is a draw, rules allowing. There are no interminable loops - the first player makes the best possible opening move, the second player answers with best possible counterplay, and so it goes until a conclusion is reached. The XKCD comic about Tic-Tac-Toe comic illustrates this.

Full agreement here.

That's complete nonsense. Optimization is a practice, the presence and absence of optimal strategies something that can be concretely mathematically studied and then applied. Everything me and NichG have been saying is about practical qualities of existing, playable games - qualities you could leverage to improve your game design if you bothered to actually get your terms straight.

Again, agreed.

I am not even sure what you are trying to argue here. Are you saying that optimization is binary? You either have the mathematically optimal solution or you don't? And even if you are 99.99% efficient, you are still not "optimal" because optimal is 100% or bust?

Because an RPG module can absolutely be optimized under this definition. Set a goal. And then mathematically fine tune your strategy to achieve your goal with the minimum of risk.

NichG's analogy of planning a heist is very close to what I am getting at. Do you not agree that it is possible to optimize a heist when given full information about the scenario?

[Unoriginal]

The problem is that my players (mostly Bob) have self-esteem issues so that they blame their failures on someone else (either the GM or the module or another player) because the idea that their actions (or even the dice) contributed to the failure is inconceivable. Combine that with a miserly attitude where they (again mostly Bob) refuse to use consumables and insist on stripping every list bit of treasure and XP from the adventure (including what is clearly optional side content) and it creates issues.

Note however, this is not something unique to my table. I have absolutely seen this same behavior from them at other tables, and I have absolutely seen them complain that modules are too hard (and sometimes I agree, see my multiple rants about Delta Green modules with absolutely impossible to guess victory conditions).

Between this, the fact that you get blamed for going too hard and too easy wit no middle ground, the fact that the one player comfortable with talking in-character goes into self-depreciating tirades when he doesn't figure out something, and the new player who you describes as trying to gaslight you...

Have you considered the idea that the relationship between you and those players is just toxic and you shouldn't play with them?

Because what you have here is neither a good gaming situation nor a good relationship.

[Batcathat]

I am not "making up" anything; it is an objective fact that the majority of computer RPGs which I have played require some manual dexterity on the part of the player. Not all of them mind you, the Interplay Fallout's don't for example*, but the vast majority do.

Great, so let's use that as an example. As it happens, I'm currently replaying Fallout 2. I've played through it many times since it came out and while I can't claim perfect knowledge, it's quite vast (and probably a lot more detailed than what most GMs could come up with if asked to explain everything that's going on, I would guess). By your logic, that should make the game basically a railroad, but it very much ain't. Because I play a different character, because I like trying different things, because I'm a different person and probably a few other reasons, but the short version is that just because I know the game, the setting and the plot very well doesn't make it any more railroady than the first time I played it, since I still have as many (or as few, depending on how you view it) options as if I didn't know the first thing about it.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

Between this, the fact that you get blamed for going too hard and too easy wit no middle ground, the fact that the one player comfortable with talking in-character goes into self-depreciating tirades when he doesn't figure out something, and the new player who you describes as trying to gaslight you...

Have you considered the idea that the relationship between you and those players is just toxic and you shouldn't play with them?

Because what you have here is neither a good gaming situation nor a good relationship.

Plus, apparently, everyone has their phone out all the time. Again in my experience (which is all I have to go on!) people don't pull their phones out at the table unless they're bored enough or pissed off enough to disassociate. Someone looking at their phone for longer than it takes to read a text is a sign to me that I need to move things along, someone's bored or feels left out.

If people aren't absorbing the information, aren't engaging with the world, aren't chatting and bantering with each other and are looking at their phones too much to pay attention -- is anyone having any fun?

[Telok]

Have you considered the idea that the relationship between you and those players is just toxic and you shouldn't play with them?

Because what you have here is neither a good gaming situation nor a good relationship.

If the only thing you ever hear about air travel is the horrible crashes shouldn't you never fly anywhere? If the only thing you read about one person's cars on a car forum is some mechanical hiccup once every six months then isn't that evidence the car is broken beyond repair? If the only time trailer parks make the news is crime and tornados does that mean all trailer parks are constant hotbeds of criminal activity that get hit by tornados?

Onward!
So, following my last incoherent ramble and having gotten some sleep, I think I was trying to talk about what game mechanics prime players to behave in different ways. Games that only really have combat rules and set ever increasing combat powers as the core of the characters will prime players to do combat & power-up stuff as a main goal. When faced with situations that aren't in the fight & loot category they flounder. And in my experience many players carry that over system to system.

Had that happen again recently to me. I set up an encounter, obviously a trap, that started social, a bomb went off (two really but only one was a munitions exploding) and then went into combat when the PCs started hitting people. They won the fight trivially of course. They had about ten or twelve hours while the bad guy leader regenerated from faking his death at the hands of the PC, got the video from the hired camera crew, very lightly doctored the video, and sent it to the police. The PCs, despite being among the victims this time, literally stealthed out and never talked to anyone. When the police call to board their ship and search for suspects they offer snide insulting remarks and run off. The PCs have all the skills, tools, allies, and ability to deal with social stuff. But most of the players are so monofocused on combat capability from years of D&D that its all they really think they can do. Its how they approach everything, like a combat encounter because that's the stuff thats been hammered into them as the most important part of the game over years of D&D & adjacent system's modules.

I'm wondering if Tak's players aren't having something like that going on. They're

[Batcathat]

If the only thing you ever hear about air travel is the horrible crashes shouldn't you never fly anywhere? If the only thing you read about one person's cars on a car forum is some mechanical hiccup once every six months then isn't that evidence the car is broken beyond repair? If the only time trailer parks make the news is crime and tornados does that mean all trailer parks are constant hotbeds of criminal activity that get hit by tornados?

While this is true, Talakeal seems like the equivalent of someone who can't get on a plane without at least one engine falling off halfway through the flight.

[NichG]

So would you consider a dungeon crawl with an open floor plan and no plot what-so-ever a "railroad"?

Yeah actually, if you remove all things from the scenario which could possibly make alternate goals or decisions at all meaningful, its a railroad. Like, the average XCrawl module is a railroad - you have a linear series of rooms each with a challenge, you take on the challenge and if you live you go to the next room until you're done.

Or hell. The players want to get into a locked room. Is this a railroad?

The GM doesn't tell them they have to get in, the players chose this goal for themselves. The GM has no plans for how they could get in; they could kick the door down, pick the lock, search for a key, teleport, turn incorporal, shrink down and crawl under the crack, try and bluff someone into letting them in, create a diversion and force the guards inside to come out, tunnel through the wall, blow the wall down, dig under the wall, etc. etc. etc.

But, if the players know that there is a key hidden under a fake rock in the garden, why would they bother with any of these things? Using the key is clearly the optimal route.

I mean why not? The rogue might want to show off their lockpicking. The barbarian might feel angry at the owner of the door and want to destroy things. These could be meaningful, agentic choices. Maybe teleporting is faster than going to get the key, maybe going incorporeal will be advantageous to things that happen after bypassing the door, maybe convincing someone that they should be allowed through will set up a larger scam in the future, maybe creating a diversion lets them take care of those guards who might be a problem for things going forward, etc.

If you sterilize the scenario so much that there's basically no relationship between the players, the characters, the way of doing things, and what happens next then yeah you've basically pushed the actual interesting agency to the edges of the session - to that one choice of 'we want to get into this room'. And even if a player couldn't put their finger on it, they may well legitimately feel like the game is railroady if 99% of the time is being spent on this kind of linear gameplay.

Or, you know, you could also just not have a key hidden under a fake rock in the garden. You're the one making the scenario fragile to information here with that choice. It doesn't mean its never okay to have a key under the rock, but when all situations start to be like that then again you're sort of excluding opportunities for truly meaningful decisions from the bulk of your gameplay, and you'll ultimately have an overall story structure that reflects less of the characters and the players are more of your own preconceptions about how things should be resolved.

If this is just one or two minutes of gameplay in an entire session made up of dozens of different moments then you haven't lost much if it gets trivially resolved. You're only in trouble if this kind of moment is the only thing you know how to design and you make them all like that.

Because if I have a map of the dungeon that includes the locations of all treasures, routes, monsters, and traps, including hidden ones, and the monsters stat blocks, I guarantee you that I can come up with a route that has a drastically higher reward to risk ratio than anyone could realistically stumble upon using only in character information.

And yet, if its a well designed dungeon, someone else with the same information as you may come up with a different route that they're happier with than your route even if they get to see your route. Because they're more interested in interacting with certain things than others, because they've specialized their character in a different way, because they value reward vs risk differently than you, because you didn't think of something that they think of, because they intend to use the improvised free form actions that the tabletop format allows to try something that you wouldn't have thought to try, etc.

Right, but failure is off the table. There is now zero possibility of actually losing.

Not if your players want different things than you would want in their place.

Recent campaign, the players were playing villain characters, and the conceit of the game was that villains gained power by accomplishing ambitions - but the players each had to determine their ambitions and the subgoals for those ambitions. I was *very* forthright about information about the world, made divinatory superpowers widely available and the players made use of these, etc.

One of the players picked that their ambitions would be to collect sets of things of greater and greater scope - starting with rare playing cards as an street-level villain, to racing vehicles, to kaiju, and ultimately they wanted to own the moon. At the kaiju level, a frequent divinatory search was basically trying to find things to capture and turn into the character's ideal Pokemon team. They had all the information I came up with, as I came up with it. It was still very hard, taking multiple sessions, for them to find the creatures they would be satisfied with; to find the particular approach they wanted to take to capturing them; to figuring out what sorts of opportunity for augmentation and transformation they wanted to pursue for each one if any.

No hidden information of note, no obvious 'failure' state other than being dissatisfied, hours of meaningful gameplay for that player, and several instances of difficult choices even in one case requiring time shenanigans for an 'undo'.

Same campaign, another character wanted vengeance on a Siberian megacity technocratic cult. The character had access to the military advisors of a high-level government, spies within the megacity, and some of the same divinatory stuff. So I was pretty open about 'what would Tunguska do if you do this?' 'what would Tunguska do if you do that?'. Their specific plans still changed multiple times over the course of 5 or 6 sessions, and the final resolution didn't look like any of them. It was a legitimately hard problem - the character had the power to act decisively in any number of ways, but they also cared about the fallout of how they went about it (to the extent at least of avoiding a quagmire of leaving behind enemies who would show up multiple sessions later to cause trouble or ending up in a forever war). In the end, the solution they converged on was to 'help' their enemy achieve their goal but basically sabotage the actual form of that success in a way that would be like having everyone walk into the soylent green machine with a smile on their face, thinking it was a door to a utopia.

I certainly didn't play their character for them in that sequence, even if I was giving them very thorough information at every stage - including things like how their portal project worked and so on. There was no single dominating optimal path in that situation either, and another PC could have wiped them out by, for example, literally capturing the entirety of Siberia into a photograph world and then burning the photo. It would have been a lot simpler, like taking the key under the rock, but it wouldn't have satisfied the player's personal goals and aesthetics about what victory actually looks like.

No need for the players to 'act out the GMs plan' in either of those cases, even if I ended up suggesting dozens of viable ways the PCs could accomplish their goals.

That's actually exactly what I am saying. That's a very good way to put it.

Playing with full knowledge is a lot less like a traditional adventure RPG and a lot more like planning a heist.

And, IMO, planning a heist is a puzzle, not a game.

Now, you can make it a game by adding in elements that make it difficult to execute the plan or force you to improvise in real time, for example, Teris is the quintessential "puzzle game" yet it still relies heavily on RNG and manual dexterity, but those aren't going to be present in a traditional tabletop RPG.

This is a failure of imagination on your part. You have an excessively narrow view of what's possible in an extremely open-ended medium. Heists do have puzzle elements for sure, but you're literally saying there are 'puzzle games' and 'puzzles are not games' in the same breath.

A good heist game is going to be integrated with the world, not just be a modular puzzle that you solve (and any viable solution is fine) and then forget about. A basic structure for example is, the players plan, but during the heist the characters individually have some opportunity to go off-plan for some personal (or even group) rewards that had not been considered during planning. The party wants to steal the Gold Heron, but the party's cat burglar sees someone among the guests who is part of their long-term vengeance scheme against the guy who got them sent to jail - do they deviate and risk screwing up the plan to pursue their own personal vendetta? Is the plan robust enough that it can survive that, or was it a very 'optimal' plan in terms of time and resources, but brittle and having no margin for deviation?

You aren't describing an RPG scenario. You are making up your own game with a bunch of artificial rules.

Throwing a bunch of pre-gen characters at a balrog and then not giving the players sufficient time to even learn their own character's abilities, let alone the balor's, doesn't prove anything, and it certainly isn't anything comparable to a full information scenario.

I can guarantee you that if you gave me an actual sixteenth level party that exists in the world and which I am familiar and put me against a balor that is forced to follow a combat script, I am going to dribble it like a basket-ball.

Adjust the level accordingly then until its a fair fight.

And there's always finite time to learn your characters' abilities. There's always finite time to work out a plan of action. The challenge in such a scenario is how quickly and accurately you can navigate the space of possibilities and strategies, not 'oh no I used Fireball but its immune'.

Of course, that isn't really comparable to what we are actually discussing; because the key factor is the GM telling the player's what to do to win.

At which point, I don't really have to engage with the game at all to win.

If the GM shouts "Ok, next round the balrog is casting blasphemy, so make sure your cleric casts silence!" I can just respond "Ok, my cleric casts silence. What should I do next turn?" ad nauseum.

And yet someone else at the table may realize 'oh wait, if the Cleric casts Silence on a pebble or something then the Balor might move, or if they put it on the Balor itself then SR and saves is an issue and they might burn their action for nothing. Instead, maybe we scatter and maintain range that round - sure one person might be Dazed, but if the Balor is spending their action in exchange for one of ours, that's not so bad - that burns down the duration on the Implosion it cast on round 1 as well. Or, what if we ready to interrupt with an attack so that way we might cancel the Silence *and* get some damage dealt as part of the deal?'

You are not a perfect strategist, your 'GM's path' is not going to be the best play. In the case where the players have all the information about the Balor and what it will do, your own advice isn't actually adding anything unless you're just that much smarter than all your players.

Absolutely. I conceded that point three posts ago. Hell, I outright *made* that point three posts ago. Because it isn't a point I am actually defending. I have no stake in propping up a strawman.

In which case, you don't need to be afraid of giving your players information!

The point I am actually making is that in the vast majority of RPG scenarios, if the GM is simply going to tell you the best way to resolve encounters, then there is no challenge, excitement, or decision making inherent in the game unless the players decide to inject it in artificially, and if they are doing that the game is more of a collaborative story-telling game than a typical RPG where you are playing a character and trying to accomplish said character's goals in character..

C'mon dude, pot meet kettle and all that.

I am talking about tabletop RPG scenarios, and you are the one trying to bring computer rpg's into the mix.

I didn't realize you were suddenly redefining our argument about tabletop RPGs to be exclusively about three specific computer games I have never played and dismissing all other games are "irrelevant".

Our argument is about false assertions you made, which you then asked me for examples to show those assertions are false:

[quote=Talakeal]
We both know that, barring profound bad luck or stupidity, the players are going to succeed at whatever goals the module sets before them with minimum risk or effort.
We both know that if the players know all the monster's stats and locations and weaknesses, combat will be a breeze.
[quote]

I gave examples that are counter to your false assertions when you asked for proof that those assertions were false. Any counter example proves you wrong. When I gave counter examples, you then *invented false things about them* in order to still maintain your point. That is arguing in bad faith.

There's no point in talking to you, so I'm going to block you now.

[Unoriginal]

If the only thing you ever hear about air travel is the horrible crashes shouldn't you never fly anywhere? If the only thing you read about one person's cars on a car forum is some mechanical hiccup once every six months then isn't that evidence the car is broken beyond repair? If the only time trailer parks make the news is crime and tornados does that mean all trailer parks are constant hotbeds of criminal activity that get hit by tornados?

There's a difference between someone describing an one-time-event, and someone describing a recurring situation with related one-time-events keeping it fresh and varied.

If one person describes their car on a forum saying "I don't know what happened, there was a loud 'BANG' when I went faster than 100 km/h yesterday" and then adds "usually, the engine lets out a puff of smoke whenever I take a turn, I can't turn the radio off, there's a weird scratching noise whenever I change gears and for some reason the fuel tank empties twice as fast as what the amount I drive should", it's pretty obvious the loud 'BANG' alone isn't what makes the car an issue.

[Quertus]

Or hell. The players want to get into a locked room. Is this a railroad?

The GM doesn't tell them they have to get in, the players chose this goal for themselves. The GM has no plans for how they could get in; they could kick the door down, pick the lock, search for a key, teleport, turn incorporal, shrink down and crawl under the crack, try and bluff someone into letting them in, create a diversion and force the guards inside to come out, tunnel through the wall, blow the wall down, dig under the wall, etc. etc. etc.

But, if the players know that there is a key hidden under a fake rock in the garden, why would they bother with any of these things? Using the key is clearly the optimal route.

Using that garden key is not optimal if
a) the garden is watched -> they are a1) more likely to be noticed and the guards of the room be on alert, or a2) likely to be noticed and the home invasion tied back to them after the fact;
b) the use of the fake rock / key is likely to be noticed after the fact, revealing that those who performed the home invasion (ie, the party) had that information, if their ability to have that information (psychic powers, informant, whatever) is something the PCs don't want getting out;
c) they want to frame some other group, whose modus operandi involves one of those other techniques;

etc.

What is a railroad is if you do not allow all the "kick the door down, pick the lock, search for a key, teleport, turn incorporal, shrink down and crawl under the crack, try and bluff someone into letting them in, create a diversion and force the guards inside to come out, tunnel through the wall, blow the wall down, dig under the wall, etc. etc. etc." solutions to work just because the rock and key exist / that's the solution you want them to use.

[Unoriginal]

Using that garden key is not optimal if
a) the garden is watched -> they are a1) more likely to be noticed and the guards of the room be on alert, or a2) likely to be noticed and the home invasion tied back to them after the fact;
b) the use of the fake rock / key is likely to be noticed after the fact, revealing that those who performed the home invasion (ie, the party) had that information, if their ability to have that information (psychic powers, informant, whatever) is something the PCs don't want getting out;
c) they want to frame some other group, whose modus operandi involves one of those other techniques;

etc.

What is a railroad is if you do not allow all the "kick the door down, pick the lock, search for a key, teleport, turn incorporal, shrink down and crawl under the crack, try and bluff someone into letting them in, create a diversion and force the guards inside to come out, tunnel through the wall, blow the wall down, dig under the wall, etc. etc. etc." solutions to work just because the rock and key exist / that's the solution you want them to use.

Indeed.

Railroading is making the players' choices not matter, either by not letting them choose and just telling them what they're doing to get to a predetermined outcome, or by pretending they can choose and then telling them what they're doing to the predetermined outcome anyway.

Reminding a player there is another option or asking them why they're not using an option the characters would remember they have is not railroading in any way, shape or form, so long as the players are free to ignore this option if they want to.

Presenting a situation with only one solution isn't inherently railroading (ex: if the MacGuffin is a box that can only be opened by using a Wish), but it makes it a pretty linear situation until you add decision points (ex: the box may only be open via a Wish, but there are many ways to seek one, or decide the box is best left unopen, or attempt to trick the bad guys that you've opened it with a replica, etc).

[Kish]

While this is true, Talakeal seems like the equivalent of someone who can't get on a plane without at least one engine falling off halfway through the flight.

Yes, this. If I knew someone who had ridden a plane many hundreds of times over twenty years and every single one of them involved some horrible wreck story, I'd absolutely tell that person to avoid planes (pretending for the moment that that person had not already been arrested for clearly sabotaging planes in some way even if they couldn't figure out exactly how).

[Quertus]

At the end of the day,

a) I love the idea of a group of kids blowing up an apartment building to kill off a Fomorian threat;

and

b) Unless the players explicitly asked for it, I hate the idea of Talakeal running yet another game involving the PCs being low-to-no-Agency Children (even if last time it was less factual and more theme ala "Goonies" iirc).

Maybe I'm remembering wrong, Talakeal, but I thought your players really didn't enjoy the "ask NPCs for help" minigame - if that's the case, that might also factor into this problem.

[Kish]

Is it any wonder that I am extra cautious about taking actions that feel like railroading to me? This entire post is written presupposing that I must be running a railroad, based on nothing I actually said.
[...]
Again, you are presupposing a railroad based on nothing.
[...]
So in your opinion, a game where the GM doesn't have anything in mind and leaves it entirely up to the players to come up with a solution is *more* of a railroad than one in which the GM lays out several paths before the PCs and forces them to choose one?

If whatever the PCs try will work, that's a pure sandbox. As unappealing as a railroad in my view, but in any event that's pretty clearly not the case here.

But if one path is easier, why would the players not take it? Why would they deliberately choose a sub-optimal path?

If there is one unambiguously best path for the PCs to take in every situation...

that's a railroad. That's the definition of a railroad. This is the "nothing" that makes people "presuppose" a railroad: the apparent lack of understanding that there's any other way to run a game. Concealing from the PCs and players where the tracks are doesn't make it not a railroad. You now seem to be saying that you're offended that people are accusing you of railroading when you reduced the ambient light to a point where no one could possibly see the tracks so your players would stop saying such mean things, not realizing that "there are actual meaningful choices that aren't 'the right one' or 'one of the wrong ones'" is even a thing.

[Quertus]

If whatever the PCs try will work, that's a pure sandbox.

I certainly hope you're joking. A pure Sandbox just means that, whatever the PCs try, that's The Plot (TM). Whether it works or not is a matter for the game mechanics.

[gatorized]

Then the fomorians attack and the changelings don't assist, at least not until they become aware of the attack, I assume. I don't see why this would stall the game.

Did you ask the players why they're reluctant to provide this information? Maybe they believe the changelings have some alliance or other arrangement with the fomorians, and want to avoid causing tension with a group whose allegiances they're unsure of. Could be any number of reasons, depending on specifics of the game world.

[gbaji]

What's wrong with allowing for the possibility of failure? To me, this is the social equivalent of fudging the dice so the players never lose a fight.

Nothing. But you are the one who created a thread about what I can only assume is "something that went wrong" in your game. So clearly, the fact that the players were unable to figure out what to tell the Seelie was a problem.

We were talking in character. I didn't need to ask "do you tell them about the attack on Muir Woods," because I know they didn't. Just like I don't need to ask you if you brought up the Jabberwocky in your post, I know you didn't because I just read it.

Yes. You did need to ask them this "out of character" precisely because they didn't ask it on their own, but clearly should have. You (the GM) need to determine if that's because they forgot that detail, or don't think that detail is relevant, or are intentionally choosing to conceal it from the folks they are talking to.

Now, as for asking them "why" they didn't bring it up, that is something I didn't do until the scene was over.

Which was too late IMO. If you'd asked the question while the scene was going on, you could have avoided the problem entirely. I get that you chose not to do this. I'm telling you that you needed to do this. I'm not the one writing about my blown up scenario in an online forum. You are. So maybe try listening and taking this advice to heart?

Because asking them is RPG equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; the players will become preoccupied with that bit of data, and the organic conversation is destroyed. They will either assume "this is the right answer, the GM is trying to railroad us," or "this is a trap, the GM is trying to bait us," and in either case the other purposes of the scene; making NPC contacts, learning about Seelie society, and simply having fun RPing with colorful characters, will be forgotten and tossed by the wayside as it all boils down to the one all important question.

I think you are grossly overthinking things and spinning of onto speculative tangents. Most players reaction to asking "Do you tell the Seelie about the planned attack on the Woods" would be to assume that you are simply reminding them about information they have, whicih may be of value to the folks they are trying to get help from. Nothing more.

I'm not telling you to start with this. But when they fail to mention the attack, despite many opportunities to do so (and with no conversation about it in your presence), that's the time to turn to the players directly, as the GM, and ask "Are you planning to tell the Seelie about what you learned from the werewolf about the attack on the Woods"?

The players claimed they didn't think it was significant.

They also said they were confused because they thought Caer (the Changeling word for castle) and Caern (the werewolf word for a holy place) were the same thing. Although this actually confuses me more, because if they thought the changelings were talking about the Werewolf caern, they should have been more likely to bring up the impending attack, not less.

And simply dropping into OOC GM mode to ask one simple question would have revealed this to you before it caused a problem in the game.

So... Next time you'll ask the players questions like this to make sure that they actually clearly understand the details and relevance of information they have, so that this doesn't happen again, right?

However, it is also possible they were simply on zoned out on their phones not paying attention and forgot, and won't admit it. I have had problems with that in the past, so it is impossible to know for sure.

It literally does not matter why they misunderstood the key information in your adventure. What matters is that they did and their lack of answering the Seelie questions with the information you expected them to answer with was a big honking clue to this fact. But instead of stepping out of character for a brief moment, putting on your GM hat, and checking, you instead just barreled on with roleplaying the scene out.

Next time. Check. If you ever find yourself as a GM thinking "why aren't the players doing <insert obvious thing they should be doing here>", that's your clue to verify that they aren't missing or forgetting some key piece of information. The sooner you recognize that this is happening and stop the scene and do that verification, the less harm will be done. The longer your keep going, allowing the PCS to make decisions they would never have made if the players running them didn't forget something, the more angry the players will be when things go wrong.

What are the fomorians planning *is* a direct question.

"Are you sure you want to do that?" Is just a polite way of saying "You are an idiot, don't do that."

These are not the same thing.

They are very similar in that both questions require that the asker and answerer have the same "mental map" (I'm totally going to use this term from now on) of the game world for the answer to make sense.

If you believe that the players both remember that there is a planned attack on Muir Woods, and realize that this is significant and may matter to the folks they're trying to get help from, you will assume that asking "what are the formorians planning?" will prompt them to provide that information. But if the players don't remember or think it's significant, they wont.

In the same way that if you believe that the player realizes that dropping off the wall will result in a 200' fall and kill them, you will assume that asking "are you sure you want to do that" will prompt them to reconsider the decision to drop off the wall. But if the player doesn't realize that "dropping off the wall" means a 200' fall to their death, then they wont.

Both are problematic if the player and the GM aren't on the same page in terms of information.

Given that this is precisely what happened (and also exactly what I predicted was what happened), maybe you should take my advice to heart? Next time, drop out of character and ask some questions to make sure the players have the correct information they need.

The players chose to talk the Seelie into helping them. In my opinion, the easiest way to do this was to make those tasked with defending Muir Woods aware of the impending attack.

Right. But that's not "the easiest way", that was "the only way you thought of", right? You wrote the scenario. The planned attack is what the PCs are expected to use to get some factions to work together to help them deal with the bad guys, right (I'm not super familiar with the setting). And while we can argue about the specifics of how/why the PCs learned of this, it was something that existed and that they could learn (even if "questioning a captured werewolf" wasn't the only way).

Did you actually write anything else into the adventure that provided any other way to do this?

But the players could have come up with a better plan I didn't think of, or they could have made a worse plan work. Hell... if they hadn't flubbed their persuasion roll their initial plan of convincing the Seelie to attack the formorians "because they are there" could have yielded results despite it being, imo, a plan that was likely doomed to failure.

That kinda answers the question. You "didn't think of" any other plan. You clearly did think of the plan of "find out about the planned attack and then use that information to get other folks to help out".

And let me be perfectly clear about this. I'm not the hard core anti-railroad advocate that some are (actually seems like you are far more concerned about this than I am). There will be elements in any adventure that, if looked at objectively, act as a railroad. You created some bad guys. You created a plot the bad guys are engaged in. And you came up with a way the good guys could stop the bad guys. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this scenario from a structural point of view.

Here's the deal though. You avoid railroading in situations like this by allowing the players to come up with different ideas. If they do, and those ideas work, that's great. But... if you have written a way that the problem can be solved into your adventure (and let's be honest, who doesn't?), and the players do *not* come up with any other alternative means to handle things? You need to make sure that they know about and are able to use the one you did come up with.

I often call this the "bail out" technique. If they can't sneak into the castle, or bluff their way in, or disquise themselves as the cleaning service, or pretend they are there to inspect the tapestries, or whatever, then I fall back to whatever I wrote in my scenario. Maybe the same contact who asked them to sneak into the castle to do <whatever> tells them about a disgruntled member of the castle staff, who'll get them in for a price. Heck. I might even foreshadow this by having said contact tell them "I'm working on a way to get you in, but it may take a few days. If you can get in before that, then things might be quicker/easier though...".

You always want to build yourself a way to make the adventure work. And no. That's not railroading. That's just successful scenario design.

Railroading is when you make choices for the players. Presenting them with options is never railroading.

Again, you are presupposing a railroad based on nothing.

I didn't say "the only way the PCs can deal with the werewolves and formians (and whatever other factions are causing them problems) is to get help from the Seelie, and an aliance of factions to help at that". I said that no one faction is strong enough to beat the werewolves in combat in a fair fight (and attacking them in their lair almost garuntees the fight will be unfair in their favor).

I did not say the Seelie had to be involved. I did not say that the werewolves coundn't be beaten outside of combat. I didn't say beating the werewolves was neccesary for the scenario. Heck, I didn't think it needed to be said, but obviously it is possible for the underdog to win due to an unconventional plan or outlandish dice rolls, or a thousand other weird things, nor did I say it was impossible to enlist help from a faction that isn't currently involved.

Sure. But you only wrote the one way to do it, right? And it looks like they tried to use other means, but they failed. So... maybe a railroad. Maybe not. Doesn't really matter. You wrote "this is a way they can do things" into your scenario. If you do that, then you need to not block that option from your players.

But you did. Which is... strange.

You seem to be saying that it is the GM's job to provide alternate solutions. Is that correct?

Sorta. I'm actually a big fan of the GM actually coming up with at least one clear method to solve things (if for no other reason than ensuring that you haven't set up the PCs for an impossible scenerio that will guarantee frustration for the players). We can all that "optionA". As a GM you should be open to other options as well, but having one as a "if all else fails, this is how they can do this" is generally a good idea.

What makes that not a railroad is that you will allow for other options to succeed. Or... even that the PCs may choose not to try do solve that particular problem in the first place (though that may or may not have other consequences depending on the scenario).

So in your opinion, a game where the GM doesn't have anything in mind and leaves it entirely up to the players to come up with a solution is *more* of a railroad than one in which the GM lays out several paths before the PCs and forces them to choose one?

Um... None of the above?

Here's my approach (and this is just mine, so whatever): If I've written a "problem that needs to be solved" into a scenario, then I'm also responsible for writing "a way the problem can be solved" as well. Everything else in the game setting is subject to player choices. The degree to which I've made the decision or created the situation, is the degree to which I'm responsible for the results/choices/whatever surrounding that. But the degree to which the players make decisions, or create situations in the game world, is the degree to which I'm *not* responsible for providing them a solution.

If I create BBEG that is threatening the PCs and/or things/people they care about, then I'm responsible for providing means to deal with it. If I create the "dark tower which holds the <something they need>", then I have to ensure that it's possible to get into the tower and get the "something", right? But if a player decides "my character is going to try to assassinate the head of the thieves guild and take over", then guess what? I'm not going to do anything to provide that PC with a "way to succeed' at that, nor ways to avoid consequences for doing that. I'm just playing out the objects in the game world and how they respond to what the PC is doing.

It wasn't the PCs playing 20 questions. It was one question. And the NPC's were the ones playing the game, all the PCs had to do was answer. Likewise, the players are the ones who are "hemming and hawwing" not me. I am asking very direct clear questions, the players are the ones who are refusing to give a direct answer.

Er. Don't be so literal. It's not about whether it was asking the right question, or giving the right answer. In either case, you were looking for the one specific shibboleth that they needed to provide to unlock the next step in the adventure. You kept asking them the same question, waiting for them to give the "right answer". The players, meanwhile were probably running around the entire scene trying to figure out what you wanted them to do or say, to get that result.

That's what I meant by "playing 20 questions". They had to figure out what you wanted them to do, to get the result they came there to get. But, no matter how many different things they tried, or people they talked to, they could not figure out the secret decoder ring statement you wanted them to say.

And, as it turned out (and several of us posters predicted), the reason is because the players themselves misunderstood the information you had provided earlier, which you expected them to pass on in the scene. That was what was missing, and without it, they could not succeed.


It's analogous to something I used as an example earlier. The PCs find a magic key. Later they find a door with a keyhole. You expect them to try to open it with the key, but instead they are trying to pick the lock, or break down the door, and otherwise use any and every means to get through the door other than use the magic key. At some point, you have to realize that they must have forgotten about the key, and remind them that they have it.

That's what you should have done here.

IMO, players get frustrated when they fail. But they also get frustrated if they feel the GM is leading by the nose.

Sure. It's a balancing thing. Obviously, it would be railroading for you to simply narrate "Ok. You go to the Seelie court thingie, and you tell factionsA, B, and C about the planned attack on the woods, and the factions decide to help you. Now let's move on to the next scene where I'll tell you what your characters are doing".

That's the wrong way to do that. But at some point, when the players are clearly trying to get help, but are failling to provide the information needed to get that help, it's not wrong to remind them that they have this bit of information, and that maybe the folks they're talking to might find that valuable.

So, as a compromise, I tend to give hints and second chances if they are barking up the wrong tree rather than just telling them they fail and moving on to the next scene. Are you saying this is a bad thing?

No. It's not. Why didn't you do that here? The hint should have been reminding them about the information about the attack. What's strange is that you allowed the scene to play out, knowing that this was the information they needed to use to get help, knowing that they desired to get that help, but were for some reason not providing that information, and you never thought to ask why?

You didn't even need to hint. Just remind them that they have the "key". That's usually sufficient in cases like this.

In the previous scene, they had asked the werewolf "What is your plan?" and she told them "We are going to create an army of fomorians, use them to attack the werewolves in Muir woods, and then release the Cataclysm."

In this scene, the players were asked by about half a dozen different Seelie "What are the werewolves planning?".

This could not be any more straightforward. All that is required is that when they are asked a direct question, they mindlessly regurgitate the information that was given to them when they asked the exact same question in the previous scene.

Right. So when they fail to do that, it's a big honking hint that they have forgotten or misunderstood the information you gave them.

Same deal. I give the PCs a key. They they come to a door with a keyhole. But they don't use the key to unlock the door. I can sit there for an entire game session, quetly wondering why they don't just use the key, but that's not terribly useful.

At some point in this process, you must consider that "they forgot about the key" and remind them that they have it.

Or, in my specific case, why would they ever decide to go ask random fairy knights to go on a crusade or unseelie goblins to blow up a building when they know there is a fey baron whose job it is to defend muir woods?

Again. They would. If they remembered about the attack, and realized that this would be of great interest to that Baron. If it should be this obvious to them, but they're missing it anyway, that's when you maybe need to check that they remember the info you gave them.


I'm remdinded of a scenario one of my fellow GMs ran. He's normally an excellent GM. But this one scenario he had set up a big bad guy with a specific invulnerability that required a specific talisman thingie to make it possible to defeat him. In the course of the adventure, we learned a bunch of stuff about the bad guy, interacted with a bunch of NPCs, went on some side quests, helped people etc. Having learned who and where the big bad was, we went off to face him. We had an epic fight, but were stimied becuase while we could deal with his minions, we could not actually defeat him. So we're sitting there, fighting stuff, and suffering spell and spirit attacks from this big bad, round after round, trying everything we could to defeat him. We saw there was this altar thing, and thought we needed to do something with it, so we tried everything, but nothing worked.

Finally, the GM asked us "why aren't you using the talisman?". The entire table responded with "what talisman?". He had literally forgotten to read the bit with the one NPC shaman we'd helped out (who provided us with some info about the big bad), where he handed us a talisman and said to "put the talisman on his place of power, and it'll make him vulnerable to physical damage". Oh hey! That was really important critical information, right? We were supposd to place this special shamanic talisman on the altar thingie and it would force the big bad into tangible form where he could be attacked and killed. Hmmm...

Every GM does this at some point in their gaming career. Don't assume that because you know exactly what the players need to do, and are absolutely certain that you told them this, that they will remember (or that you actually remembered to tell them). Miscommuncation happens. Sometimes with hilarious results.


The key to mitigating the damage caused by this is to realize when the players are failing to do something that they should know to do, and then asking question to verify that they know what to do. Heck. Have this conversation before the scene starts. This is why I'm a big fan of the players actually discussing "the plan" before the scene. I can hear what they are planning, and if I see some gross gap in the plan that I know indicate they've missed or forgotten some key piece of information, I'll let them know.

Is this "metagaming"? Sure. Maybe. Does it avoid a huge number of really dumb things in games, that will lead to pissed off and frustrated players, and that may need retconning to fix? Yes. Absolutely. So totally worth doing IMO.

[gatorized]

The players are children


"the Seelie are good guys and destroying evil is what good guys do."

This is why you shouldn't roleplay as children. It basically requires you to play like a That Guy.

[Talakeal]

I will respond with a longer post tomorrow, but real quick:

And, as it turned out (and several of us posters predicted), the reason is because the players themselves misunderstood the information you had provided earlier, which you expected them to pass on in the scene. That was what was missing, and without it, they could not succeed.

Wait, what? When did this happen?!?!?

AFAICT they didn't misunderstand anything. They told me that they intentionally chose not to tell the Changelings about the attack on Muir Woods because they didn't think it was relevant.

That's less a misunderstanding than it is a lapse in judgement / a gambit that didn't pay off.

What am I missing here? What misunderstanding are you referring to?


The only "misunderstanding" that I am aware of is that they thought Cairn and Caer where the same word... but that does precisely nothing to explain why they wouldn't spill the beans about the attack, if anything it's the complete opposite!

If whatever the PCs try will work, that's a pure sandbox. As unappealing as a railroad in my view, but in any event that's pretty clearly not the case here.

If there is one unambiguously best path for the PCs to take in every situation...

that's a railroad. That's the definition of a railroad. This is the "nothing" that makes people "presuppose" a railroad: the apparent lack of understanding that there's any other way to run a game. Concealing from the PCs and players where the tracks are doesn't make it not a railroad. You now seem to be saying that you're offended that people are accusing you of railroading when you reduced the ambient light to a point where no one could possibly see the tracks so your players would stop saying such mean things, not realizing that "there are actual meaningful choices that aren't 'the right one' or 'one of the wrong ones'" is even a thing.

I think the underlying assumption you have here is that there is only one correct answer and every answer is wrong, and further than the GM will shoot down any answers that aren't the correct answer.

This isn't what I am saying.

I am saying that if the GM gives the players "an" answer, and the players are stuck (or just lazy) that is the answer they are going with. To me, that is depriving them of agency.

Just because I believe that most every scenario has a "best" answer, does not mean that other answers are invalid or that I am going to shoot them down as a GM.


In Gbaji's summary which I was responding to, he repeatedly added in "it was the only way" to the summary events in my game, which was not correct. It was A way, I never said it was the only way, and there were plenty of other routes, even if I considered some of them suboptimal for one reason or another.

Nothing. But you are the one who created a thread about what I can only assume is "something that went wrong" in your game. So clearly, the fact that the players were unable to figure out what to tell the Seelie was a problem.

It's a problem in that my players get frustrated if they lose and self-conscious if you point out their mistakes. Its no more "going wrong" than a monster taking out a PC with a lucky critical hit or a player flubbing a critical skill check.

This is hardly one of my gaming horror stories.

I am mostly just curious about why players sometimes won't answer an NPC's direct question. This is something I have seen many times in my games, but also in other games that I have been a player in, as well as APs I have listened to online. Its a weird phenomenon that I don't understand.

Sure. But you only wrote the one way to do it, right? And it looks like they tried to use other means, but they failed. So... maybe a railroad. Maybe not. Doesn't really matter. You wrote "this is a way they can do things" into your scenario. If you do that, then you need to not block that option from your players.

Not at all, no!

With the information the PCs currently had, that was, imo, by far the simplest and easiest way to get the Changelings involved, but I can think of a handfull of other methods off the top of my head that would have accomplished the same goal such as talking to the Selkie, Bribing someone, consulting an oracle, asking about the strange glade in the middle of the park, asking a changeling about the Nunnehei, asking someone knowledgeable about the changeling's history with the werewolves, they could have asked someone about fairy territories in the area and what they had an interested in defended, explaining to a few specific NPCs that their inaction would loved ones in danger, lying to the fey to get them involved, etc...

And that is just stuff they could have done at the party to bring the Seelie into opposition against the Werewolves using the resources they had on hand, a far cry from "resolving the scenario" as a whole!

I gave examples that are counter to your false assertions when you asked for proof that those assertions were false. Any counter example proves you wrong. When I gave counter examples, you then *invented false things about them* in order to still maintain your point. That is arguing in bad faith.

There's no point in talking to you, so I'm going to block you now.

Well... I guess I am blocked... so does anyone else want to point out the part of the post he is responding to where I said:

Obviously I am speaking in generalities here.

to NichG for me?

[Vahnavoi]

I am not even sure what you are trying to argue here. Are you saying that optimization is binary? You either have the mathematically optimal solution or you don't? And even if you are 99.99% efficient, you are still not "optimal" because optimal is 100% or bust?

You are using two different words and then getting confused over a very simple point:

Optimization - the process of searching for optimal solutions - can be applied to any game strategy. Nowhere is it guaranteed that this process has an achievable end. Some games (and game scenarios) can be solved for optimal solutions, others cannot. A perfect information game can be in either category, depending on game complexity.

Which means it's possible to have a perfect information roleplaying game scenario, such as a heist, where your players can optimize all they like to the extent of their abilities, and still play sub-optimally. Their strategies may still be functional, meaning it is possible for them to complete a scenario or win against another sub-optimal player, without ever getting close to optimal.

I wouldn't have to explain this to you, if you didn't insist on using words lazily pretty much on the justification "but other people use words lazily all the time".

[GloatingSwine]

I will respond with a longer post tomorrow, but real quick:



Wait, what? When did this happen?!?!?

AFAICT they didn't misunderstand anything. They told me that they intentionally chose not to tell the Changelings about the attack on Muir Woods because they didn't think it was relevant.

Why would they think it was relevant?

[Unoriginal]

AFAICT they didn't misunderstand anything. They told me that they intentionally chose not to tell the Changelings about the attack on Muir Woods because they didn't think it was relevant.

That's less a misunderstanding than it is a lapse in judgement / a gambit that didn't pay off.

What am I missing here? What misunderstanding are you referring to?

PCs were given Information A: "the werewolves' plan"

PCs were then asked Question 1: "what are the werewolves' planning?"

That they thought Information A was not relevant to Question 1 can only be described as a misunderstanding.



The alternative to a misunderstanding is that they actually had forgotten what A was and told you "we did that on purpose because we didn't think A mattered" to cushion the blow to their egos.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

PCs were given Information A: "the werewolves' plan"

PCs were then asked Question 1: "what are the werewolves' planning?"

That they thought Information A was not relevant to Question 1 can only be described as a misunderstanding.



The alternative to a misunderstanding is that they actually had forgotten what A was and told you "we did that on purpose because we didn't think A mattered" to cushion the blow to their egos.

I think there's a second alternative: the players are disassociated from the game. They don't care about the plot, they don't care about the werewolves or the fey, they don't want to parse the difference between 'caer' and 'caern', they just want to hit something with a stick.

[Unoriginal]

I think there's a second alternative: the players are disassociated from the game. They don't care about the plot, they don't care about the werewolves or the fey, they don't want to parse the difference between 'caer' and 'caern', they just want to hit something with a stick.

I don't disagree that it could be the reason why they forgot, but I don't think it's different from the "they had forgotten" alternative.

If they just wanted to hit something with a stick and remembered Information A, answering Question 1 would have been the quickest path.

[GloatingSwine]

PCs were given Information A: "the werewolves' plan"

PCs were then asked Question 1: "what are the werewolves' planning?"

That they thought Information A was not relevant to Question 1 can only be described as a misunderstanding.



The alternative to a misunderstanding is that they actually had forgotten what A was and told you "we did that on purpose because we didn't think A mattered" to cushion the blow to their egos.

There’s more than one reading of relevance here. The players know where the Werewolves are going but they don’t know why that information would be more motivational to the far than what they have already said.

And they have no reason to trust that it will solve their problem, the fae may simply use the information and fortify or remove themselves from the danger*. Because the players have a problem with where the werewolves are not where they are going. A response to where they are going doesn’t help remove them from where they are.

So without the knowledge that this is the secret password to win the conversation they [i]don’t [/]know it’s relevant and there are predictable downsides to giving it.

*A not unreasonable response, for most entities in direct combat with a werewolf your options boil down to updating your will and telling him your favourite colour so he can have the janitor scrape your remains into that colour bucket.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

I don't disagree that it could be the reason why they forgot, but I don't think it's different from the "they had forgotten" alternative.

If they just wanted to hit something with a stick and remembered Information A, answering Question 1 would have been the quickest path.

I'm leaving open the possibility that they didn't forget, they just don't want to participate. I'm a bit confused about all of it, because what's being described seems like a social-heavy political game about building a coalition but the players are children who won't put their phones down (but also one of them is being trusted to play a character who always lies?). That seems like a mismatch of player to scenario, and some of the problems might be solved here if the plot was about venturing forth and kicking butt.