Recommend a table-top pencil-and-paper role-playing game

The Game Room
61

There is some fairness there, although most veterans view it as more of a spectrum than an either/or. If an adventure/campaign was truly 100% sandbox, the GM should quit and join Second City for his improv skills. However, on the plus side, there would be no need for prepping.

Also, part of your argument seems semantical. What if we didn’t say ‘Let’s play D&D tonight.’ What if, instead, we said ‘Let’s play Tomb of Horrors.’ And then, in sandbox style per your implication, the players say ‘We aren’t going in, we’re going to the town and then catch Giant Eagles in the mountains.’ Did they try to sandbox? Yes (for either of our definitions.) Is the opposite railroading? In your definition, yes, but when the agreement was to play Tomb of Horrors, I don’t fully count it as railroading. There should be some structure especially if the GM is spending money and prep-time. And the difference in the situations is calling the game ‘Tomb of Horrors’ instead of ‘D&D.’ -> semantics.

At a smaller scale, though, you are dismissing the sandbox. Yes, we might have to play the dungeon, but old school dungeons usually didn’t have level bosses, didn’t have mini-bosses, had lots of real choices in direction within the dungeon, and didn’t have an end goal to achieve. If there were (or were not as just mentioned) end goals, you could get to the end through path A or path B or path C and by “path” I mean a geographical path, not ‘I RPed bargaining for the macguffin from the townsman instead of stealing it! Now we can open the final door!’ Either of these last two are ‘paths’ to the same waypoint (opening the final door) and that point is necessarily where railroaded parties must go.

In old school, parties could try to kill the dragon to get the Arkansawstone, try stealing it, try buying it, try intimidating it, or ignore the whole encounter as too dangerous because you don’t even need to have the Arkansawstone.

I do concede that most old dungeons gave the GM adventure hooks to entice players with. Stuff like:
[ul]
[li]There is a treasure[/li][li]Save the town-crier[/li][li]Stop the invasion or face the wrath of the king[/li][li]Find out where the spies are and earn an earldom[/li][/ul]
Enforcing these can be viewed as railroading.

…

Once you get to the dead combatant scene at the end of the entry passage of module B1 (this is the first keyed encounter) you can see seven directions to go. None of them is required and they don’t all lead to the same place unless you define ‘clearing the dungeon Mario Brothers-style’ to be the same place (because if you cleared a dungeon you would have been everywhere, so in a sense all the passages led to the same place.)

Here is a thread from another board about dungeon design. Included in the diagrams in the first post is B1 which was titled In Search of the Unknown.

Those are some real choices.

62

Yeah, this was about the spectrum I mentioned in the last post. Sometimes, the sandboxers can go too far for your improv/prepping skills. But there are inobvious ways to use your material pushing them back.

A side point is that it isn’t as railroady if the players weren’t about to head for the Tower to the east and then switched to the west. If they were about to head east to some fortress and you planned on putting the tower on the way, then they said ‘let’s go west to the monastery instead!’ is it railroading to put the tower on the road west? In neither case were they forced to enter the tower. In neither case were they told the tower is in direction X and they were about to go X but instead went Y. The tower was bonus material on a road.

63

I mean cinematic to mean designed to look like action movies.
[ul]
[li]The use of Possibilities (the second implementation of these I know of) allows 007-like escapes and successes.[/li][li]The exploding dice (the first implementation of this I know of) allows virtually impossible results to have a chance.[/li][li]The mixing of invading cosms (the 2.5th implementation of mashup that I know of) causes a total sci-fi/fantasy/horror/pulp world scene right out of nerd movies.[/li][li]Character death can actually be a good and useful thing for the heroes! You can get a card and play it in circumstance to have a very cinematic death scene that helps your party/world. Like Hodor. Or C3PO.[/li][li]The GM advice section showed you how to structure the adventure as a series of Acts which were divided into Scenes. The structure showed you how to link them and how to lay the adventure hooks.[/li][li]Individual scenes are defined as either Standard or Dramatic. The Drama Deck had different results based on this definition. Dramatic scenes were tougher on the party.[/li][li]There are four interaction attacks (Trick, Taunt, Maneuver, and Intimidation) so that characters (and villains) can have real consequences outside of smacking someone upside the head and outside of players just declaring ‘I am not tricked!’[/li][li]The Drama Deck shows Approved Actions. On a turn, if a player (or villain) uses those actions instead of whatever they might have been about to do, they get a bonus. So a player might be whomping on a baddy, and they see that Intimidate in Approved. They might stop whomping, give soliloquy, take an Intimidate Action, and earn the bonus. Soliloquies are great![/li][/ul]

64

Agreed D&D certainly does not encompass the space of high powered games. That is why I listed superhero games. But I think you are making a logical mistake in what I said. I don’t mean that all high-powered games lead to munchkinism. I mean that low-powered games almost never do. At low levels, you might optimize as well as you can. But the Death Star would still destroy your cruiser at the Battle of Endor. That blast came from the Death Star! That thing is operational!

Also, at street level, Daredevil or the Punisher could pull of a bank heist if they wanted. They are still far more powerful than regular folks at levels that matter. Even a super-agents game (No superpowers, just equipment from an organization) usually creeps up in power (through time) so that the agents end up as supers or equivalent-to-supers (I am trying to sidestep the ‘batman isn’t a super’ argument.)

65

I do have strong opinions and perhaps a touch of history, here. In the very old days, the players were wargamers playing board games. They were used to PvP. When Arneson personalized their generals (birthing Role Playing) it became necessary for there to be a GM. The former wargamers continued to play but their enemies ended up always coming from the GM. They began to view the newer game (D&D at this point) to still be PvP and the the other P was the GM! Furthermore, they saw that the GM could always beat them because
[ul]
[li]The GM could throw more monsters at them[/li][li]The GM could use zones/encounters where the player advantages are mitigated (no-magic zones, immune to fire creatures, etc.)[/li][li]The rules explicitly said that the GM is the final arbiter[/li][/ul]

These players, viewing it as PvP, lobbied publishing companies to add rules to stop what they viewed as GM overreach (even though the rules explicitly said that the GM is right) That is the type of thinking that led to the Challenge Ratings. With Challenge Ratings, the GM can’t throw something too tough at the players; that would be cheating. And the players can know this new rule and metagame for it.
[ul]
[li]1st level characters & an Ancient Adult Dragon? Can’t be a legal combat so it must either be an illusion or a purely non-combat encounter. As long as we don’t try to strike it (initiating combat) he can’t have the dragon attack; that would be cheating because the dragon is beyond our Challenge Rating.[/li][li]We already had eight combats today. We are already beyond the Challenge Rating for the day, the GM can’t throw another attack at us, that would be cheating.[/li][/ul]

The thing is, the GMs were following the rules. They are the final arbiter per the rules. Also there are often things going on that are hidden to the players (and to which they aren’t in-game supposed to learn) that can affect the situation but which the players complain about. ‘I rolled a 73! How could I have failed?!’ Because they are in a magnetic void.

All rules sets have holes. But I rarely see GMs just ‘doing whatever they please’ outside of the game expectations. I commonly see players do it. That is why rules sets often say things like ‘the GM is the final arbiter.’

I have been at a table where a fellow player in a fantasy game started collected coal, sulphur, and saltpeter then started mixing it to try and create gunpowder. They were angry when the GM said it wouldn’t work. Last week, I was in a game where a player in a fantasy game tried to create a metal flange to attach to his bow string so that he could shoot two arrows each time.

What is it that the GM could even overreach? That the bad guys have laser swords and the Force while the players are merely barrel-smashing, gangster-bashing Feds in the 1920s Gangbusters? I have never seen that. I have seen Killer GMs and those can be un-fun (Paranoia aside) but Killer GMing isn’t cheating. The rules shouldn’t be about ‘preventing’ that. The play group should prevent that.

66

Again, all rule sets have holes. But to have a consistent, coherent ruleset, etc., in the face of players who are trying to do lots of things (including looking for rules exploits) means more railroading and/or more attempted munchkinizing. And that isn’t necessarily bad.

The game I have played the most - Champions - has an overlooked design feature. Rather than try to fight off munchkins and/or optimizing (as many of the games of the day did) they incorporated the optimization into the game system! The game is designed around mathematical balance among the various character conceptions. The rules even encourage you to buy a point or two or various stats to make the rounding-off work in your favor. You don’t have to figure out the optimization yourself, the rulebook tells you where it is.

67

I was in a 2nd Ed. AD&D group in the 90s, and our DM cheated. This was at a time when Splatbooks and “Combat Options” were available. And the DM allowed them. I had a fighter who had heavily-invested in a great axe, to the point where he had achieved “Grand Master” status. If you’re not familiar with the term see here:

Anyway he was a focused combat monster who was very good at what he did. In game terms he’d probably be one of if not the foremost expert in fighting with his chosen weapon. In one combat he fought a Drow swordsman and I rolled a natural 20, which should be an automatic hit, on top of all of his ridiculous bonuses. I was ecstatic, here’s my warrior getting into a combat with a worthy foe and I rolled the best possible roll.

“He parries your attack.”

Let’s forget that “parrying” isn’t even in the rules, you roll vs an armor class and hit or miss. But with a foremost weapons expert making a perfect strike, I somehow miss. I asked how that’s even possible.

“He’s just that good.”

A no-name NPC swordsman we happened to run into in our first combat. For whatever reason the DM just didn’t want me to be able to hit him. It wasn’t even crucial to the story. I have no idea what was up his butt. That whole campaign ended up being full of deus ex machina situations, arbitrary rulings, and a DM ignoring rules and just dictating results. Basically he wasn’t playing the same game we were. I dropped out of that game after just a couple of sessions.

So yes, a DM/GM can certainly cheat.

68

Zelzki, it sounds like you’re referring to a specific game system in post 63, but unless I missed it, you didn’t actually specify which game system that is.

And I don’t think that I’d categorize games as sandbox vs. linear. In my experience, that’s a property of gamemasters, not of the games themselves. A guy who runs old-style D&D as a sandbox is probably going to run Pathfinder as a sandbox, too, and a guy who runs Pathfinder on rails will use rails for D&D as well. There might be some tendency for gamemasters who favor one style or the other to migrate to certain games, but given the large degree of overlap between D&D players and Pathfinder players, I’d doubt that, too.

69

In later games, post PvP rules interventions, yes, DMs can cheat. That was a part of my story. But prior to players demanding intervention, they literally could not. RPGs used to be seat-of-your pants, use it or not. No one played the rules to oD&D exactly or the same as the next group over. And the GM was the final arbiter.

In that style of game, it could be that the GM was setting up a recurring villain so he says ‘he parries.’ But in newer games, the rules were amended at player request so that the GM was not the final arbiter. So, parrying might be cheating in a newer game. Even so, perhaps he wanted the bad guy to not lose, to set up a recurring villain, for example.

Furthermore, the players never stopped trying to do things outside the scope of the rules/genre/tone. Like my gunpowder example, or bow example, or playing a character with the player’s intelligence instead of the very low intelligence that was bought/rolled for the character. And yet, players complain about the GM cheating.

As an aside, the natural 20 auto-hit is not a feature of oD&D. Neither are crits on a natural 20 in oD&D. That was a Dragon magazine suggestion added to later versions, mostly at player request.

70

The DM has never had the final say. The players have always been able to ultimately override the DM, by choosing not to play in that DM’s games any more. It’s rather a nuclear option, to be sure, but like most nuclear options, it’s naturally led to a diplomatic structure of lesser actions.

And that’s just as true in modern versions of D&D as in the original. There’s still an explicit rule in the books that the DM has final say, and that’s still limited by the players’ willingness to put up with that DM. I’m not sure what the perceived change is, here.

71

Ha! We both mentioned it but it is likely that you didn’t recognize it in our text because the game isn’t famous; the game is called TORG. After a ~20 year hiatus, they just released a new version, Torg Eternity.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, sandbox vs. linear is more of a spectrum. Each end of the spectrum has a strong pole but isn’t really an RPG if you go 100% in either direction. Adventure design will tend towards a pole, though.

I meant to reply to Kenobi 65 about post #54 on this same sub-topic. When I said Pathfinder, I was referring to Adventure Paths and those are quite railroady. I am a currently playing in a Pathfinder game using the “Reign of Winter” adventure path. We are 10-15 adventures in, out of an anticipated 60-70. I am playing a witch!

Still, much modern adventure design is linear, probably due to video game influences using mini-bosses, level bosses, and end goals. Starting with Dragonlance in the mid-80s, much RPGing - especially games that are more gamist and less acting - tended in that direction.

72

TorgE is my current tabletop game. I was a KS pledge for the game and its first add-on (Living Land) and I’m very active on their forums (I typically bounce between there and here periodically). I really like the system, it’s probably my 2nd or 3rd favorite of all time. FFG’s Star Wars game is still my favorite but sadly I haven’t been able to play in a long time. I so badly miss it.

I also played original TORG back in the day but it’s a bit dated now and it’d be hard to go back to it after playing the new system.

73

I would argue that “adventure design”, itself, is inherently linear. For a sandbox game, you either design nothing, and make it all up as you go along, or everything, and end up with “world design” rather than “adventure design”.

74

And as I said, players would go up to publishers at conventions and demand changes to that rule (GMs are the final arbiter.) That is how things were developed to rein-in DMs. So, rules were added that limit the DM, such as the Challenge ratings. Accusations of cheating are much more common and therefore stronger than your nuclear option. Adding rules to limit the GM allowed players to cry foul - calling the GM a cheater can cause effects while still having the game continue.

Remember that this side branch of the conversation came of out GM Fiat vs. Rules Lawyering. These responses sound like you guys are siding with Rules Lawyering especially as you seem afraid of GM overreach. I don’t see it. Plus with GM Fiat, there might be the hidden information affecting your results, information that the players don’t know. How Could I Have Missed? Perhaps the bad guy is invulnerable to Cold Attacks but the players don’t know it and tried to hit him with a freezing sword.

Now, if a GM was just a Killer GM, that might not be fun but that isn’t the same as cheating even if the end result (Chronos’ nuclear option) is the same.

75

I Kickstarted both of those, too, but I am not active on the forums. I just don’t seem to get around to working on stuff. For example, my posts in this thread and the arcade thread took me hours yesterday and today. So I haven’t caught up on hours of the DVR or practiced piano or did the laundry.

This summer, one of my old high school group members got a two month hall pass as his wife visited her family overseas. We used the opportunity to play the introductory scenarios for Torg Eternity.

The Orrorsh was brutally unsurvivable. The Tharkold one was fun. We stole a tank (not the zeppelin) in the Nile Empire. We got lucky in the Aysle one, but I don’t remember how. The Living Land was funny as the Kid was a combat machine with the hockey stick.

Overall, we successfully played three glory cards in three different scenarios. Go Core Earth!

76

LOL, we played the LL Day One scenario before we started our original campaign and the player who played the kid was absolutely a combat monster, it was hilarious. (We changed the hockey stick to a baseball bat because of the whole opening day of baseball thing though.)

I played the Catholic priest and fell in love with Miracles, and my current character is a Living Land brute who doubles as the party healer with Miracles.

77

I appreciate GMs following rules, but also breaking them with grace and reason.

An example of bad rule-breaking: in one game, we fought slow, cumbersome flying creatures. I’d learned the D&D flying rules for my druid character, so I figured I could engage in some spiffy guerilla fights against these beasts, attacking them from hiding as they passed and then having a round or two to get under cover while they engaged in the multiple-round turn so they could make another pass.

The GM had them execute a 180 degree turn in the next round and fly right back to us, attacking the snot out of me. They weren’t any more agile in description, just in capability.

This was frustrating, because I’d used the rules to imagine the world and plan what I’d do. I’d have acted very differently if I’d known how the rules would reflect the world’s reality.

But then there are good rule-breaks. A GM who has a great plan for a recurring villain might choose to let the villain survive your attack in order to set up a more fun set of games; but if she does so, she needs to do it gracefully. “Okay, dude, yeah, that’s a great hit. I’m gonna screw you over here, so I’m giving you a “get out of jail free” card that lets you veto any one roll of mine in the future, fair? So anyway, your strike is flawless, and by all rights should have skewered the drow through the heart, but somehow he manages to twist out of the way and bring his blade up to block yours.”

I enjoy it when a GM breaks the rules against me in this way: making it clear that’s what’s happening, making it clear there’s a solid and fun reason for doing so, and throwing me some sort of cookie to make up for it.

I don’t see CR scores as rules that bind GMs at all, though. They can define a play-style, sure: if you and the GM agree implicitly or explicitly, you can know that you won’t encounter overwhelming odds in any combat-oriented scene. But there’s another perfectly legitimate play-style, in which you know that not every encounter is survivable through combat. I only enjoy that play-style if the GM gives me some way to reasonably measure my likelihood of survival, though.

78

I’ve been playing table-top role-playing games for so long they were just called role-playing games when I started, and I’ve never heard of this before. Can you give any evidence for this? It’s just wildly different from anything I’ve ever personally experienced, seen, or heard of.

The idea that GMs are the final arbiter is still explicitly stated in most mainstream RPGs, including the current edition of D&D. Some more narrative RPGs explicitly make the group as a whole the final arbiter, but that seems to me to be a result of a drift in design philosophy towards more group-based cooperative storytelling. Every game I can think of that uses consensus as the final arbiter of disputes presents it in those terms, rather than as a means of “reining-in” GMs who “cheat.”

In fact, every game that I can think of that uses a traditional GM explicitly encourages the GM to “cheat,” although generally they also explicitly discourage GMs from cheating in order to hose the players.

As for Challenge Ratings, AFAIK, they were added to 3E as part of the general drive in that edition to quantify and regularize what had been a clunky hodge-podge of a game, and were explicitly intended to be a tool for DMs to use to help plan encounters and adventures, not any sort of player-demand-driven rein on DM “cheating.”

Moreover, I don’t understand how the CR system would prevent DM “cheating.” Do you actually expect in a D&D campaign that every encounter and potential encounter you have must be of a level-appropriate CR?

Have you ever played in an actual sand-box campaign, with “Gygaxian realism”, where if the random encounter table says you encounter 5,243 orcs, that’s what you encounter, regardless of the CR relative to your level? Or in a “rail-road” campaign where the DM intentionally uses ridiculously high CR encounters to herd the PCs towards where they’re supposed to go? Or an RP-heavy campaign, where the DM doesn’t even pay much attention to CR, because most encounters are resolved with quick-thinking, problem-solving, and social interaction, rather than straight-up, toe-to-toe combat? Or would you consider all of those to be “cheating”?

79

My first D&D adventure was In Search of the Unknown, where a first-level party could easily encounter a freakin’ vampire as their very first encounter of the game. CR does a lot to avoid that sort of silliness.

It’s also a playstyle. I’m one of those artsy-fartsy sorts who likes to spend time between game sessions writing in character. I’ve written creation myths for my cleric, semiliterate letters to daddy from my barbarian, metaphysical theories for my detective rogue, and the occasional sonnet encapsulation of a session just for shits and giggles.
This playstyle is pretty incompatible with frequent/random death due to unlucky rolls on the random encounter generator. Nothing wrong with that playstyle for them as likes it–I’ve played Roguelike games and enjoyed them–but it’s not for me.

80

You have some of this backwards. I am the one standing behind GM fiat. I don’t consider that stuff cheating. I am saying that players used to bitch about it so they asked publishers to add in rules to rein-in the out-of-control GMs. Things like the CR allow the players to cry “foul” when the GM tries to do things outside of CR. I have had players say that they wanted me to write down every possible variance (their words) from published AD&D1 rules, make copies of the list and distribute the copies so that they would know in advance every way that I might “adjudicate” and by which they could call me on it if things went a different way. This happened after a rules fight where I applied a to-hit penalty for throwing a non-throwing weapon and they thought I was out of line. Firstly, they thought it should be a throwing weapon, and secondly, they thought the penalty (which they didn’t know) was too large. They demanded an apology, the variance list with a promise to never violate it, and an admission that I was wrong to adjudicate that way in the first place. The fight went on for four hours even though less than five minutes in, I told them I would not apply any penalty. The argument went on because they wanted promises that the affront would not be repeated, as well as apologies and admissions.

In this very thread, Atamasama told a story where he felt the GM cheated. I disagreed (and came up with a counter-possibility) but I feel for the frustration. I bring this up to show you that players sometimes feel that GMs cheat. I am firmly in the GMs-word-is-law group.

As to evidence, I am not going to try and go look up quotes from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s by publishers who have stated that players would approach them at conventions asking for rules to rein-in out-of-control GMs. I see no reason to disbelieve them then or now but I am not going to find it for you. CR is just one example of such possible rules but the publishers said they were trying to be more Player (as in not GM) Friendly as the players (as a group) buy more books. D&D got far more technocratic, in part to resolve all possible situations where the two sides might have had a disagreement in the past when in the past it was GM Fiat.

The rules expect you to use the CR and players might bitch about it if you didn’t. If a GM sent to many and/or too powerful encounters players could complain ‘by rights,’ because the rules weren’t followed. Maybe that wouldn’t be a big fight but I don’t see why such preconditions to a fight are even in the rules. But they are. I don’t see the point in even having CR, so I don’t GM those systems. I am currently playing in a 3.75 game, but I have no idea if CR is in use. We are out-of-doors and take breaks between encounters. If you think GMs aren’t shouldn’t follow CR then why do you think it is there?

I started playing in 1977. I have played most of the situations you have described. but not always in D&D which is a baseline in your question (you mentioned CR three times.) I definitely play in Gygaxian realism games including the situation I mentioned earlier from last week. You should see the amusing treasure they got from the random Ogre encounter on the road. I have played in Dragonlance where an infinite number of Draconian soldiers appear in a line to herd players back on track. I am in a Pathfinder game right now that is heavy RP. I am writing a post for this thread about an RP game.