On Railroading

Everything about Illarion that fits nowhere else. / Alles über Illarion was inhaltlich in kein anderes Board passt.

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Q-wert
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On Railroading

Post by Q-wert »

Tobiah Panshin: The Game Master - A guide to the Art and Theory of Roleplaying wrote:When confronted with a situation where they are losing control of the plot, the most common GM tactic is to bully, cajole, or trick the players into following the preordained course that has been laid out for them. These methods are collectively known as Railroading.
This is something between rant, constructive criticism and appeal to our quest-gms.
"My quests are never railroaded." someone said. I'm challenging that claim.

I'll pick a generally well received example game-mastered by that someone: The battle against Phelmon. While still enjoyable it had a number of people rolling their eyes, one "Well, what do you expect, its that Gamemaster." in teamspeak and frustrating 'this is not what you are supposed to do, therefore it is impossible'-moments to me.

The battle against Phelmon was set up in absolutes: The Necromancer hides in the Queens grave protected by three pillars. These pillars fuel the spawns of undead. Once the pillars are downed by excessive force, priest- or mage-rp the necromancer can be beaten. After his defeat he surrenders and puts a curse on those who kill him. This setup is great, until someone does something not anticipated. One player managed to get into an archery-position from where he ghosted the necromancer... who promply was resurrected with an emote to show this to have had no effect. I had my character fight through to the necromancer afterwards, using up a bottle of holy water (requiring one pure water and a small roleplay event to create) on the necromancer... who melted down and manifested from the shadows, as if nothing happened.
No matter what player characters did, everything not done on the pre-laid rails of the gm was very openly discouraged. Things simply did not progress until the preset, scripted conditions of the gm were met. And when they progressed, they progressed only in the way set up beforehand with only the choice of an alternate ending. To me that does fit the definition of railroading.

In my eyes such a mindset does go against the great things a human gamemaster can offer. The battle against Phelmon was a finely executed boss battle one also could find in other video games. Video games without game masters. Game master able to improvise, able to fill the gaps an engine can not. The thing I love about pen&paper roleplay (called tabletop in English for some reason) are nigh endless, unscripted possibilities on what characters can try and how stories unfold, as one is only limited by setting and creativity. I believe that this can to a very wide degree be applied to things coordinated by gms in Illarion.
I therefore think that gm-lead quests would very much benefit from a more nuanced, open and less scripted approach.

And if you are a gm and put down meteoroids, how about simply playing out the attempts to mine them with the players? Make fun things happen, maybe give them small trinkets, but most of all let them have fun with what they want to play. And please don´t tell me "I gave you valuable stuff and two leads to follow. Therefore it is not Railroading if I say you are not supposed to mine the meteors and mining them is impossible."

I would also like to recommend the book cited from. Its a great read.
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GolfLima
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Re: On Railroading

Post by GolfLima »

+ my char also tried to mine the meteors --> the intention was to get some small pices of the meteor - may be later to be used to smith a "special thing" (with GM´s help)
+ if i remember right 1 meteor has a message empty iron ore vein --> this implicate that the meteors are mineable
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Jupiter
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Jupiter »

This post is more a personal attack than proper discussing and you know that. I sent you an PM and contact you via Skype. You, however, prefer to discuss this publicly. I do not. I have nothing more to say.
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Karrock
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Karrock »

I tried aswell mine them and tried shovel to dig. I consider "official" explaining as breaking fun. We could try to remove them in game and get just normal cheap stones. Not every meteor must be valuable, I agree.

EDIT: I should add that I was much excited too discover do they have ores and I tried to dig/mine all and asked also gm when I can try to dig/mine them with support. Now I'm not interested in removing them on that char. In my opinion it should be secret.
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Azuros
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Azuros »

The only reason this upsets you is because Jupiter isn't blindly going along with whatever you say. You have had so much conceded to you by the GMs in the past, and this tiny thing goes against what you want, so you decided to lash out at Jupiter.

Things don't always work the ways you want them to. Deciding as the quester that the meteorites can't be mined (because I'm sure you wanted a super cool space sword+1 from it later) is not railroading, it is just setting a ground rule to avoid trouble later. Sometimes taking the third option won't be a win, get over it.
Last edited by Azuros on Sat Oct 15, 2016 5:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Lia
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Lia »

Okay with the many English I did not understand everything perfectly. So forgive me any misunderstandings. And my not so good english.

I understand the criticism even if I find it harshly formulated. I also understand that Jupiter is annoyed. As a Gm you put a lot of time and work into quests and events.

And whoever has done this once knows that it needs a guide and you can give the players only limited scope.
Always react and have the appropriate ready to react to any player action is impossible.

Apart from that, I find it also somewhat violent. Remember, except for Jupiter, Slightly and Silverwing, we have NObody to give us a little fun and adventure. Except we become creative ourselves.

And if no Gm does any more events and quests, then it is also complained about.

With all their criticism, please do not forget a few things.

1. We play together. That is to say, one must take consideration here and there and enter into one another.

2. Behind everyone, whether player or GM is a human who invests his free time in Illarion. who has feelings. who has sometimes bad days. who has dozens of other things in his head.

3. Criticism is great, good criticism but also brings a few solution approaches. or ideas

4. Try to consider the terms of several pages. Also from the sight and side of the other. Only so you can understand each other better.
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Estralis Seborian
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Estralis Seborian »

Dear all,

while I did not participate in both mentioned events, I'd like to point out some general aspects. Of course, "railroading" is not good GM style and I encourage players always to think about "how would my character react?" and not "what does the GM expect" or even "what do I, as a player, consider the best solution?". I am pretty sure our GMs will always try to react on such initiatives that might be unexpected and unplanned and if this can be improved, let's just take this thread as an appeal - concrete proposals would be better of course.

But my main point here is "to react" - from my GM experience, both pen and paper as well as Illarion, I can say that GMing in Illarion is massively different than pen and paper for some reasons. First, in pen and paper, you can always create new situations on the fly as all things happen in your imagination. Sure, some GMs spend some time into preparing maps or prewritten scrolls, but this is nothing one cannot change in a minute or just put back in a file for later use if the players do not decide to do XYZ. In Illarion, it's a bit different. The map cannot be changed with a blink and also, prepared scripts cannot just be deactivated. But the key difference is that Illarion won't "pause" and is not bond to one location. GMs sometimes play various characters in a quest or have to monitor different locations and different groups of players. It is very difficult to keep track of every single line spoken or every single emote. Furthermore, when it comes to battle, things get even more challenging. While in a pen and paper session, you can always take a break, imagine Illarion to be a pen and paper session where ten players in one room and potentially five players in another room require your full attention. But instead of waiting for your GM actions, the players keep rolling their dices, all at the same time, over and over again. Sure, the engine helps a lot, but still, GMs need to click and type a lot more during an event than one player. So if some initiatives are not reacted on immediately, there are human limits to what one can do.

In PvP, many players consider it good style to give the other player time for typing or emoting. Do the same if you encounter a GM event that includes battle. I once ran an event where I had to manually issue a command to deflect players from a location with a magical forcefield; instead of accepting the forcefield in their roleplaying (is that railroading now?), some players kept trying ten, twenty times each until one made it through. I accepted the situation as the engine clearly showed the result, but not because it was a clever initiative or cool plot twist. It was just that ten players can click ten times faster than one GM.

What I want to say; in battles, give the GM some time here and there. Do not use the engine just because you want to win. In pen and paper, I am used to statements like "I try to climb the wall..." or "I attempt to sneak past the guard...". Support your local GM in their events and especially as senior player, offer your ideas and twists rather than trying to enforce them.

On the rocks: The script to mine from those rocks is not ready. You can blame me if you want :-).

Estralis
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Kugar
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Kugar »

Q-wert wrote:One player managed to get into an archery-position from where he ghosted the necromancer... who promply was resurrected with an emote to show this to have had no effect.
Q-wert wrote:I had my character fight through to the necromancer afterwards, using up a bottle of holy water (requiring one pure water and a small roleplay event to create) on the necromancer... who melted down and manifested from the shadows, as if nothing happened.
->
Estralis wrote:...imagine Illarion to be a pen and paper session where ten players in one room and potentially five players in another room require your full attention. But instead of waiting for your GM actions, the players keep rolling their dices, all at the same time, over and over again. Sure, the engine helps a lot, but still, GMs need to click and type a lot more during an event than one player. So if some initiatives are not reacted on immediately, there are human limits to what one can do.
Estralis explains this quite well imo.

I'm not interested in taking any sides in an argument, so here's my opinion as a player -

Aside from my opinion that firing arrows (arrows!?) at a lich necromancer (who summoned an undead army and pillars and manifests in the sand and has all these other awesome worldly powers) is a bad solution on how to defeat him, and that holy water shouldn't be the answer to dismantling all foes (certain dark magic enchantments surely should protect any established beast from the underworld against a perhaps age old solution that could have perhaps been used thousands of times of before), I think the most important thing is to always remember the multiplayer aspect of it. In such a large scale quest the GM can't be everywhere (make sure they ghost the characters who shoots arrows at them or otherwise because they could be reacting to the players at the pillars), so there perhaps has to be absolutes in order to include all players and avoid that one player takes it upon themselves to solve the situation alone. In Illarion, above all, that has to matter to keep players interested.

The set up of the Phelmon quest was obviously cleverly enginered so that a multitude of players could take part in this storyline and experience together the struggle of dismantling an almighty foe, rather than the few. Being that I was there I can attest to that it achieved, imo, that. Several groups all split off to deal with the pillars and drive back the enemey, as intended, and all had a hand in 'defeating' Phelmon... And even then he wasn't exactly defeated. Clearly the power of Phelmon, whatever he is exactly, is phel-nominal. So using unique ways to defeat him seems fitting, again, imo.

As far as Mas is concerned there were again absolutes to allow multiplayer gameplay (the outposts and altars), but situations were open for interpretation (like opening the coffin and freeing the halfer). The meteor problem seems small scale in the grand scheme of it and, like Estralis said, we can blame him for it.

tl;dr - Illarion has to have some absolutes because of the large scale multiplayer aspect of it and the limited manpower.
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GolfLima
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Re: On Railroading

Post by GolfLima »

Azuros wrote:Deciding as the quester that the meteorites can't be mined (because I'm sure you wanted a super cool space sword+1 from it later)
:arrow: as i know the "gm - made special weapons" have no better stats than normal onces OR am I wrong?
:arrow: when i tried to mine the meteors for ore i have nothing special in mind what later can be made with gm help (may be some others have, but i definitly havent some special weapon in mind)
Fooser
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Fooser »

Q-wert wrote:in teamspeak
Just curious - do certain groups use teamspeak during PvP? If so, since this creates a tangible advantage over others, what is the official opinion on this?
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Lia
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Lia »

Fooser wrote:
Q-wert wrote:in teamspeak
Just curious - do certain groups use teamspeak during PvP? If so, since this creates a tangible advantage over others, what is the official opinion on this?

Teamspeak can use EVERYONE.
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Fooser »

No one is disputing it's availability, most methods of cheating are technically available to EVERYONE. Do the Bearers & Sea Serpent use Teamspeak (possibly even the official TS) to gain advantages in PvP and/or metagame?
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GolfLima
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Re: On Railroading

Post by GolfLima »

Lia wrote:Teamspeak can use EVERYONE.
:arrow: CAN but NO MUST - there should be no advantage if using Teamspeak otherwise it must be manatory and NOT additionally

:arrow: any offical statement :?:
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Lia
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Lia »

GolfLima wrote:
Lia wrote:Teamspeak can use EVERYONE.
:arrow: CAN but NO MUST - there should be no advantage if using Teamspeak otherwise it must be manatory and NOT additionally
I see no advantage. If you do not want to use it does not use it. Whoever wants to do it does it. You can not forbid it anyway.
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Fooser »

Based on the details given, you guys already coordinate in PvE (and spread negativity about Jupiter :roll: ) in TS, so are you conceding you all use it for PvP too?
Lia wrote: I see no advantage.
That's crazy. Communicating in voice is way more efficient than coordinating in text. Also I noticed in the past it looked like certain groups were having targets called out to them in voice chat so they could "focus" them down quickly. How else do you all metagame? Do you announce the location of enemy characters to players?

Try watching PvP in any other game between a group with voice chat vs a group without it.
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Jupiter
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Jupiter »

Since we are now quite off-topic, I allow myself to simply point to the game rules. They are quite clear on the matter.
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GolfLima
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Re: On Railroading

Post by GolfLima »

Lia wrote:I see no advantage. If you do not want to use it does not use it. Whoever wants to do it does it. You can not forbid it anyway.
:arrow: for me it looks like Teamspeak must be mandatory than and NOT longer additionally :arrow: may be some players without teamspeak will leave than

p.s. i dont have teamspeak -> if this change to mandatory i have to leave, sorry
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Jupiter
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Jupiter »

See my post above, GolfLima. It is not.
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Achae Eanstray
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Re: On Railroading

Post by Achae Eanstray »

Jupiter wrote:Since we are now quite off-topic, I allow myself to simply point to the game rules. They are quite clear on the matter.

It does seem off-topic, will close the thread but if there is any pressing need to open related to the topic feel free to contact...

Achae
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