Information in Prospectuses

[Agemegos]

Sometimes I run a mysteries campaign. Often the PCs are professional police detectives, or they might be professional private eyes. I announce that up front in the prospectus, and anyone who doesn't want to play in such a campaign is free not to volunteer. Now in theory the PCs in such a game are free not to try to solve the mysteries. They can resign their jobs, or quit their business, or neglect their duties to the point where they will be fired or go broke. If the players decide to have their characters behave so I will be rather miffed, and will feel absolutely no obligation to follow the characters into some subsequent occupation. If you agree to play in such a campaign of mine, investigating crimes is practically unavoidable.

Is that railroading? Only in an absurd sense in which offering a man a wage to do a job is coercing and enslaving him.

Running a combat-heavy campaign when you have offered and the character-players have accepted a combat-heavy campaign is not railroading. It is the fulfilment of a social contract. Entering such a campaign and attempting to subvert it by avoiding the combats is vandalism.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by Brett

Sometimes I run a mysteries campaign. Often the PCs are professional police detectives, or they might be professional private eyes. I announce that up front in the prospectus, and anyone who doesn't want to play in such a campaign is free not to volunteer. Now in theory the PCs in such a game are free not to try to solve the mysteries. They can resign their jobs, or quit their business, or neglect their duties to the point where they will be fired or go broke. If the players decide to have their characters behave so I will be rather miffed, and will feel absolutely no obligation to follow the characters into some subsequent occupation. If you agree to play in such a campaign of mine, investigating crimes is practically unavoidable.

Is that railroading? Only in a sbsurd sense in which offering a man a money to do a job is coercing and enslaving him.

Running a combat-heavy campaign when you have offered and the character-players have accepted a combat-heavy campaign is not railroading. It is the fulfilment of a social contract. Entering such a campaign and attempting to subvert it by avoiding the combats is vandalism.

I don't think the analogy is apt. First off, I want my game world to be realistic. This means it is not-realistic for detectives to turn down all of their cases...they need money to survive...and we are all detectives. That said, in the detective campaign I played in under whswhs, I think the group turned down one interesting case because there was a likelihood of it exposing the group to the Martian Triads. So we passed on that case. It was realistic for the group to do so. Making us do it anyway would have been railroading. Then there were two other cases, one trying to help out a very conservative politician, and one trying to help a Rogue AI that caused a lot of debate amongst the team. Some of the more transhumanist folks on the team felt a bit uneasy about the conservative politician case but loved AI case, while my conservative PC loved the politician case but felt uneasy about the AI case. In the end we did the cases...but it wasn't because the GM made us...it was because the group had a great discussion in character that really helped refine our characters. Also, we had a set up where we often had two cases going at once so if a PC was morally outraged by one case they could spend their energies on the other case.

In combat there may be times when the group thinks it would be disadvantageous to fight a certain group. If they can extricate themselves realistically and are inclined to do so...it would be railroady and unrealistic for the GM to say, no you have to fight them anyway.

But part of my issue is not if but how. There are many ways to solve a case, and the PCs should be able to have enough agency to try their different tactics. There are many ways to solve a violent situation (not all of which are fighting right then and there), and the PCs should be able to have enough agency to try their different tactics.

As a GM I don't expect players to do what I want because I told them so, else I label them vandals. If I want the players to engage in lots of combat, I don't tell them it is unavoidable and if they don't do it they are bad. Rather I set up a campaign frame that encourages PCs that can dish out and handle violence, then I offer frequent combat situations...but that is not enough. I need to as a GM give them a reason -In Character- to want to get into that fight, and also provide realistic ingame consequences if they don't.

If the campaign set up is the PCs are a Sheriff and Deputies in an Old West town. They may well decide that rather than getting into gun fights all the time, they want to try to handle conflict by diffusing it before it gets to violence. I wouldn't think they were vandals if they took that path. However, if I want some shooting, then I have to figure out what will make those particular PCs as they have developed decide that violence is now necessary...and that will be an important character moment for them.

For me I always want the actions to flow from the characters and the situations. As a GM I may present the characters with lots and lots of violent situations, and have stacked the deck by asking them to design characters who are predisposed to getting involved in lots and lots of violent situations...but I am not then going to dictate their character actions by saying they have to fight using method a (the direct method) every single time or they are not fulfilling the social contract.

I do subscribe to that idea of the GM controls the world and the players control their PCs. This mean I don't fee comfortable *forcing* PC to fight the way I want them to fight. I present them choices, those choices might be hard to refuse, buy they are still choices.

Let me give two separate examples of what I mean.

I was playing D&D. We had a party of 4 or 5 2nd level characters. We were investigating some bandits, who we dispatched. But they had an invitation to a shindig from some warlord. So we head out to the desert and spy on the shindig. Some big warlord is gathering up all the disparate Orcs, goblins, etc into a grand Army and is planning on marching on our homeland. We hightail it out of there to alert our liege. On the way out we come across a unit of about 20 baddies, we are outnumbered and outmatched...and fighting them would have been a bad idea. So my character does an amazing bluff. I show them the invite and claim we are all evil mercenaries who are on our way to the meet-up. I am successful and they let us go our own way. We avoid the combat...and start trying to make our way back to civilization with our warning. Our ranger makes sure we aren't being followed, we head back towards the shindig until we can tell we aren't being observed before we switch direction back to civilization, we cover our tracks. The whole bit. Did we avoid combat? Yes. But we were still planning on fighting those baddies, just not 20 vs 4 in a bad position when our greater responsibility was to protect our homeland. Well, the GM decided that combat was going to be unavoidable because he had planned for us to get into that fight. So the next they somehow ran into us again and just attacked us straight out. And we all died, because we were outmatched. Yay.

Example 2. I was running an Espionage game and there were lots of combat situations coming up. But I decided to let the players deal with it as they wanted. And did they avoid the combat as I gave it to them? Yes. Was their a lot of combat? Yes. They took a lot of control over their destinies. If there was a set up for a fight between them and opposing spies in the village square, they would do their research then get their six hours early and set up an ambush where half the team sniped the opfor from covered positions while the other half were raiding the opfor base of operations while the opfor were getting killed in the village square. They almost never engaged in a classic spy movie fight after the first few. They got really sneaky. The took control of their environment as much as they could (they couldn't always of course), and they ended up handing me a campaign unlike any I had run before, and it was awesome. If I had insisted that they all have the traditional shootout in the square or they are vandals, it would have compromised the sorts of spies they became, and it would have made me miss out on something even better because I was being too railroady and narrow in my ideas of what the combat in that game would look like. My players in that game took the initiative. They began initiating things so they could get the drop on villains. They were no longer reactive, they were proactive. And proactive violent encounters are radically different that reactive violent encounters.

Most of the time I see GMs enforce unavoidable combat...it is reactive combat--that's how they make it unavoidable. I find reactive combat might be fun for a nice jolt here and there as a bit of a change up (guys burst into the room with guns blazing)...but it gets old. Once experiencing a group of players who were amazing at proactive combat (and proactive goal setting), that is the thing I want in all my games now. But to get that, I have to let the PCs step back, then maybe sideways, before they move forward from a different direction. I have to allow the PCs to run away from fight sometimes so they can set up an even more amazing proactive battle plan that involves disguisin themselves as a homeless bum and as loud American tourists looking for the McDonalds at Red Square. I wouldn't give up those things my players did for anything.

[baakyocalder]

As Gary Jackson, the fictional writer of HackMaster might say, Trooper6's first example is that of a bad GM.

If the PCs are clever and avoid the threat, the threat can come back but it shouldn't be a problem immediately. Any GM can kill a group of PCs by using an overwhelming force that the PCs have no chance to avoid. That's about as fair as sending five skilled college football players, say those at a university named after land thieves in the former Indian Territory, against a couple kindergartners. It makes the game less fun for all involved in the long run.

The second example is better. The players were allowed to think and to avoid fights. They still fought, which was a major theme of the game, but they fought on their own terms. Even in pre-planned adventures, the players were allowed to change the action with unexpected activities.

A good GM may have carefully plotted and prepared adventures, but they might as well mail themselves the results if they won't let the player characters' actions change the outcome. I had to work at this, as I would presume most GMs do. I do less detailed planning than I used to, because it's not worth planning a month ahead if you aren't going to run the players over with a plot train. Instead, it's planning big-picture villain plans and since they don't know what the PCs will do, well they have to adjust some things on the fly.

How this relates to a prospectus is that the GM has to be very careful in communicating what they imagine the game. If it's just one campaign pitch, you may even need to compromise on smaller points. If it's one pitch of a slate of options, you need to be more clear what each option is. Since I'm filling in the sandbox and the toys, often in discussion with the players (written prospectuses even with history tend to go unread or are lightly read), there's little cause for complaint if we were clear on what game we were going to play.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by trooper6

As a GM I don't expect players to do what I want because I told them so, else I label them vandals. If I want the players to engage in lots of combat, I don't tell them it is unavoidable and if they don't do it they are bad.

But that isn't what [Crakkerjakk] <CORRECTION> Sir_pudding is doing. He is offering players a choice of a campaign in which circumstances will make a lot of fighting inevitable. To read that as a declaration of an intent to railroad seems like a perverse or even insincere reading.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Title: (Campaign Title)
System: (Game system to be used)
Genre: (Best approximation of campaign genres or subgenres)
Setting: (Name of well known setting or brief description of original setting)
Fidelity: (Description of the relative realism of the campaign).
Combat Frequency: (Description of the relative frequency of combat in the game)
Power Level: (Description of the relative power level of the game either in the terms of the character creation rules (e.g. point total) or abstract terms.
Description: (Short paragraph describing the campaign; intended to be a interesting hook).

Someone (and I think he has already posted in this thread) once made the point that a game prospectus ought to systematically include a specification of

• what happens
• how it is done.

Since reading that advice I have made a point of always including some such explicit statement in each of my campaign specifications. My usual formula is "The PCs will be X who strive for Y by doing Z".

e.g. "The PCs will be deputy Imperial marshals who protect the People and combat the corrupt authorities of a bizarre colonial society by diligently enforcing the Imperial Crimes Act (and, occasionally, shooting it out using ultra-tech sidearms).

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by Brett

But that isn't what Crakkerjakk is doing. He is offering players a choice of a campaign in which circumstances will make a lot of fighting inevitable. To read that as a declaration of an intent to railroad seems like a perverse or even insincere reading.

Fighting is rarely inevitable, unless you disregard player agency. Which is my definition of railroading.

I don't think it a perverse or insincere reading to call railroading on a GM who will insist on combat being unavoidable on a meta level when on an ingame level it could be avoided. Deciding that players cannot avoid combat despite the ingame circumstances to the contrary just because you as GM want it to happen is railroading to me.

Saying that combat will be unavoidable, which Crakkerjakk did, rather than combat situations will be frequent, reads as a meta-game railroading statement to me. And many GMs operate that way. Many I have known. I would have no reason to believe looking at the original prospectus that he didn't mean what he said...that combat would be unavoidable regardless of player choice or PC action. And that is a railroading no go for me as a player.

Now, further conversation between Crakkerjakk and I seems to indicate that he doesn't mean combat is unavoidable as I understand that phrase, but rather combat situations will crop up frequently. Crakkerjakk and I were working through our different understandings of semantics quite well before you came along.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by Brett

Someone (and I think he has already posted in this thread) once made the point that a game prospectus ought to systematically include a specification of

• what happens
• how it is done.

Since reading that advice I have made a point of always including some such explicit statement in each of my campaign specifications. My usual formula is "The PCs will be X who strive for Y by doing Z".

e.g. "The PCs will be deputy Imperial marshals who protect the People and combat the corrupt authorities of a bizarre colonial society by diligently enforcing the Imperial Crimes Act (and, occasionally, shooting it out using ultra-tech sidearms).

The how it is done is getting a bit too much into stepping onto player agency for my taste.

I'd stop at "The PCs will be deputy Imperial marshals who protect and People and combat the corrupt authorities of a bizarre colonial society." Because I can't say or force the means on the players. They may diligently enforce the Imperial Crimes Act, or they go all Vic Mackey from The Shield and break the law in order to enforce it. I can't say they may occasionally shoot it out using ultra-tech sidearms...because they might manufacture situations to justify getting into shootouts all the time. I can give the set up, but I can't force the subsequent action. I can say what game we are playing, set up the rules, and stack the deck, but once the cards are dealt, I can't dictate how the players are going to throw their cards.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by trooper6

I'd stop at "The PCs will be deputy Imperial marshals who protect and People and combat the corrupt authorities of a bizarre colonial society." Because I can't say or force the means on the players.

Perhaps not, but you can negotiate with them to reach an advance agreement. Such negotiation is not coercion.

They may diligently enforce the Imperial Crimes Act, or they go all Vic Mackey from The Shield and break the law in order to enforce it.

It seems to me that as the person who has to do most work to prep a game, I ought to have at least some say in what game I get to play. If I want to play the campaign I described in my example I ought to be allowed to say so and to recruit players who also want to play that game. I ought not to be obliged to run The Shield contrary to my inclinations, and without warning until game time just because the character-players want to play that rather than the game I offered. Worse yet, I should not be obliged to run The Shield to indulge one player, contrary to the wishes of everyone else involved.

I reckon that explicit prospectuses such as I suggested are a way to avoid and minimise both style clashes and railroading. If the GM is explicit up front about his plans and expectations he can recruit character-players with similar desires and plans into appropriate groups, and can negotiate the design of appropriate characters with appropriate motivations. Starting everyone on the same page with the same expectations is one way to make railroading unnecessary.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by trooper6

I do subscribe to that idea of the GM controls the world and the players control their PCs.

I subscribe to the idea that the GM and character-players do those things -- after agreeing on what game they will be playing and designing characters and a world that are appropriate to the agreed subgenre, tone, etc.

This mean I don't fee comfortable *forcing* PC to fight the way I want them to fight.

No more do I. But I feel no qualms about negotiating with them up front to come to a mutually satisfactory agreement that they will design and play characters who will naturally fight in an understood way.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Brett

But that isn't what Crakkerjakk is doing.

All us Jarheads are interchangeable, eh?