Games and "Railroading"

Considering I wrote both, it is exactly for what I'm describing in the second paragraph. Even if you make "intent of the designer" something that is actually relevant (I certainly wouldn't think so), the Monster Manual is there to do exactly that; come up with combat stats (and let's face it, combat is by far the most extensive and important sub-part of the system in DnD and Pathfinder) for a bunch of critters that can provide an appropriate challenge for a party. Instead of having to make out a bunch of NPCs to populate a castle by hand, I call it a dungeon, slap in a bunch of monsters, all of whom have stats pre-generated, and call it a day. It will in no way take 10-30 minutes per monster to do so.

And if they aren't put in there for combat efficacy, you don't really need a full statblock.

Is that a fucking bearded lady

Just a poorly drawn one.

/thread

>slap in a bunch of monsters, all of whom have stats pre-generated, and call it a day. It will in no way take 10-30 minutes per monster to do so.
sure if all you want to do is dungeon-crawl now all you need to do is determine the CR of each room encounter and throw in a # of monsters/traps into the room until their cumulative xp reward matches the set CR reward you set for the room. Now say the players want to go talk to this one guy they ran into earlier before trucking off, well shit all you have for the mayor's profile is a name and a funny accent to designate when he's talking, well even if all the players want to do is diplomacy him that still needs a stat profile to determine the DC of any charm, intimidate, or deception checks they need to make on him! is there a pre-generated stat for this guy? probably not one that works so now you have to generate those stats, which means cracking open the NPC creator chapter in the Core, generating his stats and adding modifiers for each level you assign him...

this is all stuff that needs to be done ahead of time if you don't want your game to grind to a complete halt while you figure this out.

You don't listen real well, do you? Unless you think that the players are likely to fight something, you do NOT need a full statblock, and I'm certainly not aware of anything in the 3.5 DMG at least insisting you make up a statblock for every NPC the players are likely to interact with.

>well shit all you have for the mayor's profile is a name and a funny accent to designate when he's talking, well even if all the players want to do is diplomacy him that still needs a stat profile to determine the DC of any charm, intimidate, or deception checks they need to make on him!
No, you don't. All you need is a name and a list of appropriate DCs to use social skills on him for things that are more or less credible, and maybe a will DC if the players want to try a more surreptitious spell on him. Done. It should take 30 seconds. Because if he's the mayor, I do not in fact need to know his strength score, whether he's better with an axe or a mace, whether he has 45 hp as opposed to 43 or 48, or what his list of combat feats are.

>list of appropriate DCs
Which you can't get without some kind of stat block that's what I, are trying to tell you!

Watch this.

>Mayor of Malloc
>Name, Tindore
>DC to intimidate, 18
>DC to diplo on something that wouldn't be tough to convince him on, 14
>If it is tough, add difficulties higher, especially getting him to talk about [obscure town secret] is +5
>If players have found out he likes figurines, can sell to him for 1.3x regular price; if made a gift of them, resulting goodwill can be used to make a +3 circumstance bonus on diplo checks.

Ta-da! No statblock. 23 seconds composition time.

It's pretty obvious.

I think the only "traditional" games that kinda manage to do it are the one were the PCs ways of thinking are fixed. A good example might be The One Ring - you do an hero and heroes gonna hero.

In DND adventurers are gonna have at least slightly different ideas and so railroading is gonna be problem.

That's way I generally diss traditional rule zero and high prep games.

Except there is nothing in the books that teaches you or at least provides useful guidelines on how to do this.

Your dungeons must be shit m8.

>The problem is translating what you improvise into the mechanics of the game.
I've never really had this problem with 3.p or later D&D editions. Mind, the encounters were less polished but I could come up with something from my notes in a five minute smoke/beer/bathroom break and be ready to go when everyone sat down and settled down again.

>Improvising is a skill
I don't think improvising is THE way to go, it's just A way. I just had a ton of notes on my laptop, mostly monsters, filed alphabetically with the most relevant info on each that I'd need. From there I can mostly work out an encounter and use a monster manual phone app if I need to get into the nitty gritty of an enemy.

Building terrain for an encounter though, I can see that being a problem, I just have never really had a problem. We use a game mat that you can draw on with dry erase so I can sketch out a fight area pretty quickly.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that OP is kind of right in that 3.p and beyond as well as other games aren't super conducive to spur-of-the-moment play, but that doesn't mean they're made to be or even necessarily encourage railroading, being spontaneous just takes a bit more work with those systems.

They don't teach you to wipe your ass either but I expect you manage to do that just fine.

Not the user you're responding to, but that isn't really fair. It wouldn't have been hard to at least give some guidelines for quickly genning up a few NPC's in the DM's guide, especially since D&D is usually someone's first P&P.

I will say that FFGSW might be the one that comes closest to doing it right. The mechanics are simple and open-to-interpretation enough to allow for far more on-the-fly GMing, to the point where as long as you know something of SW canon, you could do an open-world campaign and do it very well.

This is coming from personal experience with that system.

3.PF was the only system I've had this problem with. Anything else I've run has been much, much more conducive to/permissive of improvisation.

Did you wipe yours after pulling that nonsensical comparison out of it?

I'm not exactly an expert on DMing 3.+ or PF, but in earlier editions the DM guides gave instructions on creating random encounter tables and tips on how to run those random encounters smoothly. But in those editions an encounter didn't have the expectation that the PC's would charge headlong into a battle to the death with whatever they see that more recent editions have.

>Secondly, it should not take all THAT long to prep monsters or NPCs in a DnD 3.5 ish thing
It does if you ACTUALLY prepare them as opposed to just throwing shit together in order to keep things moving which is what you're describing. There are actual rules describing exactly how to generate the HPM; how many skill points a certain monster would have given it's HD, type and intelligence modifier; and all the other things such as attack bonus, AC and so on.

Is there really not a table of which difficulties are considered easy or hard for a given level?

to add to that, this kind of prep work is necessary for the actual adventure. and it IS time consuming. Ass-pulling in Pathfinder can only get you so far, sooner or later you will have to either move heaven and earth to get them back onto the adventure path, or call the game there so you can completely rebuild the adventure arc to accommodate the new direction the players are going in. But at the same time there are games out there where the GM can conceivably ad-lib an entire adventure just letting the players do their thing and going with it. But again Pathfinder is not really one of those games.

OPs entire thesis seems to be when Players bitch about 'railroading' it could well have less to do with their GM, and more to do with the game they chose to run.

NO!!!

None that so much as mention your character level.

This picture seems to have a very smug undertone
Your presence is necesarry but so are thé player

As for your subject, I'd say that it s okay to railroad, to a certain extent mind you. I think it's important to have plan for your adventure, a begining, a conflict, a climax and an ending, just a simple structure, the thing is to let the player do what they want( of course only things consistent with the game, nothing Lolrandumb or stupid shit). So avoid using a "you cant do that" if its just something that can slightly deviate your plot.

I have no Idea how to handle Sandbox game though,never played one

The published adventures are often railroady in pathfinder.

DM prep need not be.

Prep reusable creatures and encounters, than you can pull out on the fly.

Prep guidelines for scaling them up or down in difficulty.

If you prep a railroad, you're gonna run a railroad.

Wow. Even 4e had that.

No, that is not what I'm describing. I'm describing only actually bothering to stat out the monste/NPC stats athat are likely to come up, and ignoring the rest. The blacksmith who is supposed to repair the McGuffin score only reallyly needs to have his Craft(Weaponsmithing) delinated, everything else can be ad-hoced if it becomes necessary to have him do something else. A monster who mindlessly attacks the aprty doesn't need to have its various knowledge skilsl parsed out, and if you're pulling it from a Monster Manual, you don't even need to do that, you just need to work with what is given. For DCs to resist things like domplmacy and intimidate, that's often parsed by the nature of the request/demand anyway, and not directly correlating with a given stat.

I'm not saying to make everything up.. I'm saying to realize that parsing out an entire statblock for each and every NPC is a waste, because most NPCs are not going to be on screen the way the PCs are and don't need to have everything laid out, it just won't come up. Know what you're going to need, and write that.

4e was a lot more(or better, should I say) structured in that regard. In 3.x you can have a bard with +30 bluff at level 6, or a fighter with -1 bluff at level 20. So what's an "easy" DC at level 6? At level 20? At least in 4e you have a baseline of 1/2 level to all skills, so even if no-one has it trained, everyone will have at least +10 to bluff(or whatever the equivalent is in 4e) by level 20. So it's guaranteed that a DC of 25 will be reasonably achievable whatever the party composition. In 3.x there's no such guarantee.

>No, that is not what I'm describing. I'm describing only actually bothering to stat out the monste/NPC stats athat are likely to come up, and ignoring the rest.
That's just a different way of saying the same thing.

>In 3.x there's no such guarantee.
in FFGSW it's easy to determine difficulty since the "difficulty" is a number between 1-6 and it never changes.

There is entirely a difference between making characters by the rules for character generation, and then just cutting off the process when it reaches something you're not likely to use, as well as taking stuff from the Monster Manual, than there is in just arbitrarily creating stats for monsters and bullshitting it to keep things moving.

>So what's an "easy" DC at level 6? At level 20?
I'm starting to get the feeling you guys completely miss the point of earlier DnD editions. You're not supposed to tailor your encounters to your group, you're supposed to build a believable world that your group has to tackle.

A lock in a palace would not be 'easy for your group' or 'hard for your group' because you needed a level appropriate obstacle, it would be 'objectively easy' because it's badly maintained or 'objectively hard' because it's strengthened by spells. level scaling is a retarded practice.

Not him, and obviously too rigid a scaling is going to make its own problems, but a general assumption in every adventure type RPG is going to be that the problems that the PCs run into should be solvable with the right plan of action and possibly a bit of luck.

You could easily craft a believable world in which everything the PCs run into is either way too easy or way too hard for them to handle. It would be a shit game, but you could do it and keep verisimilitude.

>but a general assumption in every adventure type RPG is going to be that the problems that the PCs run into should be solvable with the right plan of action and possibly a bit of luck
That's a very big assumption your making there and not at all common to most systems.
Earlier DnD Editions definitely did not assume this. Neither does WoD for example. It's mostly a 'newschool' thing to have everything scale to the players.

Nice fucking strawman, mate. I'm saying that in 3.x you can't have a neat table where you have level 6, and next to it the DCs for easy, normal and hard skill challenges. I'm not saying "there should be such a table" or "there shouldn't be such a table" or whatever.

>You're not supposed to tailor your encounters to your group, you're supposed to build a believable world that your group has to tackle.
That is a perfectly fine philosophy, but not one that's going to work naturally in Pathfinder. Black Crusade, Dark Heresy, Call of Cthulhu,
and FFGSW, to name a few, cater to this approach nicely. It takes way more work to get Pathfinder to do this without it sucking hard.

>Neither does WoD for example
That's the whole point! Some games lend themselves to this and some Don't!

>I'm saying that in 3.x you can't have a neat table where you have level 6, and next to it the DCs for easy, normal and hard skill challenges
Mate if you can't do the basic addition necessary to estimate that shit you have no place playing RPGs anyway.

>That's a very big assumption your making there and not at all common to most systems.
You tell me a single system that thinks where putting the PCs into completely impossible situations where they have no recourse no matter what they do; and isn't either a gag system like Paranoia or a horror system like the various Cthulhu ones, is a good idea. Conversely, show me a system for any genre at all that thinks that no matter what the players do, it'll work, is a good design.

>Earlier DnD Editions definitely did not assume this
They sure as fuck did. That's why even the harshest modules would print out encounter tables with tough monsters, that could be fought, or had traps, which had escape routes, instead of just putting in a table [Random encounters: On an 80 or higher, super demon shows up and eats the party] or some such.

> It's mostly a 'newschool' thing to have everything scale to the players.
No, what's newschool is a very tight tying of player ability to presented challenge. But even the loosest will frown on just the GM declaring that everyone dies due to assassins murdering them in their sleep, or putting the players on a romp through the unarmed slug-people who can barely move, let alone fight. The game has to be a GAME, and part of the notion of a game is that there are a series of choices which are not all equal. By presenting a set of 'challenges' in which no amount of player choice means anything due to difficulty being too out of sync with ability, you've eliminated that. And every game I'm familiar with will encourage that, with the aforementioned caveats.

For 3.pf that kind of table would be useless because of how wide the scaling gap is between focused class skills, focused cross-class skills, and unfocused skills.
Let's take a group of 5 characters: focused level 20 rogue, focused level 20 fighter, unfocused lv20 rogue, focused level 10 rogue, focused level 10 fighter. Let's give them all the DMG "elite" statblock.
And let's make them all Tumble for our amusement.

The lv20 specialized rogue will average rolling a 38 or 39. (23 skill points, 15+5 DEX for a +5 modifier)
The lv10 specialized rogue will average rolling a 26 or 27. (13 skill points, 15+2 DEX for a +3 modifier)
The lv20 specialized fighter will average rolling a 22 or 23. (11 skill points, 13+0 DEX for a +1 modifier.)
The lv10 specialized fighter will average rolling a 17 or 18. (6 skill points, 13+0 DEX)
The lv20 unspecialized rogue will average rolling a 15 or 16. (0 skill points, 15+5 DEX)

An encounter good for a level 10 trained fighter is good for a level 20 untrained rogue, but an encounter good for a level 10 trained rogue is very hard for a level 20 trained fighter. Level just isn't that significant compared to class and specialization, and the number of specializations available is such that the system breaks down into less of a simulationist "have you spent long enough training" and more into "if your rogue put this on his character sheet, you succeed".

>You tell me a single system that thinks where putting the PCs into completely impossible situations where they have no recourse no matter what they do; and isn't either a gag system like Paranoia or a horror system like the various Cthulhu ones, is a good idea. Conversely, show me a system for any genre at all that thinks that no matter what the players do, it'll work, is a good design.
You're equating failing to solve the individual, granular problem to "no recourses", and you shouldn't. If you have no thief, that door lock doesn't get picked. Maybe your fighter can shoulder-check it down. Maybe the racket will attract monsters for him to kill. Maybe that room gets bypassed, this is D&D, there aren't cheevos for 100%ing the map.

I think you mean 3.5, not 3.pf. In Pathfinder class skill is just +3 bonus if you have the skill trained.

>You tell me a single system that thinks where putting the PCs into completely impossible situations where they have no recourse no matter what they do; and isn't either a gag system like Paranoia or a horror system like the various Cthulhu ones, is a good idea
ADnD for example?

>Conversely, show me a system for any genre at all that thinks that no matter what the players do, it'll work, is a good design.
What are you even trying to express with this?

>By presenting a set of 'challenges' in which no amount of player choice means anything due to difficulty being too out of sync with ability, you've eliminated that
What if there decisions led them to the swamp of armless pacifist slugs? or to the super demons lair? You do have stuff like that figured out beforehand, you're not a shit DM, are you?

That's calculated within the stats there, isn't it? Assuming the skill points are divided in 20 ranks + 3 bonus ranks.

No, I was wrong in and he was right in . The class component is significant because 3.0-3.5 fighters would only get to take 11 ranks while rogues could take 23; in PF rogues can take 20 and get a free +3 while fighters can take 20 but don't.

Both specialized rogue and specialized fighter would have 20 ranks at level 20 if that was the case.

>You're equating failing to solve the individual, granular problem to "no recourses"
No, I'm not. I'm actually talking in a very generalized sense "The obstacles the players come across ought to have some kind of solution available, even if that solution is only to come back later with more power or the appropriate tools"

>If you have no thief, that door lock doesn't get picked. Maybe your fighter can shoulder-check it down. Maybe the racket will attract monsters for him to kill. Maybe that room gets bypassed, this is D&D, there aren't cheevos for 100%ing the map.
This is all fine. You are making a series of tactical choices, trying to gauge risk and maximize your chance of success based on the abilities your group has. What's not fine is is when the door simultaneously needs to be opened and nothing the players have or could reasonably be expected to have will do it.

>ADnD for example?
No, it most certainly doesn't. It's not as straitjacketed as later editions, but htey sure as fuck didn't expect you to just toss players off into the deep end with no way to survive or even flee if it came to that.

>What are you even trying to express with this?
A system that encourages setting the difficulty bar so low that no matter what the players decide to do, they succeed.

>What if there decisions led them to the swamp of armless pacifist slugs? or to the super demons lair? You do have stuff like that figured out beforehand, you're not a shit DM, are you?
If their own decisions have led them to their doom, that's a set of choices that got them there, they've played a game, very probably badly, and lost.

It's okay if they decide to go to the super demon's lair. What's not okay is to start them off in the super demon's lair and then have them be eaten, right off the bat.

Yeah, I messed up. Didn't read it was Tumble (thought it was a generic skill) and didn't notice the 10 Ranks Fighter had.
Point stands nevertheless. Both PF and 3.5 have wildly varying outcomes for different characters, and therefore a "DC list by level" is mostly useless.

So we are back to 'badly designed games are bad'? Because that's kinda what the OP said and it wasn't particularly new then either.

I don't really see how different characters having different expertises means the game is badly designed. There's plenty wrong with the game, but this is not one of those things, I believe.

Different characters having different expertises is not bad. Having such a huge disparity between them that any meaningful metric of 'easy' and 'hard' simply doesn't exist is.

>Having such a huge disparity between them that any meaningful metric of 'easy' and 'hard' simply doesn't exist is.
I'll have to disagree with you here. If you're a master thief, picking even a quite complicated lock should be fairly easy. If you're someone who has never picked a lock before, picking even a simple lock should be difficult. And there isn't really anything wrong with this.

But it's a necessity of any "heroic" system, because by definition a hero makes the near-impossible look easy. And making everyone good at everything removes agency from character design.

I agree that the 3.pf systems are a sort of hacky attempt to inject extra false agency by letting people splash "flavor skills" that will never be useful rather than just giving them the good old percentile lockpicking chart, but by the same angle it doesn't actually hurt gameplay either.

>What's not fine is is when the door simultaneously needs to be opened and nothing the players have or could reasonably be expected to have will do it.
Then that is both a choice that you as GM made, and something the players must deal with.
I remember in a game I was, there was a puzzle door the party needed to get thru for plot reasons, that also dealt scaling damage to anyone who put in the wrong code.
Short version, I had ended up destroying part of the solution, and we had to wait till the next day for the cleric to use Detect Traps because we had no rogue.

Of course there is. The fact that these two characters are in the same game at the same time. You either play a game with characters grounded in reality, or a pulpy game with action heroes and master thieves, but then everyone should be above the human average even in things they are not trained for.

>And making everyone good at everything removes agency from character design.
No, you can still be better than everyone, but everyone else is also competent. I fail to see how being completely irrelevant in anything you are not specialized in is good design for a heroic system.

Because you're not irrelevant for non-heroic versions, and those DO have a simple "easy-average-hard-very hard-impossible" rubric printed in the DMG.

>Short version, I had ended up destroying part of the solution, and we had to wait till the next day for the cleric to use Detect Traps because we had no rogue.
So, in other words, you made a choice, and that choice had an effect on outcome. I really don't understand what is so difficult to grasp with what I'm saying. Games are about making choices. If you make the difficulty so far out of whack with the player's abilities, either in the direction of too easy or too hard, you've effectively destroyed the game because their choices no longer matter, success or failure is pre-determined.

Therefore, no adventure game I'm aware of recommends that, and often provide some kind of guideline (yes, even in the earliest incarnations of DnD) as to how to avoid it. If you can make a choice, and those choices have different costs/likely outcomes/degrees of success, you are still within the bound. But you can easily make a world that is self-contained, operating on a relaistic set of internal logic, and be far outside of it.

That's partially the difference between generalist or freeform and specialist systems, though. There's a bit of a social contract implied in D&D, which it can get away with because it's a genre standard, where players are expected to know that they're specializing and that some doors in the world will close if they don't have all four archetypes. There's nothing inherently different about the DC25 lock that only a superhumanly-nimble amateur could ever open, compared to a spoopy graveyard of skeletons that only the cleric can turn, or an anti-magic field that only the fighter can fight in, or a towering for that only the wizard can damage.

If you try to do without one or the other, I think everyone you're arguing will agree that alternate solutions should be on the table if plausible, sometimes they're not and it seems like you're arguing less for "they could also have packed a healing potion" and more for "fudge the DC for impromptu field surgery down to 'the barbarian's waraxe could technically be used as a scalpel'".

>It is not shitty game design because it works for the first fourth of the game's progression.
Both 3.5 and Pathfinder advertise themselves as "heroic" games, if only the non-heroic sections work, it's shitty design.

>The obstacles the players come across ought to have some kind of solution available, even if that solution is only to come back later with more power or the appropriate tools"
This is the truth...
...depending on how the players come across the obstacles.
If the GM throws out plothooks for an adventure and the PCs follow it to an encounter, there is a reasonable expectation of at least one method to resolve the encounter.
If the PCs decide to ignore the rat catching plothook to go assassinate the Godking and storm into his throne room declaring him their bitch, there might not be a solution available.
Counterintuitively, a "level appropriate" campaign is, effectively, metagaming and encourages a bit of railroading.

>If you're a master thief, picking even a quite complicated lock should be fairly easy. If you're someone who has never picked a lock before, picking even a simple lock should be difficult. And there isn't really anything wrong with this.
This is so obvious really shouldn't need to ever even be said.

>Of course there is, everyone [presumably PCs] should be above the human average for picking locks, even if they've never picked a lock before.
But then there's assholes like this.

>>>Of course there is, everyone [presumably PCs] should be above the human average for picking locks, even if they've never picked a lock before.
>But then there's assholes like this.
If we are playing a heroic game, then yes. I somehow doubt Indiana Jones would have trouble picking an average lock if the script called for it, despite him being an archeologist.

>I somehow doubt Indiana Jones would have trouble picking an average lock if the script called for it
I think one of his companions, who happens to have a background in that kinda stuff would step up (or be dragged up) to do the task and skip the part where Jones tries and fails at a task he wouldn't be skilled at.

I'm not falling into the trap of even remotely defending the level scaling of Pathfinder.
I never played it and never ran it.
I did run D&D 3.something for a while.
I just prepped what seemed like a balanced encounter, with a stack of thin NPC's and enemies statted out and ready to use if needed.
If an encounter ever got too weak or too dangerous, I adjusted it by changing whatever needed to change but hadn't yet been established.
Never been one to fart around with "proper leveling".

But this is something I noticed in the OP:
>For EotE, it is little more than a series of bullet-points of objectives with a listed Obligation reduction for if all are completed
I'm not familiar, but it sounds like a system without levels.
That works fine.

>For Pathfinder, their expected level at any given point along the adventure must be accounted for in order to award the right amount of cash.
1. Why can't you just award more cash if the PCs need more cash and throw out a cash sink if you gave too much?
It really sounds like a lot of unnecessary, and ultimately futile, scrambling bookkeeping all for some imagined ideal of balance.

2. It might just be how OP presented it, but do you "balance" money awards in EotE?
Does this mean that if I played a greedy scoundrel, it would be no different than a character that has no interest in money, because money doesn't matter?
That's the impression I got.

+3 to skill isn't significant at all. Especially when the fighter can take a trait or feat(which he isn't lacking for) to get that as a class skill for another +5 bonus to a skill.

That's the point tho. Pulpy heroic characters like Jones and Conan are skilled in everything, at least to a certain degree. Of course they will fail to pick a lock that Only a Master Thief is Able to Open, (and if he encounters one, a Master Thief companion will surely rise to the challenge), but he will not fail to open a standard lock on his rival's desk.

>I somehow doubt Indiana Jones would have trouble at snake handling or resisting hypnosis, despite him being just an archeologist.
Sometimes a heroic character is below average at something outside their specialty.
It happens.
Do you need a moment to recover from your world view being shattered?

>if the script called for it
Get fucked, you railroading dick.

>Sometimes a heroic character is below average at something outside their specialty.
>It happens.
>Do you need a moment to recover from your world view being shattered?
Yes, it happens. If you can choose this to be the case with your heroic character, that's good game design. If it happens by default whenever you try to specialise in something that's bad game design.

>Get fucked, you railroading dick.
You do realize it was a movie, right? One that literally had a script? That is not always the case with RPGs.

>but he will not fail to open a standard lock on his rival's desk.
Nor would he ever fail to dodge a simple spinning mirror, certainly.
Afterall, all heroic characters are constantly above-average in every aspect at all times and never, ever have any weaknesses or areas of inadequacy, whatsoever.
Sounds legit.

>but it sounds like a system without levels.
it is.

>but do you "balance" money awards in EotE?
eh... not really, in fact some specilizations (I.E. classes) have special talents that make them generate money automatically at the start of each session. How the players get awarded money is more determined by the type of job they are doing and other variables that would be considered at the time. for example just for running a smuggling job, your (the smuggler's) payment is determined by the rarity of the items being smuggled, whether or not they are restricted, weather or not the destination is under imperial blockade, criminal blockade, or no blockade, how far ahead/behind schedule you are, and how good you were at negotiating the contract in the first place. and If you decide to buy/sell directly where you are in the galaxy affects prices so you can buy shit cheap in the core worlds and fly it out to to sell in the outer rim for a substantial price markup. None of which even remotely considers how much xp your character has accumulated up to that point.

See

>If it happens by default whenever you try to specialise in something that's bad game design.
I want argue that this isn't necessarily always the case, but that feels like defending 3.p.
There is nothing wrong with specializing in one aspect therefore leaving you less time and energy to be well rounded on everything else.

>You do realize it was a movie, right? One that literally had a script? That is not always the case with RPGs.
And yet you mentioned it pointlessly in a thread about rpgs, so I drew attention to that fact by making the rpg parallel to "railroading".

I hope I communicated this well but if I didn't the gist of it is that money IS a thing in FFGSW, but it does not necessarily scale with the players so you could play a greedy scoundrel and jump after those high-paying jobs right after character creation, but it is instead of it being mechanically balanced, it instead encourages GM make the characters bleed for that payoff. So the big-payoff jobs are likely insanely dangerous.

People don't understand that tabletop gaming is give and take. There is an inherent element of trust involved that the party will not fuck over the GM and in return the GM will not fuck over the party. If the GM says 'Come on guys, I don't have much planned if you just walk off in that direction' and is immediately met with his players screeching about railroading, then that element of trust has been breached by his dickhole players. Likewise, if the party makes noises about wanting to try a different route and the GM straight up says 'No, you can't do that.', then the trust has been breached by a douchebag GM.

It's a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario. In a perfect world, the threat of the railroad exists on both sides of the equation but is never actually invoked because both sides trust their opposite, so the game continues on regardless.

Which isn't even to mention the classic GM dogma: The rails always exist, but if your GM knows what he is doing, you will never know they are there. There is also the fact that most sandbox games are shit because it is one of the hardest types of game to make interesting. A narrative driven approach is simply much easier for the GM and thus generally more interesting and engaging for the players.

And then you also have to take into account that operating on absolutes in any of these scenarios is completely idiotic. You shouldn't have an absolute sandbox just like you shouldn't have an absolute narrative. It's not an On/Off switch, it's a sliding scale, and everyone needs to be going into it knowing where on the scale they want the game to be (which will inevitably involve compromise) so as not to be disillusioned by unmet expectations. Those adventure paths are mostly just guidelines, and I believe they attempt to make this clear fairly early on.

I guess the point I am trying to make is that there isn't a formula for a perfect game, because the game is based on people, and people don't fit into equations.

Thank you, that was informative.
My question would be: What guidelines are there for what jobs you present to the PCs?
It'd seem to be a case of either GM fiat (mild railroading) or the same kind of constraining parameters that OP felt lended itself to railroading.
Just a thought.

>First off, a line between sandbox on one end and railroading on the other sets up an opposition between them that is not indicated, as they refer to fundamentally different things; the former about the lack of meaningful choice on the part of the players, and the latter on the emergence of the plot from player impetus as opposed to external impetus.
Hello again, you.
It still remains true that a lack of meaningful choice on the part of the players results in preventing a true emergence of the plot from player impetus.
As such, a true Railroad prevents a true Sandbox.
Similarly, the presence of a true emergence of the plot from player impetus indicates the presence of meaningful choice on the part of the players.
As such, if the game is a true Sandbox, there cannot be a true Railroad.

The two might not be true polar opposites, but they are mutually exclusive in their truest forms, so plotting them on opposite sides of a sliding line remains a natural thing for people to do.

Word.

>What guidelines are there for what jobs you present to the PCs?
as far as I know there isn't one, but considering how little prep you really need you can approach this in a few ways. either have a session 0 and setup some jobs for them to take based on the character classes they took or their listed interests, have a few rough ideas for a number of jobs across a variety of interests, have a GM fiat and shove them into a job. Or just let them go look for a job and make it up as you go.

If you are ever stuck for ideas each splatbook has in the back a number of adventure plots, each 4-5 paragraphs long, giving a rough description of what the adventure is and you can either fill the rest out yourself, or use it as inspiration.

Sounds reasonable.
I would certainly say that it proves some games are designed to get out of their own way, while others are less so designed.

>It still remains true that a lack of meaningful choice on the part of the players results in preventing a true emergence of the plot from player impetu
Not necessarily. You could easily set up a game where the grand game, the central Thing That The Players Want To Do, is completely self-generated. It's the tactical/operational aspects, how to get from here to there, that is completely determined by the GM who straitjackets any attempt to circumvent it.

You could also do the opposite; I believe I've brought up the notion before. Barbarians are invading, help your feudal king get the nobility in line so you have enough of a force to fend them off. Get enough of the noble houses behind you to provide X number of troops; you are free to make alliances as you see fit. Now you have DM determined plot with tactical/operational freedom.

Where does Black Crusade fall for you, I been reading up on my book to familiarize myself but I really don't have enough experience with RPG's to know

>You could easily set up a game where the grand game, the central Thing That The Players Want To Do, is completely self-generated. It's the tactical/operational aspects, how to get from here to there, that is completely determined by the GM who straitjackets any attempt to circumvent it.
This would only ever be true if "the central Thing That The Players Want To Do" that the players determined included the game being completely determined by the GM who straitjackets any attempt to circumvent it.
Because otherwise, the players aren't actually getting the game they determined.

Also, if the GM is controlling every aspect of how the players "get from here to there" than the players are just simply not playing a plot emerging from their impetus.
You are claiming that the horse is driving the carriage, asking us to ignore the reins, bridle, and driver.
You're very silly.

>Where does Black Crusade fall for you
Black Crusade has the feel of something that comes close to having the same open-world feel as FFG's later SW RPGs but falls short. in order to advance infamy the GM needs to come up with a compact, a goal that needs to be achieved and a number of secondary objectives that need to be fulfilled and depending on the scale of the compact you could have as few as four, or as many as twelve secondary objectives. Not to mention personal objectives the players can persue alongside the main ones that may well clash with other PC's, Which means having to do far more homework than you would need in FFGSW, at the same time not nearly as much prep time as Pathfinder might need, it's somewhere in the middle but it leans closer to the FFGSW-end.

With that said actual game play feels far more complicated and clunky than even Pathfinder, while being far less open to abuse.

There's nothing in the rules for poker which teaches you how to bluff either, these are skills you learn by doing.

You seem to be operating on a really odd definition of "heroic" where someone isn't heroic if they have any area they aren't competent in.
You're not the first person I've encountered interpreting the word that way, mind. This definition of "heroic" seems to have crept in around the 4E era, so you can't really read that into a blurb written for a game before this particular flavour of autism infected the hobby.

Pulpy heroic characters like Jones and Conan are devised for stories where a) the extent of authorial control means that Jones and Conan can reliably never *have* to tackle a job that they genuinely wouldn't be skilled for anyway, and b) more importantly, it's acceptable for them to be the "main character" and main hero who does all this shit by themselves.
Unless you're dealing with an RPG designed from the ground up to deal with a party where there's one main character and a bunch of sidekicks, this is absolute dogshit for a multi-player game based around a party of adventurers. Specialisation allows the spotlight to be shared around, rather than having whoever's quickest to declare their action accomplishing everything.
Trying to apply the standards of single-hero-focused media to a party-based format is absolute autism and needs to stop.

He's right, DnD groups have no singular Protagonist, it's always an ensemble.

>Trying to apply the standards of single-hero-focused media to a party-based format is absolute autism and needs to stop.
This.

Mm, interesting. Appreciate it, dude. One more thing - would you say by and large that the mechanics really help to create the "feeling" of being a Chaos servant, and immersing yourself in 40k, or would you say it's better to just rip out the mechanics that make that feel and put them into a different system, or even just disregard Black Crusade altogether and stick with a more efficient system?