I was going over some of my old core books and I had a thought. I have seen more than my share of "That Guy" stories about how the GM railroaded the party and frustrated everyone for it, and I'm sure in some of those cases the problem was 100% the GM's fault. But looking over the Pathfinder, Edge of the Empire, and Black Crusade core books, I wonder if the very systems of some of these games has an impact on how much railroading happens.
For example, For EotE, I look over my notes for any given adventure arc and what I find is the adventure itself is little more than a series of bullet-points of objectives with a listed Obligation reduction for if all are completed, some descriptions of locations, and a consolidated NPC list for commonly encountered adversaries and NPC's so I'm not flipping through 2-3 books to find everything.
Then I look at the kind of notes I have made for Pathfinder, Jesus-H-Christ! every encounter and the difficulty of each encounter has to be tracked so as to award the correct experience and their expected level at any given point along the adventure must be accounted for in order to award the right amount of cash. Not to mention that NPC stats are complicated enough that they really need to be generated ahead of time or you could be wasting a good 10-30 minutes making one up.
What I'm getting at is one of these games can easily become an open-world character-driven arc while the other almost HAS to be narrative-driven simply because tracking money and experience would become an insurmountable task if PC choices weren't restricted somewhat.
That's at least MY observation, that some games lend themselves more to a sandbox game and others almost have to be on rails to some degree.
Does Veeky Forums agree? or am I missing something?
Also, forgive pic.
Brandon Lopez
>Does Veeky Forums agree? or am I missing something? Several things. 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.
Secondly, it should not take all THAT long to prep monsters or NPCs in a DnD 3.5 ish thing (I've never played PF, but 3.5 isn't that different.) These don't need to be masterpieces of design,; generally, NPCs only have one or two narrative roles, right the players, give information to the players, buy or sell something, etc. You only need to pre-gen the stats that are directly impacting for that role. If the players do something unexpected, like attack one of the info guys, just shortly eyeball it; chances arem ,ost of them won't be that tough so you can quickly narrate the players killgi nit, or doing a diplo roll against the monster, or whatever.
In any event, the amount of prep time involved has little to do with how much freedom of travel you give your players, which itself is not directly related to railroading or sandboxing.
Isaac Miller
bump.
Kevin Hernandez
>a line between sandbox on one end and railroading on the other sets up an opposition between them that is not indicated, poor choice of words on my part, perhaps it would be better to say "restricted v.s. open-world narrative"?
Justin Rodriguez
bump
John Foster
>Secondly, it should not take all THAT long to prep monsters or NPCs in a DnD 3.5 ish thing It does. What you describe is essentially homebrew, because nowhere does the game tell you or even suggest to do things this way.
Daniel Allen
I like trains.
Gavin Anderson
Improvising is a skill
Clearly yours has little training
Gavin Howard
What do you think those extensive monster manual entries with those CR numbers are for exactly?
Nolan King
The problem is not improvisation. The problem is translating what you improvise into the mechanics of the game.
