Alexander 'Lex' Williams

D&D groups fall apart because of one absurd lie: “As long as everyone’s having fun, you’re doing it right.” But fun is fickle. It vanishes overnight. Players stop showing up. Real longevity demands skill, best practices, and Winning Secrets. Fun isn’t the metric. Mastery is.

On the subject of player agency. I am MOSTLY all for it. But if you're all set up to play Keep on the Borderlands, and one player decides his character's greatest desire is to open a shawarma stand right now, he's a dickhead and should be treated as such. It's a game of heroic fantasy. If you're not here to do heroic shit, get out.

Universal rule systems annoy people. If I want to do a genre I want the mechanics to support and incentivize that.

I am considering punishing with a rolled-up newspaper all my OSR friends who keep using "storygaming" to mean "railroading fools". Right. On. The nose.

Quickly! More fuel!

When I wrote Arbiter of Worlds for The Escapist 15 years ago, I was almost a lone voice crying out against railroading story-game mentality. Now there is a chorus of heroes singing the gospel of agency, and the song grows louder with every voice that joins!

I want you to hold up for a minute and listen to people who have not played D&D as the only game. They decided that was the one and true only game in their entire existence because 15 years ago there was a strong and vibrant indie story gaming community which was cranking out bangers where railroading was absolutely not something you had to talk about because it was largely impossible. 2010 gave us Apocalypse World, which is very much focused on the characters first and foremost, and the GM's job is to "vomit forth apocrypha" in the pursuit of the conversation which is the play of the game. The GM really can't railroad play in the same sense because they don't really control play. They only control how the world reacts to the player's actions. 2009 gave us Fiasco, which did away with the GM role altogether and was entirely the better for it. It had an extremely focused genre and framework, absolutely. Everyone at the table played a criminal or other ne'er-do-well in the middle of a situation gone terribly wrong. But 80% of that situation was randomly generated from some thematic tables, as were the characters. Railroading was impossible because there was no one holding the tiller on the train. Microscope from 2011 was Ben Robbins dropping out all the stuff that traditional RPGs had come to teach us that were completely unnegotiable. Not only did it do away with the concept of GM, it did away with the connection/attachment between an individual player and an individual character. In fact, tossed out the concept of linear time altogether while he was at it. As a result, a game fell out the other end in which one plays roles most certainly. But those roles are both temporary in the case of individual people and broader in terms of player interaction when it comes to the foci which they pursue across all of the unfolding events. Dungeon World (2012) was as close to classic D&D as the PBTA-inspired were likely to get. It's not my favorite game design in the space, but when it comes to replicating the kitchen sink fantasy tropes within the context of a player-driven story architecture, where the GM again plays the role of arbiter and referee in many cases. If you are familiar with GM'd non-D&D fantasy RPGs, this is likely one of the few that you're aware of. On the other side of the world, philosophically, we have Lady Blackbird, which was published in 2009. It literally inverts the sense of railroaded games in which the situation is set up extremely hard. There's very little variation in where you start and how you start, but then how you play yourself out of that hole is the whole game. Super lightweight mechanics, a strongly framed situation, but beyond the absolute concrete of the basin in which you wake up, what ensues is not really something that can be railroaded. It is just what it is. But even the powerful Powered by the Apocalypse did not come just out of nowhere. Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North, written by Ben Lehman, provided a GM-less game in which the other players brought the conflict. Again, there can be no way to railroad when there are no tracks. There are merely the situations set up between characters, and there can be no railroading when there is no GM. From 2007, we have In a Wicked Age, where Vincent Baker does his sword and sorcery thing, but drives the entire thing off of four distinct oracles to generate the seeds of the setting in the first place, promoting everyone into direct, brutal conflicts of interest. Then all the GM does is sit back with his hands in the air and helps guide the fallout, not the fight. But if we cast our eyes even further back to the heyday years of 1992, we get Over the Edge, which is a surrealist conspiracy game rooted in an extremely lightweight, high-flexibility, high-speed, low-drag, narrative-first architecture, which used broad phrases to describe its mechanical hooks rather than tightly quantized numbers tied to player-defined traits. It's a game in which you can definitely railroad your characters, but it is simultaneously so easy and so hard, and they have so much power to push back against it that it's never worth the effort. The stories that emerge at the table are not your stories, and they can never be your stories, but must be the stories of the characters that the players are poking around this incredible surrealist universe with. That's where the rubber hits the road. Not too long after that, only a decade, you have Luke Crane's Burning Wheel, which is super dense and is right there at the front of the 2000s Indies boom, but it definitely does not lean toward railroading once you understand how and why the pieces move together as they do. The wants and needs of the character absolutely have more impact into their achievements than whether or not they want to live or die and take actions to that course. Again, not one of my favorite designs, but certainly deeply impactful and deserves better than it ever gets in this kind of analysis. Let's look back at 2004 again, where Vincent Baker gives us one of the best narrative-forward GM light games when he gives us Dogs in the Vineyard. Players are absolute authorities to determine what is right and wrong, and their characters are given the literal narrative power to resolve conflicts as they see fit. Somehow it all comes together to be a moral symphony no matter where they start. You can't railroad someone into it. They have way too much agency in deciding how they want to play things out, and the GM can but watch. 2001 - Sorcerer. The GM is literally remanded to merely reacting to the chaos the players unleash, and they will unleash it because all of their powers are hooked to their greatest failings as people: what they want, why they want it, and what it will cost them, both in mind, body, and spirit, is exactly what plays out at the table. The GM's job is largely to hang big price tags on pretty things. Ten Candles from 2015, again roughly 15 years ago, gave us a zero-prep tragedy. The players at the table have absolute agency in co-authoring their own descent into darkness, with one mechanical certainty: everyone dies at the end. This may be one of the most freeing sessions of play you ever have the pleasure of going through. Kingdom (2013) is another Ben Robbins jam where he decides to take things in a direction that is almost unexpected. Yes, your player is generally sticking with a single character for the entire game, but who that character is within the context of the greater narrative, whether they be: The power that holds the reins of authority, the perspective which can easily foresee the inevitable consequences rushing toward the community, or the touchstone characters that act as the raw emotional nerve of the populace. Then there's the mechanics for when one player wants to subvert and take for their own another player's role. What happens when another player simply wants to abandon theirs for a third? The very underlying nature of the situation changes. There is no railroad strong enough to direct the bounds of these paths. Basically, what I'm saying is that before the article that Alexander Macris wrote in Arbiter of Worlds for The Escapist 15 years ago, we'd already had a lot of these discussions. We'd banged out a dozen different approaches for thoughts on agency, thoughts on GM centrality, thoughts on whether the GM is even required or acts as an active impediment to roleplay of good quality at a table. Not only that, we had shaken out different ways to experiment with it, to find out, to try it in different directions and turn out better games. Alexander may have been the lone voice crying out against railroading story game mentality in the D&D space, but because he didn't understand story gaming mentality, he completely failed to notice that it wasn't the story gamers who were trying to force stories into narratives. That's not what was happening on the story game side of the world, but I suspect there's a lot of cachet in pushing it over there and blaming it on what other people were doing at their table and having a good time with. Because there's no way that people who weren't playing sanctioned D&D could ever be not having the same damn problems the D&D players couldn't shut up about for five minutes. That could never be the case. Obviously, the story gamers were just really frustrated theater kids who wish they could be as cool as the guys arguing over the question of whether "I hit him with my sword" is sufficient narrative to be worthy of an extra advantage or not. We were playing games which were made entirely out of player agency long before you could convince someone to try it out. It would be nice to receive a little respect for the work that went and proved that some of your theories were absolutely correct, but most of them didn't go nearly far enough. I don't expect that to ever happen. You would have to be open to the idea that games beyond D&D not only exist but have fairly strong historical and game theoretic value. They do things that are worth having at the table. But you can't say that, can you? Because you need to be able to tear them down because they're not D&D. Even ACKS2, which is in all ways a laudable effort, is really just a sort of pseudo-D&D once you get under the hood. It's just one with a focus on domain play turned up to 11 and a whole lot of setting information canonized, structured, palletized, packaged, and made at least somewhat ready for domain structured play. I understand what it is and I understand what it's good for. There are days I think I might even play in it if someone offered me a seat at the table, but there's no way in hell I would ever run it. After all, I already own Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth, and that pretty much covers everything in that field I could ever possibly want. You were the lone voice crying out against the D&D story game railroading mentality, but proxying it onto story games because you didn't understand them. You didn't want to understand them. You found them to be a convenient alien to blame the problems in your own backyard on, and you never liked theater kids. That's all. That's all it is. I thank you for what you've done, but truthfully, fuck you for what you've forgotten.