NegativeJ
LOVE
- Location
- Est
Fixed that for You.
Magical Girl Escalation Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)
- Thread starter Silently Watches
- Start date
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Don't see the point of fixing that. All JRPGs are RPGs; thus, if the sentence "Actually alot of Jrpg video games have no win battles no matter how strong you as soon as you doing well they do a cut scene showing you getting your ass handed to you inorder to progress the story" is true, then the sentence "Actually alot of rpg video games have no win battles no matter how strong you as soon as you doing well they do a cut scene showing you getting your ass handed to you inorder to progress the story" is also true by rule of substitution.
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
I'm going to ask what will sound like a stupid or condescending question, and I mean it completely seriously.
How exactly are you defining "railroading" here? Because it sounds like you're using it differently than I understand it.
My understanding of railroading is that no matter the choice, the outcome is exactly the same. That is not the case here for the simple fact that there were two possible outcomes. One outcome was that Taylor survives, and what comes after will be seen in the next few chapters. The other outcome was that Taylor dies, and from there come the changes of being reborn, dealing with the impact of how that took place, who finds out about it, likely creating a new Guardian Beast, maybe springing a surprise attack on the enemies who are actually your allies; a very different direction than the previous. That, to me, is giving the players agency, just that there is not an option of defeating these opponents at this time.
Unless, again, I am misunderstanding how you are using "railroading", in which case I would appreciate an explanation.
Honestly? Because combat scenes are tiring and stressful for me to write, so if I can wrap a fight up in one chapter and move on to a different scene I prefer to do so. It made sense to me for this fight to end when it did.
And clearly I misjudged how many hurt feelings there would be about it.
- Location
- Erebus
Is our telekinesis able to create specific force? Or just that we can hold onto and move 2X our body mass? Because Lethally, we could twist pop their heads off, and Non-Lethal, we could grab dust and rocks to fill their eyes and lungs, then pin them long enough to start shouting at each other and get the point across that we got no fucking clue what they're saying, why theyre attacking and we're fuckin pissed.
...You know what. @Silently Watches could you actually go ahead and kill Taylor?
Because at this point nothing's really gonna change besides Sam still being alive. It still sucks that it happened, but I want to see where you were going with the revival plot point.
That, and I feel like we're arguing in circles. SW isn't going to change anything else beyond this, and quite honestly the only thing I really want out of this is a quicker update to get to the point where we're revived. To have to sit on this result for a few weeks would be painful, so it's better to rip the band aid off now and at least see what situation we're working with later on.
Because at this point nothing's really gonna change besides Sam still being alive. It still sucks that it happened, but I want to see where you were going with the revival plot point.
That, and I feel like we're arguing in circles. SW isn't going to change anything else beyond this, and quite honestly the only thing I really want out of this is a quicker update to get to the point where we're revived. To have to sit on this result for a few weeks would be painful, so it's better to rip the band aid off now and at least see what situation we're working with later on.
- Location
- Erebus
This is Sufficent velocity. Combat here is fun. People arguing tactics and minute details gets everybody here pumped. A binary choice of captured or die with a very abreviated fight.... eh.
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Maybe if we'd voted for a plan that actually works as counter ambush strategy.
Look if an enemy, any enemy, is putting in the time to ambush your butt, that means you have to assume they are at least somewhat familiar with your publicly displayed powers and tactics. Which means trying to be all cold and rational bombardment type wasn't going to work from the get-go.
I'm not sure how I feel about loosing sam, but frankly yeah, that vote deserved to loose, when you get ambushed you specifically don't try to do the exact same thing you always do. You HAVE to have a counter ambush plan that is in fact an actual plan to counter someone ambushing you.
Look if an enemy, any enemy, is putting in the time to ambush your butt, that means you have to assume they are at least somewhat familiar with your publicly displayed powers and tactics. Which means trying to be all cold and rational bombardment type wasn't going to work from the get-go.
I'm not sure how I feel about loosing sam, but frankly yeah, that vote deserved to loose, when you get ambushed you specifically don't try to do the exact same thing you always do. You HAVE to have a counter ambush plan that is in fact an actual plan to counter someone ambushing you.
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deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
Almost, but with the caveats of reasonable expectations of behaviour, and limits of player knowledge.
If, for example, in some other game. You had a situation where you were trapped in a room filling with water, and the only way out was sealed with a 4 digit keypad.
There are definitely two possible outcomes, but if the players are operating on limited knowledge (They don't know the code is 9734), then it's still railroading.
In this instance whilst there were multiple possible outcomes, only one could be reasonably called possible, based on both what the players knew, and their expectations of GM behaviour. (You'd have explicitly said the attacks were magical if that were the case, so obviously this was a random bunch of people with tinkertech guns. Or alternately that the TSAB don't recruit people with a functional IQ of -100)
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
The majority of players think the original outcome was a bit railroad-y because we didn't have the information required to make our vote, such that our standard/optimal response was not only incorrect, but we had no way of knowing that the situation had changed.
AFAIK the majority of the playerbase don't mind that we couldn't actually win the overall fight, though I think that @Always Late disagrees.
I disagree, we lose more than just Sam. It's also a loss, in a situation the vast majority of players didn't think was fair. The post-retcon result is fine.
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NegativeJ
LOVE
- Location
- Est
Railroading can also be used for QM/GM's that set their player's up to lose by giving them all the wrong information(Or nothing at all) and then giving them the worst possible result, because of parameters that said QM/GM's only knew about did not inform the players about or were feeding the players false information/(false sense of security) to get them to lower the guards for a quick rock shower...
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
That is a very fair question, considering one of the big nuclear words of questing has been thrown down.
The outcome of Taylor surviving only exits in an incredibly improbable setup, hence the railroading. I'm going to be summarizing alot of what myself and other have said, but here's why:
1. You said that the mages were only going to not go lethal if we fought completely differently from what we normally did. We had no reason to think that we'd need to.
2. You took us into the fight blind. So, we were operating completely on what served us well in the past.
3. The fight was unwinnable. As such a thing is an already tenuous prospect being introduced for the first time, it had to be handled very well from both a gameplay and narrative perspective. 1 and 2 cover why the former didn't happen. The latter is getting into stuff like the TSAB, Samantha, and revived Taylor, and is somewhat less connected to 'railroading'.
In conclusion, because we had no way of choosing that outcome. We'd have had to figure out the correct choices by either accident or counter-logic.
Or you know, what deadcrystal said
Give me a few minutes to trawl back through, I'll put my money where my mouth is.
So is Taylor dead or just gravely wounded and captured due to sword in chest?
Going to be really awkward when she wakes and they realize who she is.
Wait....won't they take PS then? What about Sam?
I'm just gonna say I was really angry at the original idea for killing her for pretty much all the reasons already stated.
Going to be really awkward when she wakes and they realize who she is.
Wait....won't they take PS then? What about Sam?
I'm just gonna say I was really angry at the original idea for killing her for pretty much all the reasons already stated.
I already did that actually. We were pretty much left in the dark about a lot of details because SW wanted to keep from revealing things. Besides the part where it was stated that Taylor wouldn't be totally fighting according to plan because of her mental state before the fight, there was nothing to indicate that this could've been a result.
- Location
- Belfast
The feeling of railroading (if it is there or not) seems to stem from the fact that we had minimal information going into the fight, and when we put together what should have been a reasonable plan based on what worked before we were suddenly dead, do not pass go, do not collect £200.
It's the feeling that we were provided minimal knowledge so as to guide our voting onto what you wanted us to do, all so you could roll out a mechanic that I didn't even remember existing (if it was ever mentioned in story rather than in thread). If we'd had a good idea that this was the TSAB's team arriving I suspect you'd have seen a very different response. I'm fairly sure a lot of us know that we aren't at a level where we could deal with a well coordinated strike team of enforcers. At that point the whole encounter while still negative (and possibly violent) would have probably taken a totally different path with a less final outcome.
As I said before, your following statements and attempts to placate people could easily have come across as a 'don't worry about the way things turned out! Just look at the shiny new mechanic!', and poured fuel on the fire.
Really, it was just a whole lot of little things that piled up.
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- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Hey, I agreed with your apparent point in this post - that the death was an example of railroading. I thought your other posts gave the impression that having an "unwinnable" fight in the first place annoyed you too, and more so than most players.
Thanks i honestly forgot the J when i typed it.
I've been lurking for a long time now, I think I actually participated way earlier in the thread but whatever, and... Yeah, this was a railroad.
You all but literally did the worst thing a QM/GM can do, "Rocks fall, you die" with a small consolation or making a saving roll to see if it actually killed us or just almost killed us.
And it was a roll, because everyone's votes and plans were basically worth complete shit overall. We had no information on who was attacking, what they were attacking with, or anything at all. They made a blind plan and it just so happened to not kill us. Immediately.
Frankly I'm still split on whether or not you should have even had a vote at the end of 8.9. Impossible battle that would end with either us dying or us almost dying? *Shrug*
You treated this like a story and your players like readers. Except players are not readers. Not at all.
... Part of me wants to have us die, and then twist the character around just to ruin your game, because fuck this. But I'm not really playing anymore, and that's just my spite, which I have a shit ton of, but still it's just my spite saying that.
You all but literally did the worst thing a QM/GM can do, "Rocks fall, you die" with a small consolation or making a saving roll to see if it actually killed us or just almost killed us.
And it was a roll, because everyone's votes and plans were basically worth complete shit overall. We had no information on who was attacking, what they were attacking with, or anything at all. They made a blind plan and it just so happened to not kill us. Immediately.
Frankly I'm still split on whether or not you should have even had a vote at the end of 8.9. Impossible battle that would end with either us dying or us almost dying? *Shrug*
You treated this like a story and your players like readers. Except players are not readers. Not at all.
... Part of me wants to have us die, and then twist the character around just to ruin your game, because fuck this. But I'm not really playing anymore, and that's just my spite, which I have a shit ton of, but still it's just my spite saying that.
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
I was actually meaning going back through and giving you a list of folks who were mad about the unwinnable fight.
You're right in that it wasn't a topic brought up alot in that phrasing. 'we couldn't do anything about it', 'choices don't matter', 'railroading'... it's all inseparably connected. But I digress. My findings, hopefully without too much interpretation, and multiple parts quoted for the full message.
- Location
- London
Thinking it through, the best way to do a death/resurrection in a quest would probably be to hold onto the post for a longer time and then post both the death and the waking up update at the same time. It would present the whole thing as a fait accompli, as sort of a "things largely beyond your control have happened, here's the new situation, what do you do to respond to these events?" It would also give a productive outlet for thread discussion by making people look to the future rather than only having the death to analyse.
I agree with this. If this was the result then it's not a good idea to force the players to to sit on the bad end result for a few weeks. It only really serves to breed discontent - well, more discontent if we're talking about this thread specifically - and bad feelings in general.
Any situation which is 'inevitable' is usually seen as railroading if it is the GM who has set it forth.
To put it this way, if there was no reasonable way for players to avoid triggering event 'x', that's railroading. It doesn't matter that 'x' can have multiple outcomes, if players are forced into that event, that in and of itself is railroading. It's basically used to give players direction at the start or whenever they get lost... but doing it mid 'other quest' is something that's really hard to do right without angering people or just not making sense.
It's fine if the players have willingly stumbled into the unwinnable fight, or if it's the start of a story/quest... and the players can SEE how their actions influenced the aftermath even if losing was guaranteed because they still feel like they've accomplished something. This fight was far more like a cutscene than it was something players could've done something about, and Gameplay/Story segregation problems IMO is something that quests are supposed to avoid. Here, again, it's a binary lose-capture / lose-die situation where there was no chance or action apparently for us to create dialogue, or get help or any other outcome or modifier to the 'you lose result'. And I cannot see how it is the players fault for getting into this situation. I cannot go 'well, in hindsight blowing off all these people, and making X/Y/Z decisions caused this' and thus I see it as railroading.
^ Being railroaded into a scenario with pre-planned results of 'lose-live, and lose-die' is railroading. If there was a reasonable way to avoid the scenario altogether perhaps...
This scene isn't the good kind of screw ball that we can look back and past updates and go 'ah I see how this came about' this is the bad kind where, like in old point + clicks, we needed to think in Moon-Logic and do something complete different than a reasonable/usual manner to achieve something.
We can't see logically how we ended up here from the previous updates. The information we players have cannot lead us to the conclusion that 'the surprise ambush was TSAB and our usual pattern of attack would have them treat us as some sort of super brainwash army robot'.
This is the part that is perhaps, the most worrying thing for this quest's future. This is both Worm and MGLN, where combat is a fairly important part of the narrative to both show character growth/resolve and characters themselves. Especially when most of our growth in terms of 'power' revolves around being better in combat situations (and how we're rewarded for getting in fights), if you struggle to write combat... it's probably a better idea (unless you're trying to improve on that) to figure out ways to incentivize avoiding combat scenes or figure out how to handle it more mechanically. If writing combat scenes causes this kind of problem, it is better to figure out some other way to handle it then, perhaps an outline and getting a co-gm to write them instead then?
^
This too, to comment from my experience with quests where any 'part 1 update' where the Protag is getting hammered and ends on a 'well looks like you're screwed' note without any method for players to interact with (Especially if their plan is clearly failing less than half way through the update, and had their been an INTERRUPT! to allow them to try a different plan that might've done something different) has caused some heavy flak. Especially when you give players several days to stew over it.
Every single AGG quest where something like this has happened has led to literal pages of complaints and flak. Every single time it's happened.
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All other fights had more that one round so that you could at least change tactics.
This one did not. Though I suppose that is fair when you are overwhelmingly out matched.
Though the whole token peacefulness from the "Stand down" like seems like a crapshoot when they fired the opening shot. Like, from our perspective, they're saying to lie down and take a beating.
This one did not. Though I suppose that is fair when you are overwhelmingly out matched.
Though the whole token peacefulness from the "Stand down" like seems like a crapshoot when they fired the opening shot. Like, from our perspective, they're saying to lie down and take a beating.
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- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Most of those are mad about the death though, or mad about something other than the unwinnable fight specifically. Like, to the point where I'm honestly baffled as to why you linked most of them.