I’m someone who started playing D&D under the slightly toxic railroad dynamic and when I spotted it I hated it. It’s hat mentality that tells players that they shouldn’t learn to GM lest they find out how the sausage is made so you’d never enjoy playing TTRPG’s again! When I went online to figure out if I was wrong to reject this the most common answer I’d see was “In traditional RPGs you need to have high trust in your GM that they are railroading you for the right reasons”.
I find it ironic that here “High Trust” is used to mean the opposite of all that bad advice to open myself to High Trust that I received way back.
I had similar thoughts. The term “high trust” Is misleading here although I understand why he chose it.
It’s like saying that atheism is high faith because you’ve got to have faith in people and religion is low faith because belief in something necessarily reduces your faith in people.
Defining the terms would be helpful. I don’t know what most of those terms mean.
Which terms? Defining “high-trust trad” is the whole point of the article, so that one should be covered.
I had a hard time understanding this blog. One read I was confused. Second I wondered when the point was coming. Third read I understood why it didn’t click for me - OSR (trad?) blogs are sooo meandering. Spreading out their kernels all over the place. Once I started reading like that its concepts came to me.
And it was Play to Find Out in a different package. The Plot spoken about in the article are fronts. Yup, I’m not in the OSR scene.
Also, why did it read like a recipe blog?
If it reads like a recipe blog it may be for SEO reasons
I agree, this reads like a reporter interviewing someone to get them to define terms they made up. This didn’t sell me on why I should want to use one style of play over another, just wistful “torturing” themself wondering if anyone still uses this mysterious style of play. It’s not mysterious. As you said, it’s just Play to Find Out.
I think it would be more useful to show the strengths and weaknesses of PtFO and as well as more scripted gameplay, because each has a place in RPGs, and knowing when to use one over another is a great skill for GMs to practice.
