"Railroading" is just a pejorative term for...

[Umbran]

On the other hand, are GMs missing out on something by not railroading? Is all this "the PCs must be free!" chatter robbing us of our right to tell a good story?

"Railroading" (I use quotes due to the variable and fuzzy definition) is a tool. It is neither good nor bad in and of itself. How it is used is what matters.

If you want to exclude a hammer from your toolbox, you are missing out on a hammer. If you are a desktop computer repairman, you probably won't miss that hammer. But, if you do find you want to drive a nail, you'll have to either get a hammer, or do a lot more work using other tools to mimic the action of a hammer.

 

[CleverNickName]

Ah, yes. Railroading.

This topic comes up every now and then at my game table, and it's usually brought up by The New Guy who hasn't gamed very much with the rest of us. The topic is usually introduced in a snide tone of voice, as part of a complaint about his character not being allowed to do something.

"Whadda ya mean I can't pick the king's pocket?! Oh-sorry-then, I didn't realize that this was a railroad game, my bad. (sulk)"

Like most everyone else, I run a plot-driven game. I start a campaign by writing the story first, and then all of the adventures are just steps in a progression. My campaigns work sort of like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: there is a main goal that needs to be accomplished (stopping Willow, for example), and every episode of that season is a step toward accomplishing that goal.

So imagine how crappy the show would become, how quickly it would be cancelled, and how incredibly pissed the fans would be, if ten minutes into the season premiere Buffy shoots Willow in the face with a shotgun. "There, I saved the world," Buffy says with a shrug. "Next."

This is a rather extreme example, I know. The point is that the players don't necessarily know the whole story yet, and that there is usually more than one way to solve a problem. The Scoobies don't yet know that Willow is going to be crucial to the survival of the whole world in the final season...all they see is a problem, and they want to solve it as quickly and easily as possible. (And a shotgun is a fast and easy solution to most problems. ) Without a solid plot, without character relationships, without certain assumptions of what's right and wrong, it would be a perfectly valid course of action. Unfortunately, it is one that would make the whole game suck.

I really don't know what to say about the Dragonlance example that PirateCat mentioned. Clearly, it's a poorly-written module. And the DM throwing a hissy-fit was unfortunate. If the story was dependent upon the party getting captured by slavers, the story should have started there...a whole plot can't depend on a single decision, because inevitably players will make a different decision than what your story needs. (Instead of "you have to follow them," the DM should have dismissed it, let the players have their fun in town, and then started out the next day with: "You wake up with a splitting headache. You are on a wooden floor in shackles, and a gentle rocking motion suggests you are below decks aboard a ship. You don't quite recall how you got here; you vaguely remember having a bowl of stew at the Boar's Tooth Inn, and getting really sleepy..." Or somesuch.)

I guess my attitude toward the railroad boilerplate is to trust your fellow gamers, and talk about problems the moment they come up. If you feel like your players are trying to hijack your game, or if you feel like your DM is turning your character into a prop (or a piece of scenery) stop and talk about it OOC. Disclose parts of the plot if you must, just so that everyone knows where the game is ultimately heading and how awesome it is going to be.

"Um, listen," Joss Whedon says to Sara Michelle Gellar, "Buffy can shoot Willow in the face with the shotgun, but you will all regret it if she does." He turns to face Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, and Anthony Stewart Head. "Your characters don't know this yet, but Willow is going to be needed in a couple of years. The point of the story isn't just to stop Willow, but to also save Willow. Okay? Does anyone have any questions?"

 

[invokethehojo]

My feeling on railroading has evolved over the years. I think it comes down to the DM and his level of work.

If I write a detailed plot for an adventure, using up a lot of my spare time, then I think I have a right to "railroad" the PC's in a way that keeps them from wasting the effort I put in, since all they have to do is show up and have fun. However, I have found that, over the years, when I write a basic outline with a few good NPC's, the players will often do a lot of the writing for me, and we all end up having more fun. So my personal preference now is to allow players to do what they want (as long as their motivations make sense) most of the time, and I use railroad sessions rarely, only when a core part of the story needs to take place. This has turned to work out very well.

So I think DM's do have the right to railroad, but players have the right to want to free form, so a little compromise is needed. I feel that players definately have a duty to "help" the DM, that they should do what they want but generally go along with the feel of what the DM is going for. The DM also needs to allow the players to do thier own thing, but should expect the hours he puts in away from the table to pay off, otherwise it won't be long before he loses heart, and his DMing starts to suck.

 

[Canor Morum]

"Whadda ya mean I can't pick the king's pocket?! Oh-sorry-then, I didn't realize that this was a railroad game, my bad. (sulk)"

Instead of telling them "no, you can't pick the king's pocket"; I would tell them, "sure you can try to pick the king's pocket." I would then set a very high difficulty. If they fail the roll, the king's guards arrest the individual and it's up to his friends to bail him out somehow. If he succeeds, he gets a small reward. Maybe when he tries to sell the item, someone recognizes it as belonging to the king.

The point is, this sets up role-playing and story opportunities that wouldn't exist by just saying "no". It also makes the character feel like their decisions matter. Maybe next time he will think twice about stealing from the king.

Not allowing someone to do something because it doesn't follow your script seems to be the agreed upon definition of railroading. So in this instance, the player is right.

 

[Dausuul]

For me, railroading is defined by an old 1e Dragonlance module my friend ran. We saw people being carted away as slaves. The module assumes you chase them, try to free them, and (I believe) get captured yourself. Our group saw the slaves and said, "Oh well. Too bad." "You have to go after them!" said the DM. "No," we answered. And the DM had a hissy fit and quit in disgust. That's railroading. And it's different from what's being discussed.

Agreed. This is railroading. It has nothing to do with the extent to which you lay out the plot in advance and everything to do with how you respond to player actions. The rails may stretch off to the horizon, or the DM may be laying them down two feet in front of the players' wheels. What matters is whether you can go off them.

You can have literally no plan at all, no adventure plot whatsoever, and still railroad horribly. All it takes is the willingness to arbitrarily negate any action by the PCs other than what you want them to do right then.

 

[kitsune9]

I was listening to a podcast today and I heard one of the guest hosts utter something that nigh made my blood boil: '"Railroading" is just a pejorative term for "a game in which the group actually accomplishes something!"' He went on to say "at least they're on the train" and not "stuck in the station."

This was in reference to a popular investigative RPG in which the GM is required to emplace solid, definable "core clues" in each and every scene, one that has on occasion been criticized for essentially institutionalizing railroading.

Is this a cop-out? I personally think that the PCs should be given all the freedom in the world to rund own blind alleys and chase red herrings; indeed, interesting roleplaying situations can pop up when this happens and it can end up leading to more interesting RPG experiences than the GM had originally intended.

On the other hand, are GMs missing out on something by not railroading? Is all this "the PCs must be free!" chatter robbing us of our right to tell a good story?

I think there are caveats with each DMing style that, as DMs, we have to work to overcome them. If we run a sandbox, even though it's up to the players to decide where to go, what to do, and what goals to accomplish, if the DM is completely hands off, then players can get stuck in that they may unsure of where to go or what to do or they spend a lot of time running around the town and doing a lot of nothing. That's the risk of this type of style.

For the railroading (I honestly can't think of a better term), the risk is that the DM will lead the PC's from Location A to Location B to Location C then to conclusion. The worst offense is that the DM is rigid and unflexible in allow the PC's to wander around at Location A or try to go to Location C. The adventure comes across to the players as ham-fisted so that their suspense of disbelief is shattered.

However, there is a lot of good between both styles. A sandbox campaigns give the players total control. If the DM has done his prep work beforehand, then the players will explore here, encounter something, explore there, find an adventure in the wings, and explore here and find something else. In a good railroad campaign, the players will feel that they have total control of the decisions they get to make, but in reality the DM provides that illusion of choice in order to get the adventure moving.

For me, my current campaign is a railroad. I have a specific story to tell, but I do work fairly hard to allow the PC's to go "off-map" on occasion, but I will get the PC's back on the tracks and get the story going. However, next campaign will be a short campaign, so I'm going to create a Sandbox campaign to try my hand in it and see how that works.

 

[ExploderWizard]

It appears to me that the podcaster may be so unfortunate as to never have run a campaign with proactive and engaged players. If my campaigning experience was filled with players who just waited around to be told what to do then I might come to a similar conclusion.

 

[CleverNickName]

The point is, this sets up role-playing and story opportunities that wouldn't exist by just saying "no". It also makes the character feel like their decisions matter. Maybe next time he will think twice about stealing from the king.

Not allowing someone to do something because it doesn't follow your script seems to be the agreed upon definition of railroading. So in this instance, the player is right.

True, and there is nothing wrong with this course of action. Unfortunately, it will take away 2 or 3 hours of our already-scarce gaming time, just to chase a dead-end. While the player learns his lesson, everyone else at the table is rolling their eyes, twiddling their fingers, stacking their dice, and muttering things like "can we just get back to the story?"

It is important to protect a character's sense of freedom...nobody likes to be told what they can and cannot do, especially in a role-playing game. But the DM also has to keep everyone else's fun in mind. By allowing the rogue character to pick the king's pocket (and sabotaging him to fail, no less), the game becomes All About The Rogue for a couple of hours. And that's fun for the rogue's player, but not much fun for anyone else.

But I didn't just drop the ban-hammer and say "NO." I stopped the game and said something like "Look, you guys really need to keep the king on your side. You never know when you might need a favor, hint hint." The New Guy didn't care for that, accused me of railroading, and sulked for the rest of the session. Everyone else had a fairly good time, though. (shrug)

 

[Dausuul]

But I didn't just drop the ban-hammer and say "NO." I stopped the game and said something like "Look, you guys really need to keep the king on your side. You never know when you might need a favor, hint hint." The New Guy didn't care for that, accused me of railroading, and sulked for the rest of the session. Everyone else had a fairly good time, though. (shrug)

Ah, okay. In that case, it's not railroading, just a player being a whiny little [deleted] in response to a restrained, mature, and reasonable effort by the DM to keep the game from going into the weeds. I shall now resume my customary "The DM is Da Boss" stance.

 

[Canor Morum]

True, and there is nothing wrong with this course of action. Unfortunately, it will take away 2 or 3 hours of our already-scarce gaming time, just to chase a dead-end. While the player "learns his lesson," everyone else at the table is rolling their eyes, twiddling their fingers, stacking their dice, and muttering things like "can we just get back to the story?"

It shouldn't take 2 to 3 hours to resolve that situation. You simply tell them the guards have arrested their friend. They can get him out using diplomacy, paying a sum of gold, breaking him out, etc. The rogue could also attempt to escape on his own if the players feel like leaving him in there. Any of these options could be done quickly with a skill challenge.

The rogue learns a lesson, gets his moment in the spotlight, and creates an ongoing dialogue between the PCs. "All right, rogue, don't steal anything this time, were not bailing you out again." "Remember that time you tried to steal from the king?"