Avoiding Railroading - Forked Thread: Do you play more for the story or the combat?

[Set]

I 'railroad' in the sense that I have a few encouters pre-arranged that I can drop in almost anywhere the party ends up deciding to go. That way, even if they 'go off track,' the track magically moves to where they decided to go.

(Unless they *deliberately* walk away from a particular hook, in which case, they might fight the recycled bad-guys from that hook in a completely unrelated encounter later, but won't have to deal with whatever storyline failed to grab their interest.)

I generally don't like harder forms of railroading. "No, you have to go this way, the door closes behind you." or "The kingdom dies if you don't get the McGuffin to cure the princess." because it's too easy to just say, "The hell with it. I never liked the darn kingdom anyway..."

But really, the place where railroading *really* torques me off is when it's coming from an NPC tag-along. "Sir Raleigh charges the trolls while your debating how to handle things! What do you do!" "Leave the annoying twit to die? Please? Can we?"

 

[howandwhy99]

There are ways that player choices can matter which don't involve this sort of ingame cause-and-effect so much. For example, if the GM decides that, whatever happens, the session will culminate in the Demon King appearing for a climactic encounter, BUT if what the Demon King says to the PCs depends on what they've been doing hitherto, and how the PCs respond to the Demon King is up to them (eg the GM doesn't go nuts and declare "game over" because the PCs align with the Demon King) then we have a situation in which:

(i) ingame cause-and-effect is not free of GM fiat (ie Demon King appears no matter what);

(ii) player choices are far from irrelevant to the game.

I don't think that this is a railroad. To me it looks like vanilla narrativist play.

Narrativism and railroading are one and the same. If meeting the Demon King is a foregone conclusion, why are the PCs struggling to reach him? Just because there are degrees of predetermination does not mean railroading isn't happening. Either the PCs' destiny is in their own hands or it isn't. I prefer to let the dice decide. I understand some folks like reward without success and that's fine, but I prefer not to run or play in games that do this.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Narrativism and railroading are one and the same. If meeting the Demon King is a foregone conclusion, why are the PCs struggling to reach him? Just because there are degrees of predetermination does not mean railroading isn't happening. Either the PCs' destiny is in their own hands or it isn't. I prefer to let the dice decide. I understand some folks like reward without success and that's fine, but I prefer not to run or play in games that do this.

It's not a matter of forgone conclusion. My adventures(and most adventures as far as I can tell) are a series of predetermined encounters with locations where the PCs decisions determine how they get to the next encounter.

So, for instance, you might know that the BBEG kidnaps someone from a town even before the PCs get there. They have no chance to stop him. You know that when the PCs arrive in town the people in town will beg them for help to get back the kidnapped person.

At this point, you let the players decisions matter. Do they take the mission? Do they ask for a reward? How do they go about tracking down the BBEG?

You probably know the likely methods they would use to find him(tracking, asking around town to see if anyone saw which way he went, hiring a guide, and so on). They might come up with other ways that you haven't thought of, but that's ok. You want them to eventually reach the cave where the BBEG is keeping the prisoner. You get to make it look like their choices matter. They get to think that there was a chance that they would fail to find the cave and that their ingenuity was what caused them to succeed.

Plus, their decisions DO influence the story. It is either the story of a group of people who ask around town until they meet the farmer who saw the prisoner being dragged off and go in that direction until they find a cave OR it is the story of a group of people who use their knowledge of the wilderness in order to track their prey through the forest. It may be a small difference, but it is a difference in the story that was caused by the player's decisions.

You know what forces the BBEG has and the layout of his cave. You can set up the encounters and know that they will likely happen exactly like that unless the players try some completely different tactics. Then, their decisions matter again.

Once they defeat the BBEG and rescue the hostage, then they once again have a decision as to what they do with the hostage.

And so on. It is a combination of planned encounters and "decision points" where the players gets to decide which track the railroad goes down.

 

[The Little Raven]

The question is how do the really great DMs out there manage to keep intricate campaigns with great story elements without making the players feel like they've been railroaded?

Artificial choice. Whether they go west over the Pass of Icy Daggers or east across the Sea of Burning Sands, they are going to meet Lord McGuffin's caravan while it is under attack by bandits. Some of the details will change based on the choice, but the main body of what I intend at the DM will take place. It's just up to the PCs on when and where it happens based on the decision they make and the paths they take.

Then again, as long as it leads to Funtown, my players don't care whether we get there by railroad.

 

[Harlekin]

Narrativism and railroading are one and the same. If meeting the Demon King is a foregone conclusion, why are the PCs struggling to reach him? Just because there are degrees of predetermination does not mean railroading isn't happening. Either the PCs' destiny is in their own hands or it isn't. I prefer to let the dice decide. I understand some folks like reward without success and that's fine, but I prefer not to run or play in games that do this.

So you are saying the PCs are able to chance every event that will happen in the gameworld? If an Archwizard wants to summon a Demon, our band of 1st level characters should be able to stop him? Because otherwise, the summoning of the Demon King is foregone conclusion.

BTW you may want to edit your last sentence; it may seem condescending and it would be a pity if this thread turned into yet an other flamewar.

 

[Harlekin]

My approach is simmilar to some of the other posters. I map out an overal series of events that will happen if the PCs do not interfere as well as a couple of ways the PCs can interfere. Then I let the story evolve depending on the players action. The heroe's actions will strongly affect the outcome of the events, whether they choose to use the pre-mapped solution or their own approach.

To give the events more of a story feel, I also plan actions that NPCs will take, reacting to ongoing events. Often such actions will take place in a way that the PCs cannot interfere, because they happen without their knowledge, or too far away or because the PCs have not enough power.

 

[pemerton]

Narrativism and railroading are one and the same. If meeting the Demon King is a foregone conclusion, why are the PCs struggling to reach him?

Because the manner of that struggle matters to the meeting.

And maybe they're not struggling to meet him. Maybe they're struggling to wrack up enough sacrifices to him before he arrives.

One thing I don't like is the use of the phase "BBEG" as if we can know, in advance, who this is. Like I said in my first post in this thread, I think it is up to the player to decide whether a given NPC is to be opposed or not. But in non-sandbox play it won't be up to the players whether or not that NPC plays a central role in the game - the GM determines that.

Once you allow the players to choose their PCs' orientations in this way, then the conclusion is not foregone as far as the interesting stuff is concerned - the interesting stuff being not "Who will we meet?" but rather "what will happen when we meet them?"

Narrativism and railroading are one and the same.

Well, this is a pretty controversial claim. Personally, I agree with Ron Edwards when he says that narrativism and railroading are diametrically opposed. It's not railroading to decide that the Demon King will appear (assuming that the aim of the game is not for the players to stop the Demon King appearing) - it's simply doing the GM's job of providing conflict. It would be railroading to decide how the players should have their PCs respond to this. Unfortunately, many modules (especially 2nd ed TSR and 3E WoTC ones) do railroad in this way, by presupposing that the PCs will fight the Demon King. Examples I have in my collection but could never run as written include Dead Gods, Expedition to the Demonweb Pits and Expedition to Castle Greyhawk.

Examples of D&D modules that reflect the sort of play I am describing here - non-sandbox, non-railroad - include a number of Penumbra 3E modules (Keith Baker's Ebon Mirror, Mike Mearls' Belly of the Beast, John Tynes' Three Days to Kill).

 

[Ydars]

I agree with the idea that there must be something happening in the world around the PCs and that this is not railroading, just the world taking on a "life of its own".

I also agree that the most interesting games are ones where the PCs get to choose who their enemies/friends are.

I ran a Ptolus based game where the PCs discovered that the "gods" of Praemal (the world) had actually done something essentially "evil" which was lock the souls of everyone living on the world of Praemal into a kind of eternal battle with the Galchutt (evil avatars of chaos). You see, anyone on this world could NEVER escape it (this is Monte's explanation for the world; that is was made as a trap for the evil avatars of this universe, the Galchutt).

I then invented two "good" factions; one who thought that the correct thing to do was to break "the arch of time" and release the Galchutt into the universe to end the suffering and give final rest to the souls living on Praemal.

The other faction wanted to Galchutt confined to the world and never allowed to leave, as the gods intended, but this had the side effect of dooming everyone on that world to an endless cycle of suffering, warring with the Galchutt.

So the PCs got to decide which philosophy they followed; I even set the game up so that some people in the same party could choose differently and work against each other.

I think the game worked very well because D&D is good at handling this kind of morally ambigious campaign. So this was NOT a sandbox but the players choices were very meaningful in that they decided if the "ends justified the means" in terms of the gods.

 

[pemerton]

Ydars, that sounds similar in some ways to my recently ended campaign. I agree that it's not a railroad, because the players get to make the moral decision and play it out among themselves.

 

[Tigerbunny]

It's important to distinguish between "railroading" (removing meaningful choices from the players' control) and just basic "scene framing" (decisions about when to "cut away", abstract, or "go to the dice"/"roleplay it out").

There are tons and tons of decisions that players might make that neither they nor the DM really care about the outcome of - or that only offer boring/unfun outcomes that nobody really wants to happen. Part of the skill of DM-ing (and playing) is to know which decisions/scenes are interesting - and cut to them. Doing so - when everybody is on the same page about what's interesting/meaningful, anyway - is a good thing. It's not railroading.