How Do You Get Your Players To Stay On An Adventure Path?

[S'mon]

These examples are quite different from what I was attempting to describe originally then:

A situation where there is a choice presented and it has zero consequences.

Yes, that is Illusionism and best avoided.

 

[S'mon]

I see a virtue in this (though I'd never do it) in that it's honest.

If a gm is inexperienced or just really wants to run a module and the players have agreed to run that module, I think it's ok to go "Yeah that's not in the module". It's not ideal, but in a Participationistic situation (players are agreeing to a constricted scneario) then I can see all the players going "Ok, no problem"

My experience of this (in Rise of the Runelords) was that it really sucked, because it broke my immersion. The adventure listed all these goblin tribes, exposition NPC talks about them, I say "Let's investigate Tribe X", GM says "No, only Tribe Y is detailed in the adventure". That sucked.

 

[Schmoe]

I'm gathering from this discussion that a sandbox consists of the PCs in a sort of stasis bubble in which nothing happens outside of what they directly interact with, because if it did, then hey, it's a railroad plot that happened even though the players didn't wNt it to.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm gathering from this discussion that a sandbox consists of the PCs in a sort of stasis bubble in which nothing happens outside of what they directly interact with, because if it did, then hey, it's a railroad plot that happened even though the players didn't wNt it to.

I don't think that drive by straw men are really helpful to the discussion. Nor do I think anyone has used sandbox in that manner. The idea that nothing exists except what the players choose to interact with is closer in concept to the idea of having "no myth" than it is to a sandbox, and is I think tangential to what a sandbox actually is. I can imagine however a sandbox that works like that, where new 'chunks' of the world are only loaded into the world as needed. In fact Minecraft works like this, and is clearly a sandbox, abliet a computer game rather than an RPG. But we could easily play in a sandbox style in a PnP game where the DM created new parts of the game world through some process only as needed.

What a sandbox doesn't have is a DM created goal of play and so it tends to lack content that is created for a specific narrative purpose. Instead, the DM creating a sandbox is primarily creating content according to some rule(s) in his head formal or informal as to what is 'realistic' for the setting. The DM's motives in a sandbox are less 'what would be interesting' or 'what would make a good story' than they are, "What would be here if this world was real." And the DM allows the PC's to explore this simulated reality in their own way and at their own pace, without reference to metagame considerations like balance or story.

I should say "plot" is thrown around as a very loose term to mean two different things. People will refer to "plot" is it relates to a story to mean: "the main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence." In that sense, a sandbox does not have a preconceived "plot", but only acquires something that resembles a narrative through the transcription of play. But a sandbox can nonetheless contains "plots", if by plots you mean: "a plan made in secret by a group of people to do something". It's perfectly reasonable and realistic that a fantasy world will contain various groups that are making plans to carry out various activities whether related to or unrelated to the PC's, and that the PC's can - if they go to the right places at the right times - discover these "plots". But in a pure sandbox, discovery of these plots is triggered by the PC's going to the right places at the right times and if they don't discover the "plots", then that's ok too. In a purely linear adventure, events tend to be triggered by the arrival of the PC's regardless of time and place of their arrival, because the PC's are meant to see each of the main events of a story as they have been devised and presented by the GM.

 

[TheFindus]

It matters in the following manner:

if you are going to negate the choice (ie put the tower in their path no matter which way the go) then it is better to have not offered that choice to begin with.

I have a question: by "choice" you mean the players know about the tower and intentionally avoid it, right? Because if the players do not know the dungeon is there at all, it does not exist in play. And as long as something (anything) does not exist in play, there a) cannot be a choice of the players about it which can be negated and b) it does not matter where the DM puts it into play.

 

[Zak S]

I'm gathering from this discussion that a sandbox consists of the PCs in a sort of stasis bubble in which nothing happens outside of what they directly interact with, because if it did, then hey, it's a railroad plot that happened even though the players didn't wNt it to.

This is wholly incorrect for 2 reasons:

1. Events can simply proceed offscreen and players interact with them at different stages depending on when they come in contact with them (real life works like this--if you get tickets to see the Knicks, you interact with the Knicks at whatever stage of the season they're in when you show up. Their path is predetermined EXCEPT inasmuch as the players interact with them.)

2. Players "interacting" with things early on (in even 1 or 2 sessions) can butterfly-effect events far outside what they see during the session. For example, if you run Death Frost Doom in session 1, the players could deal with the effects of DFD for the rest of a 6 year campaign, including things that happened when they weren't watching.

However it's worth noting that 1 (unexplained and unanticipatable events) can be used so much they railroad players.

Again: railroading isn't 1 technique, it's a use of common (often necessary) techniques in such a way that
the players feel them negating their choices.

 

[Zak S]

I have a question: by "choice" you mean the players know about the tower and intentionally avoid it, right? Because if the players do not know the dungeon is there at all, it does not exist in play. And as long as something (anything) does not exist in play, there a) cannot be a choice of the players about it which can be negated and b) it does not matter where the DM puts it into play.

The more important thing is whether the choice has any effect at all. If not: that's a waste of time.

If the entire content of either choice is the same, the choice doesn't matter. If the tower is the ONLY thing there either way, it was a pointless choice.

 

[Zak S]

If the players make an uninformed choice, then I see no difference as to whether the DM placed the tower there before the game began, during game play because they thought it was cool, or rolled it randomly on a wildnerness encounter table.

Then why was the choice there at all? You're just wasting time.

 

[Zak S]

Railroading happens whenever choice is removed, pleasant constraint or not. Railroading only becomes bad when it's unpleasant.

It's a semantic argument. A lot of people call "Pleasant railroading" 'participationism". I don't care what you call it.

I will say "choice is removed" is way too vague a description. Choice is always being limited in a game by the mere fact that, say, Glorantha isn't Greyhawk so you can't do Greyhawk specific things there. It's the OVERuse of techniques that limit choice that makes a railroad.

But when have you OVERused them? When the players experience it as negative and constraining.

Like if I go "There are 2 paths" I've just limited choice by not including thousands of other paths. Limiting options is necessary for their to be a game. It's limiting them so much that the players don't feel they have choices that it's a railroad.

Now "negation" is a specific technique--the players make a choice and you retroactively remove its consequences, that's super -railroady. But it's not the only way to "remove choice"--the line about when a choice has been "removed" is remarkably slippery,

Details:
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2010/05/chokers-and-chandlers.html

 

[TheFindus]

The more important thing is whether the choice has any effect at all. If not: that's a waste of time.

If the entire content of either choice is the same, the choice doesn't matter. If the tower is the ONLY thing there either way, it was a pointless choice.

Say the players decide to go east in the forest and they encounter dungeon 1 without having known that dungeon 1 is there.
If they had decided to turn west and the DM puts dungeon 1 there (the players still do not know about the existence of dungeon 1) then this is lame, bland and unimaginative DMing, I agree. He/she should have prepared (or rolled up or whatever) something else, but not dungeon 1. But no matter what, the players did not make a choice about dungeon 1. Dungeon 1 does not exist unless there is in-play information about it (unless the players know about it in play, it does not exist). No choice regarding dungeon 1 was negated. Therefore it is not railroading.