Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Maxperson]

I gave XP but then I retracted it when I thought about this some more.

Having an endpoint does not imply a railroad. Having only one route to the endpoint is a railroad. I.e the PCs can't have any impact on the way to the endpoint. They have to go through all the obstacles that the DM sets up - no deviation, no upsets, everything running as planned in advance.

Your definition would imply that every published adventure is a railroad and yet the stories told about what happens in individual games makes me think that players (and GMs) have a lot of leeway to go off the rails at any point and rejoin if/when it suits them.

Having an end point is not a railroad. Forcing the PC to hit that end point no matter what they do is a railroad. What you are describing with your multiple routes is just a broader set of rails. There is still nothing that the players can do to get off of the train.

 

[Maxperson]

This is strange. LotR isn't the output of a RPG session. There were no players, no GM, no railroading and no "changes" to the plot.

He put LotR up as if it were being run as a game. I went with that. In such a situation, Tolkien becomes the DM and the company becomes PCs.

If we want to imagine some parallel thing that might be an RPG, we've got to ask questions like "Who decided to make the ring the focus of the game" (as per my post 87), "How was it determined that Shelob stung Frodo", "How was it determined that Frodo lived or died, and who knew that at what moment of play?", "What parameters governed Sam's picking up of the ring?", etc.

Sure we can. We can look to see if things are allowed by the DM to change. In the LotR, we know that Tolkien allows things to change. The first time he ran that adventure, the PC(Elendil) was allowed to change his mind and say no he would not throw the ring into Mt. Doom and leave with it. The second time he allowed the party to split rather than forcing them to remain together. He allowed someone other than the ring bearer to carry the ring. He allowed the ring bearer to change his mind. And so on.

 

[Gardens & Goblins]

There is a difference between providing a path and encouragement, and forcing the players down a path. Setting up the Marquis to die is providing a path and encouragement. Telling the player that a search of the area including the Marquis chair automatically fails to turn up the explosives so that he can die like you plan is forcing the players down that path. Forcing the players down a path is railroading.

To be clear, yes, I totally agree. There should always be the option for the player not to do/choose/take action if one wishes to really claim they aren't railroading, at least by my understanding of the term. This is also where can encounter the illusion of choice, where a player is given the choice between two options but won't realistically take one of them due to practical/sensible reasons.

We can present the Marquis as someone who can be saved but in order to do so the players would need to search a room of several hundreds of people in a matter of minutes, a task that is not practically possible in most cases. Or the classic dungeon trick where they can go down Path A, a dark a dimly lit corridor, lined with cracked paving stones or Path B, a dark, dank slimy tunnel choked with noxious odours and swarming with small biting worms. Of course, players still get a choice, but a DM can certainly weight the choices to such an extent that they are, for all intensive purpose a non-choice (inane arguments regarding semantics aside). As a great transvestite once said, ''Cake or Death?''.

[sblock]Or my favourite - would you prefer your assignments submission date to be on Friday or Monday?[/sblock]

Of course, with regards to railroading, how and when such choices are made can lead to claims of railroading. If the DM artificially construes events to create non-choices simply to keep them 'on track' then we can certainly claim said DM is railroading. And including and emphasising the danger of a choice compared to another will certainly influence some players. Likewise, a ridiculous choice (cake or death) is so obviously a non-choice that some might argue the DM is simply better off not giving the choice, though you might be surprised how much even a non-choice can give the impression of choice and how even just the impression can influence the behaviour of a player.

Like many things in life, it is the intent rather than the behaviour. I don't have pre-crafted narratives that must be followed, but I'm happy with nudging and shamelessly manipulating my players based on their wants and fears if I believe its in their best interest - and thankfully, they trust (and expect!) me to do so.

 

[Maxperson]

We can present the Marquis as someone who can be saved but in order to do so the players would need to search a room of several hundreds of people in a matter of minutes, a task that is not practically possible in most cases. Or the classic dungeon trick where they can go down Path A, a dark a dimly lit corridor, lined with cracked paving stones or Path B, a dark, dank slimy tunnel choked with noxious odours and swarming with small biting worms. Of course, players still get a choice, but a DM can certainly weight the choices to such an extent that they are, for all intensive purpose a non-choice (inane arguments regarding semantics aside). As a great transvestite once said, ''Cake or Death?''.

If they have minutes, it's feasible for them to pick his chair in that time and a roll for success would be called for, even if the DC is hard. I've also had situations where the players decide to go early to search a place just in case. I'm not saying they should just be allowed to succeed, but there are situations where success could happen and if not allowed, would constitute railroading. [MENTION=6801286]Imaculata[/MENTION] seems to be saying that the death was 100% unavoidable no matter what, and that is sticking the PCs on rails.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Imaculata]

There have been many times when I've set something up that I thought would result in a death or some other effect, only to have a player announce that they are concerned about something and will be searching the area before the event happens. Would you allow them to prevent the death in such a circumstance? If no, then you are railroading them.

I would never block the players from searching for explosives, nor tell them that there are no explosives, when obviously there are. The assassination of the Marquis would still need to make sense. I cannot have him die to due to quantum-explosives that only appear once the players aren't looking. That would indeed be railroading, and I hate that myself.

But as a storyteller I can of course set up the scene in such a way, that the players have no reason to search for explosives. If I want the Marquis to die, then I can set the assassination up in such a way that the players will not see it coming, and so the event is pretty much unavoidable. If I don't give them any hints that the bad guys have planted explosives, or that they are planning "something", then there is no need to obstruct anything that the players are doing.

And I think thats an important distinction. Scripting events is not the same as railroading. But a DM has to be cautious then that he frames the scene in such a way, that the script is safe from tempering by the players.

I don't think scripted events in a roleplaying session are bad. Sometimes you want your players to react to something that has happened, rather than to something that might happen. But you should never resort to railroading when that script is disrupted by the players.

To give an example: I had set up a scene in such a way, that the love interest of one of the players would get kidnapped by an evil pirate. He was pretty much guaranteed to get away with it, so they could rescue her later. He had also tied this love interest to the bow of his ghost ship, to discourage the players from trying to ram the ship, as he made his escape.
But then one of the players did something totally unexpected: He summoned a water elemental and ordered it to save his love interest. Rather than railroading it, I decided to roll with it, because this was a very exciting moment, and a very cool action. If he succeeded, how epic would that be? And so I had the evil pirate fire his canons at the elemental, but with just 1hp left, he managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The maiden was saved, and the pirate captain had to flee without his prize.

And thats how I think a DM should handle a scripted scene. Sometimes the players will throw you a curveball, and you should just roll with it. Its these amazing victories that the players will talk about for months afterwards.

 

[Gardens & Goblins]

If they have minutes, it's feasible for them to pick his chair in that time and a roll for success would be called for, even if the DC is hard. I've also had situations where the players decide to go early to search a place just in case. I'm not saying they should just be allowed to succeed, but there are situations where success could happen and if not allowed, would constitute railroading. [MENTION=6801286]Imaculata[/MENTION] seems to be saying that the death was 100% unavoidable no matter what, and that is sticking the PCs on rails.

Oh aye, you can give the chance of success but, in essence, the DC is set to such a high degree that barring something special, it will typically fail - or can be achieved at great cost the party/character. Which brings us back to the intent. If the DM is setting DCs and charging for choices simply to push characters to the next stage in their crafted narrative, as a player, I'd not be pleased and feel like I have lost an element of choice/agency.

But if the DM is using such tools to shape play, then I wouldn't. For example, a player might set off on a course that will guarantee their death ('I want to stick my head in the rotating rusting mechanical portal') and the DM could then set the DC, choose appropriate language and commincate a cost to nudge the player away from such a choice, without directly vetoing the action. (''You can certainly try though you'll need luck and lightning fast reflexes to dodge the razor sharp, blood encrusted mechanism if you wish to keep your head. Let's call it a very high Dex save.'' )

In this example the DM could simply let the player poke their head into the portal and die. Instead, they give the player the choice - make a check and risk death. It's a non-choice really, for all but the most foolhardy players, but through framing the choice, providing the select details and setting the DC, the player is nudging the player away from having their characters take a course of action, for their own sake, without simply saying no/telling the player that such a choice is stupid/foolhardy. That kind of play/call on the DM's part I'm aok with. I don't mind be manipulated for my own good as a player (tell me a joke sometime!) and can respect such a style of DMing that wishes to accommodate and support play while still providing choice. [sblock] ..and we have a player that will STILL stick their head in the rusted mechanical death portal.. because.... reasons!?[/sblock]

 

[Imaculata]

If they have minutes, it's feasible for them to pick his chair in that time and a roll for success would be called for, even if the DC is hard. I've also had situations where the players decide to go early to search a place just in case. I'm not saying they should just be allowed to succeed, but there are situations where success could happen and if not allowed, would constitute railroading. [MENTION=6801286]Imaculata[/MENTION] seems to be saying that the death was 100% unavoidable no matter what, and that is sticking the PCs on rails.

It was pretty much unavoidable, given the fact that I had not given them any hint that it was about to happen. But could they have stopped it? I guess technically if they had decided to search the seat of the Marquis, or managed to pull of some magical protection trick to save his life, then he could have survived. I would always roll with what makes sense. If the players search for explosives, and I'm planning to blow up the Marquis, then obviously they'll find the explosives.

 

[billd91]

Yes.

I didn't say otherwise. I said that a sandbox game may not have a plot. That is to say, it may not have main events, as in a film or novel, forming an interrelated sequence. It may be a series of largely unconnected events with little narrative cohesion. I suspect that quite a bit of classic dungeon crawling was like this. And some contemporary OSR gaming is like this also: there are events (in the sense that play occurs), but not an interrelated sequence of main events as in a novel or film.

All plots are, by definition, linear - they are sequences of main events. (I'm putting to one side extreme avant garde novels and films. No one in this thread seems to be articulating that sort of approach to RPGing.) When the players summarise the events of the sandbox, they will fit into a linear (probably temporal) order.

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Well, they might be "plots" in the sense of "plans made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful" (the other main sense of the word offered by Google) - in this sense, a plot is near enough to the same thing as a conspiracy.

But from the point of view of the story elements of a RPG game, what you describe sounds like backstory. But it's only a plot - in the literary sense - if it is "the main events of a play, novel, film, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence." If the PCs never interact with said backstory, it can hardly be said to constitute the main events of the RPG considered as a work similar to a novel or film. If no one at the table but the GM knows or cares about them, they're manifestly not the main events. The stuff the PCs do is what makes up the main events of a RPG campaign.

But the same point I just made to billd91 applies: if the players, and hence their PCs, ignore these "breadcrumbs" then, ipso facto, they are not elements of the plot of the game, because they are not main events. The GM may be amazed by the beauty of the backstory s/he can see, but that doesn't make it the plot of the game. Hence my remark that "In a sandbox, more or less by definition, the GM does not author the main events, nor contrive them into an interrelated sequence. To the extent that such a thing occurs at all - and it may not - it is done by the players." If the players are free to ignore the GM's backstory, then only they can bring it about that that backstory is some component of the main events of the game.

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If the "plot" is flexible in the way you describe, then it seems that ipso facto it's not a plot. It is one of several candidate plots. Until the actual sequence of main events is established, the plot isn't established.

But what you describe is still, in my view, a railroad. If the end point is already known to the GM, then however colourful and exciting the detours along the way, they are ultimately being driven by the GM, with a pre-given outcome in mind.

The idea that a game in which the GM chooses the villain, the overarching story, what the campaign is about, might not be a railroad is extremely foreign to me. I take it for granted that the players will choose the villains (ie their PCs' enemies), that what the campaign is about will be some sort of collaborative thing, and that the overarching story will be established via play. That's how I've been GMing since about 1986.

What this is all telling me is that you have a very narrow definition of "plot" and very wide definition of "railroad". And clearly your definitions of these are out of sync with many of the rest of us.

The way I see things, there may be a main plot when you retrospectively look back on a campaign, particularly if you focus on one set of players and their PCs in a particular timeframe, but there are also supplementary plots and sequences of events occurring all the time that crisscross with the main plot. But then, I've also participated in campaigns that involved multiple groups, multiple PCs, multiple locations, all within the same campaign setting that we viewed as one campaign, not multiple campaigns. So each of these groups had main plots, some intersected with other groups, and all intersected with the advancing timelines the DM worked through his campaign from wars to summoning great demons to little quests for valuables or lost mines. So for me, in RPGs, plots are mutable, intersecting things, constantly being interfered with by both PCs and NPCs. Yet, since they all advance in time even if we do not interfere with them, they're all plots in the sense that they are all sequences of events causally linked together.

Your definition of plot works from a literary viewpoint in which a novel presents a primary sequence of events (though a lot of multivolume serials tend push the envelope on that definition pretty hard). But in an RPG, I don't think that works very well, not if the DM is trying to present a world in which things happen that aren't simply focused around the PCs (or one group of PCs). To use a particular metaphor, it's like a 10,000 foot view of the setting, viewing the highlights, but if you zoom in to a 1000 foot or 100 foot setting, you'll see a lot more plots running at the same time. Your definition of plot is what you get if you're running a single character-driven TV show, but mine is more like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (including the TV shows).

And as far as your definition of railroad, just because a DM has events planned out, if the PCs can choose to interfere with them or not interfere with them, I don't think it's a railroad. Plots operating in the background that affect the PCs in various ways, whether positively or negatively, aren't railroads if the choices the players make still matter. If the evil baron is oppressing the serfs particularly badly and I can choose to get involved or not get involved, then that baron plot isn't a railroad. If I came into the campaign playing a champion of truth and justice, then what that baron is doing may push my buttons enough that I can't let it pass by. But that's my choice because I chose to play a character who would care about such things.

 

[Xetheral]

But from the point of view of the story elements of a RPG game, what you describe sounds like backstory. But it's only a plot - in the literary sense - if it is "the main events of a play, novel, film, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence." If the PCs never interact with said backstory, it can hardly be said to constitute the main events of the RPG considered as a work similar to a novel or film. If no one at the table but the GM knows or cares about them, they're manifestly not the main events. The stuff the PCs do is what makes up the main events of a RPG campaign.

But the same point I just made to billd91 applies: if the players, and hence their PCs, ignore these "breadcrumbs" then, ipso facto, they are not elements of the plot of the game, because they are not main events. The GM may be amazed by the beauty of the backstory s/he can see, but that doesn't make it the plot of the game. Hence my remark that "In a sandbox, more or less by definition, the GM does not author the main events, nor contrive them into an interrelated sequence. To the extent that such a thing occurs at all - and it may not - it is done by the players." If the players are free to ignore the GM's backstory, then only they can bring it about that that backstory is some component of the main events of the game.

...

If the "plot" is flexible in the way you describe, then it seems that ipso facto it's not a plot. It is one of several candidate plots. Until the actual sequence of main events is established, the plot isn't established.

You refer to the dictionary definition as "the literary sense", but I think that's inacurrate. The dictionary definition is the common usage of the word, whereas the literary sense would include the extra nuance that arises when using the word in a literary context. In other words, to the extent that "plot" is also a term of art in addition to an ordinary word, that more-specialized definition would be "the literary sense".

This is important, because in my experience "plot" in a literary context has a much broader definition than the dictionary provides, and is no way limited to "the main events". As evidence, consider the usage of the terms side plot and plot weaving, both of which require the presence of multiple plots in a single work, a prospect that the dictionary definition does not allow for.

In an RPG context I think it makes sense to use the broader literary sense. Accordingly, I don't think it's right to use the dictionary definition to reject the concepts of flexible plots, breadcrumbs, or (optional) GM-provided plots within a sandbox.